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What are the first games you remember playing?

Started by Barry Admin, September 06, 2017, 07:52:43 PM

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Cloud

Quote from: Cloud on September 07, 2017, 03:44:40 PM
Erm... it was on my Atari ST when I was 5... thing is I only have a very vague memory of a maze and some sort of floating eyeballs.

Found it!


Steven

Ghosts `N Goblins on my big brother's ZX Spectrum, which is only short "Take a key for coming in!" but I would always die just before the end section, I tried playing it on an emulator years ago and it's still fucking hard. The big Ogre type things I'd call "Fatty Stompers."

Head Over Heels on the same, great game but I'd never know what quite to do since you had to pick up items and solve puzzles.

Batman was very similar, but you had to pick up various parts of the Batmobile.

Cobra was another I barely remember, Stallone movie to platform shoot `em up, take out the baddies and save the 'invalids'.

Slightly older I remember playing Dragon's Lair II a fuckload on the Amstrad, fucking hell was that a nuisance, never complete that one either, fucking hell the bloody disappearing platform screen would drive me to distraction.

biggytitbo

Head Over Heels is still the best game ever made, imo.

Replies From View

I'm going to have a go at identifying all the games I've ever played.  It'll be a short list.

First up would probably be my elder brother's Donkey Kong Game & Watch if that counts, followed by Fantasy World Dizzy on the ZX Spectrum, as already mentioned.

At some point my friend with the Speccy decided to get a Master System II which had Alex Kidd in Miracle World preloaded, so we played that for a bit.  Ultimately the 'fuck you' nature of the rock, paper, scissors sections pissed me off, but there was still something soothing about some of the music like when riding a helicopter or swimming in the water.  And it falls within the same fond era of childhood I had with my friend Ben which were my halcyon summer holidays.

At some point I realised there was an NES in John Menzies and I had a few goes on the Batman game they had on it.  Probably in total I played it for about about 30 minutes but it would have been spread out over several Saturdays of maybe five minutes at a time, and it seems a disproportionately large memory.  It was quite a damp and gloomy shop, that.  Part of the 1970s Southgate Shopping Centre in Bath; it had seen better days and was demolished about twenty years later.

Went on to play Super Mario World on the SNES that was in Eric Snook's Toyshop in Bath.  I treated that as a free arcade machine.  Loads of other kids were in there, they'd go off and do some shopping and come back to see me still on the same level of Super Mario World, and they'd take the piss out of me.

My parents got a TV with Teletext at some point in the early 90s and I'd play those quizzes that utilised the colour buttons and 'reveal' button.  It was a revelation to have something that was a bit like a real computer at home.

Mid 90s my parents got a second hand PC which had some games already on it.  These were Prince of Persia, Lemmings, PGA Tour Golf and King's Quest 3.  I played all of these but got frustrated with King's Quest 3 because I didn't know you couldn't complete it without spells you needed to type out from a copy protection book (which we didn't have).  At some point my parents upgraded to a slightly newer PC which had Chip's Challenge on it, and I got copies from friends of Magicland Dizzy and Dizzy Prince of the Yolkfolk, and Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion.  Also got the Klik 'n' Play software that allowed me to fiddle about making my own platformers. 

In the last year of secondary school I used some of my paper round money to buy a Game Boy from one of the kids at school.  He sold it to me for £45 with Link's Awakening included.  I played that for a while but not long enough to justify the cost.  I just get bored with these things.

Since then I really can't think what I've played.  I've played Spectrum emulators for the other Dizzy games, and played some classics like the first two Monkey Island games and Day of the Tentacle when they came out on iOS.  A handful of other mobile phone games like Tapped Out, a port of the Sonic games, Temple Run and Granny Smith.

Yep, that's your lot, more or less.

biggytitbo

You left out Samantha Fox Strip Poker on the Spectrum. That remains your favourite game to this day.

Replies From View

Quote from: biggytitbo on September 09, 2017, 04:42:28 PM
You left out Samantha Fox Strip Poker on the Spectrum. That remains your favourite game to this day.

Actually I did play a couple of games I forgot about.  Leisure Suit Larry on a PC that was at Ben's house, and a Viz game on an Atari ST (I think) at the house of the kid who went on to sell me his Game Boy.  In the Viz game you did a load of sports day type activities like trying to fart Johnny Fartpants up as high as you could by mashing buttons really fast.  Which was good.

So in a way you were right, just not with the details.

JoeyBananaduck

Quote from: biggytitbo on September 09, 2017, 01:37:02 PM
The Oliver Twins keep 'finding' new old Dizzy games down the back of the sofa don't they? There was one they'd completely forgotten about, and another unreleased NES version of Fantasy World Dizzy I think.


Kikstart 2 was my favourite game on the C64, played that to death.

Had the latter on the Spectrum. The level designer setting was pretty novel at the time, particularly if you could figure out how the bloody hell to use it.

Bhazor

From the Bastard Levels thread

Quote from: Bhazor on August 14, 2017, 12:52:02 AM
Bit of a wierd one. But when I was 4 years old and first got my Snes I loved it. Would play through Super Mario World with my parents and my sister passing the controller back and forth. Sitting on mums lap as she played is genuinely one of my happiest childhood memories. That is until we got to the first level to use these



There was just something about those platforms that scared the hell out of 4 year old me and I'd burst into tears and get my sister to play it for me. It was probably not until I was about 6 I completed the game on my own.

Though it turns out the platforms I had a phobia for were the swinging platforms that would fall when you jumped on them.

https://youtu.be/AqturoCh5lM?t=5m5s

Still gives me a little shiver.

Gulftastic

Space Invaders and Boot Hill in the late 70's at Pontins Holiday Camp in Prestatyn (where they filmed Holiday On The Buses).


biggytitbo

Reg Varney was the first man to play a video game, of course.


Rolf Lundgren

Quote from: Eight Taiwanese Teenagers on September 06, 2017, 09:12:07 PM
Got a Spectrum 128 +2 presumably in 1986 as that's when a package came out with the first games I remember playing:

Punchy - a weird game with some very odd primitive voice sampling
Alien Destroyer - space invaders
Treasure Island - this was a very odd seeming game too
Crazy Golf - boring but probably the only one 5 year old me could play
Disco Dan - can't actually remember this one. Maybe it never loaded.
Oh Mummy - I can still remember the insane repetitive music

Same here but the only ones I can really remember are Punchy where you had to get Mr Punch from one side of the screen to the other and Disco Dan where you had to negotiate Dan through a bunch of lights.

Technician Ted, Rampage and countless football games were favourites on the Spectrum and loads more that I've completely forgotten the names of. We used to play demos from Crash so what full games we had and the ones we didn't start to blur in my head. I'd forgotten about Ghostbusters until I saw it here. 

Sebastian Cobb


touchingcloth

Quote from: Replies From View on September 09, 2017, 04:28:41 PM
a Master System II which had Alex Kidd in Miracle World preloaded

I think this was the first game I played, too, or at least the first game I played on a home console rather than an arcade machine, Game Boy, Game & Watch, or an IBM PC running The MS-DOS. We were quite late to owning consoles in my family - my younger brother got a SNES when they were old enough to be reasonably inexpensive second hand, but not recently enough that the PlayStation was something we were clamouring for or had even heard about, which probably dates it to some time in 1995 - so before that all of my experience was on various friends' Master Systems (always Mk II, I'm not sure I've ever seen a I or III in person) and Mega Drives (usually the red-buttoned II, but occasionally the be-switched I), and on a solitary friend's Atari ST, the only game I can remember from which was James Pond.

Besides the couple of games I've mentioned already, the earliest games we owned for the SNES were Super Metroid, which in hindsight and on later replayings is an incredible game, but which at the time was way beyond my skill level, and I remember being too terrified of the sparse setting, the tense music and the occasional fucking massive aliens which would jump at you from nowhere, and Kid Klown in Crazy Chase, a platformer I've not come across anywhere else before or since.

There are two games in particular that stand out in my memory as being the first ones that I played properly in anger, and they were both from around the time we first got a second hand Mega Drive, and they were both games I played with my friend Matthew into the very wee hours on sleepovers at one of our houses or the other's.

World of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. I can still remember the soundtrack from this game, and even more so the sound effects. The swoosh of the capes, the twisting sound if you hit your co-player with the cape, the "moop, moop, moop" of crawling about. I'm tempted to download an emulator right now just to dust this thing off.

ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron. Another co-op platformer where you played the part of either of the titular characters (aliens with a passion for hip hop, gold medallions and backwards baseball caps) in their quest to rid their home planet of earthlings. I would recommend this game to anyone with a passion for both rap music and Nigel Farage.

Twed

Quote from: Replies From View on September 09, 2017, 04:28:41 PM
I'm going to have a go at identifying all the games I've ever played.  It'll be a short list.
I love how almost every game you've played is a stone cold classic, and you're still just not really into games. It's rare that an entire genre of entertainment is so definitively "not for you".

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: newbridge on September 07, 2017, 04:50:13 AM
Spacestation Pheta, among other early 90s Mac games. There were more fun games, but this always seemed the most impressive because it was the only game my dad would actually play on occasion.



This reminded me of Cataclysm, which I played on the Arc.




Goldentony

Thinking about it, the first game I seem to remember playing properly was either Pitfall or Centipede on my mum's side of the family's Atari. Absolutely adored Pitfall and i've not played it for years. Watched that four part Atari documentary ex staff made themselves a few years ago and I don't think fucking Pitfall came up once. No cunt ever talks about Pitfall. PITFALL.

a while later it was playing Mortal Kombat and A Spider-Man game i've forgotten the name of but i've started bolding titles now so i'm fucking stuck on his Mega Drive that properly got me into games, aswell as another mates computer that played hooky games on floppy disks, think it was an Amiga or something, and that's when I played things like Frankenstein and Dizzy Prince Of The Yolk Folk and that terrifying Neighbours game his mum had.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: Goldentony on September 11, 2017, 06:08:19 PM
Thinking about it, the first game I seem to remember playing properly was either Pitfall or Centipede on my mum's side of the family's Atari. Absolutely adored Pitfall and i've not played it for years. Watched that four part Atari documentary ex staff made themselves a few years ago and I don't think fucking Pitfall came up once. No cunt ever talks about Pitfall. PITFALL.

a while later it was playing Mortal Kombat and A Spider-Man game i've forgotten the name of but i've started bolding titles now so i'm fucking stuck on his Mega Drive that properly got me into games, aswell as another mates computer that played hooky games on floppy disks, think it was an Amiga or something, and that's when I played things like Frankenstein and Dizzy Prince Of The Yolk Folk and that terrifying Neighbours game his mum had.

After buying one nearly a decade ago for a bit of retro fun I reckon the best on the 2600 are q-bert and berzerk.

Shay Chaise

Harrier Attack on the Amstrad CPC464. I can remember playing it on my dad's lap. He'd move the plane and I'd fire rockets and drop bombs. I have absolutely no affection for the era of 80s British computing, like the Spectrum or C64 or even the Amstrad. It has an atmosphere of seedy amateurishness and terrifying graphics and music which I still find haunting. They remind me of massive car boot sales and nothing working properly.

The NES was the first system I really loved. SMB, SMB3, Zelda and Mega Man. There was a quality and solidity and refinement and warmth in those games and that system that was transportative, and it's still something I love about Nintendo. There are so seldom any rough edges or missteps or tonal imbalances. They're so cohesive in their design and philosophy.

Sexton Brackets Drugbust

Jetboot Jack.

Replayed it more recently on an in-browser version, and was astonished by how unforgivingly hard as nails it was. I have no idea how my infant self managed to get so far, when modern me struggled with the first levels.

Barry Admin

Just saw a Bizarre Creations logo there, and it took me back to 85/86 and the Cauldron games!

This probably won't show up:



Shay, I used to get NES games off the back of a lorry for £15, so I had a mighty collection. However, it was all about the C-64 and then the Amiga for me. Being able to be so creative with them was some of the best times of my life, no doubt. Figuring out how to program them, drawing ninja turtle sprites on graph paper and then putting the values into a program and making it float around the screen... absolute magic. I got letters from all over the world asking me for help with Amos Professional as I was like an agony aunt on diskzines. I was not quite as awful at keeping up with correspondence then, and would send these crazy printed out letters with all my plans to this genius guy who had come up with an incredibly compact subroutine for displaying PAC-MAN style grid maps.

Magical days, when the "Internet" largely only existed by post, and I wasn't constantly distracted by mobile phones and forums and games and bullshit.

kngen

3D Monster Maze when I got a ZX81 for Christmas  (around 82 or 83, can't rememeber) -



I've rarely felt that level of tension, fear and immersion in a game since. (Apart from one time when I played Doom during a particularly brutal coke comedown and had to turn it off and go and sit in another room, but that would be a good 25 years later)

DukeDeMondo

Oh, I just remembered what was probably my favourite C64 game of the lot.



Hell's fire, I haven't thought about that game in years and years. Just came back to me after reading that Freddie Starr thread in Comedy Chat. I loved it to bits. I wonder if it still holds up. It got a wee bit repetitive after a while, if I mind right, but it was still addictive as the devil. 

JoeyBananaduck

It was pretty good but very formulaic. Some good stabs at humour and the caricatures were good though. Played it on an emulator not too long back.

biggytitbo

Quote from: kngen on September 12, 2017, 06:02:23 PM
3D Monster Maze when I got a ZX81 for Christmas  (around 82 or 83, can't rememeber) -



I've rarely felt that level of tension, fear and immersion in a game since. (Apart from one time when I played Doom during a particularly brutal coke comedown and had to turn it off and go and sit in another room, but that would be a good 25 years later)


First survival horror game? First FPS?

kngen

Quote from: biggytitbo on September 12, 2017, 11:21:51 PM

First survival horror game? First FPS?

Yes to the first. No to the second. As you couldn't shoot anything. You just ran away - there was a big twinkly wall the gave you a big bonus though - apart from that it was just delaying the inevitable.

buzby

Pong ripoff on my Uncle's Binatone TV Master MkiV Plus 2 in the late 70s:

He then upgraded to a Videomaster Star Chess console:

This was actually made in the UK, and Videomaster were bought out by Waddingtons in an attempt to jump on the electronic games bandwagon. It was priced too high though (£70), especially for a system dedicated to a single game and was a big failure, costing Waddingtons a lot of money. I can't find any video from an original dedicated console but the game was cloned for the Emerson Arcadia 2001 system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbvl-ZncpAg

JoeyBananaduck

Did anyone have a Barcode Battler? What a fucking absolute heap of shite.

kngen

Quote from: JoeyBananaduck on September 13, 2017, 04:38:48 AM
What a fucking absolute heap of shite.

That was pretty much my exact thought when I read about them years ago - glad my instincts were so on the nose.

Bhazor

There has to be some underground community for the Tiger Electronics games. I think my first one might actually predate my SNES. My abiding memory is that they lasted about an hour before the battery died and they had watch batteries which where I lived it was actually cheaper to just buy a replacement game.

They were shit, but almost worth it just for the splash screens when you first turn them on and all the sprites light up at once.





Edit: Found a complete list of the Tiger Electronic games. Its amazing.

http://www.geekyhobbies.com/tiger-electronic-handheld-games/