[QUOTE=Alienblue]Also loved CENTIPEDE, MR.DO! and in the mid eighties GAUNTLET was so important to me that I would walk down to THE PUFFIN STOP coneiniance store in winter at 6 am to play the machine. I was in heaven when it was announced for the NES.......see, thats what I miss, waiting for arcade games to come home.[/QUOTE]
Did you actually like the NES version of Gauntlet?
Berzerk, Seawolf and this old two player fire fighter game with two steering wheels. Maybe those are from the 1970's. Eighties, I would say Krull and Spy Hunter.
Berzerk, Seawolf and this old two player fire fighter game with two steering wheels. Maybe those are from the 1970's. Eighties, I would say Krull and Spy Hunter.
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Since enjoying Magfest in DC's arcade recently, and it being 35 years now since the real beginning of the golden age of arcades, I've had my interest in arcades rekindled. The allincolorforaquarter blog is a neat place to go.
I'm old enough to have played some of the electro mechanicals of the 70s, including Midway's Sea Wolf game. Standing on a step stool, it had something really only the arcades had...highly customized controls to give you amazing immersion. In this case, a periscope. Call it very early 'virtual reality', as all you could see was the game, and you were totally focused. The game looked nothing like you might think of - no pixels or polygons. It used backlit transparencies to look almost cartoony-real, watching your torpedo track on the surface, and the red explosion in the back. Check out a video, but its really quite amazing for mid 70s. My guess is that, like pinball, it was expensive to build, a maintenance hog, and just lacked the wow factor of early video games. There is a nice homebrew game called Sea Wolf for the 2600, but its so different its hard to compare them.
As for 80s themselves, every time I get a chance to try them, I find new favorites. I was really good at Star Wars Arcade and really bad at Defender and Dragon's Lair. I really enjoy simple control schemes and games like Joust and Wizard of Wor. Now I find I can play co-op on 1 player machines to simplify the control scheme even more by drafting a kid as a gunner in games like R-type and Missile Command, which is neat. I bet I could do that for Robotron and have a very different experience too.
The fighting games that came later, with their combos and finishing moves, even had they been around in the early 80s would not have been my favorites. I don't want the challenge to be in who has mastered such a nonintuitive control scheme better.
How about you? Any Pac champs? Any Lords of Galaga? Any Sinistar Barons?
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