Favourite Game Candidates: Pre-NES Consoles 2

In this post I'm going to cover the other two systems I played in my youth. These were owned by my uncle John-Boy but he sometimes loaned them to us and I'd get to play them some when visiting my grandparents. They were the Intellivision and the Colecovision!

Run from the blue alien demon thingy!

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - This is the first game that I ever recall generating an emotional reaction in me: fear! I believe this was the first video game to make use of the 'fog of war' concept. You'd get into a room and see the ways out of the room but you wouldn't see what was down the passageway until you went and checked it out. The game gave clues as to what you might find nearby. Those little footprints in the screenshot indicated a demon was nearby. There were cow skulls which would indicate a dragon. There were little turd droppings which if I remember correctly were from rats. On top of the visual cues there were also audio ones. Snakes hissed. Bats beat their wings. (And couldn't hurt you. They existed solely to mask other sounds!) Dragons snored or roared. I think demons were silent which was particularly scary for a 5 year old or however old I was. The game made use of the Intellivision numpad to aim your only attack: bow and arrow. You could shoot in one of 8 directions. If the arrow hit a wall it would bounce off it (which often resulted in pegging myself in the face with an arrow). A good way to scout for demons was to just shoot an arrow down an unscouted hallway and hope it didn't bounce back! (They may not make normal sounds but you'd definitely hear an arrow make contact with them!) The downside to this plan is you had a finite number of arrows. The way to tell how many arrows you had left was interesting... There was no visual display. You had to hit the 'count arrows' button on your control and then it would click at you. One click for every arrow you had in your possession. Gameplay involved moving around on an overworld map. The goal was to get from the start to the Cloudy Mountain to recover the golden crown. To get there you'd have to get through forests, rivers, and locked gates. Passing each of these obstacles would require getting the right item from a dungeon. (You can see the boat which is found in the blue dungeon. It lets you cross over lakes.) The game had 5 difficulty levels which was pretty revolutionary for the time I think. I remember beating this game but I couldn't tell you what difficulty I did it on. All in all a fantastic game! I now want to see if I have this game and play it...

Disc ho!

Tron: Deadly Discs - Like AD&D, this game had you move with the disk controller and throw your deadly disc with the numpad. So you could be moving in one direction and attack in another direction. The way the game worked is enemies would open a door in the wall and come charging out at you with their deadly discs which they would throw at you. Your goal was to hit them with your disc while avoiding their discs. One of your buttons allowed you to block if you were holding on to your disc. If you managed to block their attack their disc would shatter which would render them impotent for a period of time. On top of trying to hit the enemies with your disc you could also hit the doors they opened up which would wedge the door open. Wedge open two doors on opposite sides of the screen and you could walk through them like Pac-Man! Eventually the game would get bitter at you and send out a giant robot to repair the doors. Like with the pterodactyl in Joust you could huddle in the corner and let this guy do his job or you could risk life and limb to try to take him down for bonus points. Guess which one I'd do!

Terrorists make note: this bomb is hard to stop!

Bomb Squad - You're a member of the bomb squad and need to take specific steps in order to diffuse a bomb. You get a circuit board and need to make the right modifications in the right order or KA-BOOM! How do you know what to do? The game tells you! You needed to have the Intellivoice module which would allow the console to actually synthesize speech. This module was a commercial failure in almost every definition but I thought it was really cool. No other game could talk to you! They only made 5 games for it total. My uncle had three of them. Bomb Squad, B-17 Bomber, and Space Spartans. This was my favourite of the three. Cut this one first!

It's a sausagefest!

Burgertime - A cute little platform game. You needed to walk along the pieces of the burger to knock them down and ultimately build burgers out of them. Hit the walking fried egg with the pepper spray so you can avoid him!

What a nicely dressed dealer!

Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack - This was the game bundled with the Intellivision so it is technically the highest selling game for the system with over 2 million copies 'sold'. There were several different types of poker to play, in this screenshot I believe they're playing 5 card stud. You'll note there are three hands there. One for the dealer and two for the players. If you wanted to look at your hole cards you had to push a button on your controller. You had to get the other players to look away before you did! The best part is sometimes the dealer would get shifty eyes and if you looked at your cards while he was shifty he'd take a peek at them too!

Dolla bills, yo!

Lock 'n' Chase - This game was basically just a Pac-Man clone but I'm pretty sure my only exposure to Pac-Man was the cereal and the cartoon show so I wouldn't have known that as a kid. The twist was instead of power pellets you could build walls in the maze after you went by to block off the stupid coppers who were trying to stop you from stealing things.

Where are the mines!?!

Sea Battle - I loved this game but it had the problem of being a 2 player game and my brother didn't like it very much so we rarely actually played it. You're both in charge of a huge fleet containing 8 different types of ships. You could build mini-fleets with 1, 2, or 3 ships in it and they'd appear on the map as little blips. Your opponent had no idea what was in your fleet because you built it secretly by hitting buttons on the numpad. Is your minelayer in that fleet? Do I need to go slowly with my minesweeper if I'm going to take that path? The goal of the game was to get your aircraft carrier or troop transport into their harbor. If two fleets collided you'd switch to a tactical battle map and try to sink each other there. This is the first game I ever played with a strategic world map and a tactical sub-game to handle combat.

Tron? Is that you?

Snafu - This game was a real hit in my house. Move in one of four directions and leave a tail behind you. Try to strategically cut off a big enough chunk of the map to live in while forcing your opponents into smaller sections so they'd run into a tail and die. The really cool thing about this version of the game is there were a bunch of different settings you could choose when you started the game. Want to be able to move diagonally? Sure! Want dead people's tails to disappear? We have that too! There was even an option so your tail had a finite length and the goal was to eat the other person's snake by running your head into their tail over and over again. Maybe the best part of the game was the music. When you got down to 2 snakes the music would change into this dramatic showdown music that was really surprising for a game of this era.

It's like shooting womp rats in a barrel.

Star Strike - The thing I remember the most about this game is the awesome graphics of the planet Earth slowly moving out from behind the moon to the center of the screen. You have to destroy the green spaceship thing before it gets close enough to the Earth to destroy it. If you fail there's a little animation of the Earth blowing up which is pretty sweet. The game was fun, too!

Welcome to the S&M dungeon version of the Matrix.

Night Stalker - You start this game in your little bunker thing and need to run out and grab your gun which has a limited number of shots. You then shoot at the spider, or the bats, or the scary robot thing to score points. The more points you score the more robots spawn. Later robots even gain special abilities, like invisibility or being able to destroy your bunker. It had a really tense background music to it as well.

Duck!

B.C.'s Quest For Tires - The only Colecovision game on this list. This game was a side-scrolling obstacle course game. You have to jump over rocks, and  duck under tree branches. Later on you need to time jumps onto little turtles that sink in and out of a lake.