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Posted: Mar 8th 2003, 10:09 pm
by Nostradamus
  • Miniatures: Mage Knight
  • Childhood Games: Capture the flag, Snake in the grass, and sometimes dodgeball (when I didn't get too badly beaned :wink: )
After reading those nostalgic computer game posts, I too was able to recall a couple...

"Nibbles" involved guiding a worm aroung a maze and eating numbered food icons. If you hit a wall, you lost. As your worm ate more food, it grew longer, which increased the difficulty because you could also die from running into your own body.

There was a primitive artillery game in which two gorillas took turns throwing explosive bananas at each other across a skyscraper-filled cityscape. You were supposed to calculate the proper angle and power of the banana toss to arc over the intervening buildings and hit your opponent, but I found that if you aimed directly at him and set the power very high, the bananas would simlpy cut through the buildings after a few shots.

:P

Posted: Mar 9th 2003, 4:21 pm
by GaryEA
Another great thread! I'll just list my favorites...

Board Games: Monopoly, Scrabble, Clue, Trivial Pursuit

RPG: Only played it once. Started in the middle of a campaign my friends were playing as a naked dwalf with no weapons. Died in twenty minutes. End of D&D career.

Collectable Card Games: Never played.

Console Video Games:

Then (years ago):
Timex Sinclair: Whatever they had
Atari 2600: Pitfall! and The Empire Strikes Back
Turbografx/TurboExpress: Splatterhouse, Bonk
CoreGrafx: Batman: the Movie (it was the only game I had)
Sega Master System: Shinobi, Choplifter
Sega Saturn: The game with the orange gun (Time Crisis?)
Nintento: Anything with the word Castlevania on it
Gameboy: Spider-Man, Tetris
Nintendo 64, Star Wars, anything with the word Castlevania on it.

Now (uh, now):
A big fat nothing. Until I can find a joystick that you can use with one hand, I can't play any console games. (I'm dying to play Batman: Vengeance but the PS2 has 300 buttons on the joystick... :x)


PC Games:

Then:
Wolfenstein
Return of the Triad
Duke Dukem
Descent
Myst (great game)

Now:
HALF-LIFE
The Star Wars Jedi Knight series
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
HALF-LIFE!!!
No One Lives Forever
Aliens vs. Predator
American McGee's Alice
I just bought Nightfire (007), but my machine is having major problems with DirectX and it won't play at all... sigh.
Did I mention HALF-LIFE?

LOL... :D

Gary

Posted: Mar 9th 2003, 6:17 pm
by fnordboy
GaryEA wrote:
Turbografx/TurboExpress: Splatterhouse, Bonk
Oh how did I love the TurboGrafx system. Any system that put out Splatterhouse is a favorite.

Slightly OT: Gary, did you go to the TurboGrafx show they had at William Paterson University (then college) back atleast 10-12 years ago or so? They had every turbografx game available to play (some not even available iirc.)

I remember it being great, though the irony is that I never actually owned a turbografx system. I always wanted one but my cruel cruel mother would only let me make do with the 8bit NES I had <sigh>, until the Playstation came out :) .

Posted: Mar 9th 2003, 6:49 pm
by Guest
Oh how did I love the TurboGrafx system. Any system that put out Splatterhouse is a favorite.
Grab a 2x4, we're going into the basement! And watch the spikes! Now I want to play it again, and I'm not even home. Argh! :evil:
Slightly OT: Gary, did you go to the TurboGrafx show they had at William Paterson University (then college) back atleast 10-12 years ago or so? They had every turbografx game available to play (some not even available iirc.)
Never made it to the show. In fact, this is the first I've ever heard of it (where was I, missing such a paradise?). Were they doing a college tour, promoting the console? Damn - would've loved to have been there. Pure TurboBliss.
I remember it being great, though the irony is that I never actually owned a turbografx system. I always wanted one but my cruel cruel mother would only let me make do with the 8bit NES I had <sigh>, until the Playstation came out :) .
Mothers... :D

I loved that console, and the real boon was when Sega had the market locked and TRU had almost every TGX game discounted for ten dollars.. except for Splatterhouse 2, which I've yet to play. It's a shame the system never caught on, but back then, if you didn't have a nifty flagship character like Mario or Sonic, people would ignore your system (look at what happened to the Atari Jaguar).

The CoreGrafx had a lot of great titles if I remember correctly, some anime related, though I can't remember them off-hand. I just remember breezing through a catalog, wondering how I could afford importing them (never did).

The Batman game never came over here. Nintendo had the character locked for the US if I'm not mistaken (and that was great game as well), and I know that it wasn't the only high profile game not to make it here to help the TGX compete with Sega.

Ah, to feel 20 again... :D

Gary

Posted: Mar 9th 2003, 9:33 pm
by GaryEA
Ack! Forgot to sign in! Oh, the shame...

Gary

games

Posted: Mar 9th 2003, 10:31 pm
by lance
Speaking of old computer games,

How many of you grew up on Ataris? Remember Frogger or Missile Command? How about Space Invaders? Now that was a game I blew a whole lot of quarters on.

Lance Man

Posted: Mar 10th 2003, 6:03 am
by starbug
Nostradamus wrote: "Nibbles" involved guiding a worm aroung a maze and eating numbered food icons. If you hit a wall, you lost. As your worm ate more food, it grew longer, which increased the difficulty because you could also die from running into your own body.
Yeah, that was great fun :D

I also remember a more strategic game I used to play which I think started life as a Management Game (you know, like Sim City started life as a program teaching people how to be town planners) aimed at effective labour distribution and crisis management. You were on a spaceship and you had a set number of robots with predefined skills and attitude problems, and you had to captain the ship from A-B while managing the robots etc. Every so often something would break down, a meteor would hit you and all hell would break loose. You had to send off the robots to deal with whatever crisis and if you didn't handle it well your ship would eventually reach critical meltdown and the game would be over. The missions got progressively longer and more difficult. I think it was called PS-somethingorother... wish I could find that out. Again, it was on an Amstrad, this time a 1512.

Oh, and this thread inspired me. Found this site: http://www.inthe80s.com and there's a games section. :D I have been playing lunar landing at work...

Posted: Mar 10th 2003, 1:08 pm
by starbug
well after an entire day of internet research :shock: , I have finally located that robot-ship game I was thinking of. It's called PSI-5 Trading Company and I have downloaded something called an 'Emulator' (eek), and the program for the game itself, which should enable me to play it using old-fashioned DOS which I have on my laptop at home.

I sense an evening of technical woe...

Posted: Mar 11th 2003, 1:00 am
by Nostradamus
Starbug: Thanks for the link; a lot of old memories there. :)

I once downloaded an emulator for an old SNES game, but I got the impression that you had to be at least a moderately skilled computer nerd to make it work, so I gave up.

Thought of another one: Commander Keen. Remember, with the pogo stick and the purple aliens? I used to play it at a friend's house, and a few years back I found it on a compilation CD, though I've long since misplaced it.

Posted: Mar 11th 2003, 2:06 am
by Natasha (candygirl)
Some previous old school computer game talk can be found here:

http://www.mscl.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1922