For my 12th pick, I'm going to take a game from another very early gaming system that got me through my childhood. At my Mom's house, we had the Atari 2600, but at my Dad's house, we had the Intellivision.
Astrosmash (1981) - Intellivision
Now, I'm going to admit that for the most part, Intellivision games didn't age all that well, but Astrosmash was an arcade-style upwards-shooter that had some pretty good game mechanics (and terrible "music", it was just a metronomic click that got faster as you went up in levels!) You've got a ground-based laser cannon, or whatever that thing is, and you've got to deal with incoming rocks (the big ones usually split in two when you hit them), spinning bombs (don't let these hit the ground even if you're not around!), homing bombs (if these get to ground level they'll find your cannon unless you manage to teleport away in time) and on high enough levels, UFOs. And I think that's it - but as the game levels up things get faster, objects start to come on the diagonal instead of straight down, and the proportion of more dangerous types of object increases.
The screen changes color at each level-up, the final of which (that I could reach) was at 100,000 points. We managed to get games into the 500K range, and there's not another level-up there...and we never made it to a million. It just gets too tough - and the kicker is that while you're allowed to let rocks hit the ground without dying, each one that reaches the ground reduces your score. So when you're spending all your time making sure you stop the stuff that's definitely going to kill you otherwise, you're watching your score go down, and down...
I wonder if anybody ever made a million. The game I posted above I think only breaks 100K, but there was another video where the player almost broke 800K (and it was hours long!) Man, the patience I had as a kid!
Astrosmash (1981) - Intellivision
Now, I'm going to admit that for the most part, Intellivision games didn't age all that well, but Astrosmash was an arcade-style upwards-shooter that had some pretty good game mechanics (and terrible "music", it was just a metronomic click that got faster as you went up in levels!) You've got a ground-based laser cannon, or whatever that thing is, and you've got to deal with incoming rocks (the big ones usually split in two when you hit them), spinning bombs (don't let these hit the ground even if you're not around!), homing bombs (if these get to ground level they'll find your cannon unless you manage to teleport away in time) and on high enough levels, UFOs. And I think that's it - but as the game levels up things get faster, objects start to come on the diagonal instead of straight down, and the proportion of more dangerous types of object increases.
The screen changes color at each level-up, the final of which (that I could reach) was at 100,000 points. We managed to get games into the 500K range, and there's not another level-up there...and we never made it to a million. It just gets too tough - and the kicker is that while you're allowed to let rocks hit the ground without dying, each one that reaches the ground reduces your score. So when you're spending all your time making sure you stop the stuff that's definitely going to kill you otherwise, you're watching your score go down, and down...
I wonder if anybody ever made a million. The game I posted above I think only breaks 100K, but there was another video where the player almost broke 800K (and it was hours long!) Man, the patience I had as a kid!
