H.E.R.O.

Holding out for a Helicopter Emergency Rescue Operation 'til the end of the night. Which, being underground, could be a while.

Once more, I find myself not only faced with a game I've not heard of before, but also stuck in a video game mine. Well, I'm not stuck - I'm the hero that saves everyone else trapped in the mine, and a very mine-like looking mine it is. It really sells the idea that Roderick Hero, with his helicopter backpack, head mounted laser and bag of dynamite, is on a serious mission in a completely realistic environment.

So let's see how soon we and all who depend on our H.E.R.O. perish...

Spy Hunter

Are we a spy who is a hunter, or a hunter or hunts spies?

Source // Wikipedia

For the longest time, I've known Spy Hunter as 'an old game that I hear referenced here and there, but not too often, so it can't have been absolutely brilliant, but must have been pretty good'. If you can picture that...

If it's on the list of 1001 then it must be on for a reason, so it's time to find out.

Dig Dug

Is manual labour even this hazardous?

Source // Wikipedia

Ah, Dig Dug, I know Dig Dug. Have I ever actually dug anything in Dig Dug? I don't think I've ever played it. Perhaps a version of it, or a clone or spiritual successor somewhere, but the original Dig Dug passed me by, to the best of my recollection.

If I kept wanting to not be in space when I played arcade games, Dig Dug appears to be answering my pleas by heading in the opposite direction, underground (deep underground, near the Earth's core, where it's still warm), and how colourful it is too. Simple, but it does the job, doesn't it? Looks like something you'd find in a text book. I wonder what we'll learn from this classic...

Gravitar

Landing with a thump. And an explosion.

Source // Wikipedia

By the sounds of it, Gravitar is yet another space shooter, right? I can't think of any other genre of early 80s video gaming that would settle on Gravitar as a name than a space shooter of some kind, so I do hope it's an interesting one.

It wasn't a surprise to find out that, yes, it was set in space, but I was a little surprised to find out that it plays like a mix of Asteroids and Lunar Lander, which immediately put it into the 'must play' category, for me at least. Whether it actually is a must play depends on whether I've any luck in playing it in its original form...

Gorf

'Long live', or 'so long'?

Source // Arcade Museum

Reading about Gorf didn't exactly get me hyped. "Another space shooter," I said to myself, "what does it do differently?"

Turns out it has a clearly defined mission structure, which mixes the gameplay up a little, has shots that you can cancel, in effect, so that you aren't waiting for a wild miss to keep on missing before you can fire again, and even outright rips off Galaxian, name and all. So that's bold.

But does the game live up to it all?

Frogger

Hop along, son. You've seen it all before.

Source // Wikipedia

Where oh where was I when I first encountered Frogger? I couldn't tell you, but my memory wants to say that it was a nice family friendly game, so I wouldn't be surprised if I was rather young when I was first squashed by oncoming traffic. Maybe it was available at school. We played Lemmings at school, so we might have played Frogger.

Anyway, bumbling through my memory aside, Frogger is impossible to forget, if only because everything else like it is referred to as 'like Frogger', that game where you hop a frog across a dangerously designed road network before hopping across a congested river. Only then can you feel safe, until another frog spawns (hah, frogspawn, get it?) and the cycle repeats.

It repeats so often that Frogger is everywhere, so once more I've hopped into a few different versions to see what's what (and once more, it still has absolutely nothing to do with my inability to play the original arcade version...).

Ms. Pac-Man

The only hall of fame she'll be inducted in is the alcohol of fame on the wall of shame...

Source // Wikipedia

Back in the day, I thought Ms. Pac-Man was little more than a reskin of Pac-Man. The cynical side of me would be shouting 'Cash grab! Cash grab!' but nowadays, the more learned figure that I hope I am knows how wrong such statements are.

Ms. Pac-Man has a murky past. Perhaps not murky, but not as simple as you might imagine, starting life as another game before being shown to Midway, who were impatiently waiting for an official sequel to Pac-Man from Namco... in the rush to get something out into the public, anything of merit would do. This game would indeed do.

Centipede

How have I never known of this game?

Source // Wikipedia

"Centipede?" I ask myself. "That's gotta be an early version of Snake, right?"

Oh how wrong I was. Though Centipede does feature long, thin creatures that look a bit like snakes, they're called centipede's here... and they do move a little like the snake in Snake. A bit. I'm clutching at straws here, delaying the fact that this game was so far off my video game history radar that you'd need to invent whatever the successor to radio is just to give me a chance at coming across it.

The entry in 1001 Video Games mentions that Centipede is the game to bring female players into video games, and upon reading that I thought 'ok'. The 'huh's only sounded upon reading that it involves centipede herding and pest control in a garden.

You play as... a character, possibly a garden gnome or elf, who can fire upon a centipede, damaging it to creating point scoring mushrooms which then affect how the rest of the centipede moves around the garden.

Simple, really.

Warlords

Pong × Breakout + Dragon Fireballs = Warlords

Source // YouTube

I had no idea what Warlords was until starting this review. None whatsoever. Even reading the article in 1001 Video Games, I didn't know what to expect other than 'it's a bit like Pong, a bit like Breakout, and is a great multiplayer game'.

Which means I need to find a Player 2.

Phoenix

Thou shalt spell the word "Pheonix" P-H-E-O-N-I-X, not P-H-O-E-N-I-X, regardless of what the Oxford English Dictionary tells you...

Source // Wikipedia

Read up on Pheo Phoenix and you might get the impression that it's just another Space Invaders or Galaxian kind of game. Which it is. But it's not a clone as such. Phoenix uses stages rather than waves and, early on, one of those stages is what we'd call today a Boss stage, words that held absolutely no meaning back in the arcades of 1980 because nothing else had such a thing.

Boss or no boss, it's a simple game that looks great, anybody should be able to pick it up and see how far they can make it through.

It sounds a bit off, but we can't have everything. As I've kept banging on about, games would take what worked and add to it. Moving a ship about the bottom of the screen worked, dive bombing enemies worked, different enemy types worked, will a boss work? Let's find out.

Tempest

There's a storm a-coming, one of lawyers raining down upon your fun.

Source // Wikipedia

I'd forgotten what Tempest was until I saw the screenshot and remembered "oh yeah, Tempest, from that TxK story, the one with the lawyers and whatnot frowning upon it". It's not a game I'd come across anywhere before, so it's a good job there is a dedicated following of programmers still creating versions and ports for a whole variety of systems - some more official than others...

I can't immediately think of anything that looks like Tempest, save for a few puzzles in Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal, which means my first impression of Tempest was a minigame homage to unlock a door, or some such thing. My first impression of the actual Tempest though was TxK.

Missile Command

War is Cold but the arcade cabinets are hot. Distract yourself from the threat of nuclear war by playing a little game about nuclear war defence.

Source // Gamespot

My initial reactions to reading about and playing Atari's Missile Command were mixed, along the lines of 'Oh cool, it used a trackball; oh wait, I'll never be able to play it like that; oh wow, that's smoother controls than I expected from a port'.

The goal is simple, it's the same format as shooters we've grown up with in the arcade: shoot down the targets, keep your damages to a minimum. There aren't any aliens here though, as the threat is instead the all too realistic idea of incoming ballistic missiles that signal the destruction of all that you hold dear.

So you best be accurate with your limited countermeasures, targeting a place on the screen that you hope the incoming missile will be when yours explodes, taking that threat with it. Because if it isn't, if your aim is off, that incoming missile will gladly take out a city. That's what it does.

Defender

Yet another 'Save the World' situation that you wouldn't want me involved in...

Source // Martoon.org

Like many recent entries on this list (too many, personally), my first experience with Defender was one of utter failure to get running. Thankfully though, YouTube saves the day with an upload from Old Classic Retro Gaming. A solid 42 minutes of gameplay, no less, so that should get me started (insert joke about the state of video game reviews here).

Shoot aliens, save astronauts, it's that simple. But it's not. Of course it's not. Above the screen sits a minimap with a white highlight in its center. That's you, and there are the enemies, and that's the floor... but why are is that highlight in the middle? Why would I need to know what's behind me as much as what's in front of me?

Yes, you can fly right to left as well as left to right in Defender. Alright, we aren't talking Earth-shattering technology here, but some game had to show this thing off, why not a game where you're skimming across the surface of a planet in your spacecraft, firing projectiles made of every colour of the rainbow, illuminating the screen like nothing else you've seen before?

Adventure

I wonder what could be in store when I load this mysteriously named game up...

Straight to the point titles have never been as fuzzy as they are here with Adventure, an open world text adventure with no text in sight. Supposedly home to the first video game Easter egg (which sees developer Warren Robinett credit himself for making the game - shocking, I know...), Adventure doesn't look like much, but then it doesn't have to look much in order to take you on an adventure. Assuming you stick with it and try to work out what it wants from you, of course.

Combat

Ever wondered what the Battlefield franchise looked like in the late '70s? No, neither have I, but one game has to kick vehicular combat into gear.

Atari's Combat does what it says on the cartridge, and does it pretty well. It doesn't look like much, and it takes a short while to figure out what you are and where you're going, but what you're doing is easy - shooting your opponent.

Like many a classic game from this era, it's so simple it's practically offensive. You vs me, no change in loadouts, no quirks, no perks, no faffing about.