From: yiyabob@leland.Stanford.EDU (matthew ford)
Subject: Ah, the memories!
Keywords: adventure, bump-n-jump, battleground, archon, necromancer
Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 92 22:53:57 GMT

  THIS is the COOLEST newsgroup.  Reading all this stuff is like a party!  I'm
trying to communicate to my fiancee why all this nostalgia hits me in a 
soft spot, and failing, but MAN, the time I used to spend as a hopeless and
confused geek in 6th through 8th grades, holing up (sometimes with an
equally miserable and/or vid-crazy buddy) to play my Atari 2600, Atari
800 computer, and arcade games in dim, smelly arcades.  What a lot of
memories this has brought back!
   The first time I saw the text game "Adventure" on someone's TRS computer--
the game with the key and the grate, and the two-word commands-- my heart
did a little flip.  Something in me knew I had found my first real love.
   "Adventure" for the Atari 2600-- how surreal that was!  The duck-dragons!
(Though I was very hurt when my older brothers pointed out this particular
similarity in a dragon I was doing my dutiful best to fear and worship.)
   Anyone remember "Clowns" in the arcades-- where your paddle slid a 
teeter-totter along the bottom of the screen, making two clowns pop up into
rows of balloons floating above?  I was terrible at it, secretly loving the
way the legs of the smashed clowns kicked when you didn't get the teeter-
totter there in time...
   And in the game "Battleground", that tank one-- for a long time, I believed
this legend that if you played it for hours and hours, you would actually
reach the eternally distant mountains, go up and over them, and reach a
village which you would gleefully destroy... man, the guy who told me that 
one believed it too... what an aggro guy...
   My favorite in the arcades is often that game that you can't find anywhere
because nobody else likes it.  I loved this vector-graphics game where you
and an opponent would control these knight-fencing characters, seen from
directly above.  You would maneuver your sword in quite complicated thrusts
and blocks, all the while trying to chop your opponent or push him into
one of the two bottomless pits in the center... i played that game only 
three times, and still miss it!
   Anyone get a kick out of Bump-N-Jump?  Howard and I played the hell out
of that one summer in Sunriver, Oregon...
   The Atari 800 was something special.  Lousy business people, Atari, but
they could sure have fun.  Howard and I played (and still play) a chess
game called Archon, whyou would battle over a square when you moved
your piece onto it.  Some pieces were far more powerful, but a lowly pawn-like
knight could sometimes whack a dragon to death, if you were sly enough...
   And Necromancer... whew!  A bizarre Druidic-twisted game of walking trees
and spiders and all kinds of weirdness.  Eerie music, too!  What a game.
   Howard and I would play many games of Star Raider, he the pilot moving the
joystick, I the copilot typing in all the commands for shields and such.
Recently, while both of us were in a state of chemical-induced great silliness,
we played that game again... until I decid to mutiny... turning shields off
in midbattle, making unreasonable demands... wrestling with him at the joystick
while in hyperspace... heh heh heh.
   What would I be like if not for the video games I latched onto during my
confused and formative adolescence?  Would I be as happy today were it not
for that bizarre electronic womb?{

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matthew Ford--Katharine Tracy--Orogg LaRoux       |Pithy saying 
Affiliates of Ying, Yang, & Bob Games (R).        |intentionally omitted.
Newsgroups: alt.games.video.classic