When I was in Junior High, there was a computer room where some students could play with computers. The computers they had for the students were donated TRS-80's. One of the games for those computers was Hammurabi. Though it might of gone by another name, such as Camelot, or Verona. There were various versions, including a DOS port.
The scenario of Hammurabi is that you are managing a feudal kingdom, and you have limited resources. You want your kingdom to grow. On occasion, the rats eats part of your grain storage. If you don't have enough food for the people in your city, they will remove you from office (and you lose the game). To win requires carefully balancing your resources to grow your acreage, feed your people, and sow crops to have grain for the coming year. Hammurabi was an ancient ancestor of games like Populus or Civilization, where the player are in charge of managing economies and populace.
We had an Atari 2600 way back in the day. We of course, had a dozen or so games. One that my brothers and I played a fair bit of was Air Sea Battle. Air Sea Battle had one or two players, which the preferred method was with two players. The players would then shoot at planes and ships. After a certain time, the winner of the round would be declared by the amount of destruction he or she had reaped. This may be a formative area for my love of destroying things (hard disk drives, etc).
There were some screens where you shot at planes, and some screens where you shot at boats. I recall being able to change the speed of one of the planes. Definitely a game for two players, who can appreciate the Atari 2600's rudimentary graphics. Use your imagination! They're planes, jets, battleships, submarines, mines, balloons, frigates, and canons/howitzers.
It's amazing what you can find on the internet with enough persistence and a little google-fu. When I was much younger, we had an Apple ][, and I spent much time on it creating cityscapes with Microzine 7: City Blocks.
City Blocks allowed for a small graphical man to move around 'city blocks.' you could maneuver the man, up down, left right, and he could pick up and drop blocks. The city blocks were graphical tiles that had pictures of parts of a city, or partial parts of larger building. It was a very early ancestor of the type of game-play that Minecraft might typify today: the creative sandbox. You could save your creations, and I'd make many different cities, with different aspects of the tiles (there was only about 50 tiles total.
One of the simplest games, but yet an arcade staple was the the original, the Space Invaders.
The game featured a relentless march of invading aliens with an ever increasing tempo. You were in the tempest in the fury of survival, with diminishing defenses. Your only recourse was a high score in the name of planetary defense.
As the player, you moved a mobile ground based canon that shot (one at a time) into the sky towards the descending invaders. The invaders marched in cadence, back and forth across the screen, descending after every cycle. The cadence increased the long the aliens persisted. The best way to play was to make every shot count, and to make the shots connect with the lower rows of aliens first. The aliens would shoot back, and you had several bunkers to hide behind. Though the bunkers were damages by the aliens' blasts.
A very memorable part of space invaders was the increasing tempo as the invaders drew closer. This usually had the effect of driving the defenders into a panic, resulting in folly and a landing of the aliens!
Another great game that we enjoyed on the Apple ][ computer as kinds was Artillery (game_01a.dsk). Artillery was a ancestor of the now ancient shareware game Scorch (Scorched Earth), probably the first in turn based artillery genre. Artillery used basic math to pit two forces against each other. There was a mountain in between the two 'castles,' and the castles took turns shooting rounds at each other. There was a random variable to each game, the wind. After a while, you became good at predicting the best angle and velocity to put into your round, but the wind always meant that there was and element of learning.
I loved this game, and before we finally donated our ancient IIgs, I printed off the source code for it (via dot matix). Although it did not matter as much of what was popular is archived online. Artillery the program was programmed in Apple Basic; the source code for Artillery was a paltry 175 lines (including 34 lines of remarks/metadata information):
I've conceived of a new project, I'm wanting to document some of my favorite electronic games that I've enjoyed over the years. I could start with Space Invaders, but I'll start with another of the first games I remember, Apple ][ - Olympic Decathalon.
In the dawn of the 1980's, there were the heady days of the Apple ][ and the onset of personal computing. With the rising tide of personal computing came games, and themed games representing sporting events were an aspect of electronic gaming. The 1980s started with the USA's boycott of the Olympic games in the USSR. Which then resulted in the USSR's boycott of the games in 1984 in Los Angeles. An interesting time, but the spirit of the Olympics was alive in the electronic competition of Olympic Decathlon.
The game, like many early computer games had some rudimentary input controls. For instance, for the foot race, you would alternately mash the 1 and 2 keys as fast as possible. If you were racing multiple people, they would also mash keys simultaneously, to see who could mash keys the fastest!
The game also used the Apple ][ paddles, which allowed for some analog input, but was rather horribly executed. Analog input was generally terrible until the computer joysticks became more popular, allowing developers to come to grips with how to effectively integrate analog input.
One of the most memorable parts of the game was the monophonic music during the opening crawl, roughly approximating the Olympic theme song Bugler's Dream.
Portland was not prepared for the waves of snow it received this year. One side effect of the snow and rain was a decent buildup of washboard style ice ridges on the freeway. After that melted away, the potholes began appearing, and have created a minefield. Though that may only be a partial cause for the replacement of the tires on the Prius. It was time to get new tires, as they were light on tread.
The safety warning was bulging out. The blister was a literal emphasis upon the message.
