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.

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

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.

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.

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

Spy Hunter

Dun dun dah duh dah duh dah Dun....Is that the Peter Gunn theme or did they change it enough to pretend it's an original composition.  Who didn't want to pretend that they were in a James Bond car chase.  Apparently Midway used the Bond theme on the initial run of Spy Hunter but was never able to get the rights, so we got the music that really makes this game. The Weapons Van also added a bit of a Knight Rider flair as well.  This game had cool power-ups and a weight to the steering and collisions that really sold the action. Watch out for those 'copters.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

The E.T. game always gets blamed for the crash, and I suppose this game is better but licensed games were not off to a great start all these years ago.  This game did recreate some cool moments from the film and it did have some insane puzzles and riveting parachute and grenade action.  The graphics in this could only be kindly described with the term abstract, and that would clearly be a stretch.  I loved Raiders and I wanted to love this game, but this is more Irina Spalko than Marion Ravenwood.

Spelunker

It's not really time for the NES, but this game has been on my mind.  So we are back in a mine here...I wonder when everything changed from being a mine to a warehouse full of crates and barrels?  A study must be commissioned!  This miner may appear to be a plumber.  You might imagine he can jump like a plumber.  You might suppose that he might be able to fall and survive like a plumber, but you would be wrong.  A one inch fall breaks this guy like Sam Jackson in the last reasonable movie from M. Night.  I know Mario, I have worked with Mario, You sir are no Mario.

Prince of Persia

Jordan Mechner made Karateka and then went on to create a certifiable classic, Prince of Persia.  We debated at length why the animation in PoP was so much better than everything else coming out at the time.  We compared it to the rotoscoped animation in Bakshi movies and that was a pretty good explanation.  With keyframes based on a series of photographs taken of Jordan's brother the little prince ran, climbed, jumped, and died with a fluid grace never before seen. While the trial and error game play could be frustrating the original Prince of Persia was an amazing gaming experience that is still being ported to new platforms today.

Lode Runner

I know that gaming has been stigmatized as a solitary activity, but in the late 70's and early 80's you had to get out and about and meet some people if you wanted to play everything.  George C. had Lode Runner so he was on the circuit.  Was this another game set in a mine?  With lots of ladders to climb and lots of holes to dig for hapless AI miners to fall in Lode Runner was an action puzzler that had lots of levels and lots of challenge.  And it was a good chance to go see George C.

Karateka

This game was brutally hard. A predecessor to brawlers to follow, our hero walked or ran to the right and stopped to fight.  Getting hit while running was instant defeat.  The evil eagle was a classic antagonist.  The animation in this game was a standout amongst its peers.

Pitfall

I saw Pitfall the first time in an appliance store just off the square.  It was a beautiful game for the console hardware of the time with good animation, tight control, and enough challenge to keep it interesting.  I was wild for Indiana Jones and I was wild for Pitfall.  I gathered the Treasures of Enarc (Pitfall was developed by David Crane, get it Enarc cranE) while running to the right, jumping on crocs, swinging on vines, and spelunking through caves for hours.

Huck's Trilogy: Part 3

Light Cycles Turning
Cone, Tower, Tanks, and Grid Bugs
Flynn Kills M.C.P.

Huck's Trilogy: Part 2

Isometric View
Altitude Represented
Plane Battles Dragon