Lately I’ve been getting heavily into retro games. Specifically, I’ve been playing a bunch of the games for the old Intellivision game console. My family had one back in the day along with a handful of games, but there were so many more we didn’t have but I wanted to play anyway.
I got a hold of the Nostalgia emulator along with a complete set of roms. The newest version of the emulator has support for the Intellivoice module that adds voices to certain games (and makes them pretty much unplayable without them). The voices suck by today’s standards, but considering they were squeezing all that data into only 4-8 kB of space, it was quite a feat.
What I really like about these games is that, despite the crude, blocky graphics and primitive blips and beeps they had for sound effects, the games were FUN. Really fun. Probably the reason for that is that, since they were so limited as to what they could show, they had to make up for it by what the player did to win. Lately I’ve been playing one of the Intellivoice games called Bomb Squad. It’s a bit hokey, but it’s a lot of fun.
A lot of the Intellivision games were pretty complicated for their time. I especially liked B17 Bomber–all the different controls and things you did during a bombing mission made the game feel very real (again, for the time). But they also had lots of really good, simple games like Astrosmash and SNAFU.
I also really liked a lot of the old Atari 2600 games like Missile Command and Yar’s Revenge, and of course who could forget the arcade classics like Centipede, Tempest, or Donkey Kong? And then there was Sinistar, complete with the vocal taunts: Beware! I live!
What retro games do you guys like?
Bomb Squad
Astrosmash
Yar’s Revenge
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d4/Sinistar_2.png
Sinistar
