Retro Games: 1979-1983

1979

SHERIFF
Arcade

This is a two-joystick shooter where you play a sheriff in the middle of an open field, shooting at targets around you. It's sort of like Space Invaders, but with four directions to shoot at instead of two. It's a bit awkward to control, but as shooters go it's okay.

1980

PAC-MAN
Arcade
Played on PC

Some of these first few could be introduced with "this needs no introduction." So, Pac-Man, the ultimate maze game. I have a fair bit of affection for it because I played it a lot growing up. But I dunno, it's a bit hard for me to go back to right now, for some reason. Well-designed, but I can only play it a little before I get bored.

GAME & WATCH

I'm gonna do something weird on this one. It was hard for me to find a way to play the original G&W games, so I'm gonna kick this one down the road. Later on the list, I've added the G&W Gallery games for the Gameboy series of consoles, and I'll try them out thru that.

1981

DONKEY KONG
Arcade
Played NES port on Switch

I finished this! Well, the NES version on Switch, which only has three of the four stages, but still. This was a lot of fun, the physics are good and you kinda start to figure out strategies for dealing with enemies and obstacles. And it's neat that you can get to an ending if you put a little time in.

GALAGA
Arcade
Played on PC

This is basically more-exciting Space Invaders, and kind of like Pac-Man, it's a little hard for me to go back to. I don't have hard-and-fast rules for this marathon, but if I get the sense that I've seen most of what there is to see within a couple of levels, I won't really have the motivation to keep playing, and that's what this is like. It's a game to see how far you can get and how high you can score, but for me that's about it.

1982

MS. PAC-MAN
Arcade

Pac-Man with a couple twists and new maps, but other than that my thoughts are pretty much the same as vanilla flavor Pac-Man.

DONKEY KONG JR.
Arcade
Played NES port on Switch

I finished this too! And liked it a lot. This is gonna sound weird, but this is the game that made me understand why Shigeru Miyamoto is one of the most revered game developers of all time. DK Jr., like most of the arcade titles of the time, is a single-screen game. And yet each level feels like a multi-tiered adventure. You have to dodge and weave back and forth across the screen, thru different types of zones, to get to the top. It's neat as hell how much is squeezed into this.

POPEYE
Arcade
Played on NES

Finished this one. Unlike the DK series, this game is about running around collecting things that Olive is throwing at you. But like those games, there's just a few stages, so with a little effort you can get to an ending. And I liked this, it's a bit basic but it's pretty cute.

1983

JETPAC
ZX Spectrum
Played on Xbox One

First game in the Rare Replay catalog. I wasn't expecting much from a 1983 ZX Spectrum game, but this is fun to play, has clear objectives, controls surprisingly well, and runs really smoothly. You play as an astronaut with a little jetpack trying to put his ship together and fill it with fuel while avoiding aliens. I guess my biggest gripe is that your shooting radius sucks so it's hard to shoot at aliens that are coming for you at an angle. I didn't feel compelled to play a lot of this, but it's a lot more fun to play with than I expected.

MARIO BROS.
Arcade
Played NES port on Switch
Played on GBA

You play as Mario (& Luigi) running around a single screen trying to defeat various enemies. The original (well, the NES port) has absolutely terrible physics. That surprised me. All the other Mario/DK series ports have been pretty decent to control so far, but Mario just does not behave the way you expect him to here, and so I couldn't get very far. Then I popped a GBA port of the game in and it controlled a LOT better, I got a lot farther, and I had a lot more fun.

BOMBERMAN
PC
Played on NES

I don't think I can make it thru all 50 levels of Bomberman. It feels like there's a lot of randomness inherent: the enemy movements aren't completely predictable, and the hidden exit location is hidden in a random location each time. Maybe you'll get lucky and get the exit right away, or maybe it'll take you a while. Bomberman moves slowly and the bombs are less powerful than I expected. I started out sort of annoyed by this game.

But I dunno, something about it is really compelling. Maybe the search, and the slight unpredictableness of the hunting down enemies, are both inherently enough to make me go "maybe THIS time I've got this." Maybe the randomness is low enough that I keep thinking I'll be able to find a new strategy that'll lower it. It's kind of like Minesweeper but with enemies, and that's a pretty good way to improve Minesweeper. I could see myself sinking a lot of time into this, and I had a hard time pulling myself away from it. No wonder they made so many sequels.

DONKEY KONG 3
Arcade
Played NES port on Switch

Growing up, this was my favorite of the main Donkey Kong games, maybe cause it's just so different. Something about pushing Kong up with the pesticide is really satisfying.

Now, it's still fun, but it's not as structured as the other Miyamoto games I've played so far, so there isn't really as much of a sense of pacing. I can't really get to a point where I feel like I've finished DK3. The stages loop, but not always quite in the same order, and it keeps adding new insect types. Pacing-wise it's more similar to Bomberman or Mario Bros.

Nothing wrong with that! But it is harder for me to stick with.

BASEBALL
NES
Played on Switch

I'm not sure the pixelly 8-bit sports games Nintendo launched with the NES as part of the black box line are gonna do all that much for me. I mean, how much sports strategy can you actually simulate with a D-pad and two buttons?

Now, baseball games are LONG, and unlike some other sports games where you can speed the clock up so it'll take less time, there's no real way to speed up a baseball game. You gotta sit thru the whole thing. But that's kinda weirdly relaxing in a way. There's a rhythm to it, and there's time for some real drama. Usually what happens in these is I make some colossal fuck-up partway thru cause I pushed the wrong button, and then I spend the rest of the game trying to fix my mistake, to no avail.

There's different ways to pitch (is there strategy to that? I can certainly pretend there is), and a little bit of skill to when to hit and when to run. And that's just about as much input as I need in an 8-bit baseball game. I've tried RBI Baseball (also for NES), where you actually have to make the runners run thru the outfield, and that was painful. But this kind of works.

DONKEY KONG JR. MATH
NES

It's the elements of DK Jr., rearranged to create a math tutor game. This is the sort of game that your grandmother gets you when she hears you likes games, but wants to get you something wholesome, without so much of that violence in most video games I hear about, sonny. It's not very good.

10-YARD FIGHT
Arcade
Played on NES

NES' football game. I did play this a few years ago, and I remember liking it because it took a sport I found to be inscrutable, and boiled it down to its basics. It's a bit simpler in elements than Baseball, but the gameplay is I think a little better?

It's kinda neat that Famicom shipped with so many multiplayer games, given that it's got two controllers built in. Kinda reminds me of Nintendo's rush to get high-quality multiplayer games out of the gate for Switch.

THUNDER FORCE
X1

I literally can't find a version of this anywhere. The series is a staple of the 16-bit era, and yet the original game was only ever released on a few old PC systems, and was never ported forward.

That's fine, tho, cause I found some footage, and the game looks rough. Well, it looks primitive. It's a very very early top-down shooter, and I'm honestly completely fine with skipping it over.

LUNAR JETMAN
ZX Spectrum
Played on Xbox One

This game is upsettingly unfair. It's the sequel to Jetpac, and like that game, features a player character with a jetpack, and alien creatures/debris (?) that travels very fast in diagonal lines.

In Jetpac, you could kind of strategize because the aliens (and you) can loop around the screen, so you could see things coming and avoid them. Here, you're on a more linear surface, and the flaws in the game's design become clear immediately.

Your pea-shooter gun has no range, so if something's flying at your face but your gunfire is just a little too low, it'll kill you anyway. The aliens move extremely quickly, and your walking speed is very slow, so there's no way to effectively dodge.

The game sees you piloting a lunar rover across a planetary surface, and every time there's a pothole you have to get out and patch the hole. But if you are hit by something and die, another pothole gets created, which creates an infinite loop (until you run out of lives).

Jetpac is a totally decent arcade game. This sequel is just deeply frustrating.

ATIC ATAC
ZX Spectrum
Played on Xbox One

Third Rare game for the ZX Spectrum. This is another fascinating little oddity. If it was the only game I owned, or I cared more about it, I'd probably go ahead and keep throwing myself at it until I solved it.

You play as one of three character types (knight, wizard, serif) in a top-down format as you try to escape from a haunted house. There's monsters, keys, and secret passageways. Aesthetically, it's one of my favorite of the bunch so far.

I'm reminded of 2D Zelda dungeons, but if I had, like, no map or sense of where I was supposed to go, and also if the dungeon was extremely large. It also reminds me of Binding of Isaac, where your ability to progress early on is pretty random. If I was patient, I could probably map the game out, but the game has a timer and respawning enemies that push you along, so you kinda only get a sense of what's going down in spookytown.

I like the visual design, which is a weird thing to say for the janky-ass graphics of the Spectrum. I'll definitely come back to it. But this is definitely a bit too obtuse for me to enjoy playing for too long at a time.