Editor's note: I wasn't alive when River Raid came out, and I didn't get to play it until recently, but I like this game. Maybe this article will be a trip down memory lane for you. Maybe it will be a window into an era of gaming you missed. Either way, give it a read, then go try River Raid. It's awesome. -mossy_11

The year was 1982. Atari were cleaning up the home video game business, Dexy's Midnight Runners were trying to convince Eileen for a date, and E.T. was racking up the long distance charges trying to phone home. What does all this have to do with video games? Well, it's the year the first (and greatest) independent game company, Activision, released River Raid.

And there I was, a little tyke sitting in my parents bedroom, with the TV flickering and color shifting, flying my fighter down the river to GLORY! This was one of the very few games I had as a child; one of the six in my Colecovision collection. River Raid was my first home experience with vertically scrolling games. It remarkably offered a different challenge almost every time I played. The audio (which I now hear in stereo) was very impressive, and still sounds good today.

Editor's note: I'll admit I knew nothing of the Phantasie games before reading this, but jetboy does a great job of explaining the appeal of his favourite entry in the series. I'd appreciate it if someone could explain to me what exactly I'm supposed to do in the game, though, because I went wandering and now I'm completely lost. -mossy_11

My favourite game of all time, Phantasie III, was released for the Amiga back in 1987, and I emulate it using E-UAE (in combination with a handy, legal, ROM/OS package called Amiga Forever). Since most Amiga games were distributed on floppies, I also use a utility called WHDLoad, which allows you to install the floppy versions on your hard disk and remove the nostalgic switching between 100 floppies process. This is my suggested setup if you want to play Phantasie III using MacOS as your host OS, because while there are other versions (notably DOS and Apple II), the graphics and sound for the Amiga version are unequivocally better. While I love Apple, the Apple II version is clearly the worst, and it just makes no sense trying to play it. If you really canʼt get the Amiga version going, I suggest you go with the DOS version because itʼs somewhere in the middle. [What about the Atari ST and Commodore 64 versions? -ed.]

A Mac-native version of GameBase64 Browser has been released. GameBase64 is a database of over 20000 Commodore 64 games, with detailed information and screenshots for each game. Setting up is not exactly intuitive if you do not already have the database file -- you’ll need to drag a folder (any folder) to the application, then it will tell you that the folder contains no valid database file. It will then allow you to download the database file from within the application. You can get screenshots and sounds packs here. It offers the ability to launch games in your C64 emulator of choice, but I couldn’t seem to get that feature working. Despite this strange configuration problem, it’s very impressive, so be sure to check it out (provided you have Snow Leopard installed).

A new version of the open-source IA-32 (x86) emulator Bochs was released on April 25. Release 2.4.5 implements X2APIC and Intel VMx2 extensions, fixes some CPU emulation bugs, reworks the configuration options, and more. Check the changelog for full details.

Those of you desperate for Steam on the Mac will have to wait just a little longer, with Valve announcing that it will be released on May 12. No word yet on what games will be available at launch, although you can be sure a few of Valve’s titles will be there.

More updates after the break.