In the years after Star Wars, anything involving outer space, speedy interstellar craft and dangerous battles was considered golden. Into this arena of sci-fi fantasy came Atari’s Asteroids, one of the most enduring hits in video game history. Atari’s recipe for addiction consisted of the following: one screen, five buttons, one ship, a few UFO’s, and several ship-smashing asteroids. Smack dab in the center of the action was your triangle-shaped spacecraft, adrift in a sea of space rocks. The Blasting large, slow-moving asteroids turned them into two medium-sized, speedier asteroids. Another blast at the medium asteroids split them into small, fast-moving asteroids, which could be vaporized with one more shot. Thus, if you started firing wildly into fields of big asteroids, you would likely end up in an even bigger mess than you started with, facing a swarm of tiny, zippy asteroids. The controls allow you to rotate left and right, thrust, warp into hyperspace, and most importantly, to fire your blaster at the rocky menaces. For a generation of video game addicts, Asteroids will always mean simple graphics, stressful and addictive gameplay, and dreams of high-scoring glory.
Released in 1984 by Nintendo, Duck Hunt was one of the first games on the NES platform to use the 'light gun'. The basic idea of this game is pretty simple - you're a duck hunter armed with a pistol and your trusty dog. You have three shots to shoot one or two ducks each round. After ten rounds of duck hunting (you'll probably be rather bored of shooting duck at this point), you go to the shooting range and shoot at clay pigeons for another ten rounds - although the dog is absent. The game is rather fun and satisfying initially but gets old quickly. The sound effects are pretty much what you'd expect for a game from the early 1980s - that is, awful by todays standards - gameplay and graphics are simple - but it remains a classic and is fun to play every once in a while.
Strangely addictive game that I remember playing on my old Amstrad PC back in the day when Windows and MS-DOS was still in its embryotic stages. You are the frog and your task is to make it across the road without being hit by traffic, and finally make it across the river by skilfully hitching a ride on the floating logs. Sounds simple enough, but it's the end pockets which are the hardest - and watch out for those pesky crocodiles!
If you haven't played this all time classic game it must be because you've been hiding out in a shack on top of a mountain in Montana for the last 20+ years. The object of the game is to move around the small yellow blob (Pacman) and chomp up the white dots. Oh, and watch out for Blinky, Pinky, Inkey, and Clyde (the spooky ghosts).
This game will test your memory, and, ultimately, your sanity. The object of the game is to memorize Simon's sequence of lights. On that note,does anyone remember those Simon commercials in the '80s? How could you forget! :)
Tetris is life. Think about it : As time passes, life's little problems incessantly pour down in chunks. Somehow, someway, you must conquer these hurdles, fitting them together so you can move on. Ok, maybe I'm taking the metaphor too far. In any case, this is one of the all time classic games and it was Alexey Pajitnov who created Tetris on an Electronica 60 while working for the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Tetris was released in the United States in 1986. The game's popularity was tremendous, and many were instantly hooked - it was a software blockbuster.
