This year for Christmas  bought myself new copies of River Raid and Vanguard for the VCS so I could open them and try to recapture some of the feeling of 1982.   I bought the games with very little eBay research, choosing the price over most everything else.   At the  same time, I don’t own a working 2600, and my 7800 is in a box in the garage that I’ve yet to be able to break into, so I have to settle on on using my Retron ’77 (which I’ve only ever used with the community build firmware and SD slot, never for actual cartridges). 

I knew it would be difficult to capture the same feelings of being 12 years old, but damn it, if it didn’t work anyway!  River Raid and Vanguard are such good games, they transcended my set-up and still made me happy.

There are many ways in which I could have done this better, and it could have gone even more wrong too, but in the end I still feel like I achieved my goal at about the D+/C- level, which is a passing grade.