Been a while since I put up any Games Collection posts, so here's a lazy Sunday posting of my entire Wii collection! There's a couple of stinkers in there, but most are are pretty good or even awesome, and the ones that are bad I only paid about £1 for. Oh, and a couple of the games are actually my mother's as she got them when she picked up a Wii and Wii Fit...but I'm still the only one that really plays them! :)
I will single out a few later in the blog, as stuff like No More Heroes, Little King Story and Disaster : Day Of Crisis needs to be talked about...until then, just enjoy perusing the pics!
Before I finally got my hands on my own computer to play games on, and when I wasn't able to get to an arcade or got bored with my handhelds, there was always somewhere else I could go for my gaming fix....friends houses! It would often seem like everybody had a computer or console except me, especially in the late '80s, but at least there was a few people I could rely on to let me play on their machines....
My cousin was one of the first people I remember always having cool game systems, and whenever I visited I'd try and persuade her to play on them at least for a little while, before we ventured outside and played Tarzan (she was always Tarzan, I was Cheetah) or The A-Team (everybody wanted to be Murdoch)...
The Atari 2600 was the first one I played, but as it was early on my actual memories of it are pretty hazy. The only game I really remember playing was Pitfall....
Pitfall - Atari 2600
I won't spend much time writing about Pitfall, as pretty much everybody who reads this should know what the games about! If you don't, you play an Indiana Jones type character who has to swing over pits and crocodiles, avoiding other nasties, quicksand and rolling logs and trying to find as much treasure as possible!
It's pretty much credited with creating the whole side-scrolling-platform genre, so if you've never played it you'd better seek it out so as you can maintain your "proper gamer" credentials!
I'm sure there were other games I played on my cousin's Atari, but this is the one that sticks in my memory, and it was very influential in getting me to buy many of the handhelds and tabletops in the previous blog post. It would be a while before I really experienced proper home computer games though....
Many years later, when I was almost 12, I moved home from a small group of cottages in the middle of nowhere, to a village with slightly more houses, but still in the middle of nowhere! There was still a much larger population of kids there though, one of whom was a girl who I'd grew up with at the farm who had moved away a few years previously, but had also come to stay in the new houses being built in the village. Our friendship was rekindled and we started hanging out, going on adventures in the surrounding countryside with the other kids or having epic cycle races round the block! I eventually discovered that she was the owner of an Atari ST 5200FM, and yet another batch of games would add fuel to the fire of wanting my own computer....
Barbarian (Atari ST)
As you will have noted in previous posts, I'm a sucker for the Fantasy genre, so when I discovered this game that basically let me be Conan and behead enemies, I was very intrigued! This was the first one-on-one fighter I had played that had weapons, and also the first that I remember learning the moves for! Later, when battling with my friend's little brother on woodchip piles left out the front of our houses, using canes stolen from their garden, I would impress him with the Web Of Death move I had taught myself after seeing it in Barbarian! Hehe...
My favourite bit of this game though is when you lop your opponents head off, and a little green lizard dude comes walking on, kicks the head off screen, gives a little chuckle and drags your defeated opponent's corpse off somewhere..
Anyway, as fighting games go, Barbarian is one of the best of its era, and if you haven't played it yet, you really should hunt it down and give it a go. The presentation and music are excellent too, and its still pretty groovy even today!
Quadralien (Atari ST)
My memory of this game is a bit weird...mainly because it's less about having played the game, and more about trying to work out how exactly to play the thing! My friends dad worked in a computer lab y'see, and most of the games she had for this ST were 'acquired' from certain individuals with wooden legs and eyepatches. This meant that they rarely came with any form of instructions, so if you got anything a little more complicated than a shoot-em-up, you would have to try and work out what buttons did what and what the hell it was that you were actually meant to be doing...
Apparently, the plot involves aliens taking over a large reactor in space and sabotaging it so as it's dangerously close to exploding, and you have to move barrells and orbs of radioactive material down chutes, or destroy them in other ways, whilst battling aliens at the same time. You do this by using droids with different abilities, but can only take two droids into a level at once, meaning you have an added strategic element in trying to work out what droids you'll need to solve the Sokoban-style puzzles...
Given all this, it's no wonder we didn't have a clue what we were doing when we tried to play this without instructions! Nobody ever wanted to try and work it out except me, and I'd sometimes get my friend or her brother to load it up just so as I could listen to the groovy music! Nowadays, I have a bit more of a clue what's going on, but still find it damned tricky! Still it's well worth a go if such puzzley-strategy-type things are your bag....
Black Lamp (Atari ST)
Another great fantasy game that had me hooked from the first play was this tale of a poor Jester trying to win the heart of a princess which he does by returning the coloured lamps stolen by evil dragons who have invaded the kingdom! By returning the lamps, the protection spells that kept the kingdom safe from marauding monsters will be put back in place, and the day will be well and truly saved!
I loved wandering around the lovely little villages and castle in this game, battling the evil monsters that have started attacking due to the lack of the aforementioned protection spells...and I remember being really impressed the first time I came across a dragon, killed it and retrieved the fabled Black Lamp of the title! It really struck a chord with me and I later came up with several ideas for my own games (none of which I ever made) based around very similar settings....
Eddie Edwards Super Ski (Atari ST)
Hehe...this marvelous game of skiing sticks in my memories not for the actual game itself, but for the memory of what happened one fateful afternoon when several of the local kids had gone to my friend's house to play it...
Being only a single player game, we passed the joystick from player to player as we took turns to ski down the slopes and try to beat each other's times. There must have been about 5 or 6 of us there that day, which was a bit more than the usual 2 or 3, so the joystick was getting a bit of a hammering. One girl was a bit more heavy handed than the rest of us though, and after she'd had a go, the next person on discovered that suddenly the skier would shoot of to the right of the screen and not do much else..
Funnily enough, it was upon noticing this that a very strange event happened...The girl seemed to obtain amazing auditory powers and could hear her mother calling her from the other end of the village! Nobody else could hear this, but she assured us that this was the case and she had to rush home as soon as possible, leaving the rest of us to inform the girl whose computer it was (who bizarrely wasn't even there that day) about the broken joystick. Needless to say it was a while before we got back in to play the ST again....
Starquake (Atari ST)
This is quite possibly my favourite platformer ever, and I'm not even sure it can properly be called a platformer! It was after playing this that I found myself making excuses to visit my friend a lot more often, so I could have another go at trying to beat this gem of a game. Many, many fond memories of playing it, including a run when all I seemed to find where the extra life joysticks meaning I could play for ages and almost complete it!
You play the part of B.L.O.B., and odd little creature tasked with repairing the unstable core of a rogue planet that has appeared from a random black hole. To do this, you must roam the planet looking for items you'll need to take to the core and use to repair it.
To help you, you'll find lots of little teleportation huts that you can zip between to save time. To do this though, you'll need to learn the passwords, and finding these out added another fun element to the game! Careful management of your extra platforms (which you seem to poop out by pressing down), health and ammo is also required...and to really get around you'll need to find the Access card pretty early on too!
All this adds up to a surprisingly strategic yet simple game that's loads of fun to play! I might go and give it another go actually after writing this...I never managed to beat the ST version, only the Speccy version...
Marble Madness (Atari ST)
Quite a few nice memories of playing this game too, but another one that we were all pretty bad at. Trying to navigate a marble down an isometric maze courses whilst avoiding tubes, drops and acid puddles is even trickier than it sounds! We had fun trying to beat each others progress through the levels though!
I seem to have a false memory of this being played on some late eighties gameshow, like First Class or something, but apparently it wasn't, and I might be mixing it up with 720°which definitely was played on First Class...still, if anybody else reading knows if they did play it on any random TV programs, let me know in the comments....
Nebulus (Atari ST)
This was another one that looked really cool, but none of us could get the hang of...it's amazing how many games we just couldn't get very far in but played nonetheless! A bit different from nowadays where there's so many games flying around that if you can't work something out in 5 minutes, it's consigned forever to the "Naaah!" pile....
You have to navigate your little frog-like character up a rotating tower, avoiding traps and enemies, which can either knock you further back down the tower or into the sea, causing you to lose a life...Revisiting this game recently, I was finally able to get a bit further than the first level, and I discovered a nice little side-scrolling shooter section, where frog-dude pilots a submarine to get to the next tower! I can only imagine how excited we all would have been if we'd managed to see that back in the day! But yeah, now that I can actually play it, it's not a bad wee game at all! Quite addictive....
Buggy Boy (Atari ST)
Now this is one we could play! A brilliant little driving game where you control a beach buggy, racing to the finish line trying to drive through point gates and collect flags whilst avoiding trees, walls, spikes and various other obstacles!
It's a really well presented, bright and fun game, and again we all had a blast trying to get further than the person playing before us! I have many fond memories of spending sunny afternoons playing this when we should probably have been out on our bikes or something instead! Hehe....
So that was some of the games that further fed my craving for games, but before I finally managed to get my grubby little paws on my Speccy +2a, there was another 8-bit that almost swung me to the dark side....the Commodore 64! And we'll take a look at what games took my fancy on that machine in another post some other time...... :-)
It's really hard trying to describe an old arcade from the eighties or nineties to someone who has never been in one...Sure, you can still get arcades nowadays, but they're either super-clean museum type places, those fairground types with 3 good machines or those buildings with a sea of fruit machines and one House Of The Dead cab in the far corner.....
But they're all missing the atmosphere of the proper old arcades. The ones filled with a smokey haze and the smell of fish 'n' chips, beer and sweat. The ones with the slightly soggy, sticky carpets. The ones with the Change Lady who hid behind her smoke-filled, probably-bulletproof glass booth, glaring at you as you asked her to change yet another pound note into ten pences, as if you'd just crapped in her cornflakes rather than potentially adding seconds to her life by preventing her smoking yet another cigarette.
None of which sounds very appealing...but then you had the games you see! A dazzling wave of light and sound! The beeping, shouting, flickering boxes of awesomeness that were competing for your attention and cash, sometimes taunting you with booming voices mocking your games playing abilities...
And when you added the weird mix of people you found frequenting these places, the arcade cake got it's icing! Tiny toddlers wandering around trying to reach the arcade cabs that were too high for them, and then finding those two-pence sliding machines or grabby-arm machines filled with teddies and getting very excited....teenage guys and girls who mainly hung out near the pinball machines, but occasionally came to prove their worth by beating you at a fighting game....scary looking drunk old men who hung out at the fruit machines and grunted something incomprehensible when you tried to get past them....the confused parents, searching hopelessly for their child who was only going to be ten minutes three whole hours ago, who'd popped back outside twice to ask for another pound but had since been sucked into some virtual battleground and was lost there until they defeated the game or died trying......
It was the weird juxtaposition of the slight disgust at the premises and the sheer enjoyment and spectacle of the video games that made these establishments so special...and so hard to try and explain to those who've never experienced it. I know most of you reading this will have, but for those who haven't, I just hope that you can find one of the very few remaining proper arcades that must still exist some place in the world. It's something everybody should experience at least once...
But yes, it was in these old arcades where I had my other formative experiences with video games...and they were so very different to the ones I could have at home! So lets take a quick look at the machines which impressed me enough to feed more than a few of my coins, and paved the path to my obsession with games nowadays...
A game that really needs no introduction. It is one of the first I can remember playing though, and the impressive monsters on the side of the cab drew 50s-Sci-Fi-loving me straight to it the first time I saw it! There had to be at least two of these, or at least some sort of variant, in every arcade..and the sounds of the aliens advancing and your blaster blasting were always very prominent!
If for some reason you have no idea what Space Invaders entails (really though?), you basically just move left or right, avoiding bombs dropped by advancing aliens as you try to blast them out of the skies. Nice, simple gameplay that despite being very basic is somehow still very enjoyable!
This actually predates Space Invaders, and is another of the very first games I can remember. You play the part of a gunslinger in the Wild West having a shootout with a similar soul on the other side of the screen, controlled by either the computer or another player. It's basically the great-grand-daddy of Call Of Duty, Halo or the likes multi-player modes.
The game is time based, so it's all about how many kills you can get within a default 90 seconds. Cactus plants will occasionally appear between you and your foe to act as sort of shields, and a second joystick controls the direction of your gun so you can try and aim past said cacti....
When you kill your opponent, or he kills you, the dead body floats up to the graveyard at the top of the screen, and the Death March plays....a feature I remember 5 year old me being really impressed by! The painted backdrop that the game uses mirror-trickery to stick the graphics on looks really nice too!
Another one that everybody should know, so I won't waste much time talking about. Pac-Man was a game of firsts....First proper character, first cut-scenes, first power-ups, first crazy licencing deals.....and it was one of the first I ever played! Running around the mazes avoiding and then chasing ghosts really got the adrenaline pumping, and still does today. It was another one that was in pretty much every arcade ever, and it's many recognizable sound effects were essential in adding to that atmosphere I was talking about earlier! If you're totally weird and haven't played it, then you can even try it on Google nowadays!
Another classic that has you blasting centipedes that work their way quickly down the screen, occasionally changing direction or breaking into segments as they hit mushrooms which are dotted around or left by various other creepy crawlys... Annoying spiders will appear and try to dash themselves against your character sometimes too.
It's a frenzied game of quick reflexes, and one that I got quite used to playing with the trackball controls it uses. I remember filling the scoreboard with my name at one arcade! I tried it again recently at a museum exhibition and pretty much sucked at it though, so I guess I must have lost that skill...
I always wondered exactly what you control in Centipede...are you another insect that can spit bullets? Or are you a tiny spaceship fighting in a garden, or a normal sized one fighting giant mutant beasts in some spacy mushroom patch? Well, according to DC Comics and later ports to home consoles of the game, you're actually a tiny elf battling beasties brought to a frenzy by a wicked wizard! Here's a page from the DC comic (from 1983 and readable in full at Atari Age)...
This game blew my mind when I first saw it! It was the sit-down cab, so it felt like I was actually entering into an X-wing cockpit when I sat down, and then the impressive vector graphics were among the first 3D style ones I'd ever seen! Then the machine started yelling quotes from the movie at me! It even had the scrolling text at the start! It was like all those fake games you saw in early 80s movies had suddenly become a reality!
Weaving around in space, blasting waves of Tie Fighters was awesome, but it was a Death Star run that was so perfect in design that it's pretty much stayed the same in every game version since, that helped put this right at the top of my favourite games list back then!
The weirdest memory I have of the Star Wars cab, is the fact that I used to go and play it at Edinburgh airport...for some reason, when we got bored in the eighties and visits to other family members weren't an option. my dad would often drive us to either a nearby arcade in Dunbar, or to Edinburgh airport to watch planes landing or play the arcade machines they had in their lounge! That wasn't quite as weird as travelling about 50 miles to get a cheese roll at a favourite Northumberland cafe, which we'd also often do of a Sunday, but it still seems a bit odd when I think back to it. But yeah, going to an airport to play Star Wars seemed fitting somehow too! Hehe...
I was nine when I discovered this thing, with it's smooth, third-person shooty-flying magnificence! The first time I found it must have been in 1986, because it was a later deluxe model that flung you around as you moved the joystick....you can see what I mean in the video below...but this was like an evolutionary step up from the Star Wars cab, and my mind was blown once again by being able to sit in what was, to me, an almost real spaceship that moved.....
Space Harrier is still an awesome game even without the cockpit, that sees you entering the 'Fantasy Zone', a checkerboard floored dimension filled with all manner of baddies and obstacles to shoot or avoid. When you smack in to something you let out a death cry and then the narrator tells you to 'Get Ready' for the next attempt.
The sound effects, groovy music and the feeling of properly controlling a spaceship were all amazing! But the graphics were also a step up from a lot of the other games I'd been playing, and it was around this time that games were beginning to look and sound like proper cartoons, which made me very excited for the future....
This game had a huge impact on me, and was integral to making me want a home computer, as I was certain that I'd seen a home port somewhere! I'd played it at a seaside arcade, and spent all my money on trying to get as far as possible, eventually making it to the end of first level boss a few times...But I had no idea what the game was called, as I think it was the Japanese version I had been playing...so that made it very tricky to track it down when I eventually got a Spectrum a few years later!
Once again I'd find it hard to believe you'd never heard of it, but on the off chance you haven't, you play the role of Arthur as he goes on a side-scrolly platforming quest to rescue his beloved from an evil demon. The game is pretty bloody tricky, but suitably filled with enough zombies, demons and man eating plants to keep me interested in it. And here's a tip for new players....don't pick up the bloody fire weapon! In this or it's sequels! Maybe I don't know how to use it, but it just seems bloody useless to me.....
Another side-scrolly platform game, where you play as a spy trying to rescue a female agent from an evil secret society called Geldra, who kidnapped her in order to fit in with all the various other game baddies in the eighties..(this might not be the actual reason, but it might as well be)...
Something about this just clicked with me, and although I could never get past the first level until years later when I was able to play it on MAME, it was a game I kept returning to again and again. Must have been the groovy spy music and the fact you can walk into doors in the background to replenish your bullets. I was a sucker for the little details! ;-)
Ah, OutRun.....Playing this game was like going on holiday when you couldn't afford to go on holiday. Racing down the roads in your Ferrari with a hot blonde in the passenger seat, whilst listening to a selection of epic summery tunes that are still lodged in the heads of anybody that played the game back in the day.
The different routes you could take really added to replay value and kept you pumping in the pennies to see all the lovely scenery. It really is an awesome racer, and wasn't really bettered until, after many sequels, they finally decided they had a good enough game to call OutRun 2 in 2003!
I was lucky enough to squeeze myself into a sit-down OutRun cab not long ago at a museum exhibition in Edinburgh. It's still the best way to play it, and if I could have somehow smuggled it home with me I would have. Obviously would have needed bigger pockets though....(that's not me in the photo by the way...I dunno who it is, but they need to shift so I could have another go..tch!)
These next few games hold extra special memories for me, as they were all residents of a long closed cafe/amusement arcade called Lesuireland in Edinburgh. My mum used to take us there for a plate of chips every week and then leave us to play the games whilst she went round the nearby shops. It was here where my obsession with games really started to take hold, and though I'd frequent it for a good few years into the early nineties, it was these five games that held my attention to begin with...
GAUNTLET II (Atari 1986)
Now this game, with only Smash TV coming close, has swallowed more of my coins than any other arcade game ever! I would play this for hours, and have very fond memories of showing other kids exactly what to do to get through the levels quickly and see more for there 50p!
Gauntlet II found me at a time when anything to do with dragons, barbarians or fantasy-styled settings had me lapping it up! I'd recently started playing Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and being able to go on quests where I could actually see the monsters and pick up treasure and boast about it on a scoreboard was awesome!
And the voice...oh my word, the voice!
"Blue Warrior is about to die!"
Never had I felt so much panic in game, as I rushed around trying to find that food I needed so badly!
I also have a bit of a Mandela Effect thing going on with this game though....I'm sure the voice was a lot clearer on the game I played than it seems on any of the retro packs this game is included in, or on the emulated version I've played on MAME...and I'm pretty sure I played it on a massive top-down, tabletop-type cab, with the player controls around the four sides...but I can find no existence of any such version online! So either I was another dimension at the time or someone's changed history, because I can't possibly be remembering it wrong can I?? No....*coff* `
This was memorable for its full-sized dirt bike cab. Although essentially just the same as any other bike racing game in style, every now and then you'd reach a bump in the road that you needed to pull a wheelie on to get over. This required you to pull up on the handlebars of the bike and lift it up, doing a real wheelie to jump the bumps! As you can probably tell, I was a sucker for cabs that added that extra realism, so this was another game that ate a lot of cash!
This game couldn't have been more eighties if it tried! The first thing you noticed about this game was the massive Uzi bolted on to the front of the cab....then you watched a montage of a soldier getting kitted up for war, before the shout of 'Operation Wolf' while heroic music played!
The first-person viewpoint and crazy recoil of the Uzi really made you feel like you were taking part in your very own Rambo-style rescue! Nurses and hostages would rush across the screen as well as the baddies, and you had to take extra care not to mow them down along with the soldiers! Tanks and Helicopters could be destroyed by lobbing a grenade at them, adding some extra exciting explosiveness!
When you were about to die, this pulsing beep would start and your heart would get faster, making you enter panic mode as you tried to find the mysteriously-magic 'P-on-a-Bottle' to restore some health..which sounds weird if you don't have any clue what I'm on about!
Quickly becoming one of my favourites, Operation Wolf would also play a very crucial role in my eventual acquisition of a proper computer, but that's a story for Part 4 of my history! For now, talk of Operation wolf is finished...here! (*in joke alert!*)
As I mentioned with Gauntlet 2, any game that had a fantasy element grabbed my attention when I was around 9 or 10, and Rastan was another one that impressed me enough to spend longer than usual with it. You play a rugged barbarian going on an epic quest, slaying chimeras, multi-limbed demons and lizard-men whilst navigating treacherous rivers, cliffs and fire-pits!
It's an awesome game, and testament to my love for it was the fact I continued to play it in Lesuireland, even though the joystick on their cab was broken, meaning you couldn't do the high jump required to get past a certain section of the first level! It wasn't until I found it in a random fairground that I was able to finally reach the castle, and move on to Level 2!
Although very similar in style to Rolling Thunder, and to a lesser extent Rastan, Shinobi was another one that really clicked with me. I loved playing as Ninja Joe battling his way through hordes of enemies, rescuing his master's young trainees from their kidnappers along the way!
The music was another thing that kept me playing, with it's suitably Ninja-esque tinklings filling my head long after I'd left the arcade. As did the ninja stylings in general, as I found myself buying shuriken throwing star toys to throw at my friends in playpark battles, instead of my usual fantasy swords and shields!
The big end of level baddie usually saw the end of my early tries at the game, but I remember finally beating him a couple of times and getting to the first-person, shuriken-throwing Bonus Stage and having no idea what to do! It seems quite weird that a lot of these games ate so much of my money when I only ever really seen the first level or two, but I guess that was just the way arcades went!
So that's just a few of the games that kept me busy before I got my own home computer...but there was one more crucial step before that eventuality came to pass! Playing games at my richer friends houses!! And it is that which will be talked about in part three! Coming soon-ish!
