What? You seriously think I’m going to go on Ebay, Craigslist or any of the other repositories of discarded junk that exist on the internet and elsewhere, dig up an R.O.B. and play one of these games with it? I’m sorry, do I really look that stupid to you? R.O.B. was a novelty item. I had the misfortune of encountering one when I was a kid, and remember wondering what kind of individual would use a robot that played exactly two games (badly) as a substitute for friends.
I don’t even…
John’s Rating: Gyromite (aka Robot Gyro) and Stack Up (aka Robot Block) 0.0 out of 5.0
Year: 1985 Publisher: Nintendo Genre: Sports – Golf
I have never actually played the sport of golf. I’d like to try sometime – I understand that playing golf is a prerequisite for a career requiring any degree of PR – but I just haven’t ever had the opportunity. I once hit a golf ball with a golf club and, in an impressive feat of pure beginners luck, hit the post I was told to aim for.
But I’m skeptical of video games that try to take an already relaxing and generally unathletic* activity and turn it into a relaxing and generally unathletic game experience.
Year: 1985 Publisher: Nintendo Genre: Racing – Side-view
If you were anything like me as a kid, you wanted a dirtbike. You probably weren’t anything like me as a kid, but you probably still wanted a dirtbike because, let’s face it, dirtbikes are cool, and every kid wanted one. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably the kind of person who thinks that fishing is a sport. Of course, my parents didn’t have the money to just up and buy me a dirtbike, and given my incredible penchant for falling off my regular bike and injuring myself, I think it’s fair to say that they have other motives for failing to get me one. Thus, video games were the closest I would ever get to living that particular dream.
They weren’t much for title screens in 1985
I remember liking this game a lot as a child, but that I didn’t remember playing it much, which is strange, since there’s a fairly extensive list of great and not-so-great games I remember playing for hours on end (yes, I have vivid childhood memories of playing video games).Now, as an adult, I can understand how that came to be.
It gets old. Fast.
No, really, it’s a very good game – to say otherwise is to be a fool or a liar! The controls are tight and logical, the graphics are sufficient, the sounds are generally not obnoxious and the whole thing is intuitive enough to jump into without reading a manual (which is an important feature in a post-game-manual era, as well as back when rentals were common and commonly devoid of important parts).
Not pictured: road rash.
The crushing shortcomings, however, lie in features you’ll find yourself wishing it had. You’ll wish it had two-player simultaneous play, you’ll wish it allowed you to save more than one custom track. You’ll wish that there were more terrain features to put on your custom tracks.
John’s Rating: I give this game a 3.0 out of 5.0. Better replay value or a two-player mode would have easily put this up to a 4.0, but I really can’t justify it in light of the fact that I can explore everything the game has to offer in a single afternoon. All in all, it’s an enjoyable and nostalgia-inducing romp that I see no reason to repeat.
Year: 1985 Publisher: Nintendo Genre: Puzzle – Action
Over the years, video game design has changed. Back in the Nintendo games, game design was a crapshoot – if you had an original idea, you might be on to the next big thing, or you might be about to discover, to paraphrase Edison, one of the 10,000 ways it does not work. Point being that, in the Nintendo days, many games were released with game mechanics that, in the modern era, would immediately end up on the cutting room floor.
It is now generally understood, for example, that game controls have to be intuitive. This can be a game breaker for nearly any game, but if the controls are sufficiently counter-intuitive, it can contribute to fake difficulty. If it goes far enough, however, it can become the entire game.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present “Awkward Controls: The Game”
