scotland wrote:
Great list, and I'm delighted to see the Odyssey 2, TRS-80 and Apple II on your list.
I am also a big fan of StarMaster. Its really a game I keep going back to. I'm awful, so I was never going to win that Activision patch. Toggling the b/w switch really does add something.
I'm jealous of everyone with an Odyssey 2 voice unit. I have one, but its defunct. I've yet to figure out how to repair it. Killer Bees does seem to be a very popular O2 game, Maybe it came out too late in the console's life and I had moved on to an other system, but its never been my particular favorite. Maybe KC Munchkin or UFO for me, or even Quest for the Rings.
I've never played Looping. I don't own it either, so maybe you've added something to my 'Buy' list.
I've never played Poltergeist on the TRS-80 either. Is it on the Co-Co, because I've been pondering a Co-Co purchase. The TRS-80 was the first computer I ever used, and began learning BASIC on it. While we used to put it down, I've always got a soft spot for it.
Taipan is a neat choice for the Apple II - did you play this in school, by any chance? Probably the first 'trader' game I ever played, and its not all text either. Ship to Ship battles!
And your NES game gets kudos for the story attached to it.
Thanks for the kind words! By the way, I do miss my Odyssey 2, TRS-80 and Apple //e. Funny story about the Odyssey 2 -- I'm a lawyer now and I was handling a divorce for a client. Her husband left the Odyssey 2 -- voice unit and all -- at their home. I suggested that she leave it with me for "safe keeping." My wife (who runs our office) refused, saying we have enough video consoles at home. I sold my Odyssey 2 years ago and regret doing that -- The Voice was awesome, even if most of the games were marginal at best.
As for Looping, fair warning -- that game is generally hated. I like it simply because I played it against my little brother and he enjoyed that game quite a bit. I suspect the game gets low marks because of how painful the ColecoVision controller can be through heavy use.
Poltergeist was made for the CoCo and I had the ROM-pack (I think that's what Radio Shack called cartridges) of it. That was my first computer and my parents eventually sold it and bought an IBM-PC for me back around 1983 or so. What I remember the most about that machine is that it cost $4,200 for a system with a whopping 256k of RAM, one double-sided floppy drive, DOS 1.1, Easywriter, a CGA graphics card and color monitor and an Epson 9-pin, dot matrix printer. My mom used that computer until she broke down and got something with Windows 98. While that PC wasn't exactly a "game" machine, I did play a lot of "Galactic Gladiators" on it.
Oddly, I played Taipan in college a lot. That is odd because I got my Apple //e in 1987 a few days before I started college and that computer was well on its way out at that time. However, I was one of the few kids around who had his own computer and most students relied on the Macintosh lab on campus for writing papers and such. I loved the //e, though, and still think it's funny that the maximum number of pages I could get out of the word processor (AppleWorks) was 20 due to the memory limitations of the system (an "elephantine" 128k). Also, because I didn't have a hard drive, the spell check was run through a floppy-based dictionary and took forever. I miss that computer a lot -- it had beer spilled on it more than once and just kept going strong.
Now, speaking of all these games reminds me of my favorite inventions in years -- the Hyperkin Retron 5. It might be heresy to essentially play my NES, SNES and Genesis on an emulator when I have the original equipment, but the HDMI upscaling and the fact I can use my original controller make that system a winner in my book.