Urban Champion

In the early days of the NES I believed nintendo could do no wrong.  We had Mario which was perfect.  We had Kung Fu which was addicting fun.  We had Duck Hunt which had a crazy dog.  What we needed was a 2D fighting game...maybe we could call it Street Brawler...or Street Scrapper....or Street Fighter....NO WAIT...let's call it Urban Champion and let's make it the worst game in the history of nintendo...ok..DONE!

Congo Bongo

This game had the ability to lure me in over and over...even though I never had fun and I could not play it in any reasonable way.  The arcade version was beautiful....the 2600 version was of course an abomination. Those monkeys are some real bastards.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWqilHI9_vA

Mario Bros

After the debacle with the monkey, Mario now aided by his brother Luigi got back to bidness in the sewers.  I mean they are plumbers right?  This game seemed better then that it does now, primarily because it set the stage for one of the greatest moments in gaming history that would forever eclipse this game...

E.T. The Extra-Terestrial

The game that gets blamed for killing the 2600 and the American gaming industry in 1982.  To be fair this game does suck. It should suck as all  high profile movie tie-in licensed games do...they ALL suck. (Feel free to try to list the exceptions that prove the rule in the comments)

Robotron 2084

Let's stop playing around.  Robotron 2084 is the best arcade game of its era by a long shot.  It has immaculate control, brutal but rewarding difficulty, spectacular sound design, evocative graphics and sooooooo much fun you can't really understand it.  Save the last human family (of hundreds of clones) from our evil mechanized overlords. If I was going to bother to have one classic game in my home...this is it.

Centipede

This game had DDT. THAT alone could be 'nuff said.  Centipede had a surprisingly large amount of game play for it's apparent simplicity.  Controlling the descent of the centipede by the placement and removal of the mushrooms added a strategic element to the otherwise twitchy proceedings.  The trackball was the perfect analog control for this game, AND it had DDT.  These DDT containers may have been manufactured in the same plant as the missile command missiles because they also had slow motion explosion technology.

Time Pilot

Having seen many a horrible port onto the 2600, the ports on the ColecoVision looked like gifts from all-father Odin himself.  Time Pilot was no exception.  This game was awesome.  It preserved the multi-screen scrolling and time traveling stages of the arcade version with a visual fidelity that really impressed.  There is not a ton of complexity or depth to the action and some of the challenge came from weakness in the controls, BUT Time Pilot kept us coming back for more.

Venture

Venture took AdVenture up a notch.  The colecovision had screaming hardware, hardware that seemed indistinguishable from arcade hardware to my young eyes, and Venture was a great port on the system.  I believe I heard about Venture from the same sortie that first brought back word of Dig Dug.  Venture included elements of Adventure, multiple enemies of an early Roguelike, and Berzerk and was an absolute blast to play and a blast to talk about. LOVED IT.

V~ FB Friend Podcast - 9/23/10 (featuring Jim)

Wizard of Wor

Gather Worriors for the Wor to end all Wor!  Fight against deadly Burwor, Garwor, Thorwor, and Worluks until you rise to the rank of Worlord (Worlard maybe??)! Fine I get it...everywhere you should have written War...you write Wor...funny joke...effing hilarious, good one Midway, you all get a bonus. This game is somewhat similar to Berzerk but it had a pseudo fantasy setting that really appealed to me at the time.  It also had level music that could really ratchet up the tension. TIME FOR WOR!

Kangaroo

Somewhere half-way between Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr lived Kangaroo.  It has ladders.  It has fruit.  It has stunningly bad graphics on the 2600.  Sometimes you want to go parking and sometimes you want to make a kangaroo punch a giant bell.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Many people don't know that Aronofsky's "The Wrestler" is a thinly disguised adaptation of Sonic's memoirs.  As a tribute to my planned trip to Rolla, Mo, I want to talk about Sonic.  Sonic the Hedgehog is not the only game I've played in Rolla.  We of course also played a LOT of "is the townie 18", but Rolla is also the town that showed us Sonic at the top of his game.  It really added something to the standard platforming formula of the day.  Sonic really was fast and that was exciting. We won't talk more about what they have done to Sonic since then.

Frogger

There are a couple ways I could go on Frogger. One of them is a full review that says 'meh'. I might also comment that the inclusion of the lady frogs that you need to mount and carry back to your pad makes Frogger reasonably crazy and awesome, even though I don't think the actual game is fun.  Thanks to Josh I can link this video. NSFW for the record.

The greatest minds of the late '70s determine our children's futures.

Dig Dug

I heard about Dig Dug before I ever saw it...the insanity of this game actually matches my imagination of its' insanity based on the description I had heard.  The main character inflates his enemies with a bicycle pump until they explode.  THAT is good stuff, and when I finally saw the game in action I couldn't believe that advance reports had been correct.  You can also create tunnels under the rocks and drop them on enemies skulls, and that is also pretty entertaining.

Q*bert

I have no use for Q*bert. I hate the character design. I hate the late 50's sunday comic strip swearing.  I hate the game play.  I hate jumping off the edge of the map and falling.  I never found Q*bert to be fun and I might spend my time travel to go back and stop it and let somebody else take care of Hitler.

Mat Mania

My grandma was really into wrestling, Old time wrestling, SCIENTIFIC wrestling!  Not these thug wrestlers with their punching and kicking!  Even though Coco Savage continues to be typecast to this day and now winces at the racial insensitivity of his portrayal here, Mat Mania was a solid time waster at the Cville Country Club.  We eventually came to understand that the AI was completely busted and that it could be played until you passed out (Go Go Bobby D) but this was a great fighting game on the leading edge of real greatness right around the corner.  This game had great voice, cool presentation and incredible fun factor.

Lord of the Rings Online Goes Free to Play

We tried D&D online for free and it never really grabbed me.  I played LOTRO in the beta and felt like it was already pretty good way back then before release.  Who wants to check it out?  I'll update this post with server information when I finish my download.UPDATED: Look for Eldread on Windfoal server
Get Started Here

Kung Fu

An unhealthy amount of Kung Fu was played.  I first saw this in an arcade, but this is an NES game to me.  Drawing heavily from the plot of a movie where Bruce Lee fights Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Kung Fu delivered a challenging but approachable gameplay experience.  Your character climbs the levels of a tower as the difficulty ramps up and new enemy types are introduced.  This formula has been done to death a million times since Kung Fu, but it still felt fresh at the time that it came out.  Also having endured the graphics of the 2600 the NES really delivered in terms of both graphics and control.

Adventureland

In a time when a cassette tape was an elite data storage mechanism there was Adventureland (I rememberd this as being just called Adventure, but the mind is a fragile and delicate meatgrinder).  I believe this was my introduction to Text Adventures and I remember really loving it.  When Eddie and Charlie, and I weren't out roaming the campus with throwing stars we might be playing this game.  Nestled in the land between a novel, a choose your own adventure, d&d, and space invaders the text adventures explicitly decided to trade on the landscape of the mind.  This is not what I was thinking when we made a Ghostbusters text adventure in FORTRAN, but Adventureland was a great game. Long live the vic20.

 

D&D (red and blue box)

Steve and Tony know all the devilish detail.  Back when you had to roll your own dice, we played some Not That Massive Pen and Paper Role Playing Games.

Food Fight

Another classic at Venture.  Another step closer to Robotron.  When our protagonist actually eats the ice cream cone that is his goal his already huge head expands to incredible size, which is pretty darn amusing. Another really fun game with a lot of crazy.

Night Driver

If you have ever said something like "graphics don't matter" here is your test.  The bad news is that you would have also have said "gameplay doesn't matter" to make much of a case for Night Driver.  This is a first person driving game with a big idea.  If the game is at night, and it's really dark outside all you can see are the the perfectly spaced white stakes along the side of the road.  GENIUS!

Qix

If the image below seems to make very little sense, that is because Qix is a crazed fever dream of a game.  Another standard at the Holidome,  Qix is an abstract puzzler with a strong random element and a frustrating quarter gobbling amount of difficulty.  I never played it on a console, but it probably is a better experience in this context.  I know some people have affection for this game, but I did not enjoy it.

Xevious

I was totally blown away by the more representational graphics of Xevious.  Instead of flying across space or a highly abstract playing field.  The battle of Xevious unfolded above a lush panorama of fields and forests.  Looking at the screenshots now it is a little bit difficult to understand why I thought that, but Xevious had graphics that were amazing for its day.  I also really liked the finite range of the bombs and the bomb sight.  Xevious was a big step toward the modern top-down shooter and a great game.

Jimdex = ( 8 love + 6 play it now)/2  = 7

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi - Death Star Battle

The best Star Wars game for the 2600 lets you pilot the Millennium Falcon as Nien Nunb = Star Wars games for the 2600 pretty much sucked.

Star Wars: Jedi Arena

I don't remember who had this one, but after word got around nobody else bothered to pick it up.  No one could muster the amount of imagination required to make this game seem ok.  This one makes the Raiders game seem like a shining example of Blizzard polish and design perfection.  The paddle controller moved your lightsaber...ok....bad start there.  A training drone fired lasers at your shields...apparently your jedi shields or....something...I'm not too sure, strike two. Two strikes is plenty and this game is out.  Star Wars gaming at it's worst.

The Jimdex = (Jim's Love + Jim's Desire to Play this Game Today/ 2) = (1 + 1)/2 = 1

Tempest

Fast and Frantic gameplay, novel forced 3D perspective and eye popping color vector graphics made Tempest a head turner when it arrived in arcades.  I think I first played it at a Showbiz pizza.  I really enjoyed this game but I was also frustrated by the difficulty, and I recall really hating the crazy enemies that got to the top of the "tube" I was shooting down and then started flipping along the top rim to eat me.  Those guys were NOT cool.

Gauntlet Victorious! Atari Basketball Savaged!

Four Games currently lead the list of Most played games by readers of Games Jim Played.  With three votes each

1. Gauntlet, 
2. Adventure,
3. Atari Basketball
4. Pitfall 

Gauntlet has the distinction of having each person that played it mark also that it was Great! VICTORY!
Atari Basketball has the honor of having had all three of it's players mark it as Horrible (Ouch)!
Star Wars, Pitfall, BreakOut, and Track & Field all had two people rate them as Great!
Intellivision Baseball is a split decision with 1 person finding it Great! and 1 person finding it Horrible!

Sinistar

Few games have made as big of an impression in as little time as Sinistar did on me.  The sound in this game was unparalleled.  All of Sinistar's dialog was great, and his bug nuts crazy roar as he began his relentless pursuit of you was a true horror of the Pizza Man experience.  This is a game that understood (much like X-com) that the imagination is far scarier than what can be depicted.  So Sinistar did the great majority of his smack talking off screen.  Even though the gameplay was kind of pedestrian, this game is a classics classic based on its presentation alone.

Satan's Hollow

I remember thinking that this game was equal parts awesome and insane.  Didn't they know that we were already taking heat on the D&D front about the devil?  I didn't need to hear about how a Galaxians variant shooter with an awesome joystick controller was going to turn me into the prince of darkness too.  Sweet cabinet art on this one but help a guy out there Bally Midway, my copy of the Fiend Folio was already causing trouble.

Star Raiders

On the road to Elite and Privateer was a classic called Star Raiders.  I played the version for the 2600, but apparently that was a port of a superior version for Atari computers.  This was still really fun and scratched the Trek itch instead of the Wars itch.  This also foretold the gameplay that would waste a billion hours in minesweeper, this game include lots of scanning.

Yie Ar Kung-Fu

After Karate Champ there was Yie Ar Kung-Fu.  With a series of enemy characters with different fighting styles and weapons and what at the time seemed like totally over the top action Yie Ar Kung-Fu showed the way toward the fighting games that would follow.  Another gem from the Tilt at the mall, I remember this game seeming punitively hard...I liked that.

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Nothing says Star Wars more than three purple bars in a bad Defender clone, except for three purple bars and a gray dog in a bad Defender Clone.  The imagination is a powerful thing and all of the brilliance that we incorrectly imagined rested in the mind of George Lucas we also imagined rested in this cartridge.  I'm hoping for better things from The Old Republic.  I'm an eternal optimist and/or I am experiencing battered nerd syndrome.

Defender

I loved CHiPs, and the cops on CHiPs loved defender. Therefore I loved Defender. I didnt hurt that the gameplay was incredibly fast and responsive and explosive.  Defender took many of the limitations of the era and made them into spectacular fun. Even the vastly inferior 2600 version was worth playing.  I really would love to find an arcade machine of Defender right this minute and unleash a smart bomb.

Gauntlet

I heard about the existence of Gauntlet before I got to play it.  The time period between these two events seemed extremely long. Nerd needs to play game....badly. Nerd is about to die.  Gauntlet was awesome for its class based dungeon crawling design.  It had amazing use of voice, but the constantly draining health was a pretty lame and inelegant quarter grabber.  The multi-player, party based component is what really took this one over the top.  There is controversy about the origins of the design that lead to gauntlet.  I went to the web to try to confirm the story I heard out of wotc that Richard Garfield had designed gauntlet, but the controversy I found there did not include him....the mystery remains.  Gauntlet is a certifiable classic.

Gorf

Galactic Orbiting Robot Force had an amazing synthesized attract voice.  I remember this game from some random trip to the Pizza Hut in Champaign-Urbana for god knows what.  It would periodically retort "Space Cadet". It sounded like SPAYZE CADUT but that was still pretty cool.  This game added several variations to the space invaders shooting formula with 5 separate play modes.  Laser attack and Flagship were both cool and the galaxians mode is well galaxians.

Berzerk

Three great things about Berzerk.  It was a shooter, it had speech synthesis, and it had a crazy bouncing smiley face of destruction that would chase you out of each level if you dawdled. Apparently it had 64,000 mazes.  I'm pretty sure I never got past about 10.  I really thought the bouncing smiley was cool even though I was not yet aware of the Prisoner and the smoke monster had not yet been conceived.

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Pac-Man

An epic disappointment on the 2600, this wrote the book on how not to adapt an arcade classic. Sad really.  I was never a huge fan of Puck Man in the arcade but this adaptation really sealed the deal.

 

VS

Tutankham

This was a really fun arcade maze game.  The explorer could move in four directions but only fire right and left.  Fun often arises from restrictions.  I never noticed at the time that they had screwed up the name of the game, apparently Tutankhamen was too long to fit on the cabinet.  This game was about getting the keys to open the doors and advance long before that formula had every last bit of potential wrung from it's dry and lifeless husk.
Great Game.

Track and Field

It was hard for me to decide which platform to address first on Track and Field.  I've decided to talk about the arcade version.  The real draw of the arcade version was all the various kinds of cheats that could be perpetrated to get super fast button presses....the golf ball method, the plastic comb method, etc.
Great graphics style for its time.  Lots of challenge and competitive play.
Loved it.

Atari Basketball

Apparently they were serious.  This game really made the case for Intellivision.  The leg kick animation that I believe was supposed to simulate running was great in a Manos: Hands of Fate kind of so bad it's bad kind of way.  Somehow we were still able to play quite a bit of this. Further proof that PvP can elevate any kind of weak crap.

This is also a candidate for the greatest box art to gameplay graphics delta of all time, stark.

Breakout

The paddle controller for the 2600 is for Breakout.  Apparently there was an arcade version of this, but Breakout didn't mean anything to me in the arcade until Arkanoid hit.  However, Breakout was HUGE on the 2600.  This game is just fun...meditation in motion...a good Breakout groove is really satisfying. Loved it.

UFO!

The Odyssey also had a great asteroids clone. You will also notice that Magnavox overuses the exclamation point even more than I do!

(I couldn't come up with a good still image so we get a little video)
UFO video on some random site