Favourite games from the 80's (MSN Forums)

[LordGaz]

Got directed to this thread whilst checking my email just now, people are listing their favourite games from the 80's, some nice nostalgia there . I already listed my games .

http://boards.msn.com/UK_Tech_Gadgetsbo ... did=697082

[NotMan]

Solo187 wrote:

Yeh The C64 was The King Of The 80's No Doubt

LOL! No wonder mahlemiut is pissed off. No CPC in 80's??? Nice to see some people like Speccy there.

C64 (no partlicular order)

Bruce Lee
Impossible Mission
Ms Pacman
Arkanoid
Bard's Tale I
Lode Runner
Jumpman
Hyper Sport

Arcade

Donkey Kong
Pacman/Ms Pacman
Gauntlet
Galaga
Tetris
and too much much more which I can't remember right this moment.

NotMan

[mahlemiut]

Solo187 wrote:

Yeh The C64 was The King Of The 80's No Doubt

LOL! No wonder mahlemiut is pissed off. No CPC in 80's??? Nice to see some people like Speccy there.

Hah, I'll just throw Richard Wilson's port of Frogger to the CPC+ in their face. (ignoring that the CPC+ was released in 1990, and this port was written in 2007 )

[LordGaz]

I never owned a speccy, I was a BBC Micro man. I was always around friends houses playing on their spectrums though. Games that come to mind are The Alchemist, The Manic Miner & JSW games of course, Starblitz, Wild West Hero, Wheelie, Lunar Jetman, Styx, Nightmare Park etc.

[Frankie]

I never owned a speccy, I was a BBC Micro man. I was always around friends houses playing on their spectrums though. Games that come to mind are The Alchemist, The Manic Miner & JSW games of course, Starblitz, Wild West Hero, Wheelie, Lunar Jetman, Styx, Nightmare Park etc.

You can compete in some of these Spectrum games over at HARP if you care

[The TJT]

Elite, anyone ever played this? Was it on that "beebs" system?
Football manager?
The sentinel?
Manic Miner - Yeah, must be a British list...
Prince of Persia, FFS!
Sim City, so eighties, not.

Well they got Gauntlet, Pac Man and Track'n'Field "right"...

[mahlemiut]

Elite, anyone ever played this? Was it on that "beebs" system?
Football manager?
The sentinel?
Manic Miner - Yeah, must be a British list...
Prince of Persia, FFS!
Sim City, so eighties, not.

Also all on the Amstrad CPC too...
Well, except maybe Football Manager, hard to tell when there are plenty of football manager type games around.

[Alessandro.S]

Sim City, so eighties, not.

Well I did play SimCity on the University PCs instead of studying... and it was 1988 or 1989 (I started the Uni in late 1987 and quit by June 1990 after realizing I'd never complete it )

According to Wikipedia it was 1989, all right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity

[LordGaz]

Yup, Elite came out originally on the "Beeb". Spent a few hours on it myself, I can even remember the sequence of levels you went through on the way to "Elite".

Harmless, Mostly Harmless, Poor,
Average, Above Average, Competent,
Dangerous, Deadly, Elite.

It did a great job of giving the illusion that the game was massive when the whole gameplay was actually quite simple but so well written (I hate university boffs ), and it had to be considering the code had to fit inside 32k RAM of which around only 20k was usable after screen memory and OS space is taken out. The screen memory had to store half the code while it loaded in from tape and relocated itself. I don't think file compression was even invented then.

The 3D graphics were all wireframe and see-through except for the sun which was solid and EOR'ed over the stars. The enemy ships generally were on screen one at a time except for the vipers which came in packs.

[mahlemiut]

I was always (and still am) amazed as to how The Sentinel, managed to squeeze 10,000 solid 3D levels into just 42Kb of RAM...

[LordGaz]

Probably generated them randomly using the level number as the initial rng seed.

[mahlemiut]

The levels aren't random at all.

Most likely is that some levels are repeated, but with a different layout of enemies and stuff (and a different colour scheme), to make it harder.