OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you etc.
Just call me “carpal tunnel thumbs” from now on…I may not post for a while…my girlfriend will never forgive you…
Qix is another in my “games I haven’t deleted yet” file. To be honest, there’s a lot of Commodore games I remembered more fondly than they really deserved. Say… Park Patrol for one. But then there’s some that are just so addictive and fun that I’m still in love with them. Qix was one of those. A great “Ok, just one more game” style game.
For those not in the know, Qix was one of the simplest games I’ve ever played but you can just keep playing it and playing it. You’re a mighty dot on the edge of a large square, inside of which is a zapping lightning bolt type thing that races about. You have to ran into the box, leaving a trail as you go and hit the wall of the square again before the bolt hits you or your line. If it does, you die. If you succeed, the rectangle you drew fills up with color and the interior of the square gets smaller. I think you have to fill about 75% of the box with color to go to the next level. You get more points for filling large areas (since it takes longer to do and your chance of getting hit goes up mesurably) than you do a bunch of tiny boxes. All the while, you’re also getting chased by two other dots. Ok, so it sounds really lame, but trust me – it’s a lot of fun.
Vanguard was awesome. It was the first arcade game I ever encountered that you could continue. You could keep on pushing in the quarters until you beat the game. And I did. Over and over again.
Also: I’ve got Pac-man fever. It’s driving me crazy. Anyone remember Buckner & Garcia, who cut an entire album of songs about 80’s video games. They were huge in Philly…
Go, Frogger go … keep on hoppin’ till you get to the top … dang, I can’t believe I actually know the words to that one. 
Anyway, on my list:
Pac-Man, Breakaway, and … Videolympics? I don’t know if that’s the right name, but it had about four dozen Pong-ized sports games like Soccer, Basketball, Foosball, and or course Pong.
Tetris, of course, and I had a lot of fun with Duck Hunt too grin
Legend of Zelda was the first and only quest-type game that I really liked and wanted to keep playing.
A few years back in grad school we inheirited my in-laws’ old Sega set, so we spent a lot of time playing Sonic and Columns.
…Alien Invaders
Attack! Attack!
You have been promoted to Space Colonel
Crystal Castles
Satan’s Hollow
DigDug
Moon Patrol
Tron
Discs of Tron
Rock n’ Rope
Pengo
TimePilot
TimePilot '84
Frontline
Tempest
Joust
BurgerTime!
Track and Field
Too bad, Space General
Insert Coin…
One more:
My brother, one of our friends, and I played Bruce Lee on our Commodore64 for over 36 hours straight! Mail Order Monsters also kicked @ss.
At the arcade, I loved Gauntlet
I still go around saying, “Michael needs food… badly.”
“Michael… your life force is running out.”
On the computer, I use to telnet in to a VAX machine to play Galactic Trader. You flew your ship around, made money, bought weapons and went out and blew up your friends who were also playing. I guess it was basically an early MUD.
Moon Cresta.
I have a real, working Moon Cresta tabletop arcade machine in my home. (It is currently used as a living room table.)
JBirdman12 wrote:
It also played this great music when you flew through energy and became temporarily invincible. That music made you feel like you really were invincible!
I later discovered that this music came from the Hawkmen-attack-rocketship-Ajax cue from the Flash Gordon movie soundtrack. Which sounded pretty awful in its original version. I was so heartbroken.
I loved this game! Do you know where I could find a copy??? Please?
Falc,
I got it on MAME if you want it.
Gauntlet was great. I still think Gore could have won the debates handily if he’d just looked at Bush and said “Elf needs food-badly!”
Anyone remember Reactor? You were a particle in a nuclear reactor that was melting down. the game was OK, but the music kicked ass. If the volume was cranked on the machine, it blew you away.
In the Tetris genre, I RULED at Block-Out. It was 3-D Tetris. I was much better at it than the original.
I had an Atari ST series computer. There was a game called Dungeon Master that I would play for hours. If any one know where I can get a P.C. compatible version of it, I’d be real grateful.
I once played Joust for 7 hours, hunting teredactyls. I think I got something like 9 million points. It took me another hour just to kill all my men after I stopped hunting, and I was on a level with NOTHING but blue guys-somewhere in the 90s I think.
That is strange that someone mentioned Tapper. We used to play it every day during high school during our lunch, at a local pizza place. I was just reading the “Yankee Brew News,” a beer newspaper, and they say that you can go to http://www.mame.net for an emulator program, and then to http://www.emux.com for a Tapper program. Or, you can look at the screens by going to joystick.virtualave.net/tapper.htm as well.
I’m relatively new in this MB–how do I “clip” someone’s words (you know, so it says “originally posted by ___,” and puts it in bold print)?
Nine,
See that little button marked “quote” at the bottom of each post? There ya go!
Aha!
Satan wrote:
Since when does Zork qualify as a video game?
Does anyone remember Denby for the Apple IIe? It came with a book full of code that you typed to create the game. Anyone? How about Conan for the Apple IIe? That has got to be the most addictive game.
I’ve got a couple of them. One is Super R-Type, for the Super NES. It’s all right. The second is R-Types, for the Playstation. This version has two faithful ports of the arcade games, plus some extras…shows a bit of the space vehicles’ histories, stuff like that. I need to get it out and look at it again. But if you liked it in the arcade, get the PSX version.
Ok. I have this Gameboy game called “Elevator Action”…has ANYone heard of it besides me, my brother, and the few people who have played it at my house???
P.S. It’s not what it sounds like, there are elevators involved, but not in THAT WAY;)
Getting blasted and throwing quarters into Tempest. Wow that was a pretty game.
The when I got engaged, my Mom gave us Atari 2600 for a present. We’d sit up all night playing Missile Command.
COmmodore 64? Oh, I wish. I had the VIC-20, and played Radar Ratrace until my eyes bled. 3 Blind Mice was the music…over and over and over and…
I never had an Atari, but I went to my neighbors to play Pitfall. Never EVER got anywhere, just ran to the left for hours. Frogger was good too.
Arcade games I loved…Tempest, Robotron 2040, and Centipede. I had welts on my fingers from that roller ball on Centipede for months.