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by Lore Sjöberg
Robotron 2084
Wahoo! Two joysticks! No longer were the sprite-based heroes
of video games limited to shooting in the direction they
were actually headed! Carnage could be handed out like
napkins at an ice cream social! Of course, you weren't doing
this for futuristic jollies, no sir. You had a traditional
family to rescue from scads of evil robots! Unless they were
converted into evil progs, then you had to kill them! Such
is daily life in the world of 2084. A
Tapper
This game, where you played a harried bartender, was one of the
few arcade games to center around beer. Personally,
I think this is one trend that should have continued. We could
be playing Beer Fighter II Alpha and Baldur's Beer Bash now,
but alas such was not to be. They also came out with "Root Beer Tapper",
so that little kids wouldn't grow up to be alcoholics as a result
of pretending to serve beer to cartoon characters. I'm sure
that worked great. C-
Qix
In this game you played a dot attempting create boxes while avoiding
an evil line. It was pretty abstract. The major controversy surrounding
Qix was of course the proper pronunciation of the name. The proper
pronounciation was "kicks," but the more common street-level way
to say it was "Quix," which sounds like a 70's breakfast cereal. B-
Burgertime
Donkey Kong inspired a whole series of scaffolding-based games where
angry bitmaps came after your ass and you had to defeat them
by hitting them with unlikely objects. Burgertime was the best of these,
with the weaponry being huge meat patties, buns, and lettuce leaves,
and the adversaries being eggs and hot dogs who seem to be upset that
they have competition on the cholesterol front. How come nobody's made
a Quake II skin along these lines? C
Defender
This was a pretty complicated game for the time, given that
it had something like five buttons at a time when having
both "Jump" and "Fire" was considered Ph.D. level work.
This was another in the "save the humans from the non-humans"
genre, made all the more fun by the fact that if you
blasted an alien who was carrying a human, the human went into
a graceful plummet, requiring you to swoop down in classic air
adventure style to catch him before he hit the ground in a
lovely spray of individual pixels. A
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