As I’m staring the exit of my 30s, I’m becoming more nostalgic. Perhaps that’s the normal course of life that as we age, we yearn to return to certain pleasurable moments of our lives. For me, one of my favorite hobbies has been videogames.

I’ve collected and bought most of the videogame systems and hundreds of games since the Atari 2600 and dropped countless quarters in the arcades. We had a pinball machine for awhile, but alas, we sold it to claim the space. Haven’t bought an arcade machine yet, but I’m sure that will happen at some point.

It’s no surprise that in these early morning hours of a day we are later heading out on the skyway that I’ve landed on a site called retroremakes.com and loving it. This site bills itself as “largest game remakes community on the internet” and has news archives dating back to July 2001. The site is all about categorizing and cataloging remakes of classic videogame history. Games like my favorites: Pacman, Tempest, the button mashing sensation: Track and Field, Pengo, Robotron, Asteroids, Phoenix and I could keep this going for another 100 games. Just check their Retro Games list, all of which I checked were for love (free and some include source code) and not money. And probably if they were for money they wouldn’t be legal anyway. At least the ones that are using the trademarked graphics and sound files.

Gotta love some of the name/theme spins like Pac Horror in place of Pacman.

And there are three different remakes of an arcade game that I’ve been passively searching out for years: Star Castle. For those not familiar, this game was sort of a vector based Asteroids knockoff, where you flew this ship around trying to shoot out these layers of shields to blast this enemy ship. It’s rare to find it in even the most retro of retro arcades, but retroremakes.com has links to not just one, but three different remakes (one link of which was dead): Galactic Fortress (with source code) and Star Castle. Both looked promising but Galactic Fortress looked from the screenshot to be the better one.

You can keep up with new retro remakes and other news by subscribing to the RSS Feed . This isn’t a blog but I put it under the Hmm First Links category anyway because it quickly made by favorites list and has an RSS feed. You can just smell the passion emitting from this site. Breaking my own rules of entry to this category, but oh well. French maids and retrogaming, so far the quality level is high in this category.

As I plug in the charger for the PSP and pack Namco Museum, Pinball Hall of Fame and Midway Arcade Treasures for the trip, I’m getting ready to do pixel battle with the aliens and the badguys.

Are you feeling the retro gamer scene? What are your favorite videogames from the past?

French maid cleavage, iPods and podcasting, what a combination. A Ben Week claims the first ever Hmm First Link with Who likes French Maids? and by linking to the French Maids TV video blog.

This new Hmm feature will periodically feature blogs we’ve never linked to in a post before including the reason why it was linked. I figure this is one way we can share cool finds and help other promising blogs/bloggers. This blog has been helped by others linking so we felt this would be a good feature to add. Note: these may not be new blogs or new bloggers, they’re just new to being linked here. Since there are 100+ million blogs out there, we figure we’ll never run out of blogs to feature.

A new category has been created called Hmm First Links. As with any other category here, you can subscribe to this RSS feed separately, if you like.

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