My favourite games from before my birth

I was born on August 15, 1984. It’s a pretty special date, because it meant I was born into the recovering videogame (Boy, I hate that spelling… thanks, VG Styleguide. I only do it because at least someone’s standing up for standardization in videogame editorials) industry. I didn’t experience first hand the epic failure of E.T., or the resulting drought that nearly choked video games out of existence. By the time I was old enough to crawl, the NES was strong and a new era of gaming had begun.

However, I spent a lot of quality time with games older than me while growing up. Our house was an anomaly: we had a games console and a computer, which many others didn’t have, but we always had very dated, second-hand equipment. During the reign of the NES, I could only play jealously at other houses, wishing my father would upgrade us from the Atari 2600. When the Pentium 100 came out, and I watched my friend play Warcraft II, I wished my father would replace our old Atari ST desktop. He did– with his friend’s old 486 (not even a 486DX! The horror!). The Christmas when the N64 came out, my mom gave me her boss’s kid’s SNES (in my opinion, they got completely shortchanged here. The 64 was good, but I got an SNES!).

Some of these games suck now, but they have a certain magic to me. That magic is impossible to capture due to the Internet, nowadays; before you even look at the cover of a game, you can now know if it is good or if it sucks. Back in the day, you couldn’t even rent these games. You had to get them at garage sales, which were usually run by the parents of people who owned the games, so they couldn’t even tell you if they were good. That’s something that’s probably lost on kids nowadays. Back then, I didn’t even have someone to compare games with. If I ever have kids, I will give them all Game Boys, and not let them on the Internet until they start needing it for school. Then I wil buy them horribly shitty Game Boy games that they will love, despite the crap, because they don’t know better. Every nerd should experience loving a dud game.

[b]Breakout[/b]

This game pretty much solidified my opinion of how games should be played. Why play Pong with a friend? If my friend is over, I want to run around and play guns or draw pictures or pretend to be spacemen. If I am home alone, however, I want a game to play! Breakout was the first “Pong vs. A Brick Wall” game and I still have never stopped playing games like this (Alleyway on Game Boy, Arkanoid on Commodore Amiga, Nervous Brickdown recently on DS). I still don’t “get” multiplayer gaming. I always think there’s something better I could be doing with my friends. I’m barely talknig about Breakout… or am I?

[b]Space Invaders[/b]

This one I only got to play in arcades, and not very often, but I loved it. It was probably the earliest example of videogame masochism I can remember. My parents would give me one or two quarters and leave me at the local mall arcade for an hour while they took care of their business. I would usually play the newer, shinier games like TMNT: The Arcade Game, but for a while, it was Space Invaders. I’m not sure I ever beat the first wave of baddies (I sucked at games then, just like I do now). The game I played was in black and white, too, with coloured cellophane over the screen to make it look like the aliens had color. Awesome.

[b]Asteroids[/b]

This is probably the game I played most on my Atari ST personal computer, with the possible exception of Bubble Ghost (which came out in 1987, and doesn’t make the cut for this list). Boy, this game was amazing. I think the version I was playing was actually “Asteroids Deluxe,” but it doesn’t matter. This game had one of my favourite mechanics to ever not be really ripped off by every game ever; the “warp” mechanic, which was essentially the “oh shit, I’m probably about to die, if I hit this I might live… or I might TOTALLY die right away” button. When I got bored of the game played normally, I’d challenge myself to only move using warp, and forego the up/down/left/right controls entirely.

[b]Gorf[/b]

My friend scored a VIC-20 from a garage sale with this game. It was the first game I ever saw that you had to load from a cassette.  The wait was excruciating. It made me really glad that I had the Atari 2600, whose load times were virtually non-existent. But, once Gorf was running, it was a masterpiece. The game was punishing, like Space Invaders, but once you passd that first level, it was practically a brand new game. This was the first time I’d ever really experienced the feeling that a game could present another scenario instead of “the same as before but harder.” Now, that’s taken for granted, but back then, it was like finding $5 in an old pair of pants. A completely unexpected surprise (remember, there was no Internet to tell us!), and a reason to go to that friend’s house way, way more (aside from his other awesome stuff, like later, an NES, and before that, his dad’s hidden adult mags).

[b]Combat[/b]

I know I said I didn’t like multiplayer games above, but this was one of the first examples of me changing my mind. You could play as tanks, planes, or… uhh, faster planes in this one-versus-one shooter. The tanks were the best. Trying to explain the game just doesn’t get the message across, I’ve learned. It’s a game that I think everyone should experience with a good friend at some point. It may have been the most perfect 1v1 shooter ever made, and it’s held up fabulously. Seriously, go play this game. Like, now. After hours, when you’re sick of tank mode, try the planes mode.

[b]Donkey Kong[/b]

This is one of the three 2600 games I actually owned, and probably my least favourite of the three, but that’s not saying much. The first (or third, or fifth, or…) level is the one you’d recognize if you’ve never played the game; a questionably wobbly looking tower with a monkey on top, throwing barrels at you. THIS WAS NOT THE BEST LEVEL. The best level was the second level, with four perfectly level floors, with two poorly built rivets each, and a really nasty, high-speed fireball on each. See, the fireball had free range on the level until you jumped over and killed a rivet. Then, it could only go back and forth between the wall and the rivet (or, if you trapped it in the middle, the rivet and the other rivet). I’m not sure I am doing this justice. But, the feeling of being over on the ugly side of a rivet, and timing your jump so that you went over a rivet AND the fireball at the same time, AND trapping the fireball on the useless side of the building, was so epically awesome that you felt like an absolute master of video games. I never managed to do that more thna twice in one level (you get four chances), so you felt like you’d done something really special. I don’t know if this game is actually hard anymore, but back then, it was the perfect level of punishing. Not hopeless, but NOT easy.

[b]Ms. Pac-Man[/b]

I never had Pac-Man, but I had Ms. Pac-Man. I think I cried when my dad bought it, not because I knew Pac-Man was a better game, but because it looked like it was for girls. But, I played it. And I played it a lot. In fact, this is one of the games I got to the “end” of (not really, as I’m not sure there even was an end; however, every Atari game I had would eventually glitch up a few levels in, forcing me to start over. Thanks, dust, for complicating my young gaming life.). I should play this game again; since, I’ve only played a bit of Pac-Man and a bunch of Pac-Man C.E. (which will make an appearance on my top games of 2007 list, so stay tuned). Ms. Pac-Man was also very unique in that it had a main female character who wasn’t included to make dudes want to bang her. Nice one, Namco.

[b]Mario Bros.[/b]

This isn’t Super Mario Brothers. This is the game before it, for the Atari. You’ve probably played it while playing your friend at SMB3 on the Nintendo, when you enter the level he’s standing on. But, that version pales in comparison to the original. You had to commit to jumps, back in the day. You had to save that POW block for when you really needed it, not just when you felt like messing with your buddy. I think my game had a glitch, too, because there weren’t any coins when you killed a badguy; there was a weird spinning multi-colored wafer. I remember always thinking they looked like candy, and wanting to eat them a lot.

That’s it for this segment of “Will Missing The Good Ol’ Days.” I hope to do segments on later generations of games, and later consoles in the future. Keep an eye out for a Game Boy retrospective. I’ll try not to talk about games you’ve heard too much abotu already, like Pokemon, and stick to ones you have definitely not heard enough about, like Final Fantasy Legend (the first), Solar Striker, Baseball, Super Mario Land (the first), and maybe a few others.