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

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.

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.

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.

Space War

I never got a chance to play the original on a PDP-1.  But I did play this version in a roller skating rink in Alton.  I was much better at this than I was at skating.  I was especially blown away by the sun that you could choose to turn on and off that had a gravitational pull on the ships.  I think the gravity also pulled the torpedoes fired from the Asteroids ship or the Enterprise. I played this before I played Asteroids, but I can't tell you who thought of vector triangle as ship first. And I don't know if the crew of the Enterprise was breaking Starfleet regulations by firing on a vector triangle.