Nth-ing Dragon’s Lair. Okay to watch, a waste of money to play.
I liked Defender, but I was never any good at the arcade version. Getting a 5-digit score was an accomplishment for me. On the Atari 2600 version, though, I could play about as long as I wanted.
Are you sure you aren’t thinking of Zaxxon, a game I couldn’t handle for the same reasons? Vanguard was a side-scrolling (and occasionally diagonal-scrolling) shooter that I remembered for having 4-way shooting.
It sounds like you may be thinking of Man Enough. AFAIK that was only ever released to the PC though.
Ugh, try the Atari 2600 version. I had it(called Tron Deadly Discs) and it was really bad, even for a 2600 game.
Yeah, but Double Dragon 3 looks worse and plays worse than its predecessors. I’m not sure what happened…
You may be confusing Tron with an earlier arcade game called Discs of Tron. Tron consisted of four “zones,” each of which was a different game; for example, in one, you raced a lightcycle against the game (in higher levels, the game had more than one cycle) and tried to make the computer’s cycles crash.
The thing I hated about the arcade 4-zone version of Tron is that the angle of the shooting was too hard to align with the arm/gun graphic: it always seemed like you weren’t actually shooting at the angle you seemed to be aiming at and so the only way to make sure was to either remember or fire a tracer, which wasted a shot when you were on a tank level.
Yes, I don’t think they ever imagined people would be clearing a million points. By the time they got around to Stargate, however, they built in that feature. But I was never very good at Stargate.
Speaking of trying to delicately get an exact score, I still remember when someone told us the cheats for Tempest. By landing on precise scores, you could either get unlimited plays, or jump ahead a boatload of levels. Our local arcade owner figured that out in less than a month and shut it down, and in retrospect I certainly don’t blame him.
Managed to ace the following:
Asteroids I. Once I quit with like 50 extra ships across the top, let some other guy play it out.
Defender. Would typically be disappointed to not get to the million points score turnover point, where you would get a whole host of extra ships-which was good since for the next million points you would get diddly.
Berserk. Often cleared 15000 points-for a few years the machine at Cedar Point (~15 years ago) kept my high score in memory. On Mame I once got to 35,000, then quickly lost 3 straight mazes. :mad: [Note I never used-or was aware of-the cycling cheat, where if you noticed a certain maze pattern you could play the same easy 4 boards over and over with no danger of dying by simply exiting N, W, S then E, thus going around in a circle]
Battlezone. Myself and another good player during my first college would switch after say every 100,000 points so we’d be able to remain mentally fresh. 1-2 hours on one quarter.
Yes, it was Zaxxon, that pseudo-3D bastard. I always died in like 4 seconds because my hand-eye coordination wouldn’t map the 2d representation of a 3d view.
I also didn’t care for Vanguard, it was just like a mediocre version of Defender for me. But I bet everybody remembers that sweet-ass iconic commercial for the Atari Vanguard cartridge with the tagline “Luther Destroys The Gond”.
Boredom sets in…
The original arcade “Pong” (or some clone). Two of us got so good at it that we would play “first goal wins” - it would usually take about an hour for one of us to score. We would then pass it on to two others - one of whom would run the score up to the limit of 11 fairly quickly.
The original arcade “Breakout” - I stopped playing after I routinely cleared both “walls” on the first ball. “Super Breakout” was more challenging - you had a choice of three versions of the game. I mastered two of them, but not the third one (where the “wall” slowly descends).
Even when it first came out PONG was boring as shit. When our parents bought me the home version for my birthday I didn’t even want to hook it up.
There was a game that I am guessing came out in the late 70’s but damn if I can recall it’s name. It was all black and white like Asteroids. The joystick was really small and it felt like you were going to snap the sucker off. UFO’s would fly toward the screen and you had to line up a rudimentary crosshairs on them to shoot them. Even if you direct hit some of them several times they wouldn’t stop and you would lose a turn! :mad:
It was almost impossible to get extended play and it didn’t even seem like you were playing. Almost like the outcome was completely pre-programmed and you were just pointlessly moving the stick and hitting the button like a chimp in a test lab. It was a total rip off.
Anyone have any clue WTH game that was? The only place I ever saw it was in the vestibule of a SuperValu grocery store in southeastern Wisconsin.
It sounds a lot like Starship 1, an Atari game from the late 70s. That had an aircraft-style yoke instead of a joystick, though.
I was 12 years old in 1980, and my subsequent teen years were spent at the arcade during that “golden age” of games. I dabbled at many, and became really good at a few (Galaga, Gyruss, Wizard of Wor, Turbo, Asteroids Deluxe, Star Wars, Ms. Pac Man, Astro Blaster, Xevious, **Gorf **off the top of my head). I do remember Dragon’s Lair. My cousin gave me a cheat sheet of “for this scene press this; for this scene, press that” but I never saw the attraction.
But I could never figure out Tempest. I spoke the language of arcade games. I “got it” for most of them. But the few times I tried Tempest, I felt like I was trying to complete my English assignment using only Greek. I just could not understand that game at all.
There was an arcade game I only saw in one location. It was called Space Zap, and the bowling alley at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station had one. Me and my little sister beat the hell out of that game. One of us would take over the laser cannons, and the other would man the fire button. If there was ever an award for “best performance on an arcade game by a 12-year-old boy and his 10-year old sister,” we would have crushed that award.
Having said all that, my true love was pinball. If I ever hit the lotto, the first thing I’m going to do is fill a house with all the best (and even sucky, for nostalgia’s sake) pinball games I’ve played. For example, I *still *need to beat Addams’ Family.
This was my favorite game at the mall arcade. I probably couldn’t fit into the “cockpit” now.
I enjoyed both of those. Tron was more basic but had four different games, whereas Discs of Tron was the one where you were standing inside a console surrounded by speakers but only played the disc game. Was Discs of Tron earlier than Tron? I thought it was later - the graphics and play were certainly better.
As we’ve digressed, my favorite game was Heavy Barrel, but as an eight-point shooter it was a recipe for carpal tunnel damage.
I recall encountering Discs of Tron in the early '90s at a rather large arcade in San Diego called “Wonderland”. Their selling point was that the games ran on nickels instead of quarters, but there was an admission fee (less than $10, I think) and no loitering/spectatorship was allowed - you had to always be playing or in line to play a game (and for the big games of the day, like Mortal Kombat, there was always a line.) One corner of the building was dedicated to older (and therefore presumably undesirable) games that were free to play, and Discs of Tron was one of them.
I found it at the time to be much more entertaining than the original game.
I never lasted more than a few seconds on Zaxxon. Frustrating as all heck
There was also an Atari 2600 Journey game. It was also not good.
I liked Journey Escape for some reason, probably because it was easy enough to play forever and not be super-stressful but hard enough that it doesn’t become instantaneously boring. Plus the Big Bosses looked silly.
Yep, that’s it. I went online and searched some videos of its actual game play. I’m certain that is the one.
I only saw one version of it. Perhaps the yoke had been broken and the repair service Rigged a little joy stick on instead.
the most boring beat em up ever was capcoms marvel comics the punisher…
Take everything annoying about a beat em up game and put them in a basket and a plot that didn’t make sense even for a marvel game …but worst of all it was cheap and boring …
Funny thing is I decided I was going to beat it once and for all so I used MAME and free play mode and I beat it in about a half-hour …
lol, my unicorn wins the lottery pinball game is the data east star wars game… I should start a go fund me so I can get the 6-8 k the collectors want for one …