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The latest double, triple, or quadruple "a" game just came out; yet another promising $19,99 "indie" has just released on Steam or, wait...there's actually a nice discount on it on Steam! And hey, "what about the backlog???!?!?111"

But NOOO, you're stuck in your 3D wire-framed vectored and pixellated past, wasting your precious gaming time starting another run-through of Eye of the Beholder; or, hell, having another try at that obscure text-driven Magnetic Scrolls adventure you never finished as a kid (*whistles*). Or, just fire up 2 or 3 arcade games from the '80s on MAME (hello, "Punch-out", my old friend) and there it goes your gaming night. Great.

Welcome to the Retrogaming thread. where we can post about our experiences and memories with games (Atari line, Amiga, C64, Amstrad, Spectrum, PC and Console) long forgotten (gameplay, graphics, screenshots, box covers or whatever else); or either, from time to time, post snippets of current playthroughs (for detailed runs, the radicalthon thread is next door, like Kail is doing for Ultima), advices, tips, suggestions, etc.

My personal time frame for Retrogaming: 1978 - '97-'98 (release of Final Fantasy 7 on consoles, or Baldur's Gate 1 on the PC). But that's just to give you an idea, no need to stick to it.
-------------------

Let me start the thread by posting the box cover and a single screenshot from a game (just one of the countless we could post about); let's see if any of you played or...my god, even actually FINISHED it:

(http://www.atarimania.com/st/boxes/hi_res/barbarian_psygnosis_d7.jpg) (http://www.projectfirestart.org/amiga/barbarian_atarist.png)

http://www.mobygames.com/game/barbarian

I so loved the controls in this game....NOT.  So much frustration toward the screen and at my poor Atari ST mouse. But hey, I think I actually managed to get past the...umm, third of fourth screen of the game :P. Still, nostalgia is strong with this one: environments were nicely done, loved the big sprites and how colourful it was. But, yeah, best thing was of course the box cover by Roger Dean (one of his many masterpieces).

I was mostly interested in Barbarian because the game was banned in in my home country Germany. Like a lot of games that "overly celebrated violence".

A lot of the games look outright silly on those lists. 1942 was banned, Raid over Moscow, Barbarian and Barbarian 2, Blue Max, Rive Raid. Didn't prevent us from getting them and playing them though.

LOL. I kinda understand (though I would never approve that censorship) for the two Barbarians; but Blue Max, River Raid (never played it, looked it up on Google) and especially Raid over Moscow, which was a fantastic game? (but yeah, I get the "war" background and all that).

Regarding Raid over Moscow, I played it on the Atari 800xl and the craziest part was at the beginning when you had to manouver your planes out of the hangar: they "slided" all over the place so, in the end, it was funnier to just crash them on the walls :P

Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wujic5k8n3E

Box:
(http://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/72440-raid-over-moscow-commodore-64-front-cover.jpg)

I never made it past the sliding plane part in Raid over Moscow.

My first game system was an actual Atari VCS 2600 (the original edition with the fake wood paneling) that came with two joysticks, Pac  Man and Zaxxon. Got it in 1981 or 82 when I was five or six years old. Got it at Christmas and couldn't play it for a week because my Uncle and my Dad hogged it and constantly played it.

I still like those two games even though they are really shitty ports of the arcade titles. Probably still have that system somewhere in my parent's house

I remember playing Raid Over Moscow on my first computer which happened to be Amstrad CPC464.  :grin:

My old roommate collects ancient systems and games, lots of older games are nearly unplayable, shitty designs. Like everything on the Vectrex is nifty looking, but shit for play. Minestorm crashes after 10 or so levels, but all the novelty and fun are gone by level 5.
I'll try to fire up the OdysseyII next week while I'm here and get some shots from Quest for the Rings.

I played a bunch of River Raid and Blue Max growing up but I guess I was too young to think of them as anything other than games.  I had no idea they were controversial or banned anywhere, that's pretty interesting.

I have 2 Atari 800s packed away with loads of games but it's been ages since I've done anything with them.  They take a huge amount of desk space  plus at this point I'd want to hook it into my computer and I'd have to figure out how to even do that.  It would be a fun project though at some point if I could ever make the time.

Daaaaaaaaaaaamn, that takes me back.  One of the kids in my neighborhood had an Odyssey 2 when I was 12 or 13.  We played so much Quest for the Rings.  The insta-death invisible levels sucked so much.

that and KC Munchkin (totally not a pac-man rip-off, because the dots move!)!

During some clean up/move I let my parents throw away my dear Atari 1040 ST and I would love to get another functioning one, preferably along with the original, glorious SC1224 Monitor:

(http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTIwMFgxNjAw/z/oogAAOSwv0tVUjut/$_1.JPG)

Emulators are great and all, but that CRT/small screen feel can't be reproduced (although you might find some SweetFX/dosbox settings that try to emulate it as well).

No matter the fact that the 800xl was my first "computer" ever (with the C64 as a funny and pleasant interlude) with the Atari ST I finally mutated into a "gamer" specimen :ye_gods:

P.S. My favourite Pacman (always disliked the original):
(http://www.retrogaminghistory.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=21082&d=1361312290&stc=1)

you're a crazy person

In my defense, I'm also a Star Citizen backer.



Oh wait.

I could fill this thread.

Currently have one MAME cab I have been working on for years. It has a slot machine marquee monitor that changes based on game and emu. It has a robotic servo mount on the monitor that rotates on the fly to match whether the game (Centipede, for example) or emu (Vectrex) is in portrait mode. (Build thread here: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=153370.0 and video is here: https://www.pololu.com/blog/649/automatic-rotating-arcade-cabinet-display). It has a massively customized control panel with dual spinners, dual analog sticks, dedicated exit, coin, and back buttons, and a trackball, all RGB LED illuminated so that I can light up game-specific controls. A 270 steering wheel is there too.

This thing currently emulates Tennis for Two, Space War, assorted pinball, early integrated circuit arcade machines via DICE, MAME, Astrocade, Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, 8 bits, Lynx, Channel F, Apple II, B&W Mac, Colecovision, Intellivision, C64, Vic-20, PET, Game & Watch, Microvision, GB, GBC, GBA, DS, NES, SNES, Odyssey 1, Odyssey 2/Videopac, GameGear, Master System, Genesis, PSP, Vectrex, and more. I did a custom graphic design for the frontend and the library is sorted so you can browse through historically in chronological order or by platform, with historical information attached to each platform or category. It's called "Press Start: Emulating Videogame History" and kinda resembles a museum kiosk at this point, TBH.

I actually recently released MVEM 15, which is currently the best Microvision emulator out there, originally authored by Paul Robson... updated to be cab-friendly, and with full artwork for every game, see https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/05/07/microvision-emulator-release/.

I also have now built two bartops out of old iCades using Raspberry Pi. The first one was a gift for my nephew for his 11th. The second one is evolving to be a mini version of the big one, with trackball support, additional buttons added, replacement electronics for the controls, and even a mini-keyboard mounted in the base.

I also have several older machines too, but space has kept me from really collecting seriously.

PS, I once beat Blue Max on highest difficulty and got Ace ranking.

Yeah well...

/thread  :grin:

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No, but seriously, that's amazing, Raph: now that's what I call being passionate about something.

Another random game I played on the Atari ST (later ported to the Amiga and Amstrad):

(http://a141.idata.over-blog.com/500x375/5/81/07/87/ORDIS-RETRO/atari_nh.jpg)(http://retroshowcase.com/images/computers/Amiga/41/4.jpg)

Night Hunter (1988):
http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-st/night-hunter

Has anyone played it?

Colour palette was pretty nice, environments were quite detailed for the time and, for once, on the ST the movement of all the characters on the screen was fluid, unlike other games of that era on the platform (I still hate you, Black Lamp (http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-st/black-lamp/screenshots)).

While I never understood what I was actually supposed to do, sucking blood with Dracula and watch people become skeletons while crumbling to the ground was half the fun  :grin:

I had an Atari ST growing up and played a ton of games on it.  Among my favorites:

(https://www.arcade-museum.com/images/118/118124214369.png)

(https://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17h65wnmwrfb3jpg/ku-xlarge.jpg)

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/ba/Sundogbox.JPG)

(http://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/25645-time-bandit-dos-front-cover.jpg)

Sundog! Was too young to really understand it (not to mention the language barrier), but hey, FTL went on to make a certain game called "Dungeon Master" after that :).
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According to Wikipedia, August 2017 also marks 35 years since the U.S. launch of the Commodore 64; I remember dabbling with Basic, copying lines of code on the screen in order to get that damn moving ball at the end  :grin:

I really liked a lot of games on that platform, especially sport ones. Among my favorites:

Championship Wrestling:
(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rLB4rR0fP-4/hqdefault.jpg)

The whole "Street sport" franchise by the legendary Epyx software house (here's the basketball one)
(http://ready64.it/giochi/full/s/street_sports_basketball_04.png)(https://www.c64-wiki.com/images/c/c7/SS_Basketball_turfselect.png)

Summer Games 1984, again by Epyx (I basically learnt some of  the national anthems thanks to that game :D)
(https://www.c64-wiki.com/images/0/05/Summergames-cover.jpg)

Microprose Soccer, of course:
(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hX6F9ftgGJ0/maxresdefault.jpg)

Among Others, non-sports games, one of my favourite was Sabouter:
(http://www.lemon64.com/games/screenshots/ext_full/s/saboteur_ii_04.gif)

Last but not least, I owned this...
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Commodore-Datassette.jpg)

...and I'm proud to be part of the highly special bunch that, with the tape version, actually managed to get to the intro screen of the "Highlander" game after a...LONG loading time. But, well, no proof, so you'll have to take my word on that  :why_so_serious:

Can we rename this thread "Nostalgia: A Gaming Genre" because seriously, retrogaming implies that these are things worth playing and I don't want people to get confused. ʘ‿ʘ

Oh wow, the Sundog Resurrection Project (http://sundogresurrectionproject.com/index.html) went into beta last year.  I remember running across it about ten years ago and it inspired me to fire up the original in an emulator (it actually holds up pretty well in some respects, I really like the ship upgrade/repair system where you have to swap parts around and sometimes make tradeoffs when expensive components burn out).

Screenshot from the remake:
(http://sundogresurrectionproject.com/images/Screenshots/screenshot12.png)
I think it's awesome how they've "upgraded" the graphics by only about ten years compared to the original.   :grin:  All the way from 4-bit color to 8-bit color!

Wow, a Sundog remake. I can stop having an Atari ST Emulator on my PC just for one game.

Sundog really was the game that make me think in a few years (from then) games can do everything. After Dungeon Master came out I thought their next game could be a simulation from a whole solar system down to crawling through individual dungeons you discover while exploring planets you land on (it had the potagonist of Sundog as a playable character after all, so the games were in the same universe, for sure).

Oh, the naivety of youth.  :awesome_for_real:

Dungeon Master.

Sigh.

Going by that benchmark 99% of retrogaming is useless. Theres probably only a handful of games from the early home computer era up to and including the Genesis/SNES that are really still worth playing and that stood the test of time.

fify  :grin:

Bah. There's more than that *per platform,* honestly. You'd be surprised.

Showed my kid Montezuma's Revenge; that would be perfectly at home on a DS today. They got hooked on Goonies too, too bad the controls are a bit stiff, but the two-player puzzle solving totally holds up.

Spelunky is basically a modern version of Montezuma's Revenge/Rick Dangerous

RICK DANGEROUS.  OMG.

Stop guys.  Stop.

I used to love my life.

Ironwood, I owned both a C64 and an Amiga. I was living and breathing shitty games like Rick Dangerous (Amiga Version).

The NES was ridiculously expensive and almost unavailable in Germany and the SNES came out August 1992 over here. So it was Commodore all the way until Super Mario World

The Commodore 64 was the greatest gaming platform ever built.

I'll fight anyone who disagrees.

A lot of games surely had their own unique colour flavour (when it came to music too) on the C64 when compared to the emerging 16-bit counterparts. For example, this little piece of software here, which is still considered among the best ones on the platform:

(https://www.nerdream.it/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/289117-ninja1.gif)

It was also true for the static images of some text-based games like the Magnetic Scrolls ones (here's a small pic from The Pawn):
(http://birdsanctuary.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/the-pawn-c64-01.png)

The Atari 8 bits had a superior architecture, and in many cases the canonical version of a game was on Atari not C64. But I'll grant that given the sheer quantity of C64 titles, there may be a better overall library there.

Last Ninja had absolute horrible controls and some items were literally only a few pixels and easy to miss but it had awesome music and graphics for its time and the fact that it was a C64 game.

I almost feel like you two wanna go....

I would say C64 for nostalgia reasons, copying games on tapes. Played the crap out of games like Sid Meier's pirates, beat 'em up like double dragon, arcade games like 1942, so many games. The jumping sequence in the last ninja made me want to hurt kittens though. Then you had this
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/Normal_tac2.jpg/250px-Normal_tac2.jpg)

My C64 was my first computer/console. I also have like 2 of those joysticks.

Rose tinted Nostalgia glasses are great and all and I dearly love my C64 (it is still around somewhere including hundreds of 5 1/4 inch floppy discs with all of the games) but most of the C64 library hasn't aged very well - even compared to other home computer systems of the time. The memory of most people is probably also influenced by most of us having played pirated copies of most of the C64 games. Usually with a neat cracker intro and a trainer that gave you infinite lives.

A whole lot of the library of the C64 is shovelware or not entirely legal remakes of arcade or NES games and a lot of it suffers from bad controls or other gameplay issues. The Last NInja series is a great example. You probably can't push the C64 much further as far as graphics and sound capabilities are concerened and the soundtrack to Last Ninja has aged rather well. The gameplay is a whole differet story though. Pixel hunting for quest items, pixel pefect jumps to avoid insta-death and a clunky combat system. Try to play it without infinite lives.

Especially if you compare it to what was available on the NES or in the arcades at that time.

Also most of the really good games were actually available for all or most of the home computers of the time. The list of platform exclusives that were also great wasn't that large.

The Atari/Commodore wars are long over, I'd hope we can have a less argumentative discussion about it at this point.

But you're nuts if you play any version of MULE other than the Atari one. ;)

RIGHT THAT'S IT LETS GO  :why_so_serious:

I'm not even sure if you could get a hold of Atari in 1983 small town Australia. All I know is my Dad stopped at the races on the way home from work, hit a winner and we got a c64 out of it (and pizza that night woot!). I was still playing that thing 8 years later. God bless that horse.

I am trying to think of a good game I played on my Spectrum. All I can think of is "The Sacred Armour of Antirad." Which is a game you can probably complete in literally 10 minutes. But I played the absolute shite out of. Over and over. I'm not crazy...~~

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/72/Antiriad.jpg)

I still remember the text messege when you succeeded "YOU WIN YOUR RACE IS FREE PRESS FIRE TO PLAY AGAIN" Yep, no punctuation.

My first computer was a VIC-20, the precursor to the Commedore 64. With an eye watering 3.5K of memory. My fav on that was an up scrolling plane shooting thing that was utterly impossible. I only got to the second level twice.

ZX Spectrum? I don't know how many hours I wasted playing Manic Miner. But then, I never was that good at platformers.  :awesome_for_real:


(https://regmedia.co.uk/2011/07/06/manic_miner_2.jpg)

never played Manic Miner, but sank a fair amount of hours into Jet Set Willy II. never could get more than 10 rooms into it as I sucked!

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_Set_Willy#/media/File:JetSetWilly-ColdStore.png)

In addition to Wizardry 6, I just started up an Ultima IV game as a paladin (fuck Dupre). Wow is it an easier start than mage. I can kick the shit out of anything that comes at me on the map, at least so far.