Ask the Game Trust: The First Game You Bought
2/5/2009 4:57 PM | 19 Comments | Page 6 of 7
How much did it cost? I have no clue. $50?
Did it live up to your expectations? Yes; it blew me away. I loved that game and was excited about all of the sequels the manual promised. A Dracula version? Woo! Of course, it was buggy;
Darklands was my first experience with game patching. Back then you could
call a company and they would send you a patch on a 3.5" disk. A guy at MicroProse and I chatted about the game for a good 15 minutes before he sent me a patch disk. Crazy!
Would you buy it again (at the original price)? I would absolutely play
Darklands today, but I wouldn't pay top-price for it. I would like a modernized version of it, though. I guess you could say that
Baldur's Gate was an extension of a lot of its ideas, but the setting and the witch vibe were great. I do not own it today, as I lost a lot of my old games in the Great Graduation Move.
FoF,
Panzer General,
Jagged Alliance,
X-COM: UFO Defense ... all vanished to the pile of lost things.
Harold Goldberg: Space Invaders (Arcade)
So, this is kind of hard to write. Growing up, we were really lower-middle-class, bordering on poor. I was constantly in and out of the hospital as a kid, so working at the local burger joint or delivering papers weren't options. A console wasn't an option, and not only due to lack of money -- our black-and-white Vornado television wasn't in the best shape.
It usually came down to spending my extra couple of dollars on a new record, new comic books, used paperback classics or some play at the arcade. I liked
Space Invaders more than
Pac-Man. I admired the look of the font for
Space Invaders, which was dripping with fear and loathing, something between the font in a horror movie and a sci-fi movie. I loved the sturdiness of the cabinet and the lunar environment portrayed upon it. I would imagine that I was on the surface of the planet, bravely saving mankind and myself from marauding aliens, who were bigger and uglier in my mind than the primitive graphics moving forth in adamant formation on the screen. So the first game I played gave me the same feeling as the rest of the popular culture I ravenously consumed at the time; a combination of fear, awe and, most of all, glorious freedom and escape from the mundane outside and the pain inside.
Scott Jones: Pac-Man (Arcade)
I wanted an Atari 2600 in the worst way. But, like Harold, my parents were poor (we lived in a trailer out in the middle of the woods). So, despite a series of well-crafted letters to the North Pole, no Atari 2600. I remember when the father of a classmate gave him a roll of quarters -- an entire $10 -- to play
Pac-Man. I was wracked with envy. The Zayre department store had a
Pac-Man machine in the front, near the checkout counter. Like Harold, arcade machines were always magic objects to me. I'd get excited when the demo screen would come up, and I'd think, for a brief second, that I was
actually playing. I bought one of those "How to Win at
Pac-Man" books; I studied all the mazes, memorizing the patterns. I had a fantasy that
if I ever got the chance to play, I'd get a high score. I imagined all the customers in the Zayre gathering around me, cheering me on. "LOOK AT THIS KID GO!" "HE'S AMAZING!" "HE'S GOING TO GET THE HIGH SCORE!" "GO, KID, GO!"
