I also went to private (Catholic, so close to Episcopalian .. right? It's been a while) school and remember being jealous of the kids with the TI-eightywhaever calculators just one step above mine having Mario on those things. Stupid advanced placement math kids ... effing jr. high. lol Look forward to next entry.
Video Games of My Life: Part Four – 1984-1986
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 On 02/11/2014 at 01:24 AM by KnightDriver See More From This User » |
In these years I was going to private school and lost touch with my neighborhood friends who still went to the public school and so didn't play much on home consoles anymore. However, my friend Phil (also a private school kid, not going to the same school though) and I hung out and rode our bikes all the way to the the arcade in the Mall. It was five miles and one mega hill away. I was an athlete then and it was just fun to climb that hill on the way back every time.
Left. No. Right. NO. LEFT!
When Phil and I finished challenging each other to complete Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace, we moved on to Marble Madness, playing it like a sport. This game must be played with the roller ball controller. I’ve tried this game in Midway’s Arcade Origins on Xbox 360 and it’s not fun without it. I also played a lot of Ice Hockey and 1942 with my friend Mark with whom I’m playing Borderlands 2 at moment. Games have come a long way but the fun is much the same. There’s just more to talk about afterwards. Other games I played then were: Ice Hockey, 1942, Paperboy, and Gauntlet.
I even had that nice pleather case
I had a Texas Instruments calculator for school, a TI-55. You could do some limited programming with it, not graphics of course, but make it resolve equations. Between this, my flip books where I drew animations, and reading my scifi/fantasy novels, if you could’ve mashed them all together you might have got something like Gauntlet on-the-go. Someone at Nintendo put all that together and came up with the Game Boy a few years later.
About this time my parents bought their first home computer, and I played my first serious RPGs on Sundays after church (an Episcopalian Church), where I was Verger. Duties were to open the church at 7am in the morning and fill in for any acolytes that didn’t show up for the services. After the last service and the following breakfast get-together at the church school, I sequestered myself in my mother’s sewing room to play Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord on the Apple IIc. It was your classic turn-based RPG with a rudimentary wire frame environment to travel through. It was great fun to write out the mazes on graph paper and you had to do this or be forever lost. I didn’t much like the sequels Knight of Diamonds and Legacy of Llylgamyn though. Knight of Diamonds had these really unfair pits in the first level and Legacy of Llylgamyn required you to transfer your characters from the previous pit filled nightmare, so I always went back to Proving Grounds.
Mark and I replayed the whole game, perfectly ported, on the NES (a system I missed in these years since I was too busy with the Apple IIc) in a tandem race to the end a few years ago. I just won at twenty-five hours over two days. I loved every minute of it. I’ll always have an NES deck just for this game.
In ’86 I graduated High School and went to College toting an Apple Macintosh Plus Computer, but I’ll leave that adventure for the next blog.
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