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 On 07/01/2023 at 10:09 AM by KnightDriver See More From This User » |
I'm slowly creating a list of 80s retro stuff I want to revisit. This is for 1981.
Electronic Games Magazine: I remember reading EGM but not in the 80s. The only gaming mags I knew about then were Dragon Magazine, which was mainly about DnD, and The General, about war games. I would love to come across old issues of EGM to read. I just found Digital Press and their collection of EGMs you can read in PDF format, even print them. Very cool. I may try and print issue one to read. I'd rather try and recreate the viseral feel of reading a real magazine then reading on the web.
Fantasy (SNK): An action arcade game that uses a continue feature, maybe the first instance of that. It's on the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection.
Space Dungeon (Taito): An early twin-stick shooter, one of the first. It got an Atari 5200 port but is not on the Atari 50 collection unfortuneately. It is on the PSP game Taito Legends Power-UP which I still have.
Treasure Island (Data East): This arcade game has an isometric view and makes me think of it as an adventure version of Q*bert. It is not on the only Data East collection I know of for Wii, Data East Arcade Classics. I used to own it, but sold it. I'm kicking myself now for that. But Treasure Island is not there anyway. I'd need the TI-99 computer port or some sort of online emulation to play it now. I'll think about it.
Wizardry Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Sir Tech): Oh, my favorite Apple II game, and I played it in the 80s (unlike the others above) around 1984 on the Apple IIc. I have the excellent NES port which I will bring out again. My meatspace friend will likely join me and play it too on his own machine. We'll think up of some competition for it perhaps. It's the best of the early wireframe dungeon crawl RPGs. Many subsequent games have been inspired by it. I'm thinking of new names for my characters already.
Axis & Allies board game: I was playing the Avalon Hill game Squad Leader and its expansions at the time. Axis & Allies is a simpler war game I've always wanted to try. There have been many versions of the game published and even a reprint of the original game. I've seen it in Barnes & Noble. So, I may get it and give it a spin.
That's 1981. My list grows. It's gonna be fun playing all this stuff starting next week.
1981 was when I was first old enough to understand video games. Donkey Kong, the first arcade game I played because of its colorful graphics, animation, and sounds, is my favorite arcade game of all time to this day.
I had Space Dungeon on Atari 8-bit, and played the arcade version through MAME. I would like to see it as an Arcade Archives game.
1981 was also the release year for Zork II and Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness. I didn't play those until a while after they released.
Us kids were crazy for Donkey Kong. We couldn't wait to see the close-to-arcade-perfect ColecoVision version when that came out.
I couldn't get my PSP to read the UMD for Taito Legends Power-Up where I could play Space Dungeon. Maybe I should turn my PSP into a MAME machine?
I played a little bit of the NES version of Ultima III: Exodus a while back, but I've always wanted to spend more time with an Ultima game.
I know I played Pac-Man when I was five, so I must've not played it untll 1981. But I was just a little kid and didn't have access to arcades or much of anything really. Looking back now, it seems that big 1981 titles would've been Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Galaga. The ones on your list I had never seen in arcades, but I did play Fantasy on the SNK collection. Love that digital voice!
It seems I was just the right age for arcades, 13. I could get on my bike and head to the mall on my own.
Fantasy is a very interesting game. I found it tough though and didn't get very far in it.
Yeah I didn't get far in Fantasy either. There's a part where you're supposed to land a balloon on a pirate ship and avoid the cannon fire, and I couldn't do it.
I got past that this time but failed in the Scramble-like sequence.
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