PixlBit

I've been making a list of games I want to play this year. I write down games coming only a month ahead because release dates are usually solid by then. After that I rate them by how much I want to play them. The highest rated go to my Gamefly que. Two months in and I don't have a five star, or "must-play", game yet, until now. 

Williams would soon put out a classic video game, but their main interest was pinball. Firepower was a great table out in 1980. 

I recently made a list of current gen games and rated them based on how excited I was for them. Five stars was a "must play" game; four stars said, "I really want to play it"; three stars just, "want to play it"; and two stars was a, "curious". There was no need to list one star games. You could say those were all the rest. So here is a list of my five star games for 2017 in chronological order. 

Back in the day, I didn't even notice pinball machines in the arcades. I guess they were there, I just never played them, or rarely, because I don't remember a single one. But now that FarSight Studios has brought these games to consoles, I've become a fan of them. I even go to the local arcade on occasion and play the real thing.

I didn't play Zork until '81 at the earliest because that's when the IBM PC came out. My aunt had an IBM and I played Zork at her house one family visit. I don't remember playing it for very long. It's a text-based adventure where you have to figure things out as you go along. I think I got bored of the obscure solution to the game and went back to pursuing my aunt's huge scifi/fantasy book collection. 

I started off with Pinball FX3 on PS4. Then I played it again on XBO. Then I played Pinball Arcade and the simulated tables. After that I played some Gears of War 4 multiplayer and surprised myself by playing it the rest of the time. 

I tried to beat some of Rangergirl's scores in Pinball FX3, built the portal for Lego Dimensions and played it, and finished the campaign in Gears of War 4. 

The Warp Hive is still being refueled with power pupae from the alien bee queen, so I'll just reminisce about Intellivision's PGA Golf. 

Fishing Derby is another Activision game for the Atari 2600 that I played on Activision Anthology for PS2.

This is Skiing for the Atari 2600, made by its first third-party developer Activision. Over the years I've become a bigger and bigger fan of the first generation of Activision developers. I think their game design for the Atari 2600 is perfectly suited to that machine. The graphics are simple and colorful, the gameplay very accessible and easy to understand, and the games are just darn fun, even today. I have seriously considered collecting a complete Activision collection for the Atari for those reasons. Skiiing is one of the earliest examples of this.