Sasha's Retrobytes 🏳️‍⚧️

A Japanese ad for a Game Boy Pocket with a classy feel as if it's aimed at professionals with a visible keyboard in the photo of two, silver and gold, and a fountain pen and mug.

The Game Boy Light - A tougher console that can be played for longer periods of time thanks to that all-important backlight!

Such a sleek design, and as with a GB Pocket ad I shared a while back, the copy promotes it as one for adults because of the less toy-like design.

A full-page magazine ad for Macross 2036, with a very cool illustration of Komilia Maria Fallyna Jenius in flight suit dominating the ad

📖 Bytes of Game Ads 📺

The legendary MACROSS returns! Serving as a sequel to Do You Remember Love, SDFM 2036 is a pretty nifty side scrolling shmup that makes good use of the PC Engine CD-ROM2 for animated cutscenes produced with series character designer Haruhiko Mikimoto's involvement.

The cover for the Genesis game Elemental Master, with a 90s looking dude posed like he's casting a spell while another giant hand from a monstrous creature reaches out from behind.

Brad never expected to wake up one day with magic powers. Now he's on a quest to save another world. Unfortunately, all he had to hand for hero clothes was his dad's old Tatooine moisture farmer cosplay top, a satin bedsheet, and some trash bags - and a pair of scissors.

Booting up... Installing... Welcome Back, Commander.

📺: Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, Westwood Studios, 1999

A screenshot of an auction for Klax on Mega Drive. It's labelled as Quarth (Crux)

It is the nineties, and there is time for Quarth (Crux).

What kind of character class/archetype do you think each of these evokes?

xD It sounds like it's a knock-off name ,but it was the name of their home console division up until the early days of the PS1.

The Sinclair ZX81 – and six of the best ZX81 games | Stuff Sinclair’s breakthrough home micro still shines over four decades later. We look back at the ZX81 and six of its best games.

www.stuff.tv/features/ran... :D

New Noisy Pixel article! I got to review Ratcheteer DX, an upgraded version of a game previously exclusive to the Playdate handheld!

Ohh, neat! Can you remember the circumstances behind you getting one over an Apple or Atari computer?

Timex introduces the $99.95 computer. An ad for the US version sold by Timex, with much information about its capabilities and how it'll demystify the computer.

Manufactured by Timex, it also saw some use in the US where it was sold as the Timex Sinclair 1000.

A few peeps stateside have commented whenever I've showcased something about the ZX81 that they used it, which is pretty neat given how much Apple, Atari, and Commodore were a presence there.

A scan of one page of a magazine ad for the ZX81, £49.95 in kit form and built: 69.95. The equivalent of around £250-300 now. A sizeable chunk of change but far cheaper than an Apple II or IBM PC.

A photo of a ZX81 in black/grey case with white-grey keys pre-built form

Ohhh gosh, I'm glad I didn't miss marking this anniversary: 45 years since the release of the Sinclair ZX81.

This was the microcomputer that fuelled the UK bedroom coder revolution, and the springboard for careers in the industry for many of our game devs of the 80s and 90s.

Yeah, very much so!

Yeahh, amazing <3

Ahh, cheers for the heads-up!

xD Yeah, weirdly enough, it's stuff that's more easily understandable now than back then.

It's such a good dose of Macross you can show someone without much any other context of the rest of the franchise. Its focus is so narrow and the story it tells is so intensely personal that you can just draw parallels to Top Gun and roll with it.

A snap of the Sharon Apple concert

Isamu standing in front of the YF-19, shot in a wide angle

A shot of the flight test control room with lots of near future sci-fi tech and peeps in UN Spacy uniforms standing watching

A shot of Isamu in the cockpit of the transforming fighter, seen from the front in the iconic UN Spacy flight suit and helmet

Watching Macross Plus OVA with Kit for the first time on Blu-ray. Looks absolutely gorgeous.

New release of the movie edition next month!

Ahh, no! No luck with getting it resurfaced?

xD Yeah, it's like the Appleeed Manga Video dub. They added copious amounts of profanity to that to get it up to a 15 rating; might be the same case here.

xD That's quite the name, yeah. It's a name used by Skip Stellrecht, Eng VA for Might Guy in Naruto and Vicious from Cowboy Bebop.

A photo of the cover artwork of Naomi Armitage in her red leathers

A photo of the VHS tape in its clamshell case

The back of the case, with episode summary. Just one episode per tape!

"Armitage III is a gritty New Wave thriller where robots have emotions and nothing is as it seems..."

A peek at episode one of Pioneer's 1995 VHS release of one of the coolest 90s cyberpunk anime: Armitage III.

Me too, aha. Something about the angle and the expanse of space around it feels very pleasing to the eye.

Yeah, I probably would too now as I am not fond of overly sugary/sweet things.

xD You're very welcome

Yeah! It's a great game for those quick blasts of arcade action.

Aha, I'm sure. I'd fallen out of arcading by the time Hydro Thunder came around, but it would have been dangerous on mine if I'd seen it anywhere.

xD Yeah, it really did. Almost no flavour once the sherbert was gone.

A photo of a pack of refreshers, chalky round thick sweets

Ohhh those! Yeah, we had our own version of those called Refreshers.

Aha, I do! I didn't have them at time, but I have a couple of the UK version of the Pizza Hut discs from early on in my PS1 collecting.