I realise I casually dismissed an entire genre of art here by saying "I haven't played video games in years". It's a bit like saying "I haven't been to the cinema in years". In my defence, I also haven't been to the cinema in years. -- Tom
A note about the GB Boy. They're properly compatible with Gameboy and Gamerboy Color cartridges and short of getting one of the expensive AGS-101 Gameboy Advance SPs (Or any GBA that someone has modded an AGS-101 screen into), it's the only way to play Gameboy Color games on proper hardware (It's a proper hardware clone, not emulation) with a backlit screen. There's a number of other small improvements as well like better buttons.
Hey, the GB Boy Colour is actually pretty good. Some folks prefer it to the actual Game Boy Color because it has a backlit colour screen and is compatible with the games. A lot of retro gamers actually seek it out these days.
The backlight is one if the big selling points. Almost all the old portables can be modded with backlight, except for the GBC. It only allows front light, which is much worse.
ntlespino and I participated in the contest for the deleted joke about STD-phones, which was a part of the video where they told everyone to stop calling the phone number, which they offered as a help hotline for the apology video you are talking about.
One of my best friends uploaded Unreal Tournament to my high school's network in a really long; really frustrating folder chain. One of the best memories of that school was going in on the last week of term; to a full computer lab; with 30 kids all desperately trying to log in; navigate this folder chain; then beginning to load up Unreal Tournament. Now; this being the last week of school; nobody thought to do any checking that any staff were around... So; in through the rear door comes a teacher. Everyone STOPS... and in the one second that everyone in the room is paused; the teacher manages to get out: "What's going on here?!" EVERYONE BOLTS. 35 kids; as one unit; rush for the door and flee as though they all got caught with porn. The teacher tried in vain to stop everyone; but nobody would dare stop. I shoot him this look of: "hate to say it; but you've lost this one"; then I casually leave; this poor teacher is just... befuddled; wondering what the hell happened...
Some of the first DOS games I remember: Golden Axe, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem 1+2, Jill of the Jungle, LHX Attack Chopper, Strike Commander, Incredible Machine, Lemmings, UFO Enemy Unknown … and of course all those Lucasarts and Sierra adventures.
I FORGOT ABOUT THE INCREDIBLE MACHINE. Also Lemmings. Also I just remembered Gunship 2000, although pretty much all I ever did in it was take off and shoot down the friendly base immediately. -- Tom
Definitely Lemmings. I was pretty terrible at it and never got very high in the levels. But I remember things from those many hours. Writing down the codes as I succeeded at levels and keeping them on a sheet of paper in a long list for later use. The strange lighting of everything, especially the forests. The confetti that exploding Lemmings turn into, and sometimes having to line up a Lemming just right to explode it to make a hole in just the right spot. The way the green hair swishes on the blockers as they look back and forth. The sort of furry caterpillar that they make when they walk really close together. The bloo-oo-oooop! that they make as they go home. I didn't have many games, and I didn't have the reflexes to play most of them anyway, so yeah Lemmings takes up a large amount of my old game memory space.
+Markus Birth > and of course all those Lucasarts and Sierra adventures. Aaaand those from Infocom, of course! Hitchhikers Guide, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Stationfall, Planetfall, Bureaucracy, Trinity, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and the Zork series...
Supaboy is basically a portable snes, retron hd is pretty much an emulator machine that lets you play the original original games on hdtvs and upscales them
I at one point before I moved into my little studio apartment had a Supaboy and it worked great. I know some people have had issues with them breaking the button or the pins inside but if you are careful with it like any other portable electronic device they work great.
_Alphr NZ_ Backlight? Pfft, you're missing out on the experience of having to attach a magnifying glass with lights over the screen. And burning through *two* sets of batteries at once. ;)
As a kid, the game I spent the most time on was "Robot Odyssey" for the Apple IIe. The premise of the game is that you've been trapped in Robotropolis, an underground city populated entirely by robots, and in order to escape you have to build circuits to make a trio of friendly robots perform tasks that will let you advance through the game. I didn't realize it at the time, but that game was incredibly difficult, and any kid who got past the second level was practically destined to become an engineer.
My secondary school used to have Acorn computers, as I did at home. This was late 90s when games still came on 3.5" floppy disks. So kids used to bring in games and run them in lunch breaks. I remember LOVING Mad Professor Mariati, and Fervour. SO much time lost to those games. I can still remember the music in my head. So many great old Acorn games.
Old DOS games are still amazing. If you ever want a good space flight sim (in terms of combat and writing, not realism) check out Star Wars: TIE Fighter. Play the older version when you're offered the 1994 and 1995 releases - the 1995 version did a texture overhaul at the cost of replacing the adaptive music that contributes to situational awareness (there are different musical cues for different events that you can otherwise easily miss in combat. "Oh hey, a Mon Cal starcruiser just showed up? Where is that? OMG It's 50 meters behind me running time!!!!!") with a looping rip of the original music tracks. It's brilliant music, of course, but since it has nothing to do with what's happening in game, it's rather immersion-breaking. The textures are 1995 quality anyway, so they're really not worth trashing the music.
TIE Fighter was truly a special game. It was one of the few games at that time where I truly felt I had a choice as to how I could complete the missions. Not only that, but successes and failures followed you through the career.
What I honestly liked the most was the writing, weird as that sounds for a game of that era. You're playing a pilot working for an evil empire, and you know it...but while playing, you feel like you're actually a good guy, fighting pirates, upholding law and order, bringing peace to a region with a generations-long civil war. Play it with the right mindset and you'll catch some of the propaganda tricks - tricks that were actually used in world war 2 (on both sides) to maintain morale.
I agree. It's particularly motivating to be given the option of joining the Emperor's secret organization. Gaining traditional career advancements while at the same time working on side missions for the Emperor himself is quite the ego boost.
There was a similar problem with the later CDROM versions of Monkey Island 1 & 2. They didn't even add voice or anything like that, just upgraded some of the graphics, and turned the original synthesised score into a bunch of CD audio tracks. Problem is, whilst they sounded fantastic (at least as good as the Gravis or MT32 originals would have, a serious upgrade for anyone used to an OPL2) there was far more than a single CD's worth of music in each game alone, never mind between them (they came on one disc)... so there was a lot of repetition, and some missing favourites... and of course, it could no longer do the whole iMUSE adaptive soundtrack thing, which, same as in TIE Fighter (both were Lucasfilm products of course...), made things flow much more nicely and gave a subtle hint as to a change in situation after performing a certain action... rather than a sudden silence and jarring change as the CD drive switched tracks. And, of course, excellent shout for TIE itself. Better even than X-Wing vs TIE by all accounts despite having far fewer ships and only having the option as playing on one side.
I had an old 286 computer growing up that ran at 10mhz, but had a button on the casing called “turbo” that would crank your CPU up to 20mhz! There was a game called “Sopwith” where you flew old planes around through obstacles or shot someone, I now can’t remember, but it was meant to be played at 10mhz, and at 20mhz was absolutely impossible to control.
Yeah, I vaguely remember Sopwith. There was another one, Paratrooper I think it was called, where you had to shoot paratroops as they fell from planes and defend your gun emplacement. I tried that in DOSBOX a while back... maybe half a second before the gun was over-run and blown up, not even time to push a button!
Thank Jason Scott for the Internet Archive having the emulator built into their website; he thought it was a brilliant idea, and so far only Nintendo has complained and asked for their games to be removed from the archive.
There's one set of computer games from the 90s that you've either completely never heard of, or remember in perfect detail like it was just yesterday: The Jumpstart adventures series (people usually remember the 3rd and 5th grade titles the most.)
Hi Ho Wolverhampton :D My sisters and I sing one of those songs all of the time! The one from the Kindergarten disk about falling in mud and washing off. Good stuff.
i was always curious about toms experience with video games, whenever i watch one of his videos about computery things i often understand the things he is talking about only because of games, either directly or indirectly it makes perfect sense to me that tom grew up with those old commodore 64 type games,, i cant quite put my finger on why but it just seems a natural fit
The DOS game "Lander", where you have an Apollo lander and an autogen 2D moonscape with one large flat area and one small, surrounded by 'hills'. Readouts are altitude, X/Y velocity components and fuel - you had to land on the flat, with vertical speed < 10 m/s and horizontal speed < 1 m/s. Gravity, thrust and fuel were tweakable in Settings.
Buying actual old games is a fool's errand right now because the boom in retro gaming interest has resulted in most sellers putting massive markups on the most common stuff. Like I've seen people trying to sell copies of Super Mario World, a pack-in game that came with every SNES for over £70. Hence I started collecting PS1 stuff, where the super common stuff only gets marked up to £20-30 because I'm an idiot.
I still miss playing TradeWars2002 on 300 to 1200 baud dial-up BBS systems. It was all text (with a few extended-character-set drawings of ships and color, if your terminal emulator supported it) and was turn-based. There were maybe 2000 numbered stars with up to 6 random warps between them. I wrote a program to find large dead-end clusters of stars that could be easily defended and find close trade pairs of space stations where they had complimentary buy/sell for three products: equipment, organics, and fuel. We got so powerful once that the amount of money on our home planet rolled over its 32-bit limit and went negative, causing the game to crash when we landed there. The sysop of the BBS didn’t want to reset the game so we blew up the main trade station-something that was supposed to be impossible, but not for our hyper-advanced team of three, by that point. It’s amazing that so limited a setting can be so immersive and fun. (Probably while I still play Minecraft.)
Never had a console myself, only computer. Remember playing a lot of the games from Microsoft entertainment pack; rattler race, pipe dream, rodent's revenge and ski free among others. Also had an older brother who introduced me to the commander keen games, as well as a great game that i think was called the lost vikings.
It's also called Sega Genesis in Canada. :) That being said, we're often included with the "US" (sadly). (The MS-DOS link is amazing. I'm having so much fun playing Winter Games! 😂)
Fun fact about why it's called the Genesis: the name "MegaDrive" had already been trademarked by - unsurprisingly - a disc drive maker. I forget which one tho. Also, it's not "the US (and maybe Canada)", it's "the NA market" (NA meaning North America, aka the US, Canada and Mexico). Or just NTSC-U, but that came later with the advent of optical-media-based systems. Like CDi, 3DO, the SegaCD, the Saturn (who remembers that one?), Dreamcast and of course PlayStation. Also, who remembers region coding?
I got a Megadrive copy Micro Machines Turbo Tournament to my left. It does have the controller ports on the cartridge. But also 8 premade invitations to send to friends in class for a Micro Machines Party/Tournament. My copy of Persona 5 and Nier Automata didn't even bother with an instruction manual. The things I always used to read when shopping with my mum after the game was bought but still needed to buy food in Marks and Spencers.
I had an MSX by the way and I had cassettes too, but I just threw them all together on a reel to reel tape and wrote the counter settings down, making it really easy to find them :D.
Its still alive! AoE2 has a thriving competitive scene (with most of the same pro players since 1999) and the original game is being "revamped" by Microsoft - search AoE Definitive Edition. The full orchestra soundtrack is amazing
Rusty Brakes Glad to hear that! Definitely will be on the lookout. AoE 2 was my favourite out of all the AoE games, I guess it's because it's the one I grew up with.
Kings Quest taught me how to type really quickly. Excellent series of games but lost a bit when the mouse took over. Sierra Online produced so many gems.
Digger or Diggers? I spent a lot of time on Diggers (four alien races, having punchups with the opposing side, the developer obviously having a girlfriend/wife/daughter called Jenny because all the cool stuff was called some variant of that) but I'm a few years younger than Tom so his early years games are probably too early for me
I have a supaboy, it's right above my computer screen right now on my cabinet. It's for playing SNES game cartridges on the go, but you can also use it as a console. I still have my old SNES console but I prefer using the supaboy because it takes up less space and I don't have to worry about messing with an old console that could cause problems. Mine has worked great for a long time, only thing is you have to have the old cartridges in order for it to work.
I started out with a ZX Spectrum 48K, playing games off tape like Dizzy, Kaos, Armour Geddon, Carrier Command and even the type-in adventures like Seabase Delta. "Your Sinclair" magazine with tapes on the cover was pretty much my entire source of fun. Then went to an Amiga, playing Settlers and Frontier: Elite II... Then on to a 486 DX4-100 with 16Mb of RAM and a Turbo button... Then a Pentium 200 MMX which I over-clocked to 233 and spent my time playing games that my machine couldn't really handle like Sim-Copter.
Star Wars Droid Works was my jam for the longest time. Taught me about inclined planes, magnetism (how does it work!?) and some other stuff I forgot, all while cobbling together weird looking droids. I should get around to playing it again now that it works in Win10 for some reason, didn't in 8.
I remember playing games on a Commodore Pet at a friend's house - one game was a {cough}First Person Shooter{cough} where you used the arrow keys to turn and move, and each time you did that, the new viewpoint was painstakingly LINE drawn and you got a line of text which told you whether a monster was there or not, at which point you attacked it, with further text explaining how the fight was going. So - when Wolfenstein 3D came out, my mind was blown away!
I have fuzzy memories of 5 or 6 years old me sneaking to my brother's room to play Command and Conquer Red Alert on his Window 95 PC. That computer was full of all kinds of problems. I most distinctly remember the game somehow not rendering the terrain graphics and left a house of mirrors effect on the black void when a unit or the camera moved. It was pure magic to me.
I recently re-played my way through Theme Hospital. Imagine my horror when the fax machine pops up an expectant visit from a one "Billy Savile OBE". That dates it.
I played Commander Keen as a kid and still play now! There are some great modern mods around which you can find on the Keen Wiki, and an active community called the Public Commander Keen Forum.
So young. I had the original Home Pong ('74). I skill have my NES (with my favorite game for it being Marble Madness), Suoer NES, PS1 (favorite game here was Wipeout XL), Nintendo 64, 3DO (lost it to a robber) and a Dreamcast (fav was Devil Dice). As a child I had a Coleco Computer with games like Buck Rogers on an old audio tape (strange as that was). At one time had the Atari 800 XL with Missile Command, Centipede and Ballblazers. Don't play video games anymore. Now mostly table top Euro style and strategy games (Carcassonne, Settlers, Dominion, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Dune, etc.)
GoldenEye for N64. Played a lot with friends and eventually got to the point where we piled up video cassettes and news papers in a way so you could not peek on the other players part of the screen.
I know of a group that actually uses a Retron for their TH-cam channel. The reason why is simple: it hooks up to their recording system. The old stuff is now so old that you need specialized adapters or an even more specialized capture card to plug in. Buying a more recent knockoff that uses modern/semi-modern connectors is a bonus. Also saves them from having to dick around with stacks of increasingly-fragile cartridges with increasingly high odds of having something corroded inside. They say they actually have the games - I've seen some of them, so that's good enough for me. (well, aside from a couple of rare ancient things like Snatcher, anyway. That game has mad collector's value because it's so rare, as is the system it runs on.)
I started a fresh game of Morrowind yesterday, always a pleasure to return to that place; some say the love it gets is nostalgia, but I genuinely love the diceroll combat and written dialogue. Still an incredible game 15 years later that is constantly a work in progress thanks to one of gaming's truly historic modding communities. Internet archive is very cool with it's DOSbox implementation, but the actual DOSbox gives you so many options of controllers, sound/video device emulation, and every CPU speed you could need. Games are cool, computers are cool, I gotta build me a damn Socket 7 PC one of these days for that sweet original hardware experience. Edit: On an unrelated note, boy would it be great to have a beer with you guys... or coffee, or well, whatever social beverages Tom actually drinks.
Buzz lightyear 2 and Jak & Daxter are two of the earliest games I remember playing also various call of duty and medal of honor games make me feel pretty Nostalgic.
I was never a gamer but my brother had the Master System, the Megadrive, and the Dreamcast. The only games I played on any of those was Streets of Rage on the Megadrive, and an attempt at Micro Machines, though I always fell off the table when coming down the screen (it would've been a darn sight easier if the camera had followed the cars for the whole lap but no. It didn't!) because I could never figure out that left for a car facing me meant I had to turn left. And it's really weird that I've just sat and watched someone else's uploaded play-through of Earthworm Jim simply because it was a game my brother had borrowed that stuck out for its sheer... weirdness. And the fact that the graphics were actually really good for a mid-90s 'platform' type game (it was way less platform than Sonic, which was the other game I really remember from watching my brother play stuff).
My childhood was late 90's and especially early 2000's Nintendo games. Stuff like Donkey Kong '94, Paper Mario, Pokemon Sapphire, and Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker were the best. Also had a Mac from the 90's. Some favorites of mine included Maze Madness, Sim City 2000 and shareware/freeware games like Blobbo and BOOM!.
Favourite old games.-.. well, where do I start? Well, there is a game called "Verlies" (german for dungeon) which was an RPG on a german tape/disk-magazine for the Commodore 64 called "Input 64". Its main flaw was that it had no game save and load features, but it had amusing writing, a (then seemingly) easy to use interface (nowadays I'm spoiled by GUIs) and it really drew me in. I still like my RPGs, to be honest. I could talk about my PC gaming experiences, including, but not limited to "The Bard's Tale" and the original "System Shock", but then we'd be here all day and nobody got time for that.
Head over Heels on the Spectrum, it was magnificent! About 20years after I last played it, I found that it had been remade for PCs. Worrying, I still knew the whole map and all the tricks...so, that's what I'm using my memory for, instead of remembering *anyone's* name!
Games I’d recommend to Tom: (PC) Super Spellbound (DOS game. Educational for teaching kids to spell, but super nostalgic) (PC) Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers (Also came on a floppy disk) (PC) Antichamber (Mess-with-your-mind’s-spacial-awareness game) (PC?) Two Brothers (Requires controller, I think. Good experience) Possibly more, but those hit home.
The thing about multiplayer over modem was not one's ping per sé, but the stability of it. There were command strings one could send to the modem to turn off certain features which made downloading and web browsing faster, but introduced handshaking overhead which made one's ping fluctuate. Multiplayer games would handle pings up to about 400ms fine, as long as they didn't vary. Anyhow, one didn't have to be on a modem connection to experience lag. When Unreal Tournament came out, my PC was right on that edge where it could run it, but stumbled when things got really hectic. I remember playing it at a LAN get together, the guy next to me had the latest and greatest rig, so he was hosting. He also had a 19" monitor and, on several occasions, I could see myself being gibbed out of the corner of my eye, while still trying to dodge the rocket on my screen. :D
I loved Star-Trek Elite Force (and the sequel). I have a bunch of those older Star-Trek games still stored in a closet. Classics likeArmada, Bridge Command, Away Team, ... I was obssesed with those as a kid.
I enjoyed consoles when young because I could pack the Genesis (and later, ps1 and ps2) into a small bag on trips, plug it into whatever TV was at the place I was staying, and play it there with very little effort or fuss. Few wires, not even a table needed. Great for small hotel rooms. However, since Microsoft and Sony's consoles are now basically just computers with horrible load times, and since laptops are more affordable than before, now I just stick to PC and bring a laptop when away from home.
My 1st computer was a TI-99, and I had a single game for it, Lawnmower Man (nothing to do with Stephen King, btw), where you drove around on a riding lawnmower cutting grass. You had to get everything in one go or game over. There were rocks and other obstacles that prevented you from just running a set pattern to win each time. After that, DOS games. Decent, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Panzer General were my games.
I also grew up a PC gamer, but I'm from a very different generation than Tom. My nostalgia games are Snood and Bugdom (and text adventures, and a couple HyperCard games that my uncle bought for me shortly before I was born).
I'm probably 2-3 years or so younger than you two, so I started with, also on the PC, Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken and took all the LucasArts adventures with me. Plus lots of other point and click adventures (I'm German, after all) and a few text adventures. Add a big helping of Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment, and of course The Settlers (1+2, because again, German), and Neverwinter Nights in the early 2000s, and that's most my gaming history as a kid.
I still can not forget when I became really into games. I played since before I could read but really god hooked up when I ws maybe 8, by by Civilization 1. I could play that for hours nonstop and I even managed to win it after few years. Very important to note here is that I was not speaking a single world of English back then nor anyone I knew did. So that says a lot about how great that game was.
My most nostalgic game is from when our school computer (yes we only had the one) had Troggle Trouble Math. It took me about 10 years to find out what it was called because we just called it "the doggy game". It was wonderful.
I only recently discovered the cheats for Crash Team Racing on PlayStation spelled out things too, with triangle being an A, the arrows being UDLR or NSEW, etc. So for the cheat to unlock all, you hold L1+R1, then press Right, Right, Left, Triangle, Right, Down, Down, which spells REWARDS (Right, East, West, A, Right, Down, South).
70% of the time I watched my brother play or dad work, waiting for my turn (Macintosh Plus). I would play Shufflepuck Cafe, Bolo, Glider, NumberMaze, and tons of others. When we got a Apple PowerPC I/we could play tons of dos games. Commander Keen, A10 attack just the ones I still remember the name. Me and my brother get nostalgic and revisit them. The Macintosh Plus still works, including expansion.
OH MY GOD, Alley cat?! I based my review/videos logo on the "you won" screen from that game. And I still remember the theme song by heart. I love it ;_;
I also played a lot of Alley Cat. And a bit of a game called Star Wars, much simpler than any game of that name I can find on Google now. Two space ships, a planet in the center of the screen, missiles and very short laser beams. Then also Leisure Suit Larry. When I was way too young for that. And Police Quest.
My first gaming memory is Tetris, in the original gray and sickly green. Also on the same system, Adventure Island (2? 3? something with a number) and Double Dragon.
Without a doubt, the Super NES game Mr. Do was my favorite video game, and I instantly went to look for it when you said Nintendo was re-releasing its old games. No luck though. My second favorite was Atari's game Missile Command. I still have my old Super NES console and Mr. Do cartridge (and they still work) and my brother still has his too, but I'd love to get a backup copy in case either / both die on us. I bought an Atari joystick several years ago when they re-released their video games packaged in a joystick (to be plugged into a computer and played), and it's nice, but I'd have preferred a console that plugs into the TV to get the full effect. I'm so old-school! :)
Here’s a fun thing you probably didn’t know of: A games company called Zachtronics actually developed and shipped an MS-DOS port of a mini-game from another one of their games in mid 2017. Its called Shenzen Solitaire for MS-DOS, but you cant get it anymore because it was a one time kickstarter
Now I'm going to immediately look for the classic 'Dizzy the egg' games This game was literally my introduction to video games, on my dads Amstrad computer. It was horrifically unreliable, it involved loading cassette tapes, running it for an hour only for it to fail. But occasionally it would work! and that was just pure magic to my 5 or 6 year old self. Wow how much gaming has come on in recent times! Todays generations will never know the pain we had to endure, to sometimes not even get to play the game!
The SupaBoy and Retron HD are sold in the US too. I have a SupaBoy, it's just a "portable" (lol barely) Super Nintendo with a screen on it and a battery. IIRC the Retron series is multiple old consoles in one machine. They're half decent but definitely came from Asiatown sweatshops
Heh, now that's making me feel even older... I have the full brace of Id and some Apogee shareware games, as registered versions, because they were included on a disc in the deluxe edition of the "Id anthology" which included Quake and all the Dooms... That was released in 1998. :-o
Manually typed in the code from a games BOOK on a TRS80 computer. (Star Trek the Computer Game) My chum and I would stay after hours in the computer lab, madly typing away and correcting typos, forgetting what time it was, and eventually get thrown out by the janitor. Then there was having to explain to our parents why we didn't come home from school and missed supper, etc, etc. Good times, good times.
Oh god theme hospital. I lost /so/ hard on the level where you got surgeons because I was terrible at managing the training thing. I have and will always be aggressively bad at games, i guess. Still, fun stuff!
The GB boy clones are actually quite popular. They're backlit as standard, so you get the feel of the real console buy with the convenience of the backlight! (And some extra games built in of... Dubious legality.)
To be fair, I clicked on this thinking I wouldn't know any of these games. Know, played, and loved 90% of the games you mentioned. I even got Theme Hospital on gog not that long ago.
I realise I casually dismissed an entire genre of art here by saying "I haven't played video games in years". It's a bit like saying "I haven't been to the cinema in years". In my defence, I also haven't been to the cinema in years. -- Tom
Such OP
Bad Request they upload the video , comment then wait a while to make it public
cinemas are expensive and outdated, viva la Internet and Net neutrality!
Matt and Tom How is that a dismissal? Sounds like a statement of fact to me. 😕
How has this comment been here for almost a day on a half hour old video
Tom is 100% right about double dash
balrogdahomie He did omit how even singleplayer it was more strategic than any other Mario Kart.
A note about the GB Boy. They're properly compatible with Gameboy and Gamerboy Color cartridges and short of getting one of the expensive AGS-101 Gameboy Advance SPs (Or any GBA that someone has modded an AGS-101 screen into), it's the only way to play Gameboy Color games on proper hardware (It's a proper hardware clone, not emulation) with a backlit screen. There's a number of other small improvements as well like better buttons.
Hey, the GB Boy Colour is actually pretty good. Some folks prefer it to the actual Game Boy Color because it has a backlit colour screen and is compatible with the games. A lot of retro gamers actually seek it out these days.
The backlight is one if the big selling points.
Almost all the old portables can be modded with backlight, except for the GBC. It only allows front light, which is much worse.
Also, the sound output is better than from the original GameBoy(colour). It has little to no humming and beeping background noise.
Can confirm, recently picked one up and it is lovely, the backlight makes a world of difference
Gameboy Boy Colour
"A Rollercoaster Tycoon kid"
+5 Respect Points from me Tom!
That thumbnail makes for a great jumpscare. Glad it wasn’t uploaded in the middle of the night for me.
it is for me
Nuclear Effect do you want an apology from Matt and Tom for jumpscaring you in the middle of the night? i am sure you deserve one.
... you do remember the last time they published an apology, yes?
Was going to write the same thing and ask for an apology
ntlespino and I participated in the contest for the deleted joke about STD-phones, which was a part of the video where they told everyone to stop calling the phone number, which they offered as a help hotline for the apology video you are talking about.
Unreal Tournament 1999 GoTY, Age of Empires, Age of Empires 2, Rollercoaster Tycoon, SimCity3000, all games from my past. Still amazing to this day.
One of my best friends uploaded Unreal Tournament to my high school's network in a really long; really frustrating folder chain.
One of the best memories of that school was going in on the last week of term; to a full computer lab; with 30 kids all desperately trying to log in; navigate this folder chain; then beginning to load up Unreal Tournament.
Now; this being the last week of school; nobody thought to do any checking that any staff were around... So; in through the rear door comes a teacher.
Everyone STOPS... and in the one second that everyone in the room is paused; the teacher manages to get out: "What's going on here?!"
EVERYONE BOLTS. 35 kids; as one unit; rush for the door and flee as though they all got caught with porn. The teacher tried in vain to stop everyone; but nobody would dare stop. I shoot him this look of: "hate to say it; but you've lost this one"; then I casually leave; this poor teacher is just... befuddled; wondering what the hell happened...
Brilliant recollection, best comment on this page. 8)
Meanwhile the teacher is disappointed; he just wanted to join in on the FPS fun 😂
Some of the first DOS games I remember: Golden Axe, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem 1+2, Jill of the Jungle, LHX Attack Chopper, Strike Commander, Incredible Machine, Lemmings, UFO Enemy Unknown … and of course all those Lucasarts and Sierra adventures.
I FORGOT ABOUT THE INCREDIBLE MACHINE. Also Lemmings. Also I just remembered Gunship 2000, although pretty much all I ever did in it was take off and shoot down the friendly base immediately. -- Tom
Definitely Lemmings. I was pretty terrible at it and never got very high in the levels. But I remember things from those many hours. Writing down the codes as I succeeded at levels and keeping them on a sheet of paper in a long list for later use. The strange lighting of everything, especially the forests. The confetti that exploding Lemmings turn into, and sometimes having to line up a Lemming just right to explode it to make a hole in just the right spot. The way the green hair swishes on the blockers as they look back and forth. The sort of furry caterpillar that they make when they walk really close together. The bloo-oo-oooop! that they make as they go home.
I didn't have many games, and I didn't have the reflexes to play most of them anyway, so yeah Lemmings takes up a large amount of my old game memory space.
+Markus Birth
> and of course all those Lucasarts and Sierra adventures.
Aaaand those from Infocom, of course!
Hitchhikers Guide, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Stationfall, Planetfall, Bureaucracy, Trinity, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and the Zork series...
What, no Halloween Harry, Jazz Jackrabbit or Blackthorn? :D
Double dash is the best mario kart
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DS if only for portability. Best thing on long trips w/ friends.
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Andrew Joy *worst
Supaboy is basically a portable snes, retron hd is pretty much an emulator machine that lets you play the original original games on hdtvs and upscales them
gb boy is just a super dodgy chinese rip off :p
I at one point before I moved into my little studio apartment had a Supaboy and it worked great. I know some people have had issues with them breaking the button or the pins inside but if you are careful with it like any other portable electronic device they work great.
Actually the GB Boy Color is great, the you can't back-light the GBC and this one has a bright screen.
_Alphr NZ_ Backlight? Pfft, you're missing out on the experience of having to attach a magnifying glass with lights over the screen. And burning through *two* sets of batteries at once. ;)
As a kid, the game I spent the most time on was "Robot Odyssey" for the Apple IIe. The premise of the game is that you've been trapped in Robotropolis, an underground city populated entirely by robots, and in order to escape you have to build circuits to make a trio of friendly robots perform tasks that will let you advance through the game.
I didn't realize it at the time, but that game was incredibly difficult, and any kid who got past the second level was practically destined to become an engineer.
There's a dusty bell ringing in the depths of my mind.
YES. Robot Odyssey was(is) amazing. I learned circuit logic from it. I did beat it, eventually. It took a LONG time.
I miss the rainbow Comic Sans
My secondary school used to have Acorn computers, as I did at home. This was late 90s when games still came on 3.5" floppy disks. So kids used to bring in games and run them in lunch breaks. I remember LOVING Mad Professor Mariati, and Fervour. SO much time lost to those games. I can still remember the music in my head. So many great old Acorn games.
Old DOS games are still amazing.
If you ever want a good space flight sim (in terms of combat and writing, not realism) check out Star Wars: TIE Fighter. Play the older version when you're offered the 1994 and 1995 releases - the 1995 version did a texture overhaul at the cost of replacing the adaptive music that contributes to situational awareness (there are different musical cues for different events that you can otherwise easily miss in combat. "Oh hey, a Mon Cal starcruiser just showed up? Where is that? OMG It's 50 meters behind me running time!!!!!") with a looping rip of the original music tracks. It's brilliant music, of course, but since it has nothing to do with what's happening in game, it's rather immersion-breaking. The textures are 1995 quality anyway, so they're really not worth trashing the music.
TIE Fighter was truly a special game. It was one of the few games at that time where I truly felt I had a choice as to how I could complete the missions. Not only that, but successes and failures followed you through the career.
What I honestly liked the most was the writing, weird as that sounds for a game of that era. You're playing a pilot working for an evil empire, and you know it...but while playing, you feel like you're actually a good guy, fighting pirates, upholding law and order, bringing peace to a region with a generations-long civil war.
Play it with the right mindset and you'll catch some of the propaganda tricks - tricks that were actually used in world war 2 (on both sides) to maintain morale.
I agree. It's particularly motivating to be given the option of joining the Emperor's secret organization. Gaining traditional career advancements while at the same time working on side missions for the Emperor himself is quite the ego boost.
There was a similar problem with the later CDROM versions of Monkey Island 1 & 2. They didn't even add voice or anything like that, just upgraded some of the graphics, and turned the original synthesised score into a bunch of CD audio tracks. Problem is, whilst they sounded fantastic (at least as good as the Gravis or MT32 originals would have, a serious upgrade for anyone used to an OPL2) there was far more than a single CD's worth of music in each game alone, never mind between them (they came on one disc)... so there was a lot of repetition, and some missing favourites... and of course, it could no longer do the whole iMUSE adaptive soundtrack thing, which, same as in TIE Fighter (both were Lucasfilm products of course...), made things flow much more nicely and gave a subtle hint as to a change in situation after performing a certain action... rather than a sudden silence and jarring change as the CD drive switched tracks.
And, of course, excellent shout for TIE itself. Better even than X-Wing vs TIE by all accounts despite having far fewer ships and only having the option as playing on one side.
I had an old 286 computer growing up that ran at 10mhz, but had a button on the casing called “turbo” that would crank your CPU up to 20mhz! There was a game called “Sopwith” where you flew old planes around through obstacles or shot someone, I now can’t remember, but it was meant to be played at 10mhz, and at 20mhz was absolutely impossible to control.
Yeah, I vaguely remember Sopwith. There was another one, Paratrooper I think it was called, where you had to shoot paratroops as they fell from planes and defend your gun emplacement. I tried that in DOSBOX a while back... maybe half a second before the gun was over-run and blown up, not even time to push a button!
Hurricane Cook the 286 didn't go to 20 MHz, and the turbo button slowed it down to 4.77.
I'm way too young for anything that old, but you just reminded me of the game Crimson Skies that I used to play. Cheers!
Daniel James I used to play that!
Daniel, how about F19 Stealth Fighter? I played the hell out of that game!
Thank Jason Scott for the Internet Archive having the emulator built into their website; he thought it was a brilliant idea, and so far only Nintendo has complained and asked for their games to be removed from the archive.
There's one set of computer games from the 90s that you've either completely never heard of, or remember in perfect detail like it was just yesterday: The Jumpstart adventures series (people usually remember the 3rd and 5th grade titles the most.)
Hi Ho Wolverhampton :D My sisters and I sing one of those songs all of the time! The one from the Kindergarten disk about falling in mud and washing off. Good stuff.
I've been playing a lot of The Sims 2 recently and I can still remember the music from when I played it as I was a kid.
i was always curious about toms experience with video games, whenever i watch one of his videos about computery things i often understand the things he is talking about only because of games, either directly or indirectly
it makes perfect sense to me that tom grew up with those old commodore 64 type games,, i cant quite put my finger on why but it just seems a natural fit
We were a Macintosh household back in the days of System 7 through System 9, so Glider holds a special place in my heart.
The DOS game "Lander", where you have an Apollo lander and an autogen 2D moonscape with one large flat area and one small, surrounded by 'hills'. Readouts are altitude, X/Y velocity components and fuel - you had to land on the flat, with vertical speed < 10 m/s and horizontal speed < 1 m/s. Gravity, thrust and fuel were tweakable in Settings.
I remember that on the apple .... I am guessing the source code for it got compiled on various machines
I had that on my old Tandy 1000!
Buying actual old games is a fool's errand right now because the boom in retro gaming interest has resulted in most sellers putting massive markups on the most common stuff. Like I've seen people trying to sell copies of Super Mario World, a pack-in game that came with every SNES for over £70. Hence I started collecting PS1 stuff, where the super common stuff only gets marked up to £20-30 because I'm an idiot.
I still miss playing TradeWars2002 on 300 to 1200 baud dial-up BBS systems. It was all text (with a few extended-character-set drawings of ships and color, if your terminal emulator supported it) and was turn-based. There were maybe 2000 numbered stars with up to 6 random warps between them. I wrote a program to find large dead-end clusters of stars that could be easily defended and find close trade pairs of space stations where they had complimentary buy/sell for three products: equipment, organics, and fuel. We got so powerful once that the amount of money on our home planet rolled over its 32-bit limit and went negative, causing the game to crash when we landed there. The sysop of the BBS didn’t want to reset the game so we blew up the main trade station-something that was supposed to be impossible, but not for our hyper-advanced team of three, by that point. It’s amazing that so limited a setting can be so immersive and fun. (Probably while I still play Minecraft.)
Never had a console myself, only computer. Remember playing a lot of the games from Microsoft entertainment pack; rattler race, pipe dream, rodent's revenge and ski free among others. Also had an older brother who introduced me to the commander keen games, as well as a great game that i think was called the lost vikings.
It's also called Sega Genesis in Canada. :) That being said, we're often included with the "US" (sadly).
(The MS-DOS link is amazing. I'm having so much fun playing Winter Games! 😂)
Fun fact about why it's called the Genesis: the name "MegaDrive" had already been trademarked by - unsurprisingly - a disc drive maker. I forget which one tho. Also, it's not "the US (and maybe Canada)", it's "the NA market" (NA meaning North America, aka the US, Canada and Mexico). Or just NTSC-U, but that came later with the advent of optical-media-based systems. Like CDi, 3DO, the SegaCD, the Saturn (who remembers that one?), Dreamcast and of course PlayStation.
Also, who remembers region coding?
I'm sorry for your loss ;)
Don't forget you got the same media rating board :D
Think of the nice northern neighbour.
I thought Canada was the 50th state, and North and South Dakota were merged
I got a Megadrive copy Micro Machines Turbo Tournament to my left. It does have the controller ports on the cartridge. But also 8 premade invitations to send to friends in class for a Micro Machines Party/Tournament. My copy of Persona 5 and Nier Automata didn't even bother with an instruction manual. The things I always used to read when shopping with my mum after the game was bought but still needed to buy food in Marks and Spencers.
I just about fell off my chair when you popped up the "Alley Cat" graphic... Oh nostalgia. I'd completely forgotten about that game.
I had an MSX by the way and I had cassettes too, but I just threw them all together on a reel to reel tape and wrote the counter settings down, making it really easy to find them :D.
Age of empires... My childhood.
Maelstrom same
Absolutely. Wololo!
The hours and days I spent on those campaigns...
I sucked at it, but I loved it.
Its still alive! AoE2 has a thriving competitive scene (with most of the same pro players since 1999) and the original game is being "revamped" by Microsoft - search AoE Definitive Edition. The full orchestra soundtrack is amazing
Rusty Brakes Glad to hear that! Definitely will be on the lookout. AoE 2 was my favourite out of all the AoE games, I guess it's because it's the one I grew up with.
Started with PC with the Kings Quest series in the 1980s myself.
Kings Quest taught me how to type really quickly. Excellent series of games but lost a bit when the mouse took over. Sierra Online produced so many gems.
Miss this channel so much 😢
Alley Cat was also one of my starter games. As soon as it was mentioned, I got the music stuck in my head...
Digger was amazing, i still play it occasionally. also played games like secret agent 006 and Thor: God of Thunder for DOS
Digger or Diggers? I spent a lot of time on Diggers (four alien races, having punchups with the opposing side, the developer obviously having a girlfriend/wife/daughter called Jenny because all the cool stuff was called some variant of that) but I'm a few years younger than Tom so his early years games are probably too early for me
Super Matt and Tom. Wear your overalls, guys. I don't care what temperature it is.
Marco aren't they called coveralls in little England?
Jesus Gonzalez Ah, yes. Good point.
Overalls, coveralls, jumpsuits, boilersuits... we use them all interchangeably.
You clod ;)
You mentioned Alley Cat and after all these years, the music just popped back into my head....
thanks Tom, now the theme to Alleycat is stuck in my head again.
I have a supaboy, it's right above my computer screen right now on my cabinet. It's for playing SNES game cartridges on the go, but you can also use it as a console. I still have my old SNES console but I prefer using the supaboy because it takes up less space and I don't have to worry about messing with an old console that could cause problems. Mine has worked great for a long time, only thing is you have to have the old cartridges in order for it to work.
I started out with a ZX Spectrum 48K, playing games off tape like Dizzy, Kaos, Armour Geddon, Carrier Command and even the type-in adventures like Seabase Delta. "Your Sinclair" magazine with tapes on the cover was pretty much my entire source of fun. Then went to an Amiga, playing Settlers and Frontier: Elite II... Then on to a 486 DX4-100 with 16Mb of RAM and a Turbo button... Then a Pentium 200 MMX which I over-clocked to 233 and spent my time playing games that my machine couldn't really handle like Sim-Copter.
Star Wars Droid Works was my jam for the longest time. Taught me about inclined planes, magnetism (how does it work!?) and some other stuff I forgot, all while cobbling together weird looking droids. I should get around to playing it again now that it works in Win10 for some reason, didn't in 8.
I remember playing games on a Commodore Pet at a friend's house - one game was a {cough}First Person Shooter{cough} where you used the arrow keys to turn and move, and each time you did that, the new viewpoint was painstakingly LINE drawn and you got a line of text which told you whether a monster was there or not, at which point you attacked it, with further text explaining how the fight was going. So - when Wolfenstein 3D came out, my mind was blown away!
I enjoyed the Infocom text adventure games: Zork, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Hitchhiker's Guide...
google it, you can play those games on your current box
I have fuzzy memories of 5 or 6 years old me sneaking to my brother's room to play Command and Conquer Red Alert on his Window 95 PC. That computer was full of all kinds of problems. I most distinctly remember the game somehow not rendering the terrain graphics and left a house of mirrors effect on the black void when a unit or the camera moved. It was pure magic to me.
When you showed the picture of Alley Cat a huge unexpected rush of nostalgia hit me.
I also had a Commodore 64, and I also had its predecessor the Vic 20.
My FPS of choice growing up was the TimeSplitters franchise. I got the original with my launch day PS2 and was hooked from there.
I recently re-played my way through Theme Hospital. Imagine my horror when the fax machine pops up an expectant visit from a one "Billy Savile OBE". That dates it.
I loved the original Roller Coaster Tycoon, and Sim City 2000. Man, I could spend forever playing those things.
I played Commander Keen as a kid and still play now! There are some great modern mods around which you can find on the Keen Wiki, and an active community called the Public Commander Keen Forum.
Thrust, Gauntlet, Archon, Galaxian, Chuckie Egg - those were the games of my childhood (way back in the mists of time...)
So young. I had the original Home Pong ('74). I skill have my NES (with my favorite game for it being Marble Madness), Suoer NES, PS1 (favorite game here was Wipeout XL), Nintendo 64, 3DO (lost it to a robber) and a Dreamcast (fav was Devil Dice). As a child I had a Coleco Computer with games like Buck Rogers on an old audio tape (strange as that was). At one time had the Atari 800 XL with Missile Command, Centipede and Ballblazers. Don't play video games anymore. Now mostly table top Euro style and strategy games (Carcassonne, Settlers, Dominion, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Dune, etc.)
GoldenEye for N64. Played a lot with friends and eventually got to the point where we piled up video cassettes and news papers in a way so you could not peek on the other players part of the screen.
I know of a group that actually uses a Retron for their TH-cam channel. The reason why is simple: it hooks up to their recording system. The old stuff is now so old that you need specialized adapters or an even more specialized capture card to plug in. Buying a more recent knockoff that uses modern/semi-modern connectors is a bonus.
Also saves them from having to dick around with stacks of increasingly-fragile cartridges with increasingly high odds of having something corroded inside. They say they actually have the games - I've seen some of them, so that's good enough for me.
(well, aside from a couple of rare ancient things like Snatcher, anyway. That game has mad collector's value because it's so rare, as is the system it runs on.)
I started a fresh game of Morrowind yesterday, always a pleasure to return to that place; some say the love it gets is nostalgia, but I genuinely love the diceroll combat and written dialogue. Still an incredible game 15 years later that is constantly a work in progress thanks to one of gaming's truly historic modding communities.
Internet archive is very cool with it's DOSbox implementation, but the actual DOSbox gives you so many options of controllers, sound/video device emulation, and every CPU speed you could need.
Games are cool, computers are cool, I gotta build me a damn Socket 7 PC one of these days for that sweet original hardware experience.
Edit: On an unrelated note, boy would it be great to have a beer with you guys... or coffee, or well, whatever social beverages Tom actually drinks.
Buzz lightyear 2 and Jak & Daxter are two of the earliest games I remember playing also various call of duty and medal of honor games make me feel pretty Nostalgic.
I was never a gamer but my brother had the Master System, the Megadrive, and the Dreamcast. The only games I played on any of those was Streets of Rage on the Megadrive, and an attempt at Micro Machines, though I always fell off the table when coming down the screen (it would've been a darn sight easier if the camera had followed the cars for the whole lap but no. It didn't!) because I could never figure out that left for a car facing me meant I had to turn left.
And it's really weird that I've just sat and watched someone else's uploaded play-through of Earthworm Jim simply because it was a game my brother had borrowed that stuck out for its sheer... weirdness. And the fact that the graphics were actually really good for a mid-90s 'platform' type game (it was way less platform than Sonic, which was the other game I really remember from watching my brother play stuff).
My childhood was late 90's and especially early 2000's Nintendo games. Stuff like Donkey Kong '94, Paper Mario, Pokemon Sapphire, and Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker were the best. Also had a Mac from the 90's. Some favorites of mine included Maze Madness, Sim City 2000 and shareware/freeware games like Blobbo and BOOM!.
Nintendo 64. I had tons of games. I loved that Pokémon arena and the one where you take pictures of Pokémon, and Mario world 64!
Grew up with Paratrooper and Sopwith, on an 80286 with a tiny monochrome CRT
Recently been playing Simon the sorcerer 2 via scummvm on my mobile which has been casted to my TV via Chromecast. What a time to be alive.
Favourite old games.-.. well, where do I start? Well, there is a game called "Verlies" (german for dungeon) which was an RPG on a german tape/disk-magazine for the Commodore 64 called "Input 64". Its main flaw was that it had no game save and load features, but it had amusing writing, a (then seemingly) easy to use interface (nowadays I'm spoiled by GUIs) and it really drew me in. I still like my RPGs, to be honest. I could talk about my PC gaming experiences, including, but not limited to "The Bard's Tale" and the original "System Shock", but then we'd be here all day and nobody got time for that.
I played Alley Cat in early 2000s with my friends from primary school! That game was hard back then!
AWWWH Matt was so sweet at the starttt and Tom looked so goddamn cute 😭😭😭
“Awhhh we can go after this one” 0:08
Head over Heels on the Spectrum, it was magnificent!
About 20years after I last played it, I found that it had been remade for PCs.
Worrying, I still knew the whole map and all the tricks...so, that's what I'm using my memory for, instead of remembering *anyone's* name!
There was a version of frogger on some of the zero88 lighting consoles. We had one at school, so I just played on that if I got bored in rehearsals 👌
Games I’d recommend to Tom:
(PC) Super Spellbound (DOS game. Educational for teaching kids to spell, but super nostalgic)
(PC) Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers (Also came on a floppy disk)
(PC) Antichamber (Mess-with-your-mind’s-spacial-awareness game)
(PC?) Two Brothers (Requires controller, I think. Good experience)
Possibly more, but those hit home.
The thing about multiplayer over modem was not one's ping per sé, but the stability of it. There were command strings one could send to the modem to turn off certain features which made downloading and web browsing faster, but introduced handshaking overhead which made one's ping fluctuate. Multiplayer games would handle pings up to about 400ms fine, as long as they didn't vary.
Anyhow, one didn't have to be on a modem connection to experience lag. When Unreal Tournament came out, my PC was right on that edge where it could run it, but stumbled when things got really hectic. I remember playing it at a LAN get together, the guy next to me had the latest and greatest rig, so he was hosting. He also had a 19" monitor and, on several occasions, I could see myself being gibbed out of the corner of my eye, while still trying to dodge the rocket on my screen. :D
I loved Star-Trek Elite Force (and the sequel). I have a bunch of those older Star-Trek games still stored in a closet. Classics likeArmada, Bridge Command, Away Team, ... I was obssesed with those as a kid.
I enjoyed consoles when young because I could pack the Genesis (and later, ps1 and ps2) into a small bag on trips, plug it into whatever TV was at the place I was staying, and play it there with very little effort or fuss. Few wires, not even a table needed. Great for small hotel rooms. However, since Microsoft and Sony's consoles are now basically just computers with horrible load times, and since laptops are more affordable than before, now I just stick to PC and bring a laptop when away from home.
My 1st computer was a TI-99, and I had a single game for it, Lawnmower Man (nothing to do with Stephen King, btw), where you drove around on a riding lawnmower cutting grass. You had to get everything in one go or game over. There were rocks and other obstacles that prevented you from just running a set pattern to win each time. After that, DOS games. Decent, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Panzer General were my games.
A bunch of my programming classmates got Halo:CE working on lan at school. Best thing ever.
My childhood consisted mainly of Spyro 3, and Ratchet and Clank 2. And it was amazing
The DOS game Monster Bash is my most vivid childhood computer game memory.
I also grew up a PC gamer, but I'm from a very different generation than Tom. My nostalgia games are Snood and Bugdom (and text adventures, and a couple HyperCard games that my uncle bought for me shortly before I was born).
I had Alley Cat on my first PC! I never touched it until I was older because I couldn't figure out how to do anything...
The best part is, all of those knock-offs in Matt's picture are great products.
I'm probably 2-3 years or so younger than you two, so I started with, also on the PC, Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken and took all the LucasArts adventures with me. Plus lots of other point and click adventures (I'm German, after all) and a few text adventures. Add a big helping of Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment, and of course The Settlers (1+2, because again, German), and Neverwinter Nights in the early 2000s, and that's most my gaming history as a kid.
I still can not forget when I became really into games. I played since before I could read but really god hooked up when I ws maybe 8, by by Civilization 1. I could play that for hours nonstop and I even managed to win it after few years.
Very important to note here is that I was not speaking a single world of English back then nor anyone I knew did. So that says a lot about how great that game was.
My most nostalgic game is from when our school computer (yes we only had the one) had Troggle Trouble Math. It took me about 10 years to find out what it was called because we just called it "the doggy game". It was wonderful.
All 3 of those "knock-offs" are actually brilliant. They're very well made, well reviewed alternative options for retro gaming.
I only recently discovered the cheats for Crash Team Racing on PlayStation spelled out things too, with triangle being an A, the arrows being UDLR or NSEW, etc.
So for the cheat to unlock all, you hold L1+R1, then press Right, Right, Left, Triangle, Right, Down, Down, which spells REWARDS (Right, East, West, A, Right, Down, South).
70% of the time I watched my brother play or dad work, waiting for my turn (Macintosh Plus). I would play Shufflepuck Cafe, Bolo, Glider, NumberMaze, and tons of others. When we got a Apple PowerPC I/we could play tons of dos games. Commander Keen, A10 attack just the ones I still remember the name. Me and my brother get nostalgic and revisit them. The Macintosh Plus still works, including expansion.
OH MY GOD, Alley cat?! I based my review/videos logo on the "you won" screen from that game. And I still remember the theme song by heart. I love it ;_;
I also played a lot of Alley Cat.
And a bit of a game called Star Wars, much simpler than any game of that name I can find on Google now. Two space ships, a planet in the center of the screen, missiles and very short laser beams.
Then also Leisure Suit Larry. When I was way too young for that. And Police Quest.
My first gaming memory is Tetris, in the original gray and sickly green. Also on the same system, Adventure Island (2? 3? something with a number) and Double Dragon.
Without a doubt, the Super NES game Mr. Do was my favorite video game, and I instantly went to look for it when you said Nintendo was re-releasing its old games. No luck though. My second favorite was Atari's game Missile Command. I still have my old Super NES console and Mr. Do cartridge (and they still work) and my brother still has his too, but I'd love to get a backup copy in case either / both die on us. I bought an Atari joystick several years ago when they re-released their video games packaged in a joystick (to be plugged into a computer and played), and it's nice, but I'd have preferred a console that plugs into the TV to get the full effect. I'm so old-school! :)
Here’s a fun thing you probably didn’t know of: A games company called Zachtronics actually developed and shipped an MS-DOS port of a mini-game from another one of their games in mid 2017. Its called Shenzen Solitaire for MS-DOS, but you cant get it anymore because it was a one time kickstarter
Now I'm going to immediately look for the classic 'Dizzy the egg' games This game was literally my introduction to video games, on my dads Amstrad computer. It was horrifically unreliable, it involved loading cassette tapes, running it for an hour only for it to fail. But occasionally it would work! and that was just pure magic to my 5 or 6 year old self.
Wow how much gaming has come on in recent times! Todays generations will never know the pain we had to endure, to sometimes not even get to play the game!
The SupaBoy and Retron HD are sold in the US too. I have a SupaBoy, it's just a "portable" (lol barely) Super Nintendo with a screen on it and a battery. IIRC the Retron series is multiple old consoles in one machine. They're half decent but definitely came from Asiatown sweatshops
Tom, did you ever play Commander Keen?
Childhood memories!
I am 15...
Yeah, I'm 18 and played the original and Keen Dreams, because my dad is awesome.
Geez you guys make me feel a little old. I'm 34.
Kim Taura Commander Keen was released in 1990, you can't have been very old then. :-)
Heh, now that's making me feel even older... I have the full brace of Id and some Apogee shareware games, as registered versions, because they were included on a disc in the deluxe edition of the "Id anthology" which included Quake and all the Dooms...
That was released in 1998. :-o
You blew my mind with that the fax machine number in theme hospital number spelt out CHEAT... 20 years too late too.
Well, here's my fine list of nostalgia. ;)
*ZX Spectrum:* Alien8, Wheelie, Manic Miner, Jetpac
*Atari ST:* Oxyd series, Duck Dash, Punt, 9Lives
*Atari Falcon:* Oxyd series, Shocker 2, Willie's Adventure, Moon Speeder/Games, Towers 2
*PC:* Frontier, Theme Park, Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2, Unreal Tournament, Myst series, Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 & 3, NoLimits Coaster Simulator, and more.......
Over at friends': Sonic, Mario, Golden Eye, Duckhunt...
That moment of realization was awesome.
Manually typed in the code from a games BOOK on a TRS80 computer. (Star Trek the Computer Game) My chum and I would stay after hours in the computer lab, madly typing away and correcting typos, forgetting what time it was, and eventually get thrown out by the janitor. Then there was having to explain to our parents why we didn't come home from school and missed supper, etc, etc. Good times, good times.
Oregan Trail!
Many hours were spent on the library computer dying from dysentry.
Oh god theme hospital. I lost /so/ hard on the level where you got surgeons because I was terrible at managing the training thing. I have and will always be aggressively bad at games, i guess. Still, fun stuff!
The GB boy clones are actually quite popular. They're backlit as standard, so you get the feel of the real console buy with the convenience of the backlight! (And some extra games built in of... Dubious legality.)
I'm surprised you didn't mention The Oregon Trail, to this day, I still like that game!
To be fair, I clicked on this thinking I wouldn't know any of these games. Know, played, and loved 90% of the games you mentioned. I even got Theme Hospital on gog not that long ago.
Oh wow alley cat was a great game! My dad still has it on his atari 2600, I played it a lot when I was younger