This is the second half of the 80s and my college years. Nintendo revived the video game industry with the NES but what did I know about it? I played games on an Apple Macintosh and in the arcades. I had no home or handheld consoles, so sorry NES, Sega Master System and GameBoy.
1985 Gauntlet (arcade)
1985 TwinBee (arcade)
1986 Dark Castle (Macintosh)
1987 Sky Shark (arcade)
1987 1943: Battle of Midway (arcade)
1987 Shadowgate (Macintosh)
1987 Beyond Dark Castle (Macintosh)
Gauntlet in its four player arcade incarnation was a lot of fun. It led to Mark and I playing a long list of Gauntlet action RPGs released through the 90s and 2000s. There was Gauntlet Legends on Dreamcast, Gauntlet Dark Legacy and Gauntlet Seven Sorrows on Xbox. In 2014 there was Gauntlet Slayer Edition on PS4 but I haven’t played that yet probably because Mark and I play on Xbox.
Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle were 2D action/adventure games for the Macintosh computer. I had an Apple Macintosh Plus (usually called Mac Plus) that I did all my papers on. You moved with the arrow keys and shot with the mouse. You had to solve puzzles and fight off bats and undead in a castle and its grounds. The sound in the game was very good. It had lots of sampled sounds from the better than average sound board on the Mac Plus. There is a Genesis port of Dark Castle but it is pretty terrible. It looks good but the controls are totally broken.
I was really into vertically scrolling shooters at the arcade mainly because Sky Shark was the only arcade game in my remote college town, and 1943: Battle of Midway had two-player so Mark and I could play when I returned home on breaks. TwinBee I discovered on a Konami collection and really loved it. It’s a lot like Xevious except that you are a bee fighting off other flying bugs and whatnot. I would love to come across an arcade cabinet because I’ve never played it outside a collection.
Shadowgate was another game I played on my Mac Plus. It had a monochrome screen but it was pretty sharp. This game was like a graphical version of Zork. You would be presented with a static environment and had to figure out what to activate, pickup or direction to move to get to the next screen. You would collect items to use later in the game to solve the bigger puzzles. This has been ported all over the place and even remade in 2014. I’ve seen it in the store on Xbox One. It may be time for a revisit.
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