PixlBit

     When arcades were all the rage and Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders ruled the day, going to the arcade was the ultimate video game experience and they were everywhere. Second to that were home consoles and you had three choices: The Atari's AVCS (later Atari 2600), Mattel's Intellivision, and Coleco's ColecoVision. They had lots of ports of arcade games and a host of original titles perfectly suited to their respective systems. Lastly, you could also play games on the first affordable home computers. In North America you had: the Commodore 64, the Tandy's TRS-80 (I used to call it the Trash 80, but I was just being a snob), the pricey IBM PC 5150 (something a rich Aunt of mine had), or an Apple IIc (the one my parents got). Arcades, consoles, computers. You had it all.

                                   

     1942 [Arcade] (1984): This vertically scrolling WWII shoot-'em-up was just a little less graphically detailed than its sequel 1943. One difference was, in 1942, you only fought against other planes whereas, in 1943, you also attacked ships. In both you can play two player co-op which is a lot of fun in a busy arcade. I have both in the Capcom Classics Collection on Xbox. Flippin' awesome!

                                      

     Spy Hunter [Arcade](1983): I remember the exact location I played this in my home town. The cabinet version is the only way to play this game. With the foot pedal and the steering wheel, you could get precise control of your vehicle. No other port that I've played has come close to the feel you got on the arcade cabinet: the sense of speed, the way you could slam other cars around with a quick turn of the wheel, dropping your speed to a precise low level so you could enter your truck for upgrades without crashing. You could also turn into a boat if you drove off the road at certain spots. That was boss!

                                         

    Xevious [Arcade] (1982): The first vertically scrolling shooter I played regularly when I went to the arcade. I vividly remember walking into Space Port in my local Mall every weekend and walking down the lines of arcade machines, popping a quarter in here and there, trying new games, and saving Xevious for last because I wanted to spend some time with it. I never beat the game - far from it. It was hard, but I never tired of trying. I loved the strange sounds the game made, the interesting overhead view of the landscape as it flowed by beneath your ship, and the trick of bombing targets while keeping those strange flying saucers off your back. You picked up power ups and learned the patterns of attack. As you got farther along, new strange things would attack you like those black dots (where they ships or flak, I wasn't sure) that flitted in and out of view. The game was always fascinating to me.

                                             

     Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord [PC] (1981): Every Sunday after my duties as Verger in my Church, I would join with a kind of Crusade against the forces of evil and crawl through dungeons in search of the Mad Overlord - Werdna. With graph paper in hand, I would carefully map my progress and mark the locations of elevators, pits, treasures and one-way doors until I had all ten levels clearly drawn. Eventually, I beat this game, requiring a lot of patience and careful grinding. If your whole party died in the maze, it meant they were lost and you had to form a new party to go retrieve them. If one member died, you had to raise him/her at the church, and there was no gaurentee it would be successful. This added a lot of nervous tension to the dungeon crawl. The final level in the game gave me the spooks as I fought Vampire Lords and Greater Demons. Sunday afternoons in my Mother's sewing room with the Apple IIc and Wizardry were the best!

                                           

     Sea Battle [Intellivision] (1980): When the Intellivision came out, it was competing with the Atari 2600, and it offered something really different. It had more detail in the graphics than Atari games and did really well with sports titles because of the more complex movement available to the figures. This also made it able to explore more complex game types like strategy and simulations. Sea Battle was the best action-strategy game on any console of the time in my opinion. Two players each had a base in an ocean environment full of islands. You would see the whole map as you moved your fleets around and then, when you came close to an enemy fleet, the screen would zoom in and BOOM! You'd be in real time batte with the other ships. You moved a cursor from your ship with the circle pad and shot at the other ships. The controler felt a little bit like a mouse and keyboard squished into a handheld device. I didn't own the system though, my neighbor did, so I would go over there as often as I could to play it. Sea Battle is in the Intellivision Lives! collection on last gen consoles or in Xbox Live's Game Room ap, but it's really best on the original console with that funny key and circle pad controller.

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     Lunar Lander [arcade] (1979): I was fascinated with this machine. It attempted to simulate the approach and landing of a Lunar Module like the ones used for the Apollo Missions to the Moon. You had to monitor fuel useage and steer towards a landing site as you plumetted to the rocky surface. Land too hard, and you either lost points from taking too much damage, or exploded on impact. Each round used up fuel. The object was to see how many landings you could do for the highest points before your fuel ran out. Of course, you could add fuel by putting in more quarters in the arcade machine. You had a bar that controled thrust, and several buttons to rotate the craft. I always liked the realistic feel of working against gravity in this game. It led me to games like Gravitar, Art Style: Orbient (WiiWare) and others that use gravity as a game element.                    

                                        

     Breakout [Atari 2600] (1978):  This, the first full year of the Atari Video Computer System, saw just the basic stuff come out such as sports games like Bowling, board games like Backgammon, and racing games like Night Driver (should've been called Knight Driver). But there was one arcade port that worked really well on the system with the AVCS's bundled paddle controlers - Breakout. This was basically pong but put vertically with a brick wall above that broke away as you hit it with the ball. If you broke through to the space above, the ball ricocheted around and cleared lots of bricks. The object was to clear the screen for points. It's such a simple game, but an addictive one. It's sequel, Super Breakout was even better, but this is where it started.                                                                                                                                                                     

    Squad Leader [Board] (1977): 1977 was the year AVCS debuted, but Air-Sea Battle and Combat, were not favorites that I would play again. However, 1977 was the year my favorite board game arrived - Squad Leader. It, and its several expansion packs, became an obsession with me all through the eighties. I would say, if it weren't for Squad Leader, I wouldn't have been interested in strategy video games. There were strategy games on computer at the time, but I didn't seak them out, and there were pretty much none on console of any complexity until Herzog Zwei on Genesis and Nobunaga's Ambition on NES in 1989. Squad Leader was my go to strategy game on the era, better than anything I knew on a screen.

      And that's it! I have now traveled the entire thirty-six year history of my involvement with video games, giving my top picks for each year! Phew! What a project! Now to play them all again and then start on the number two's. Ah, heaven!

    Note: I've used images of flyers from the arcade museum's archive for the arcade games. It's an awesome resource you can check out here: http://flyers.arcade-museum.com/