Not a review, just unpacking the JXD s7300, a quick look, no demonstration really, just showing what I received from LighTake in China (thanks for the link, Bill!), and just a few thoughts regarding such devices.

Here is a video of the Oldskool Demo Compo released at Revision 2013 held in Saarbrucken, Germany from March 29th to April 1st.

Back in early 1984, when I was first exposed to the Commodore 64, one of the games that I had a chance to play a fair bit of was Blue Max by Synapse Software (SynSoft in the UK). In the game, you take on the role of a hot-shot World War I biplane pilot by the name of Max Chatsworth who is known affectionately to his friends as Blue Max.

The game is essentially a 3/4 perspective vertical shooter similar to Zaxxon in presentation. You have at your disposal a machine gun with unlimited ammo as well as a finite number of bombs which you can use to take out buildings, tanks, bridges, roads and boats. Overall control of the plane is very responsive, although (as with Zaxxon) keeping your altitude straight can be rather tricky. The shadow cast by your plane helps a lot in determining your horizontal location on the level (for bombing purposes) but you need to match your altitude to that of the enemy planes in order to shoot them down. You also need to mind your altitude to do strafing as well as estimate the time for a dropped bomb to reach its target.

Batman (Amstrad)Welcome to the December 2012 update to my list of working emulator and simulator sites for various platforms and games. All of these enable play directly within your browser, so there's no sticky business of downloading software and finding the necessary game files to get it all going, though some do offer the option. These are all great sites and we should all show our support. I'd love to keep adding to this list, so suggest away. Here you go:

I finally got around to finishing Halo 4 last night and the ending troubled me. Not because I thought it was incoherent or unsatisfying, but rather I didn't know what to make of its attitude towards women--or, rather, what assumptions it seems to make about the player's attitude towards them. One thing really stood out to me: clothing and the lack thereof. I looked around the net to see what others had written about Cortana, and quickly discovered I'm far from the only one who has some issues with it. As Jon W of Gamasutra puts it: "It doesn't seem particularly fair to permaban pumped-up teenage boys from acting like immature sexists when that is exactly what the game has trained them to be." Warning: there are some spoilers here.