Quarantine day 6:

The rise of new comic prices has caused me to pay more for back issues more easily these days.  5 bucks for a new comic that takes 5 minutes to read and is 1/6 of a story is inferior to the Silver, Bronze and 80's books. 

I loved arcades as a kid. It had this sense of magic and these distinctive sounds and lights that just captivated me as a kid. It was magical and being transported into a land of wonder, much like the comic shop as a kid. I still remember the distinctive smells of both. The arcade smelled of movie popcorn and machines since it was so close to the movie theater in the mall, and my LCS was next to a rotisserie chicken restaurant, so I smell cardstock and smoked chicken in my mind when I think of my LCS.

I once beat Time Crisis 2 on a single play. I think it was 50 cents at the time. My peak arcade performance right there.

I used to like Centipede the arcade game so much I would watch anyone playing it. I wasn't all that good at it (as with the Pac-mans). I think people would crowd around Frogger too. Home games that were likewise fun visually to just watch were mostly by Activision... especially Dolphin! I got to the points in River Raid and Dolphin where the secret word was revealed and you were supposed to be able to take a photo of the screen and mail it in for a sew-on patch, but being in Canada I didn't or couldn't. Atari's Adventure had a secret invisible dot you could take from a caste's torchlit maze's secret room accessible only with the bridge, carry it way down to a screen past the gold castle and enter a hidden screen that had the flashing letters 'created by Warren Robinet'. Frostbite was another Activision fun to watch game that had the character building an igloo brick by brick before the temperature dropped; the fun bit was if the bear got you it made a cute sound and we would get killed on purpose to hear it!

My most played at-home games (2600?) were Adventure and Haunted House for Atari. No time limits or increasing speed but levels of difficulty. I bought one of those plug & play retro mini-consoles just to be able to try Adventure 2 and Haunted House 2 loaded on it... I think they were either never released or made up long afterwards, and Adventure2 was a lot of fun with extra castles and one more dragon I think added. It also had Activision's Pitfall and River Raid so that was neat.

The weirdest Atari home game I had was some tiny company's release, Cosmic Ark, where you go to various planets and collect two goofy aliens (clomping about on the surface) with a tractor beam from above, but it gets so fast eventually I think it is unplayable really. Really fun up to then! Also had Donkey Kong which was by another non-Atari company (Coleco?) and it was well done, and Yar's Revenge had a little comic book by Frank Cirocco in it which I still have someplace. I bought three of the five Activision games I had all at once at some kind of special on-release promotion in a big store in Reno, Nevada. The fifth game I had which was also very good was Star Master. Activision were the best!

I guess we could've had a video game thread. I go back to the original pong game as released by Sears. That must've been around 1975? We rented an Intellivision for Christmas once but the only game I remember coming with it was Baseball, but it was very well done too. Then my brother just up and bought an Atari (it came with Combat and I think Video Olympics). As a kid that was always getting or being sick I spent a lot of time with games, a little b&w tv given to me with an earphone, and of course comic books... also had a two speed kids' record player with radio, some micronauts, lego, and a couple of dozen china animal figures from Red Rose brand tea. I remember using the lid from the record player as a spaceship for the animals with some lego bits added.

Well, back to our regularly scheduled Meanwhile?

My arcade game history starts with pinball in college. Hours and hours of pinball in college. All-mechanical pinball machines; no LEDs or digital screens. The pinball room held over a dozen machines for a campus of ~2,000 students. I think it was my junior year when a new machine showed up just outside the pinball room; it was called "Pong". Over the next decade, electronic games became huge. Every bar had one or two, and arcades started springing up all over suburbia.

The next game that was really big after Pong was Space Invaders. After that, in approximately chronological order came Asteroids, Berzerk, Centipede, Frogger, Galaxian, Qbert, Galaga, and then the megahit game Pac-Man. Everybody played Pac-Man for months, and Ms. Pac-Man when it came out.

These games faded from my life after a few years. The last one that I remember being popular before I stopped playing was Donkey Kong, the game that introduced Mario.

The first video game that I was addicted to was Centipede (great taste in games, beccabear67 !). Our local supermarket had a machine at the front of the store, and when I went with my mom to do our weekly shopping, she would give me two quarters and let me play while she got through the store (I don't think she appreciated my "help" with that task).

There was also a little arcade in the same shopping center as the supermarket, and it was there that I fell in love with Dragon's Lair, featuring Don Bluth animation of the adventures of Dirk the Daring, who was attempting to rescue the lovely Princess Daphne from a dragon and an evil wizard. It was done on a videodisc, so each motion of the joystick or push of the button caused the disc to skip to the next scene in the sequence. Some of the challenges were easy, but the majority were reliant on split-second precision to move just right through the castle. I was never great at it, but I was so into it. My best memory around this game involved my maternal grandmother, who lived in Memphis and made an annual two-week visit to Pittsburgh every summer. One year, she took me up to the arcade, handed me a sandwich baggie full of quarters, and stood there and watched me play this game for what seemed like hours, not once complaining or rushing me. She's the same one that gave me my first comic books, and I think what I miss most about her is that she "got me" as a person when everyone else in my family wanted me to be something that I really wasn't.

After that, it was Gauntlet, 24/7/365. My buddies and I would go to the arcade at the mall in the next town over and pump an unending string of quarters into that machine. It was the first game I can remember that four people could play at once, which was great for our little group.

These days, the only time I ever play an arcade game is on the boardwalk in Ocean City, MD. There is an arcade there that has one of the Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga anniversary edition units, and I will play that while my wife and daughters play skee-ball. As well, there used to be a House of the Dead shooter that I enjoyed, but it wasn't there the last time we visited in 2018.

On the home front, I had (in sequential order): Atari 2600 (favorite game was Track & Field), Atari 7800 (Robotron 2084), Nintendo (Legend of Zelda, duh), Sega Genesis (NHL 94, the greatest sports game for a home video console ever), and finally a Playstation 1 (I still replay Castlevania: Symphony of the Night every year or so). We currently have a Wii, but I rarely if ever play it; the only game for it that was specifically bought for me was Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, and while it's fun enough, the controls for these games have gotten so complicated that I have a hard time doing well at it.

Yeah, Centipede is a really great game, but I've always preferred Millipede. Probably because it's faster and tougher, same with Super Asteroids



I got a Digital Leisure re-release of Dragon's Lair for my high school graduation and while it is a visual fest, there's not much meat on the bone. It also has an option to just let the game play itself (which kind of defeats the purpose) so you can see all the movies. Also came with some added features like documentaries, Dragon's Lair 2, and Space Ace.