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mmcirvinWhat are your favorite video games of all time?
I think I can make a distinction between the games I most admired, and the ones that actually seriously hooked me. I admired the hell out of Star Raiders, but somehow my young self found playing a full game such an overwhelming experience that it didn't provide the level of repeat addiction that other games did.
Though I still find several of the old arcade classics astonishing (Tempest is like something that fell in from another, stranger universe) I never really got into arcade games at all back in their heyday; the thought of shoving all those quarters into a machine turned me off somehow. I always had a nagging feeling that this made me insufficiently macho, since arcade versions of games were usually harder than the home versions.
On the other hand, there are games that I just couldn't stop playing.
On the VCS/2600, there were several games I played a lot, but the ones that were most addictive were probably Missile Command, Asteroids and Breakout. The 2600 Asteroids was just a little bit too easy, at least in the default game version; Breakout was actually viciously hard and could be discouraging if you weren't in the zone; Missile Command was tuned just about right for me, so it had the greatest addictive potential of all.
On the Atari 400/800/XL series, nothing came close to the hold that Defender had on me. It was the one video game in my life that I played so much that I physically broke the machine.
After my teenage years, there were various games that I got interested in for a little while, but the only one that I was motivated enough to master was Battle-Girl, an undeservedly obscure mid-Nineties game in retro-Eighties style for classic Mac OS (and later for Windows). In gameplay it was sort of a Robotron/Defender hybrid on a big panning playfield; the look was early Eighties vector with echoes of Space Duel and Star Castle combined with a few Maelstrom-esque rendered sprites. Battle-Girl was a supreme twitch-trance game; the difficulty gradually ramped up until you hit levels that were just entirely filled with dozens of vicious enemies coming at you at once, and even with the BFG firehose you had by that point, survival meant entering an altered state of consciousness.
I've still got my registered copy, but I have to boot into Mac OS 9 to play it, which is enough of a hassle that I don't play it much these days.
I think I can make a distinction between the games I most admired, and the ones that actually seriously hooked me. I admired the hell out of Star Raiders, but somehow my young self found playing a full game such an overwhelming experience that it didn't provide the level of repeat addiction that other games did.
Though I still find several of the old arcade classics astonishing (Tempest is like something that fell in from another, stranger universe) I never really got into arcade games at all back in their heyday; the thought of shoving all those quarters into a machine turned me off somehow. I always had a nagging feeling that this made me insufficiently macho, since arcade versions of games were usually harder than the home versions.
On the other hand, there are games that I just couldn't stop playing.
On the VCS/2600, there were several games I played a lot, but the ones that were most addictive were probably Missile Command, Asteroids and Breakout. The 2600 Asteroids was just a little bit too easy, at least in the default game version; Breakout was actually viciously hard and could be discouraging if you weren't in the zone; Missile Command was tuned just about right for me, so it had the greatest addictive potential of all.
On the Atari 400/800/XL series, nothing came close to the hold that Defender had on me. It was the one video game in my life that I played so much that I physically broke the machine.
After my teenage years, there were various games that I got interested in for a little while, but the only one that I was motivated enough to master was Battle-Girl, an undeservedly obscure mid-Nineties game in retro-Eighties style for classic Mac OS (and later for Windows). In gameplay it was sort of a Robotron/Defender hybrid on a big panning playfield; the look was early Eighties vector with echoes of Space Duel and Star Castle combined with a few Maelstrom-esque rendered sprites. Battle-Girl was a supreme twitch-trance game; the difficulty gradually ramped up until you hit levels that were just entirely filled with dozens of vicious enemies coming at you at once, and even with the BFG firehose you had by that point, survival meant entering an altered state of consciousness.
I've still got my registered copy, but I have to boot into Mac OS 9 to play it, which is enough of a hassle that I don't play it much these days.
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Date: 2006-07-25 01:00 am (UTC)Dav2.718
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Date: 2006-07-25 03:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 01:18 am (UTC)Metroid was awe-inspiring, but after I played it through once I never bothered to do anything but Justin Bailey my way through it.
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Date: 2006-07-25 01:25 am (UTC)I thought of another one that I played all the way to the end: Bolo for the Atari ST. Not anything to do with tanks, but, rather, the Bolo that was Oxyd creator Meinolf Schneider's transformation of the Breakout/Arkanoid genre into a surrealistic puzzle game.
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Date: 2006-07-25 05:10 pm (UTC)I also created a tribute song (http://www.partiallyclips.com/filk/nethack) about it, which has been linked from the main page at NetHack.org (http://www.nethack.org)
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Date: 2006-07-25 02:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 02:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 02:33 am (UTC)Apple II: Wings of Fury (sort of a WWII-themed "Defender"). Bolo. Microbe. The original (and Beyond) version of Castle Wolfenstein (and the "Castle Smurfenstein" hack). Dino Eggs (and Dino Smurf). Drol. Taipan, especially with the enjoyable bug that let you overpay the loan shark so he'd start paying you usurious interest.
Macintosh: Airborne. Crystal Quest/Crazy. Mission Thunderbolt (futuristic themed Nethack with real graphics). Spaceward Ho. Civ/II/III and I just bought IV. Alpha Centauri. Heroes of Might & Magic/II/III/IV.
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Date: 2006-07-25 03:05 am (UTC)My father was never much of a gamer, though I remember some of his co-workers going nuts for Original Adventure (Colossal Cave) on the old Honeywells.
Sim City 2000 was interesting for a little while, but didn't have tremendous staying power. Maelstrom for the Mac was probably my favorite Asteroids-type game.
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Date: 2006-07-25 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 01:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 02:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 12:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 03:15 am (UTC)And speaking of, I don't think I ever realized, until a recent VG Cats strip, that you can use Fire Flower to defeat Bowser in the castles...
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Date: 2006-07-25 03:48 am (UTC)Atari 2600: Had this for a long time, favourite was Ghostbusters (we lent it to another family and it was their favourite also.) I also remember playing Double Dragon on it (not a very good version though.)
Commodore 64: Wizball, when I could get the chance. 1/2 an hour to load some games off tape was not uncommon.
Sega Master System: (my brother's) Wonderboy III - The Dragon's Trap
NES: Never owned one, but I did enjoy Super Mario & Duck Hunt.
Megadrive/Genesis: (the first console I had) Sonic, Landstalker, Revenge of Shinobi, rentals
PC: CIV II & III, Diablo
Dreamcast: Shenmue, Wacky Races, Soul Calibur, Skies of Arcadia
I've lost interest since about last year, I still like the nostalgia surrounding the earlier games though, I found this interview with Yuzo Koshiro (composer of many old-school game soundtracks), that I quite enjoyed reading.
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Date: 2006-07-25 04:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 07:30 am (UTC)On the old IBM XT clone: Lode Runner
On the NES: Super Mario Bros. 3
On the SNES: Super Mario Kart, edging out SMW.
On the 486DX2/66: TIE Fighter
On the N64: GoldenEye? Hard to pick just one.
On the Athlon: Counter-Strike
Too soon to judge anything from the past five years.
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Date: 2006-07-25 12:07 pm (UTC)Elite (Spectrum 48K Version/Archimedes Version) - Ummm, I have Oolite currently installed with a prominent icon sitting on my desktop just beneath the one for GTA:SA. So I think we can say that's really stuck with me to this day.
Doomdark's Revenge (Spectrum 48K) - Lords of Midnight (the original, not, not, NOT, the PC sequel) is doubtless objectively the better game, but Doomdark was much much more *compulsive* for me because the NPC-armies acted much more randomly in pursuit of their goals. LoM is essentially solvable, DR was different everytime you started a new game. Also snowy themes/fimbulwinter good!
...and since currently Titan Quest is eating me alive (when I never got into Diablo) and City of Heroes is the only MMORPG I ever managed to play a character to a high level in, canny developers should be able to work out the simple trick which horribly addicts me every time merely by analyzing the commonality between the two, thus gaining them an audience of at least one obsessive player!
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Date: 2006-07-25 01:29 pm (UTC)Pacman-Atari
Mario Brothers-Nintendo
Lands of Lore-PC
I've tried many others but I get too frustrated if they make them too hard then I lose interest.
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Date: 2006-07-25 01:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 06:12 pm (UTC)That's because LJ suddenly hates me!
Date: 2006-07-26 12:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-03 05:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 03:39 pm (UTC)Wizball is one. The dream-like surrealism and completely original gameplay has stuck with me through the years. Completing the game still puts me in a very strange and somewhat distrubing state of mind, just from the overdose of weirdness.
The Monkey Island games, of course.
Gravity Force. It was a Thrust clone, and a very good an entertaining one. Cave flyers like that have since become one of my big obsessions, and I've spent some time writing my own, too.
More recently, I've been finding the pearls of the last couple of generations of consoles. Rez for the Dreamcast and PS2 is a masterpiece. Ikaruga, for the Dreamcast and Gamecube, is probably my favourite shooter ever. It dumps all the unnecessary complexity of weapon upgrades and other distractions, and instead focuses INTENSELY on the gameplay mechanics. Bangai-Oh for the N64 and Dreamcast is another fun shooter with minimalist game mechanics and gameplay that focuses on being incredibly fun, instead of well-polished like Ikaruga. Vib Ribbon on the PS1 is a super-minimalist music-based game that is loved by everybody I've shown it to.
Desreving its own paragraph is Ico for the PS2. It's essentially Prince of Persia (there's another worthy old game, by the way) in 3D. That would be enough to make a good game, but what really makes it is an incredbly intense focus on atmosphere and presentation. It opts for visuals that are almost impressionist rather than realistic, and digs into some very deep archetype of being a hero to pull you into the game. If you let yourself get emotionally involved with the game, it's even more gratifying. I haven't played the next game, Shadow of the Colossus, from the same team yet but that one got a lot more attention than the sadly forgotten Ico. I expect that it should be about as good.
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Date: 2006-07-25 04:36 pm (UTC)Also, for reasons unknown to me, the only game my mom would play was Pepper II (http://www.mobygames.com/game/colecovision/pepper-ii), and she was better than any of us at it.
Modern day brilliance? Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4. Maybe it's because it's the first Tony Hawk I really played, but that learning curve was brutal, with just enough growth to keep you going, until one day you realize that you're amazing and can complete all 190 goals in an afternoon no problem.
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Date: 2006-07-26 04:58 pm (UTC)More games need to take two full decades or more to master. And it's not like I haven't tried.
And "Venture." Also Coleco. Also rules.
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Date: 2006-07-26 06:56 pm (UTC)I think I beat Jumpman Junior once. I think there were about 12 levels, but it's been a good 15-20 years since that point so I can't trust my memory on that.
Burgertime!
Date: 2006-07-25 04:39 pm (UTC)Q-Bert is the one I played obsessively enough to get to the point of playing for three hours on one quarter.
My current compulsive behavior is a game I still refuse to pay for because I'm convinced it's really just a copy of one we played all the time 20 years ago on my housemate's Amiga (and a poorly made copy at that).
more memories
Date: 2006-07-28 06:07 am (UTC)Joust was the one game that really felt like doing something special, and it was the one game I really enjoyed both playing and watching. Such simple, natural actions to control such complex motion and play. I agree with
I also agree about Katamari Damacy, and it's a good thing I know myself too well to allow a game console in the house. I play it every couple months at my little sister's house.
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Date: 2006-07-25 07:38 pm (UTC)Q*Bert was the first, and pretty much only, arcade game that I could consistently get #1 on. I played a certain amount of Street Fighter 2 in college but never got really good at it.
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Date: 2006-07-26 02:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-26 05:56 am (UTC)Dork is even simpler.
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Date: 2006-07-26 12:28 pm (UTC)The epitome of minimalism has to be SFCave, an incredibly addictive game using a single button. There's also an even more exciting 3D version!
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Date: 2006-07-26 12:46 pm (UTC)zero buttons!
Date: 2006-07-26 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-27 03:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-26 12:31 am (UTC)Did I like Tetris? I don't know - does a junkie like smack? Let's just say I had A Problem, and leave it at that.
After grad school, a friend bought an original Joust cabinet. That's a sublime game, and maybe my favorite of all time. I still play the hell out of it on PS2, and I will destroy any challenger, punk. I've also recently gotten into Robotron, as well. It's got that same twitch-trance vibe as Battle Girl (which I loved, but never got over the stupid red "mist" on the screen). I should definitely install an OS9 partition and give that a shot again (it won't run under Classic, alas).
On the PS2 (note that, aside from Tetris, I went straight from late-80s arcade games to the PS2 - games haven't been a big part of my life's entertainment), nothing can touch Katamari Damacy. I love it more than I love oxygen.
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Date: 2006-07-26 02:15 am (UTC)Also, Dance Dance Revolution. I guess most people don't think of that as a video game.
Come to think of it, I also played the Atari 400/800 Joust a lot (and I just discovered that the 2600 port was pretty good too). That was a game that lent itself well to porting. Donkey Kong and Pole Position had really good Atari 8-bit versions too, though Nintendo's 2600 Donkey Kong port sucked.
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Date: 2006-07-27 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-27 11:09 pm (UTC)