8-bit legends: The golden days of gaming

[The Succubus]

Howdy,

This thread is for discussion of the truly legendary days of gaming and the 8-bit 3 way war between Spectrum/Amstrad/Commodore was the focus of many Playground scuffles.

What this thread is *NOT* about: Nintendo/Sega consoles or their kind.

The reason I was inspired to start this is because a lot of my social circle have been talking about the old Dizzy games and their reappearence on iOS and Android. After successfully prying my sister's iPad out of my hands (almost finished the Dizzy game as well) we spent the evening playing a game where we had to identify old 8 bit games from their theme tunes. Games like Glider Rider, Tau Ceti, Druid and the ever popular Dizzy games were immediately recognised, the more obscure stuff like Roland in Time (no relation to our glorious mod overlord), Auf Wiedersehn Monty took a little longer.

Are there any games from that era that have permanently embedded themselves in your brain? Would you know how to get past the Wide-Eyed Dragon in Fantasy World Dizzy?

Share your nostalgic memories! :smallbiggrin:

[factotum]

The game I always loved was Strangeloop on the Spectrum...although to this day I have no idea what the loading screen picture had to do with the actual game! Honourable 2nd place to Tau Ceti: Academy, which had the most awesome shaded 3D graphics...on a Spectrum! (OK, the programmer cheated by making all the objects in the game circular, which made it a lot easier for him to do the shading...).

[The Succubus]

Mmmm. The 3D capabilities of the 8-bits were very surprising for their time.

Think, if you will, about the first "true" 3D games - Total Eclipse, Driller and Castle Master (and to a different extent, Sentinel).

These games were able to support first attempts at 3D rendering, positioning and object manipulation (I still remember having endless fun with the Stone Throw Teleport potion in CM :smallbiggrin:), all in a program no bigger than your bog standard text document.

It does leave a little surpised as to why modern games take up the colossal amounts of space they do. Not being a programmer, I couldn't say whether this was down to unoptimised code or not. Whatever the reason, it never ceased to amaze me what they could do with that tiny amount of space.

Hell, we even had speech synthesisers and everyone remembers Codemaster's introductory voice-overs. >8D

[Morph Bark]

Are you solely talking about the years 1980-1983, or are you including the games that were made for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC (the latter two only really appearing much in Europe, primarily the UK) later on? Apparently there were over 90 games released for the ZX Spectrum in 2010, so I was wondering if you meant to include those.

Otherwise you're only talking about give or take four years nearly 30 years ago only in the UK.

[Avilan the Grey]

I have replayed a lot of my old favorites later and unfortunately I think that was a mistake; basically all of them are really really awful compared to newer games when you have the nostalgia filter ripped off your eyes by trying them again.

Some still stand, of course, but mainly the ones that are classics anyway, such as Pac-Man and Tetris.

Games I remember I loved at that time though (played on my C64):

Monty's Revenge
Blue Max
Uridium
Saxon
Whats-it-called... the game where you rescued soldiers with a helicopter
Ghosts And Goblins
Boulder Dash (which I still consider a great game)
Exploding Fist

[The Succubus]

Are you solely talking about the years 1980-1983, or are you including the games that were made for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC (the latter two only really appearing much in Europe, primarily the UK) later on? Apparently there were over 90 games released for the ZX Spectrum in 2010, so I was wondering if you meant to include those.

Otherwise you're only talking about give or take four years nearly 30 years ago only in the UK.

I guess what I'm looking for is the early 8-bit home computers, when commercial software houses were producing for them, rather than home-programmed stuff so much. So it's mainly the 1980-1990 period. I'm trying to avoid discussing consoles, as there are often quite a few discussing stuff released (usually on the SNES) and not so much for the old computer systems (which also extended to the Atari ST and very early Amiga systems).

As for the replability of old games, again granted not many of them have strong replay value (although quite a lot do :smallbiggrin:). This is merely an old man wallowing in the pit of nostalgia. Feel free to join me. :smalltongue:

[Morph Bark]

As for the replability of old games, again granted not many of them have strong replay value (although quite a lot do :smallbiggrin:). This is merely an old man wallowing in the pit of nostalgia. Feel free to join me. :smalltongue:

I'll have to decline, sadly. I was born in 1990 and mostly know of these consoles thanks to friends. I don't think we ever even owned a Commodore and our first gaming console was a GameCube, though later we also got a NES and Nintendo 64 and I've played on other non-Nintendo consoles at friends houses, but nothing that was created prior to 1983. I hadn't even heard about the ZX Spectrum until I looked it up (and found out there were still new games being made for it). :smallredface: I'm intruiged to hear that some of the old stuff is resurfacing as games for smartphones and the like though. That will give the newer generations a whiff of the ol' stuff and I've always quite liked that, both in gaming and otherwise.

[pendell]

As it turns out, *I* was born in 1971.

The games I remember from that epoch as standing out most clearly ...

Pitfall 2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitfall_II:_Lost_Caverns)

One of the earliest dungeon crawls, our hero found his way swimming through rivers, riding balloons, and solving puzzles to find his niece Rhonda, his cowardly pet Quickclaw, and the Raj Diamond from the caverns. Holds up well today, especially if you can get the Adventurer's edition which has the second cavern.


The Dreadnaught Factor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreadnaught_Factor)

One of the earliest examples of Nintendo Hard. They gave you four, count 'em, four extra lives for every level on difficulty setting "4" and above, and it still wasn't enough. My gosh, that game was intense. The trick was to disable the dreadnaught engines and tackle a few portions of the space defense grid at a time ... if you took on two much, your ship would be annihilated by guided particles, energy beams, and kamikaze drones. Vicious, absolutely vicious.

Star Raiders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Raiders), an early space strategy game. It required careful navigation through hyperspace jumps, managing energy consumption, strategy to protect the starbases, and superb space battle. Not until Wing Commander came out would there be a better space game.

Starflight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight). Somewhat eclipsed by star control 2, for its time it was a very engaging, engrossing game as we explored the galaxy in the hopes of saving what was left of humanity and allied species.


That's enough for now. Maybe more memories later.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Balain]

:et's see For my C64 I played all the time, Mail Order Monsters, Ultima 4, Ultima 5, Jumpman, Trolls and Tribulations, nightshade, druids, bruce lee, bard's tale, Karteka, Autoduel, Skool daze, Pitfall 2

On my Vic 20 I played hours of rat race and clowns

[Gnoman]

Are you solely talking about the years 1980-1983, or are you including the games that were made for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC (the latter two only really appearing much in Europe, primarily the UK) later on? Apparently there were over 90 games released for the ZX Spectrum in 2010, so I was wondering if you meant to include those.

Otherwise you're only talking about give or take four years nearly 30 years ago only in the UK.

The Commodore 64 ruled the US market with an iron fist, so it's far from "only in the UK" even if the other two didn't make any dent over here. (Commodore's only real competitors here were Apple and Commodore.)

With that said, the game I remember most is exceedingly rare in "legitimate" form, as Nintendo brought the wrath of the courts down on it. The Great Giana sisters was a pretty blatant Mario ripoff, but had more memorable music and stage design, along with a lot more game to it. (The total number of levels is the same (32), but they were generally far longer, and there were no "stub" levels like some of the Mario castles.)

[Avilan the Grey]

:et's see For my C64 I played all the time, Mail Order Monsters, Ultima 4, Ultima 5, Jumpman, Trolls and Tribulations, nightshade, druids, bruce lee, bard's tale, Karteka, Autoduel, Skool daze, Pitfall 2

On my Vic 20 I played hours of rat race and clowns

Ah... Rat Race... Better, but more annoying, than Moon Lander. :smalltongue:

Bruce Lee... I guess I was too young, I never figured out the goal of that game other than kicking that one ninja and that one sumo (that could kung-fu kick, for some reason).

Speaking of Monsters, I did find Movie Monsters and the orginal Ghostbusters game entertaining.

[factotum]

|(Commodore's only real competitors here were Apple and Commodore.)


Commodore were competing...with themselves? :smallconfused: No wonder they went bust in 1994...

[Avilan the Grey]

Commodore were competing...with themselves? :smallconfused: No wonder they went bust in 1994...

Commodore 128?

[Balain]

...orginal Ghostbusters game entertaining.

Oh man how could I forget Ghostbusters I played that soooooo much

[Avilan the Grey]

Oh man how could I forget Ghostbusters I played that soooooo much

"He slimed me!" :smallbiggrin:

[The Succubus]

Does anyone else remember a game with the unusual name of Ranarama?

It was a semi-roguelike game where you controlled a magic frog through various levels of dungeons and faced off against enemies like soldiers and wyrms.

What made the game different was the mental combat you could do against the warlocks and necromancers - if you were successful, they dropped various runes of power on the floor which could be combined to make spells. There were also Glyphs, which served as AoE explosions, travel routes, maps and spell creation areas.

I'd love to see a modern take on it.

[Sprinter]

The Commodore 64 ruled the US market with an iron fist, so it's far from "only in the UK" even if the other two didn't make any dent over here. (Commodore's only real competitors here were Apple and Commodore.)


Main competitor to Commodore 64 around here was Atari 800XE or 800XL rivalry was quite intense it went even into games. I remember great game called Mercenary (vector graphic 3D game with big game world/planet to explore) had destroyable billboards with Atari and Commodore logos on it. For destroying Commodore billboard game called me traitor while friends version was praising him but then again he had Atari 800 while i had Commodore +4. :smallbiggrin:

But the most popular (and also cheapest) was ZX Spectrum and dozens of its clones all with Zilog Z80 as core.

[Gnoman]

Commodore were competing...with themselves? :smallconfused: No wonder they went bust in 1994...

`Mainly was referring to the horrendous mismanagement and extremely poor marketing decisions that Commodore made, leading to their implosion.