Almost forgot Arabian Nights! Any video game with a score by Rimsky-Korsakov is a keeper…
Ms. Pac Man—After all these years, it still looks sexy. Crisp, beautiful graphics and colors, simple premise, high replay value. The game is a classic. In today’s world of crazy almost photorealistic 3D graphics, I think Ms. Pac-Man still simply looks gorgeous.
Out Run—Even today, I can’t stop playing this game. My favorite racing game of all time, I’ve never gotten sick of playing it.
Karate Champ Vs.—Forerunner to Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and all those other player vs. player fighting games. It did have primitive graphics and a rather odd two-joystick control system, but I found the game addictive as hell.
Those of you who liked Track and Field … let’s talk shop:
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How did you press the buttons to increase to insane footspeeds? Could you just tap the buttons real fast with your index fingers? Could you do that “wave” thing with your hands, hitting the buttons with pinkie-ring-middle-index-pinkie-etc. in perfect rhythm? Or did you ever lay a pencil across the buttons and ratta-tat-tat away?
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What was the perfect angle to long jump or to throw the hammer? 43 or 45 degrees?
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Weren’t 7-second 100-meter dashes and 9-foot high jumps the coolest?
Prepare to meet your Gorfian doom, Space Cadet!
Anyone remember a game called Qix (or something like that)? You had to trap some moving lines in a box you would draw.
Qix was awesome. You’d build up these little blue boxes on fast draw and then enclose big brown boxes on slow draw for more points. Then you had to avoid the sparx that followed your lines. On higher levels, you’d have to split the stix. Very cool game.
I’ll throw out the first vote for Super Mario Brothers – spent way too many hours playing that one. The original Mario Brothers was also loads of fun (but hard for me).
I’ll second pulykamell’s vote for Karate Champ, a game well ahead of it’s time. Another fun fighting game was Yie Ar Kung Fu (sp?), in which you had to take on various armed opponents (except Buchu, but everyone else had nunchuks, a chain, fans, clubs, etc.) w/o weapons of your own. Every opponent in YAKF had a specific weakkness … except maybe for that club guy.
In the realm of sports games … Vs. Baseball was OK … Vs. RBI Baseball was the bomb. Vs. Excitebike was also big game around here.
Anyone else ever play the wrasslin’ game Mat Mania? Remember how hard it was to beat Coco Savage until you learned to do that running-shove move?
As for Gridiron Fight – did any game give more unforgiving calluses?
Just remembered one I used to play all of the time - Phoenix.
Man I loved Gorf, and I was damn good at it too! That’s gotta be my favorite, closesly followed by Centipede. Second choices, but also fun: Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Joust and Qbert.
I would have done much better in college if those games hadn’t been around!
Seconded. Was thinking about this one during my last post.
There was a laserdisc game called Star Rider that had (for its time)fantastic (pre)rendered graphics, but it was only around for a very short time, after which the cabinets were still in circulation, but with some dreadful 16 colour motorcycle race game installed.
I also remember a ground-breaking driving simulation called Hard Drivin’ which amazed everybody because it had a force-feedback steering wheel.
My top three:
Pac-Man: I must have spent at least a couple hundred dollars in my youth playing this game. I got as far as the ninth key (the point at which the power pills are ineffective except to reverse the direction of the ghosts). My high score was ~250,000.
Centipede: Another game that took a good portion of my allowance to play. I also liked its sucessor, Millipede, but there weren’t too many of them around.
Galaga: It took me awhile to build up skill, but once I did I could keep this game in play for a long time. After I cleared a million points and was well past the 100th level I started killing off all the extra ships I earned.
Others deserving of mention:
Robotron 2084: How one game could have so many objects moving on the screen at once was amazing.
Q*Bert: A cute, fun and fast-paced game.
Gyruss: Sort of a 3-D Galaga. The music was cool, too.
Mr. Do!: Another cute, but fun game.
Tempest: Lots of action and fast-paced play.
Joust: I played this one a lot at the ski lodge when I went in for a warm-up and to eat lunch.
Donkey Kong: Everybody played this one, didn’t they?
Frogger: Fun, but game play was short.
Missile Command: Another game I liked but play time was too short. I rarely made it past the third level as all my cities would be bombed by then.
Vanguard: Not as well-known. A good shoot 'em up game where you traveled through space caverns as you fought off the bad guys.
Gorf: 5 games in one! Wow!
A few I didn’t care for:
Asteroids: I know, it came out in the late 1970s, violating the OPs parameters, but still… I never got very far playing this one.
Defender: Also too hard, got blown up and shot at all the time. It’s successor, Stargate, was more engaging, though.
Venture: I don’t remember much about this game other than that it was difficult.
Zaxxon: Cool graphics but also too difficult to keep in play for very long.
Beware! I live!
Thirded. Loved those shoot 'em up space games. Pleiades (looked that one up when I was a kid. Comes in handy on crosswords.), Galaxian, Galaga, Defender, etc.
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I’ve been trying to find out the name of one game that I used to play in '87 or '88. You were a barbarian fighting hordes of enemies. You would get coins when your enemies died, and could buy upgrades armor and weaponry (particularly fun was the flaming mace with extendable chain). The game was a 2D side-scroller, but you could move and attack up and down within the environment as well. Anybody help?
[/hijack]
Here’s a nice sideview of the cabinet on that one. This comes from the AGH Museum, which has a lot of views of old coin-op games.
Street Fighter II came out in 1991.
Actually, G2 was out a few years ago. There’s another, better graphics…Legends, IIRC. Somehow not as much fun…
Saw that Wizard needs food badly as a T-shirt a few days ago online… maybe have been Diesel Sweeties comic.
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Astro Blaster, oh yeah…and uhh
I’m surprised that so many people like Gorf. I was always a little embarassed that I liked it so much. The graphics were on the Space Invaders level, while other games were stretching the envelope - it was obviously derivative - but I was completely addicted.
Qix pulled me in with it’s sound and the feeling that you were building something. Does anyone else still hear that sound in the back of your head from time to time? I can’t even describe it.
As third, I’d have to say Q-bert or Tetris. Q-bert has the whimsey vote. Tetris is just absorbing. Kind of a toss-up.
You know, the first time I ever played Sinistar in an arcade, when the game had first come out, that Voice rang out, and the Sinistar came outta nowhere to chew on my ship, and it startled me so bad I nearly crapped my pants.
I loved that game.
Anyone remember StarCastle? Vector graphics - you had to shoot through concentric layers of shields to blow up a central cannon which would shoot at you through shield holes and also send three hunter/killer stars out after you (I nicknamed them Curly, Larry, and Moe). I played that damn game so much I could go for an hour on a single quarter.
Another of my faves was Berserk, the maze game with killer robots. The voice synthesis commentary was the best: *“Kill the intruder”, “Chicken - fight like a robot” * and more, in a cool electronic voice. My favorite was the teaser screen when you were deciding which game to play. One of the Berserk’s stock phrases for the teaser was “Coins detected in pocket.”
I’m pretty much in agreement with just about everyone else, too. It’s way too hard to narrow down my favorites, I played 'em all. I practically lived in arcades from the late 1970’s to the mid 1980’s.
I still play them all, too. Thank Og for emulators.
One night in college I took some LSD. This was not unusual in itself, but (predictably) some weird shit happened. I was on one of those meaning-of-life trips when a familiar voice floated in from the ether.
“Save keys to open doors”
Of course! Suddenly, it was all so obvious! Save keys to open doors! I had been such a fool. The meaning of life, right there in front of me for so long…
Gauntlet, the most profound video game of all time.