Games, part one of four
This is the first of a four-part series discussing my favorite PC games. As a Mac user, I rarely get to play games anymore, but for a large portion of my childhood and young adult life, they were my preferred source of entertainment. This list was not compiled via some rigorous computational method, nor did I even closely examine my motivations for selecting them beyond, “Hmm, these games were significant for me.”
We begin with today’s post: Old School Games. All of these games predate my entry to the internet, and so represent a sort of Precambrian/Paleozoic era of gaming, when I’d play literally every game that I came across, legally or not. There were no such things as games not worth playing yet.
microsoft decathlon
(microsoft / electronic arts)
I received my first computer as a gift from my uncle, who worked with computers in California. At least, that’s what my parents told me, despite my precociously persistent elementary-school questions: What exactly does he do? Where does he work? What kind of computers? Does he make robots? I’ve come to realize that they simply do not know what he does, nor do they care, because computer concepts cause their brains to swell painfully. My father describes my graduate studies (medical informatics) as ‘something biomedical.’ I’ve learned not to explain to any more detail, lest they collapse and have seizures from the information overload. Anyway, my uncle-in-California gave us this monstrously huge 286 for Christmas one year, along with a handful of games he had pirated sometime in 80’s, all of them on 5.25″ floppies. Hardly any of them worked anymore, for one reason or another. Decathlon was one of the few that did, which made it awesome by default. Moreover, it was multiplayer, so my brother and I could fuel our growing sibling rivalry by bashing keys on the keyboard as fast as we could. We’d play until our fingers and hands were sore, and oftentimes we’d quit before the actual 10 events were up. We’d never do all that well—we never placed higher than 5th, and the computer, which never had to worry about nagging repetitive stress injuries, pretty much destroyed us every time by embarrassing margins of victory. But at least I kicked Nick’s ass at the 100-meter dash, even if all I did was hit O and P as fast as I could.
pirates!
(microprose)
Back when Babbage’s carried only PC games, I found this game on the sale rack for $9.99. I convinced my parents to buy this for me for Christmas. I think I somehow convinced them that it was of some educational value or something like that. Funny how that works out. Years later, I won my middle school’s geography bee on a question about the names of Caribbean islands, the answer to which I recalled from playing this game. It was a strangely satisfying feeling. I remember telling my mom how I knew the answer, but she never quite seemed to care as much as I would have liked.
prince of persia
(broderbund)
Before I understood the concept of “platform jumpers” as merely a genre and not the totality of PC gaming—that is, when all games available to me were essentially 2d side-scrolling action games that involved running, jumping and defeating enemies—there was Prince of Persia. Despite the simplicity of the graphics, I was blown away by the natural, fluid character animation, the smoothness of the transitions and the subtle, convincing touches of realism throughout. It was also the first game in which I remember feeling real anxiety. I felt palpable, eleven-year old fear whenever I entered a room with full of enemies with only one heart remaining, knowing that I would have to start over way back wherever if I died.
red baron
(dynamix / sierra)
This was the very first flight simulator I played to any serious degree. My friends were all in love with the super-high-tech military jet games based around stealth fighters, games that required keyboard overlays to remind players which button to push at what time. Far too complex for me, especially with my hand-me-down two-button Kraft KC3 joystick. Not exactly Top Gun. Red Baron was easy to play, easy to grasp, and introduced me to the world of blacking out from G forces and jamming guns. It took its period sensibilities seriously, allowed you to play as either Central or Allied powers, and let you fly free-form missions of your own design. And blowing up dirigibles was about the most fun thing ever. Incendiary ammunition! Awesome.
Last but not least…
nba live 95
(ea sports)
The mother of all sports games. If one were to examine my console-game collection, one would notice it is made up of mostly sports titles, nearly all of them produced by Electronic Arts. This disturbing habit can be directly traced back to a fateful evening some 12 years ago when my brother and I saw a commercial where Chris Mullin and Chris Webber skip practice to play NBA Live 95 and Coach Nelson angrily drags both players and the console itself back out to the court. We decided then and there that we simply needed to have this game. Somehow we tricked our parents into buying it for us (surprise, surprise!) and the rest is history. We’ve played and/or owned every iteration of the title since, learning valuable basketball strategies like Center’s Gotta Shoot the Three Every Now and Then, Small Forwards are Pretty Much Interchangable and Full Court Press is the Only Defense Worth Anything. Additionally, we’ve developed a nasty Madden NFL dependency along the way.
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