Favorite 80's Video Game

In My Humble Opinion
1

I remembber back in the good ol’ days, when vieeo games were played on old 8-bit systems (or worse). Remeber how much fun and challenge used to be packed into such a small total memory?
Look at today’s games… All concerned with looking and sounding better than the ones before, and in my opinion, most of em aren’t that much fun to play…
Where are the side scrolling shoot-em-ups? Where are the single-screen puzzle solving strategy games, ala “Jumpman”?
Where’s the ultimate in impossible challenge, ala “Bubble Bobble”?
Have gamemakes lost the ability to make a fun and challenging game nowadaya, going instead for substance-free graphics and sound?

Are there any good side-scrolling shoot-em-up games for computers nowadays? Is there a “jumpman” type game out there anywhere? Does anything have the appeal and charm of “Bubble-Bobble?” anymore?

So I guess what I want to know is, what’s YOUR favorite game of old, either on a console, like Atari or Coleco, or a home computer, such as the Commodore 64? List it here, and give a brief description if you would…

2

Tecmo Bowl. Not Tecmo Super Bowl, the original Tecmo Bowl. It had Payton, Dorsett, Dickerson, Largent, Montana, everyone, it was great.

3

One of my favorite Commodore 64 games (which, of course, I still have for the 64 emulator) is Defender of the Crown. The graphics on this game were amazing by 64 standards, and the gameplay was pretty good, too. Just for the heck of it, I might as well include Impossible Mission on the list purely for its digitized speech. Who can forget such lines as:

“Another visitor. Stay a while. Stay forever!”
“Destroy him, my robots!”
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

When I was a kid, and the guy fell into a hole and yelled “AAAAAAHHHH!”, my mother came running into my room to see what was wrong. It was THAT good. Of course, no one I knew ever finished Impossible Mission, or, for that matter, even knew what the goal of the game was. Still, it was a blast to play.

But do you want the real king of the 64 era? That’s right, it’s Karateka. To this day, I have never successfully completed it, despite having gotten almost to the end. I just love the music and cut scenes in this game. Of course, it’s pretty easy to play, since you can beat all the bad guys with just one keystroke. The only time you need to use more than that is when fighting that damn bird! Once you finally kill him, it’s a piece of cake.

4

i had karateka on a 90 in 1 nes cart. how the hell do you beat that bird?

5

Jeez, my biggest obesession would have to be the Arkanoid series, follwed closely by the Tetris- and Columns-style puzzle-games.

As for what you can do on your PC today, check out MAME. Say buh-bye to any future productivity…

6

Wow, I totally missed the C64 stuff the first time through this thread, how did I do THAT?!?

In addition to Impossible Mission, I loved Paradroid. I would buy an old C64 in a heartbeat if it meant I could play that game again…
BTW, I got good enough at I.M. to finish it pretty often. You were supposed to collect pieces to puzzles. Then, once you got all the pieces, you had to assemble them into a set of completed jigsaw puzzles (since pieces could be rotated and flipped to mirror-images, and it wasn’t necessarily obvious which pieces went with which puzzles, this was not trivial either). If you got all the puzzles assembled before time ran out you won.

7

My absolute favorite was the original Final Fantasy. Right behind it comes the original The Legend of Zelda.

I only recently beat FF on an emulator, more than a decade after having first played it. I’ve NEVER beaten the second quest of Zelda. Has anybody here done it?

8

You already named my alltime favorite Bubble Bobble. I’ve downloaded the emulators, I’ve got the old nintendo version, I’m currently looking for the full sized arcade stand up. Yeah, it’s silly and obsessive, but I don’t care. I loved that game.

I also used to love the original Pitfall for the old 2600. I played what I guess was a sequel on my Aunt’s old TRS-80 that I thought was a lot of fun, too.

The first few games of the Mega Man series were great, but I’m not a big fan of the X versions for the Playstation. Ecch.

9

I remember that! I had a copy, that didn’t come with docs, so I had to learn it on my own.
The object was to search the furniture for puzzle pieces. Once you had enough pieces, you used the “phone” to find out if there was a possible solution to a puzzle. A puzzle was solved by taking the pieces and combining them together in such a way that they filled in a complete square with no holes. Do that often enough, and you eventually get all the puzzles solved. From there, you go to the one door that you never could open inside one of the rooms (Looked like a large fireplace if I recall) and inside was the “mad scientist” that would say (again, in digitised speech)
“No NO! NOOOOOOOO!” when you opened the door to his lair.
Finished it only a couple of times, and it crashes on my emulators today, so I doubt I’ll get the chance again…

10

Yeah, this game is definitely a classic.

11

Oh, MAN, that is such a hard game. It’s so hard to come out of a combat with everyone alive…

O_O

On the other hand, it came out in 1990 (In North America. 1987, Japan.), so it doesn’t really count, does it?

12

If you want a nice little top to bottom scrolling shoot-em-up game, try the shareware game DemonStar. It’s on download.com. Fun stuff.

And, oh yeah, I also never did figure out how to play that Mission Impossible game. I remember getting a few pieces then having no idea what to do with them. Ah, the memories.

13

Spoofe, I beat the second quest of Zelda. I bought a guidebook but you won’t believe my secret - I found a sweet spot fighting giant spiders. Before I went in to do the last maze I put my little Nintendo contoller on the coffee table with the fire button weighted down with books and puttered around the house for about eight hours while Link hacked the same spider to death over and over again. I built up about 36 extra lives. I can hardly remember, but I know there was a long haul to get to the last maze, through a swamp full of monsters, and I used up most of the lives just getting to the maze. At the end of the last maze Link fights a dark mirror version of himself.

Ah, youth!

14

Star Wars

The sit-in vector game. I played this game sooooo much. I know a guy (actually 2) who got world records in this game. Atari sent out somebody to verify it. A couple of us were there to take over during the 10 min breaks. The first attempt lasted 1 day+ (about 29 IIRC), the 2nd was for 2/3 days. Then some group of Americans played it for a week and we gave up.

I loved bubble bobble, Wonder Boy, Salamander, Kung-Fu Master, Dragons Lair, Mario Btothers and on and on …

15

Ah sweet memories,
Both Zelda games for NES were great as was Contra. I really liked Mega Man 2. The one game that I sucked at was Metroid, the game was so weird to begin with and got worse.

16

We had the “Odyssey 2” game system, made by Magnavox. It was great! It was out around the same time as Atari 2600, but the joysticks were 8-directional rather than 4-directional. The best game was one called “K.C. Munchkin,” a kind of Pac-Man ripoff, but the mazes were cooler and you could even create your own mazes. The character was cuter than Pac-Man, with little antennae and a smile. There was also a Donkey-Kong ripoff called “Pick Axe Pete” which was pretty cool. Come to think of it, most of the Odyssey games were “based on” (rip-offs of) other games, but man, were they fun!

17

Without question, the coolest game ever. You had to have the booth - I’ve tried it at the nearby university on the stand-up games and it’s not as good. I was wretched at SW and loved it anyway. Damn those growing towers!

18

Well, seems like every time one of these threads comes around, I post the same links. Get ready, because this time is not exception.

http://c64.emucamp.com/ is a link to Lemon’s C=64 site. Actually, no it’s not. It’s a link to a site saying “this site has moved!” and linking to Lemon’s site. But I’m too lazy to fix it right now. Cope.
http://arnold.c64.org/ is the Arnold database of Commodore programs.
http://ltd.simplenet.com/c64/games/a/ is even more fun stuff.

Anyway, get yourself a Commodore emulator. CCS64 beta is probably the best one out there. Once you’re fired up, get ready to play some Paradroid, Bubble Bobble, or whatever else once again! Actually, I’ve downloaded several hundred games since getting the emulator and most start to get old fairly soon, but Paradroid remains a classic in my book.

Other classics:
Mail Order Monsters: Order yourself a beastie from the catalog and equip it with various weapons, supplies and genetic traits. Then send it out to kick some butt for cash so you can buy more of the above.

Archon: Sort of a fantasy chess game where good battles evil. Played on a chess board, the pieces actually fight when they go onto the same square. Not staged fighting like Battle Chess, but actual joystick controlled combat. I used to be able to beat this game with White in about 5-7 moves when I wanted to. I believe it was Elemental on Shape Shifter, Teleport Unicorn onto Dragon (or shifter if Sorceress raised it from the dead), Unicorn onto Sorceress, grab the other “spot” squares while Black feebly sent goblins and stuff against your unicorn. The unicorn was fast and strong enough that with a little practice at sniping from behind the “trees”, it was easy going. By the way, the IBM version of this game sucked. I think the phoenix was still able to be hit while flaming, so it was less useful than the banshee (which black got two of). Ok, I’m getting off topic here…

Adventure Construction Set: What a good time. Build an entire world to adventure through and set it up in any period or genre that you wanted. I made an adventure based off of a fantasy series that was amazingly true to the books that I’m still proud of. The ony thing keeping me from downloading it onto the emulator is that I don’t think I could find anyone who’d actually want to play an ACS adventure today :smiley:

Racing Destruction Set: Create a track using various heights and jumps, curves, etc. Make it dirt, asphalt, ice or any combonation of the three. Customize cars to drive upon it and give them armor, crushers, oil to spill or leave them without any of that if you wanted speed. Set the gravity to anywhere from Jupiter’s to Io’s. Then let 'em rip!

I could go on and on, but I’ll let others have a say.

19

Anyone remember the TI-99/4A computer? That had two terrific video games:

Tunnels of Doom was one of the first really good video D&D games I ever played. It was fantastic, had a surprisingly huge number of monsters, weapons and magical items for a game at that time.

Parsec was indescribably wonderful.

20

Asteroids was my first obsession. And I played it on a stand up arcade game, pumping in quarters like it was going out of style.