Old School.....arcade games

I just came across a disc that I thought I had lost.  It contains what I consider a priceless assortment of files. I thought maybe some of you could appreciate the memories they brought back. I’m gonna post some of my favorites along with comment, facts or tips.  I’ll explain exactly what it was I found at the end of the blog.

Phoenix- Just fun. During the game three birds will attack all in a line. Let those birds fly all the way to the bottom and start to fly back up. As they are flying up, shoot all three in a row real quick (2 or 3 seconds) and you will get 200, 000 points instead of 200.

Tapper- Funniest part of the game- The customers were all dicks and the little move the bar tender does when he loses a beer -
There were three versions of Tapper released: Root Beer, Budweiser, and Sun- tary (UK).
The main character in the game (as well as the guy in Domino Man and one of the lumberjacks in Timber) is based on a Marvin Glass employee named Mike Ferris who had the same mustache and bald head and wore a red T-shirt all the time. This game was play tested in a Chicago-area Rush Street bar called the Snuggery with much positive feedback. Digitized belches were going to be used in the game, but they never made it into the final version.

They called it SUPER PAC-MAN for a reason.

Klax- It was written in just a few weeks on Escape From the Planet of the Robot Monsters hardware. But it  was so good it seemed  like it should have taken years. Unique puzzle game.

Millipede It’s  the kick-ass continuation of centipede. If “Continue Game” is turned on, you can keep continuing at a higher level each time. However, you must gain at least one extra man in each continued game to continue that game. This process stops when you reach the 300, 000 point mark. At this point, no matter how high your score gets (i.e. 400, 000, 500, 000 etc.), you will NOT be able to continue your game at a higher score.

Joust- I will kick your ass at this game, yes I am talking to you.
Early machines had a bug that allowed players to rack up millions of points by standing on the middle plat- form and killing pterodactyls endlessly, or until they got tired and gave up.
Another bug that became a “cut -throat” feature was the ability to belly-flop and squeeze between tight gaps in staggered platforms.

Ghosts and Goblins- One game I could never make it to the end of. I’m still bothered by that fact to this day
Weapon trick – After having defeated a level boss(es), the knight can fire two or three “invisible shots”; if the man is facing the right border of the screen while doing so, the shots will reappear in the following stage. This can be exploited to kill some of the skulls at beginning of level six

Gaplus-They were not called stages…they were called parsecs…awesome

Dig-Dug- Probably played this more than any other video game other than Joust. It was fun to blow those little things up

Food Fight was designed for Atari by General Computing as part of a lawsuit settlement for an illegal speedup kit for Missile Command, in which they affixed their copyright. This was one of two games; Quantum was the other.
Inspired by the food fight scene in National Lampoon’s Animal House.

 

Championship Sprint Amazing because 4 people could play AT THE SAME TIME!

 

Crossbow The creepy sound effects are what made the game and the way your people melted when they got hit only made it more fun.

 

Galaga 88 My favorite of the Galaga series

Centipede-Cool cause you used a roller ball to control it. The first coin-op game designed by a woman. A grasshopper was in the original design, but was later removed from the game. 

 

Choplifter-Sometimes you would accidentally (on purpose shoot the guys you were trying to rescue and they made a funny little shriek. Must have played this one a million times. In the early stages, try to fly as low as possible – this way the fighters will not shoot you, and you are low enough to shoot the ground targets without being shot. Since this only works when you’re in the air, and not when you’re on the ground, it only works well on levels 1 and 3.

 

Crystal Castles- One of the first “3-d” video games I ever played. Originally called Toperoids, this game was originally a 3D Asteroids variant, in which asteroids and other objects fell from the sky, endangering the player. The enemies coming down from the top of the screen was an artifact from the original concept.

 

Crazy Climber- With the crazy 2 joystick controls. In the second building: when you arrive at the electrical sign, choose the left path. Then put yourself under the electrical wire (rightmost window of the left path) but keep both joysticks pressed. After a few seconds your climber will become red with white hair and electricity won’t have effect on it.

 

“Bubbles was an attempt to come up with a non-violent, clean game, ” (no pun intended) says programmer John Kotlarik.

 

Burger Time Those little eggs still piss me off.
The original Data East version hardware had a cassette module so games could be converted easily and quickly. Unfortunately, the cassettes were prone to breakage, and the systems were quickly junked. When Bally Midway licensed the game from DECO, they replaced the hardware with a dedicated hardware system.

Carnival- This was another one of my favorite bowling alley arcade games.

Berzerk was originally designed for the 6809E CPU, until it was discovered that the processor didn’t work properly. The board was then redone to run on a Z80. The speech was done using LPC coding, which cost $1, 000 per word to compress at that time. The game also originally had a monochrome monitor; when Defender was released in color, the company re-considered their display approach and re-designed the display using a color overlay board.
Evil Otto was named for Dave Otto, who worked for Dave Nutting’s Arcade Engineering group as R & D director at the time Alan McNeil did. Each Berzerk unit was “autographed” by the designer.
Mr. Peter Bukowski was the first person to die playing a video game, when he died of a heart attack playing Berzerk at  the “Friar Tuck Game Room” in Calumet City, Illinois.
An interesting quirk: The space between your man’s head and body is not technically part of your man, so that shots that pass through this area (your “neck”) will not kill you. 

Zookeeper- Round and round you go trying to keep the animals from escaping…round and round and round

Sinistar- The thing I remember about this game is when Sinistar  came after you…you were fucked, fast and hard.

There is a project called MAME.

MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. When used in conjunction with images of the original arcade game’s ROM and disk data, MAME attempts to reproduce that game as faithfully as possible on a more modern general-purpose computer. MAME can currently emulate several thousand different classic arcade video games from the late 1970s through the modern era.

The ROMS are available on the net and some have been released for public use. Be careful cause possession of ROMS you don’t have a legal right to is piracy just like any other software. Just cause it’s old and cheesy doesn’t make it free to use. MAME is not difficult to configure with the ability to make basic video adjustments you can set it up.

I’m not sure how many games MAME supports now but years ago when I was messing with emulators there were over 3000 different variations of arcade games supported so go get yourself a computer joystick and take a trip down memory lane.

 

 

 

Old School.....arcade games