I loved Tempest. You could last quite a while on a quarter and it had some nice sound f/x to go along with the vector graphics. I even made a Tempest t-shirt in 6th grade for our silk screening art project.
I thought Dragon’s Lair was awesome but never played it because it sucked the quarters so badly. I promised myself someday I would beat it so I downloaded it for my DS last year and spent a week on it.
OK, what game was this? You were an Old West sherriff or bandit something. The controls were unique - there was a disk that rotated your shooting arm clockwise, then you pushed down to shoot in that direction. One level involved you catching up on your horse to a speeding train, jumping onto the roof and shooting bad guys. The bonus level was you sitting by a campfire getting points for shooting a tin can.
Another Elevator Action fan here, that was my best monopolize-the-cabinet-on-a-quarter game back in the day.
I was also quite good at Defender, Joust, Time Pilot, and Phoenix.
The two big giants, Asteroids and PacMan, I always sucked at for some reason. Rarely even ever earned a free man on those games.
Deadly Discs Of Tron
First, it had a back to it, with a butt rest.
Second, the wonderful joystick all the Tron arcade games had.
Third, the voice sampling.
I have this game for MAME and still love it.
I have the fondest memories of that game. It was the first video game I ever played, on a portable IBM PC my dad had brought home from work. And by “portable” I mean it was the size of a large oscilloscope, little monochrome-orange screen embedded in it and everything. Good times.
Discs of Tron was great. It’s a testament that even with all the Tron mods and games that have tried to do disc combat, none have the smooth gameplay of the old cabinet.
I’ll toss in another vote for Joust, or if you allow going a few years ahead, Bubble Bobble. Great games in their own right, and the dynamic can change completely with another player in the mix. Add in game design that inevitably results in the players accidentally screwing each other over at some point, and hilarity ensues.
Ahh, Joust, Elevator Action, Rolling Thunder, Gauntlet, Bump&Jump. All were worthy.
The answer, however, is Black Tiger.
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Please accept some Zenni Coins!
Never heard of it.
Mr.Do
My favorite and the only one I was ever able to master enough to get the high score on was Robotron 2084
Some good memories here. Defender, Joust, Missile Command, Battlezone, mmmm.
I’ll add an earlier one; Adventure to the list. I was always fond of that one. I also liked Space War, especially when I could get my brother to play with me.
Space Invaders, Pitfall, & Tank Battle on the Atari.
I completely mastered Asteroids, Defender, Berserk, and Battlezone (as in I figured out the primitive AI routines)-I tended to favor complex games which demanded on-the-fly tactics. Once I got ships completely across the top of the screen in Asteroids, then, bored, turned it over to a couple of other guys who had been watching me (yes, I hunted the little saucer-after all he was hunting me-turnaround is fair play). A friend of mine who was also a Battlezone fiend would play tag-team with me (we’d switch every 100 points so as to not get mentally fatigued), and we’d run up scores in the millions (there was a bug where someone who died quickly might get a similar score, at least once wiping out our score).
Defender looked hard, but if you learned the patterns (c.f. the pods’ intersection point, or the “international date line” that enemies would never cross), it became relatively easy, tho you still had to manuever like a madman. Berserk remains my favorite tho because of the humor factor involving the robots killing themselves/each other, but Lord some of those later screens were virtually impossible to survive (open mazes with bots using the rapid fire multi-bullet guns shooting at you from multple directions at once).
Rampart was one of the last arcade games with a “classic” feel (before arcades got taken over by generic machine gun shooters and karate games)-the 3 way multiplayer games got pretty cutthroat. Gauntlet was enjoyable at first (I invariably played the Wizard so as to blast death when he showed up), but got pretty repetitive after awhile.
The game was Wild Western. It came out in 1982.
At the candy store next to my apartment building, I was pretty much unbeatable on Lunar Rescue (a different game than Lunar Lander, on which I sucked) and later Tron.
Once I learned the pattern to the original Pac-Man, I could play for 20+ minutes on one quarter.
Robotron: 2084
That’s it - thanks!
Another favorite of mine was Solar Quest. Two players chasing each other around in tiny vector based Asteroid-looking ships. Star in the middle had gravity, so you had to keep moving or get slowly sucked into it.
The cool thing was that you could disable your opponent and then you still had to move in for the kill. So once hit you may lose steering, but stil had thrust and maybe your gun. Of course your opponent could be playing possum, waiting for you to cross in front of their gun while floating around with no maneuverability.
The way I see it, it was the silver age that spanned Gauntlet - SFII. The golden age ended with the popularization of the “continue” option that started with Gauntlet IIRC.
And even then, I’d say from Pac-Man onward, the games had a much more commercialized feel than the games beforehand, but I can’t find a firm dividing line there, especially since I would categorize some games that came out after Pac-Man as being “true” old school.
My vote for best classic video game is a tie between Route 16 and Blueprint. Both games with mechanics that are rarely if ever duplicated.
I’ll nominate M.U.L.E.. It is a fantastic game and was waay ahead of its time, IMO! You can still play the original version online, and somebody actually made a version with online multiplayer mode.