Favourite Game Candidates: NES Games 2

In the second NES installment I'll go over games I mostly discovered during the time I owned an NES, which was in University and was 14 years after the NES launched. I missed some of the 'classic' games that I'm sure other people really love (I'm looking at you, Zelda) but I didn't play them so they don't have a place on this list. I bought the NES after a scunt (my house was scunt headquarters and I think the guy who lugged it over didn't really want to take it back) mostly because it had a Final Fantasy cartridge in it. Best $10 I ever spent!

Solo ninja ho!

Final Fantasy - I played a lot of games at Comfy Prime. I watched a lot of people play games at Comfy Prime. The common area in the basement had three tvs with an NES, a SNES, and a Playstation. Josh left his computer in the room. And with all those games going on the one game that has the most memories for me is the original Final Fantasy. It spawned the nickname Bung. I remember one term Manders was working 20 hours a day and then would come home and play Final Fantasy instead of sleeping. Well, while sleeping. The game waits patiently for input so falling asleep wouldn't kill you. Buying potions one at a time with your foot so a party of four white mages could slowly beat the game? Sweet! The cartridge only had one save slot and I can remember people waiting to get their turn with the save.

Green?!?

Ice Hockey - I used to play this game a lot with Andrew. When my NES eventually got stolen out of the MathSoc exec office this was the game inside. *frowns* You had the option of choosing between three different types of skaters on your team. Skinny, medium, and fatty. You had 15 different possible team configurations but I'm pretty sure I only ever used two of them. Fatty, fatty, fatty, fatty or fatty, fatty, fatty, skinny. Fat guys were the best at checking and scoring. Skinny guy was there as the token fast skater to try to advance into the enemy zone. Penalties in the game only came about after a fight... Loser of the brawl gets a penalty!

2x4s and High Schools, together at last

River City Ransom - Truth be told I didn't really play this game. Josh bought it from a used game store for the house and I mostly just watched people play it. It was a pretty decent side-scrolling brawler game. I remember it had a cash system for upgrading things? It was sort of a sandbox/RPG/Double Dragon style game.

Blue wizard needs food BADLY!

Gauntlet II - This sequel to Gauntlet featured 100 levels and a bunch of different power-ups that made you really powerful. I remember spending a day pounding away at the game to beat the 100 levels. Only to discover, sadly, that there was no end to the game. It merely scrambled the order of the 100 levels and made you start again. But you kept all the power-ups so there really wasn't much point in playing. You couldn't possibly die or get better. I guess you could keep making your score bigger by collecting tons of treasure but after playing through a little over 100 levels of Gauntlet I gave up.

Favourite Game Candidates: NES Games 1

I didn't have a NES when I was younger. My best friend and next door neighbour Ross had one so I did get to play a fair number of games. I later bought a NES from some guy at a scunt in University (my house was the Math team headquarters so lots of random stuff was carted over) and played a few games then. I'm thinking this list should probably be split into two. One covering games I liked as a child and one for games I liked as an adult. Here's the early stuff!

Hey Mikey... All you're good for is diffusing bombs!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - It makes me sad to admit that I have still never beaten this game. When I was a kid we used to play with each of us taking a different one of the turtles. So if we wanted to make use of Donatello's long reach I got to play. I believe my brother was Raphael, Ross was Leonardo, and Ryan was Michaelangelo. It was a lot of fun playing like that, and a lot of fun playing by myself too. I'm pretty sure I've made it to the final dungeon a few times... Now that I have an xBox controller for my computer I should try loading this up in an emulator again to see if I can finally beat a 'Nintendo hard' game.

Ew, radish!

Super Mario Bros 2 - Did you know this game wasn't supposed to be a Mario game at all? Nintendo decided the real Mario 2 wasn't going to cut it in the US since it was too hard and too similar to the first Mario. So they took a different game, reskinned it to look like Mario, and sold it to us anyway. This game was interesting in that it was a platformer with 4 different characters each of which had a different strength. We played this the same way we played TMNT. I got to be Princess! She was the best character in my eyes because she broke one of the fundamental rules of the game: gravity! She could hover in the air for a while after jumping which let her do things no other character could even think about doing. Toad could dig faster... So what?

Got wood?

Mega Man 2 - Really all of the NES Mega Man games could make it on this list, but this one was the first one we really played and remains my favourite of the series. It didn't have a lot of the later features which I felt got in the way of the games. Stupid dog! There are a lot of people who'll say the Mario series of games are the best platformers but I think the Mega Man games are the top of the pile. I really like the way each boss is weak to one of the weapons from another boss so there was an 'optimal' sequence of bosses to fight but the game was still playable in any order. It let you apply smarts to make the games easier which I always like. Then the platforming itself is great. Not too much going on and not too little going on. Just a right amount of stuff going on! Great music, too.

Fly, my pretty!

8 Eyes - This was an interesting little platformer that featured a really neat co-op mode. One of you controlled the human character and the other one controlled the bird! I don't think we ever really figured out how to play the game properly and it was practically impossible to play single player but I've always liked the concept.

Chip is apparently a third the size of a Smurf.

Chip n Dale Rescue Rangers - Yet another platformer! This one was based on the cartoon show Chip n Dale's Rescue Rangers. I don't actually remember much about this game, just that I used to like playing it.

Microwaved for 11 minutes and 20 seconds?

Maniac Mansion - A non-platformer! Once again, I don't remember a lot about the game other than that it was unlike anything we'd ever played before. Also, I'd always thought the game was based on the tv show but it turns out the tv show was based on the game! That's really surprising to me.

Super Dodge Ball - I actually found an emulated version of this game on a website a couple weeks ago and played it for a bit. It isn't anywhere near as fun as my memory lead me to believe. I remember having a ton of fun playing this game as a kid, with passing the ball around and then using super moves! Playing it again did make me want to play some real dodgeball though...

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.

Favourite Game Candidates: Pre-NES Consoles 1

Initially my plan was to lump all the pre-NES consoles into one post. My thinking was that I'd almost certainly played more notable SNES games than all of these games combined so it might keep the post lengths at least comparable. And then this one post just kept getting bigger and bigger... Too big, in fact. So I'm splitting this one up. And when I get to the SNES, well, I'll probably have to make a bunch of different SNES game posts. We'll see!

I'm going to start with the two systems my family owned when I was a small child: Atari 2600 and Atari 600XL home computer!

Flower!

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial - This game is frequently cited as one of the worst games of all time. A lot of the blame for the 1983 video game crash is placed squarely on this game. The heavy losses from this game sunk Atari as a company. The game went from design to production in 5 weeks and was done by one programmer! It sold 1.5 million copies which is an awful lot, but 3.5 million copies went unsold which is pretty ridiculous. Atari made several critical mistakes with this game and it cost them. Despite all that, I loved this game as a kid. I didn't know about any of that stuff. I didn't know that games could be so much better. I didn't know that levitating out of a pit only to fall right back in over and over was unacceptable. It was just the way the game worked and I had to deal with it if I wanted to make a flower grow and help ET phone home.

Realistic Wartime Violence!

River Raid - This game for the Atari 600XL was played a lot in my household. I don't recall personally liking it all that much but it was definitely a family favourite. Reading a bit about it now I'm amazed at the history here. This was the first shooter ever to scroll. It was also programmed by Carol Shaw who was apparently the first female video game designer. There was no end to this game. It just got harder and harder to collect enough fuel to stay alive. The goal was just to score as many points as you could. Interestingly the game apparently had a rating discouraging minors from playing it since it promoted violence. Your plane is shooting at a helicopter, after all!

I hate you, snake!

Q*bert - I don't even remember what system I played this on. Atari 600XL maybe? I liked this game a lot. Some of the levels the cubes would toggle between hit and un-hit so you had to make a plan to hit every cube an odd number of times. I remember having the Q*bert board game, too!

Bring it on, Terry!

Joust - I think we had this for the Atari 600XL. I remember having a lot of fun with this game as a kid. Bouncing along on that left-middle platform to rocket out the crack on the right side? Sweet! I think this game more than any other game showed how I approach games differently than other people. I can remember early on at University a time when Josh and Jer were really into playing Joust. I'd watch them play a bit and ask why they weren't killing the pterodactyl. They looked at me like I was insane. And everyone else around agreed with them! They thought he existed to encourage you to finish the levels faster and was to be avoided at all costs. I thought he was a challenge that needed to die. He was worth a lot of points! I can remember spending a lot of time as a kid getting good at killing him off for points. (Good here being relative of course since he'd often kill me... But I'd get him some of the time! At least I was brave enough to try!)

4 Player Arkanoid!

Warlords - I remember this game only because it used the paddle controllers. You got two paddles per controller port so you could play this with up to 4 players. Really the game itself is nothing special. The cool part is the early multitapesque set-up from the paddles.

How much for the flute?

Raiders of the Lost Ark - This game was my introduction to adventure style games. Having to pick up the right stuff at the right time and use it in the right spot. Figuring out to avoid the dud items. Properly timing when to use the parachute to slide under that stupid branch... This game was pretty sweet. And I beat it! Woo!

Uh, say what?

Yar's Revenge - I'll be honest here. I don't remember playing this game. I recognize the name and I know we had it. I vaguely recall my brother really liking this game. It was referenced in a lot of the articles I was reading about earlier games on this list, though. Apparently it was the highest selling Atari game. It was programmed by the same guy who did Raiders of the Lost Ark and ET! Apparently he spent 7 months on Yar's Revenge. 6 months on Raiders of the Lost Ark. And 5 weeks on ET. No wonder people think it's 'unpolished'!

All-Time Favourite Video Games Criteria

Mark commented last week that Final Fantasy Adventure was in his top ten favourite games ever. It got me thinking... What would be my top ten? What criteria could I even use?

I looked up the definition of favourite and it wasn't a lot of help. "(prenominal) most liked; preferred above all others" Should an all-time favourite game be a game that to this day remains a favourite game? Should it mean a game that was at some point at the top? Clearly the whole thing is going to be subjective but I don't want to just pull things out of a hat. Is it based on time spent? Times completed? Can a game that was a lot of fun but has practically no replay value count? I really liked the Professor Layton game I played, for example, but I'm not going to play it again. On the other side of that coin... I play Freecell every now and then. Does that make it awesome? I mentioned that I thought Secret of Mana was one of the best games all-time... But I actually have little desire to play it again. Should that lower it on the favourite-game-o-meter compared to something like Actraiser which I'd probably plug in and play right now if I owned it? What about innovation? I thought Portal was really cool! But I've only spent a few hours playing it. Compare that with the time spent on World of Warcraft...

I think what I want to do is go over each generation of video games and think about what games I preferred above all others at that time. A game may not have aged well, but it can still have a place as an all-time favourite. And then come up with some way to rank them after I've identified them all. The biggest problem I foresee is identifying all the potential candidates so taking some time and methodically going over things in small time periods should help with that problem.