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Post by Batflunkie on Apr 15, 2020 14:05:24 GMT -5
I am playing through The Legend of Zelda again for NES now. Not like...this second, of course. Timeless design and nostalgia are a powerful combination. I still maintain that game had some of the most satisfying and memorable sounds of any game. The laser blast of your sword beam, that thick BLUNK and BLEWLP when you kill an enemy, and of course that overworld musical theme. I never really undestood the appeal of Zelda, same with Metroid. Link's Awakening and Zero Mission are some damn fine games though, I will admit |
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Post by impulse on Apr 15, 2020 14:15:15 GMT -5
I am playing through The Legend of Zelda again for NES now. Not like...this second, of course. Timeless design and nostalgia are a powerful combination. I still maintain that game had some of the most satisfying and memorable sounds of any game. The laser blast of your sword beam, that thick BLUNK and BLEWLP when you kill an enemy, and of course that overworld musical theme. I never really undestood the appeal of Zelda, same with Metroid. Link's Awakening and Zero Mission are some damn fine games though, I will admit I think a lot of it depends on how old you were the first time you played it. Then again, some people just don't like certain things. I was prime market for the NES when I had one as a kid, so a lot of those resonated with me. Quite a few of those have not aged well, however, and without nostalgia would be miserable slogs. Even with nostalgia some of them are... The Zelda game from SNES though, A Link to the Past, holds up wonderfully, however. I replay it every so many years. Never did get into the Metroids or Castlevanias quite as much personally. |
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Post by Batflunkie on Apr 15, 2020 14:25:17 GMT -5
The Zelda game from SNES though, A Link to the Past, holds up wonderfully, however. I replay it every so many years. Never did get into the Metroids or Castlevanias quite as much personally. I played the GBA re-release of it, thought it was "okay". not my particular cup of tea But yeah, I'd definitely recommend Metroid Zero Mission. It's kind of a remake of the NES original with elements taken from Super Metroid. It's is pretty damn good. Atmospheric too |
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Post by brianf on Apr 15, 2020 14:55:02 GMT -5
My favorites to play were Zaxxon & Tempest, my favorite to watch was Dragons Lair - I sucked at it.
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Post by beccabear67 on Apr 15, 2020 17:09:46 GMT -5
I don't remember Pot Of Gold but am getting flashbacks of that Leprechaun movie just looking at the machine! I remember some flat tabletop games that were fun with two people but not the titles, some kind of tanks and helicopters thing... I'd love to own any working old pinball machine, I remember trying to play them a few times, even needing a wooden box to be tall enough, so I was pretty young and they were pre-videoscreens. I remember one comic shop having a Spider-Man pinball near the back, but never got to see it in action before the shop closed. I know brianf's old The Funhouse had some cool looking game machines up front... shooting deer, or was it ducks... and I think a Pinball. Three PBRs in I start to forget things. |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 15, 2020 17:42:02 GMT -5
I don't remember Pot Of Gold but am getting flashbacks of that Leprechaun movie just looking at the machine!
it was pretty horrific, and there's a reason it never really caught on.. LOL
here ya go... I'd skip to about 1:40 to see some of the "game play" and hear the game sounds.
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Post by beccabear67 on Apr 16, 2020 0:26:37 GMT -5
I would definitely play Pot Of Gold! I vaguely remember some kind of Egyptian themed game a bit like that... maybe it had a mummy that chases 'you' around pyramids and palm trees?
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Post by DE Sinclair on Apr 16, 2020 14:12:43 GMT -5
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?  I had an Atari 2600 back in the day, and I have one of the retro mini-consoles too. I remember the thrill of finding that secret dot in Adventure and accessing the secret room. I've also always been a big fan of the Pitfall game too. I also have a hand held version with a bunch of the Atari games, including Pitfall. Nostalgia is a powerful draw. |
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Post by DE Sinclair on Apr 16, 2020 14:21:32 GMT -5
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. Fun thing about Centipede was the original port to IBM compatible computers back in the XT days (yes, I'm that old) had the game play geared to the PC's clock speed. When the 286 computers came out, trying to play the old game was impossible because the PC clock speed was so much faster. You'd start the game and the centipede would shoot to the bottom of the screen in the blink of an eye. Dragon's Lair was my absolute favorite game that I completely stunk at. It was so cool and beautiful looking that I spent a ton of quarters on it just trying to get beyond the first couple of screens. |
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Post by brutalis on Apr 16, 2020 15:02:52 GMT -5
Hmmmmmn, Playing Atari Asteroids is my 1st memory of arcade play. Then the march of games which followed eating my quarters that I enjoyed but never could become good enough to win at: Centipede, Millipede, Dig Dug, Crazy Climber, Frogger, Dragon's Lair, Joust, Galaxian, Galaga, Tron, Star Trek, Q*Bert, Defender, Rampage, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Tempest, Zaxxon, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Burgertime, Gauntlet, Battlezone, Missile Command, Metroid, spy Hunter and of course one of the very last we played for hours on end was AVENGERS where you could choose whichever Avenger team member you wanted to be. Slinging Cap's shield, Hawkeye and his endless supply of arrows, Thor's hammer....oh the days and nights of never ending changing $1 bills for quarters.
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Post by impulse on Apr 16, 2020 15:15:27 GMT -5
I think it is breaking the limits of generosity to call Dragon's Lair a "game." It's barely interactive and is just a digital siren, a pretty cartoon forcing kids of the 80s and 90s to crash quarters upon its shores endlessly. Yeah, I sucked at it, too, and was enthralled by how pretty it was.
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Post by Batflunkie on Apr 16, 2020 16:16:06 GMT -5
So this whole unemployment thing has been a fiasco. Waited for weeks to hear if I was approved and when I finally was, I entered in the wrong direct deposit information. So the money is just sitting there in limbo, waiting for me. Really can't change the information online and trying to get in touch with unemployment office is impossible, both through email and telephone. So glad I'm living with my folks, otherwise I'd be absolutely boned
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Post by impulse on Apr 16, 2020 16:22:28 GMT -5
Ugh, what a nightmare. Sorry to hear that. I read that a lot of people who filed their tax returns with Turbo Tax in a prior year had their direct deposits go into whatever they used as their payment method, not their direct deposit accounts. Horror stories of people having their stimulus put onto temporary gift cards they had long since thrown away. What a fiasco.
And apparently the $350 Billion with a B small business relief fund is already tapped out, with much of it going to "small" shell LLCs owned by millionaires. Yay.
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Post by The Captain on Apr 16, 2020 16:30:55 GMT -5
Ugh, what a nightmare. Sorry to hear that. I read that a lot of people who filed their tax returns with Turbo Tax in a prior year had their direct deposits go into whatever they used as their payment method, not their direct deposit accounts. Horror stories of people having their stimulus put onto temporary gift cards they had long since thrown away. What a fiasco. Much as I would love to blame the government for this, it was a massive exercise to undertake in a short period of time for a huge number of people. Hopefully they get things sorted out for situations like these. Did you think it was going to turn out anyway other than this? People who were connected and knew how to navigate the system were able to react quickly and get to the front of the line while the guy who owns the local bakery or the woman who owns a pet grooming business will see their life's work vanish during this. |
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Post by impulse on Apr 16, 2020 16:33:30 GMT -5
Much as I would love to blame the government for this, it was a massive exercise to undertake in a short period of time for a huge number of people. Hopefully they get things sorted out for situations like these. Oh yeah, no way it would go super smoothly. Still sucks for those involved, but I am not shocked at issues. Did I think it would turn out differently? Nope, but it still pisses me off to see the little guy get screwed while the rich yet again take advantage of the system. I am doing my part and ordering dinner from a local pizza spot tonight. It's just a drop in the bucket, but I hope it helps. |
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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.
