Today I am taking part in the
Level Up! Blogfest hosted by
Jamie from Mithril Wisdom and
Allison over at Geek Banter. (click on the link for a list of all involved)
Participants are asked to share a favorite game. It can be a video game, card game, board game, party game, drinking game, whatever. It sounds simple, but it's been difficult to decide upon one game.
So here goes nothing...
I like video games. I'm terrible at them, but I've always liked to play them. Growing up, my siblings and I had an Atari 2600. Some of our favorite games were Pitfall, Stampede, Outlaw, and Combat. We also had a completely
lame awesome game called "Plaque Attack" where you were a tube of toothpaste and had to destroy the junk food that was out to rot your teeth. Think "Space Invaders" but with donuts and candy canes (by the way, that candy cane level was super hard). Our neighbors had a high coveted smurf game. I don't remember much about the object of that game, except for avoiding Gargamel and Azrael, but I do remember being absolutely green with envy that we didn't have that game for ourselves.
 |
| A screen shot from Adventure |
But my true Atari game love was a game called Adventure. It involved swords and dragons, so naturally, it was my favorite. Your character was a square. A little yellow square. Your sword was a golden arrow, and you used your sword to protect your little square self as you navigated your way through various random rooms and castles looking for the Golden Chalice (which, by the way, was always hidden in the black castle. Just a little tip from me to you). Once you found the Golden Chalice (again, in the black castle), and used a magnet to retrieve it from the wall in which it was hidden, you then had to bring the chalice back to the golden castle where you started the game. And while you were doing all this, you had to be on the look out for dragons (red, yellow and green. They had names, but I can't remember what they are) that would eat you if you didn't kill them first. On the upper levels, there was also this stupid bat who would swoop in at random times and steal whatever item happened to be lying around. He'd steal a key you desperately needed or a bridge (yes, I said a bridge) and put it somewhere else. Sometimes, he stole the bodies of the slain dragons and leave them in inconvenient places that would cause you to have to reset the game and start again because all you had was an arrow sword and poking an already dead dragon with it accomplished nothing.
That bat was a real bastard.
But the game was awesome, and I miss it. If it were possible to get it for my Wii, I totally would.
A while back, you could buy a retro system thing. It looked like an Atari 2600 controller and just plugged into your TV and came with a handful of the Atari classic games. Adventure was one of them, so one afternoon, my sister, B, and I took it upon ourselves to introduce a new generation of kids (who had grown up on the Playstation) to the magic of Adventure. Here's how that went:
Me: See that key on the left? Go get it.
Kid: Where am I?
Me: See that yellow square?
Kid: Yeah. What's that?
Me: That's you.
Kid: I'm a
square?
Needless to say, she wasn't impressed.
For the literary minded, this game also receives several shout outs in the novel
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It delighted me to no end. Of course, the whole book is one big 80's reference, but this one delighted me the most.
That's going to do it for me today. Thanks to Jamie and Allison for creating a very cool blogfest. Can't wait to see what everyone else had come up with.
Cheers!
