Into the arcade Part 5
Single screen arcade games are my absolute favorite, with vertical shooters a close second. In the arcade I was spoiled for choice. Games like PacMan, Donkey Kong, Breakout, Popeye, Frogger and of course, BurgerTime presented the player with its entire world laid out on one screen. The amount of coin I fed to these and their like was probably best not remembered. These games were intense, fast and loud. The best gamers could make a single credit last until the game broke and we watched them with awe as they did so.
A game that I really liked was Frogger, where you guided a completely unarmed frog across a fast moving motorway, then halfway across the screen you found a fast flowing river full of lumber with your home just on the other side. Hopping from one log to the next (it seems our frog had forgotten how to swim) you made it to one of six froggy houses and the game loop started again.
Faster, and with crocodiles.
I loved this game and played it to death. So much so I could blitz the road section without hardly looking, it was total muscle memory and learning the patterns. In fact a lot of the single screen games had patterns that could be learned and therefore beaten with enough coin or, if you were lucky, with a little help.
I mentioned before that the fate of a broken machine was 50/50. If it went back, you either got a good one or you didn't. If you were seriously unlucky it was a claw machine, but we won't go there. One day I hit the arcade late and noticed my Frogger was missing. Apparently damaged by a whole cup of fanta and it needed to be replaced. Not that fussed I went back to BurgerTime for a while until I walked in a few days later and saw the replacement had been delivered and it was new to me, and boy did I suck at it.
The game was MrDO! An absolutely superb single screen game that was so simple it was brilliant. It had shooting, it had collecting and it had more than a nod to DigDug. The premise was simple, you moved around the screen collecting cherries and avoiding the baddies while carving paths through the earth. You defended yourself with a bouncing ball that vanished for a while after killing an enemy.
Collect all the cherries or kill all the baddies and you cleared the screen. The game was loud, the music was superb and the gameplay was frantic and it got faster, more intense and the screen layout changed and I was stuck, seemingly forever, at screen 4. That was until I walked in one day and saw a guy playing so casually but so cleanly he was tearing through the levels and racking up the points like a fury and all I could do was watch with amazement.Nyx
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