Video Gamers Podcast - Video Games Quick Take - 80's Games

Episode Date: October 7, 2023

From video games hosts Josh, Paul, and Ryan we're bringing you even more video games content each week.  Video Games Quick Takes are a short series of game recommendations, funny moments, off-topic chat and more. A small dose of gaming to brighten your Saturdays! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hello and welcome to the Video Gamers Podcast where we break down all things gaming. We cover things on this show like first impressions on new releases, deep dives, gaming news, and tournaments like figuring out the best gaming dad of all time. And on Saturdays, we have these Quick Take episodes. These are a little bit older. They were recorded by us back in the day under our old name, the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. And the Quick Take episodes were initially only available to Patreon and Apple supporters, although there was a little bit of demand that people were requesting to hear them as they got a little bit older.

So we started releasing these to the public for everybody to enjoy. These episodes are pretty short. They are generally about 10 to 12 minutes long, and they are recorded by just one of us at a time. Usually, it's us wanting to talk about something that just didn't really fit the format of the main show, so it always gave us an opportunity to maybe record just a few minutes about something that we've always wanted to talk about. Just keep in mind that as you listen to this episode, if you hear any announcements or upcoming dates, plans, anything like that, just take that with a grain of salt because you're listening to this quite a bit delayed.

All right. I think that covers everything here. We hope that you'll enjoy this episode. Let's do it. Hey, guys. It's Paul here. I'm back with another Quick Take episode for you all. And I don't know if we have already announced it on the show, depending on when you are listening to this episode. But we are shaking some things up in regards to these bonus episodes for our Patreon and Apple supporters. We are going to be shifting things around a little bit. We're going to be phasing out these individual quick takes. We're going to do some bonus episodes that involve me, Josh, and Michael all together,

which I think makes for the best content I think that you guys do as well. So we are winding down these quick takes. So we have some limited things left that we wanted to cover here with these quick takes. And I wanted to talk to you guys today about some of my favorite games going back to the 1980s. Now, I know that some of you listening to this were not even born yet. Even me being born right in the middle of the 80s. I barely remember the 80s myself personally, but there are a lot of games that came out in the 80s that are absolute classics. A lot of these games you can still play today, and they're amazingly fun. And so I thought it would be fun just to get a little nostalgic, look back at the 80s a little bit. Now, I certainly disagree with Josh that

it's the greatest decade, but it's still a great decade for gaming, as of course we had the big boom of the NES hitting the homes of people worldwide, and also with the amazing popularity of arcades. So tons of games that we could talk about, and I'm just going to choose a couple to address here. Now, one of the games that I absolutely love, that I have mentioned in passing a couple of times, is Gauntlet. Now, Gauntlet is kind of like a very early Diablo style game. And one of the really cool things about Gauntlet, which came out in arcades in 1985, is that it is the very first multiplayer dungeon crawler. So you had these levels that you would work your way through. The game did not have any bosses,

but you always had to fight your way from the beginning of the stage back to the end, and it allowed for four people to play at once. So in the arcades, this was actually one of the very biggest setups that they had because you had to have room for four people, which of course became more common later on, but Gauntlet did it first. And Gauntlet is set in a fantasy world. You get to play either as a warrior, a wizard, a Valkyrie, or an elf. And so the fact that you were able to not just play with two people in the arcade, but you could actually team up with four was really, really awesome. It's really hard to just understate how neat that was to be able to play, like if you had how neat that was to be able to play, like if you had a birthday party, to be able to hop on with that many people.

And the individual characters played quite a bit different as well. The warrior was by far the strongest character with melee, the wizard had the best magic, Valkyrie had the best armor, and the elf was the fastest on the battlefield. So Gauntlet, absolute classic. I know in the past I tried talking Todd and Josh into deep diving the newest PC version of Gauntlet, but I was not able to successfully lobby for that. But Gauntlet games continued all the way into the 2000s. Really fun series to play. All right, now we can't talk about the 80s without talking about Contra. And Contra, I was kind of surprised at how old the game is. It actually came out in 1987. And I think for anybody who's my age, Contra just played a huge role in your childhood.

You know, you had friends that had it on NES, You would play it in the arcades. And Contra was so hard because it's the first game that I remember ever playing where it was just a one-shot kill. You did not have a health meter. You did not have HP. It was incredibly difficult to play this game because you're running around as essentially like a military commando. But there were just so many enemies and so many bullets that would end up fired on the screen. It was very easy to accidentally take a hit from a stray bullet. But I think the real beauty of Contra was that you had your default gun, but then as you would run through a course, you would get these little ribbons that would start to fall from the sky,

and they had different letters on them. And those would give you different weapons that had completely different mechanics than the default. And so I always got most excited whenever I would see the S. And I think that everybody had that as their favorite weapon, but it gave you spread. And so basically you would shoot your gun and i'm pretty sure it would come out as five streams so it would shoot straight and then it would fire two that were up at an angle and two that were down at an angle but contra was an absolute blast you could also play it with co-op and have two people play simultaneously and contra for me is definitely

one of those early side scrollscrollers that it was... Like, in 1987, when it came out, I have no doubt that it was the best side-scroller at the time. And so you definitely have to think about Contra whenever you think about the 80s. Alright, I also want to talk about a couple of games that all came out in 89. So the first one that I'll bring up here is Prince of Persia. Now, Prince of Persia was a real pioneer in the gaming world, because it's actually the very first video game to use motion capture technology. And I did not know that they did that all the way back in the 80s. So they would actually record somebody doing moves, and then

they could translate that into the coding. So the animation of Prince of Persia, even though it's all the way back from 89, it actually looks remarkably good if you bring it up on YouTube. The mechanics are incredibly smooth whenever you see a round kick or jumping and pulling yourself up onto a higher ledge. If anyone's not familiar at all with the series, you basically play as a character that is running through platform levels, and they are loaded with different booby traps and things that you have to try to avoid. So I would almost say it's kind of like a side-scroll version of Indiana Jones or Tomb Raider, in a way. It's kind of like that. So the levels in Prince of Persia would have certain plates that you would walk over,

and then all of a sudden spikes would shoot up out of the ground. And so you had to move quick, you had to be very aware of your surroundings, and they made several Prince of Persia games over the course of the years. Of course, they made a very unsuccessful movie with Jake Gyllenhaal, which I never saw. I never had any interest in that. But the Prince of Persia game that came out in 89, it's considered to be the first cinematic platformer, and it actually holds up relatively well, because I think it actually looks a lot better than a lot of games from the 80s. The sound effects and some

stuff like that are still kind of bonkers that haven't aged terribly well. But you know, what a cool trendsetter to start bringing in motion capture tech. And then of course, you know, you get things like that later in the Mortal Kombat games and things like that. All right, I also wanted to mention Golden Axe, which was on Sega Genesis. I believe it was also in the arcades, although I never played it in the arcades. I know I've talked about Golden Axe before, so I won't spend too much time on it. But Golden Axe was such a great game where you got to play as a male warrior, a female warrior, or a dwarf. And over the course of playing these games, you would be fighting various trolls and different fantastical beasts. But the real cool thing about it is that you had a magic meter. And over the course of a level, as you would get more potions, it would fill your meter.

And then you could unleash this crazy ultimate ability based on how much magic you had built up. So you could have your stage 1, your stage 2, or your stage 3 ability. And Golden Axe really left an impression with so many people because you even see a complete copycat ripoff of Golden Axe that is programmed inside Grand Theft Auto Online. And I know that we talked about it in that deep dive episode, but you can tell that Golden Axe really left an impression on people who played it back then. I know for me, I had one friend that owned a Sega Genesis, and they only had maybe like four games for it. But Golden Axe 1 and 2 were two of the games that they had, and both of them were just an absolute blast to play. All right, just two last games here that we'll mention, so that way this won't go on too long, but Rampage. Rampage came out in 1986,

another game that got turned into a movie here in the 2000s that I did not see. But Rampage was one of the very rare three-person games. I feel like every once in a while you would get these that would come out. And the whole point of Rampage was basically to play as like King Kong in the old movies. You get to climb on the sides of structures. You are just punching windows, demolishing buildings. You're grabbing people out of windows. And you just get to play as these big bad monsters. And I felt like at the time that was very novel. It felt very different, because you were so used to playing as the regular people fighting the big bad monsters, and this kind of flipped it around on its head. So whether you got to run around as the lizard,

Godzilla-looking creature, or the King Kong-type gorilla, or the third beast, I don't even remember what the third beast was. I'd have to look that up. But even later, they would start to port Rampage to websites like shockwave.com. And I know that Shockwave is now defunct, but when I was in junior high, that was like all anybody wanted to do was you would hop onto Shockwave. You could do these multiplayer games and Rampage was one of the ones that I was still playing all those years later. So we're talking now, even in the late 90s, I was still playing ports and versions of Rampage because it was such a cool idea for a game series.

And then the last one that I want to bring up is Pipe Mania from 1989. I mentioned this in the Lucas Quick Take episode that I had filmed. Pipe Mania started out with the name Pipe Mania, and then later it was changed to Pipe Dream, so you might know it by one name or the other. And this is actually my very first favorite video game. I had a buddy named Andy, not the same Andy we normally talk about on the show, not Josh's brother-in-law, but a different one that I was friends with in grade school. And he was the first friend that I knew of that had a computer with a lot of games. So our family ended up buying a computer when I was in third grade. But in the beginning, we did not have any games at all. And then later over the course of time, we did end up with a few. But I had a buddy that just had like hundreds of games installed on his computer. And so whenever

I would go over and hang out, we would just spend a ton of time messing around with different PC games. And Pipe Dream was just like the perfect puzzle game. It was where you would have almost like a sewage line where you had this toxic green slime coming out of a pipe, and you would have to quickly build the pipes ahead of this slow crawling slime, and you would have to connect it to the end. But then you could also get bonuses for things like crossing the line back onto itself with like an X type shape. And so you would get bonus for that. And I would always try to fully complete the board. So I wouldn't just beeline it from the slime to the exit. But if you could fill all of those boxes, you would get additional points. And so Pipe Dream, I just very fondly remember as my first favorite game.

This is, you know, really even before I played NES, I remember playing Pipe Dream. And that was a very fun time. Just a single player game, but my buddy and I would just take turns playing, try to set new high scores for one another to try to beat. And so Pipe Dream lives very fondly in my memory. All right, well, that's it as far as games from the 80s. You know, a couple of honorable mentions. I think that these are games that are just more popular. I mean, Super Mario Brothers 3, Mario Brothers 1, Mega Man 2, Punch-Out!, Double Dragon. I mean, these are all fantastic games, but who doesn't already know about them? And I feel like we've talked about those a lot anyway.

So just a couple of my favorite games from the 80s that I thought would be interesting. Hope you guys all enjoyed it. Thank you so much for your support, whether it's on Patreon or Apple subscriptions. We really do appreciate it. You guys are the ones that keep the show running. So thank you very much from the bottom of all of our hearts, and we'll see you guys next time. Happy gaming.