What Video Game Did I Play Yesterday?

Katamari (Atari 2600)

November 7th, 2025

I started playing around with Retro Achievements in Retro Arch yesterday, which is allowing me to "finish" some strange old and homebrew games. I kicked off with Slot Machine for the Fairchild Channel F, which is actually what got me on this path. I started out wanting to play one of the weird Evangelion pachislot games for DS and just gradually got less and less ambitious until I was playing a very simple slot machine from 1980. It was a nice game to zone out with, even if there wasn't anything particularly innovative or interactive going on with it. Plus, now I've cleared a Fairchild Channel F game, thanks to the achievements, and that's kind of a neat step back into gaming history!

After that, I went through the achievements in an Atari 2600 version of Katamari, which was a blast! It focused more on being playable and fun for Atari than it did on recreating everything perfectly, looping between item collection levels and ones where you dodge the King of All Cosmos shooting lightning at you. It wasn't really like a normal Katamari game, but it was a small, cute and fun 2600 game that played to the system's strengths. I was glad I tried it.

My before bed game last night was Bishoujo Battle Cyber Panic!, because I clicked on the wrong icon on my desktop and just kind of rolled with it from there. I'm still so confused by all of these PG-13 anime girl games being super casual fluff, but this is Qix, and I like Qix. I'm sure these girls are from other games, but I would prefer to imagine that they're just mom game enthusiasts, popping up half dressed and heavily armed to cheer people on in old arcade games played at a leisurely pace and mahjong solitaire matches.