R-Type [1987]

The first big question that, for me, looms over R-Type [1987] (and many arcade titles of its ilk) is a stupid, but fundamental one: why is there so much dang video game inside this video game? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48TyDnakXZE Dead Can Dance - Dawn Of The Iconoclasts [1987] R-Type is way longer than it seems to "need" …

Maniac Mansion [1987]

The following post is presented in the fabulous and rare FIRST-DRAFT-O-VISION. Normally I would either delete the irrelevant and pointless crossed out portions or rearrange and rethink them so they did amount to a point. Not this time, though! This time I gave up just to get something out. My high school English teacher said …

The Twilight Zone’s Opening Volley (Patreon Bonus)

I just watched the first 8 episodes of The Twilight Zone and I got inspired by them, so I thought I'd write about them to get them out of my system to see if reading my thoughts on them and potentially thoughts about the other random media works I happen to experience in the future …

A Mind Forever Voyaging [1985]

(Content warnings: My suicide attempts. Racism against black and Asian people. Animal cruelty. Police brutality. Fascism.) Continued. Around these parts it feels like the world never even started. That's by design. Trust me, I've helped build these rows of tract housing at a remove from the cities. Not even suburbia, which is immediately adjoining a …

Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy [1984]

Here, we reach an important milestone for this blog: This is the first game I've written about that I've actually played before. When I was a kid (I think somewhere from age 10 to 13) I nearly completed this game, without even saving. When I was an even younger kid (think 4 to 7,) The …

Deus Ex Machina [1984]

Three off-the-beaten path early 1980s Art Game picks in, and a typology is beginning to emerge. Deus Ex Machina [1984] is largely, through probably not intentionally, a different spin on Lifespan [1983]. What both share in common with The Prisoner [1980], besides the obvious self-identification as art, is that their reflections on the medium has …

Elite [1984]

(Content warning: Slavery.) THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE On August Tenth, 1675, at precisely 3:14 PM, John Flamsteed laid the first foundation stone to renovate Greenwich Castle into The Royal Greenwich Observatory. Who laid the second, the third, the fourth and so on are, strangely, not so well-specified — those would have been, I can …

Ant Attack [1983]

The opening screen. Now here's something: A game that's in grayscale on purpose. The ZX Spectrum is famous for its garish color schemes, and Ant Attack [1983] flaunts that up front, with a title screen that has the name of the game written in a color cycle on a background of hot pinks, blues, and …

Robotron 2084 [1982]

Text version, for legibility and slow connections.Music: Front 242 - U-Men (Instrumental) [1982]

Robotron 2084 [1982]

The screen is enclosed by rainbow flashing that snaps open and shut like a curtain between levels. There's one sound channel but it's overloaded with buzzing and bipping and screaming. There's dozens of robotic enemies closing in on you from all sides, and their colorshifting teletextural bullets travel faster the further they are away from …

ET [1982] + Pitfall [1982]

The Video Game Crash Of 1983 wasn't. It wasn't a video game crash nor even "the Atari Crash," it was a crash of the entire North American consumer computing industry, from Atari to Radio Shack to IBM. Every American computing firm fell prey to, yes, offering a slate of sub-par products, many with confusing naming …

Galaga [1981]

(Content warning: war.) The first thing that strikes me on booting up Galaga [1981] is that it is a beautiful game. Games I've written on up to this point have been eyesores. (They mostly make a virtue of it.) Even the prior entry in this franchise, Galaxian [1979], a visual tour-de-force, looks pretty drab, predominated …

The Prisoner [1980]

(Content warning: torture mention.) In the 1300s, there was a game called Obligations. It was played in the early Latin Christian universities by the friars, the bishops, the Franciscans, the students and teachers and such, and its structure informed much of the underlying phrasing and logic of the century's theology and philosophy. Obligations is a …

Berzerk [1980]

Not too close, not too close. I'm too big for where. Am I a knight? Right through the neck please. Hercules for a moment, then lament the blue brush. There's no room and there's no rooms. Gives green around the gills. KILL IT. The base place intruder. Regular 6-point figures trace the forever now and …

Lunar Lander [1979]

Lunar Lander [1979], at first blush, seems an incongruous fit for the arcade. It must be intentional as an attempted marketing strategy for floorspace in the ever-more competitive competitive arcade ecosystem. It's austere, maybe serious, adult, even intellectual. Slow, certainly. Methodical: Twitchy, nick-of-time reactions will get you nowhere here, you need to commit to medium-term …

Space Invaders [1978]

It's more about time than it is space, not that those can ever be fully disentangled. Space only finds actuality in relative positions, and you're not being challenged to judge the length of the gap between your cover shields or navigate a maze. If the titular were not engaged in constant horizontal motion, the game …