Gaming What was the last videogame you beat?

Dungeon Adventure (Level 9, 1983)


The finale of Level 9's Adventure Trilogy. This one is a straight-forward puzzle fest, with a host of monsters lifted directly from Dungeons and Dragons. It's simple - find a bunch of treasures in the Dark Lord's dungeons (whom you defeated in the second game) and return to civilization. The game benefits from not cribbing 80% of the action from a prior one (like the first in the trilogy, Colossal Adventure, based on the original adventure game Colossal Cave), and has an extended end game in a "Central Dungeon" where you have to collect 10 gems to get to the final treasure.

 

Your game is more old school than my game. Nice.

 

Rogue-and-a-half Plays Through the History of Video Games

*So, hey, guys, remember this little project where I played through like ten or eleven games from the seventies and did these write-ups about them? And then I just quit? Well, I’m, yeah, I think I’m starting back up, at least for a few reviews.

*Okay, so looking back, I see that I had, in fact, played and reviewed the first 11 games from the book, 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die. That wrapped up the seventies and started us into 1980. Just to kind of reorient us, I’m going to do something I rarely do on here anymore, which is link to my website, Absolute Knave. Here’s my page on the 1001 Video Games project. That’ll be easier than trolling through the back pages of this thread to try to find any of the reviews if you want them.

*Anyway, we started in 1971 with The Oregon Trail and, quickly, went through Pong, Breakout, Boot Hill, Combat, Space Invaders, Adventure, Asteroids, Galaxian & Lunar Lander to wrap up the seventies. So, that’s ten games for the entire decade of the 70s.

*Then we moved on to 1980, which, just 1980 alone, has 11 games, more than the entirety of the 70s. Anyway, we started 1980 with Battlezone and then I quit. So, that leads us neatly up to game 2 from 1980 (may . . . be?; more on that in a second), so let’s get started with another arcade game from Atari.



Centipede (1980) – Atari

*Okay, so you may remember that for this series, for somewhat arbitrary reasons, I decided to go with this “bullet-point” review style. In contrast to my more traditional “paragraph” style reviews, this style is a little looser, more conversational.

*A trainwreck, basically.

*Anyway, yes, we will be talking about the video game Centipede and there’s a lot to talk about: its historic designer, the confusion surrounding its exact release date &, of course, the gameplay.

*But first playing this game sparked a thought in my mind and so I just briefly want to talk about an idea I had for a movie tie-in game.

*Yes, I am, of course, talking about a movie tie-in game for The Human Centipede.

*So, look, if you don’t want to read about this, skip down about . . . you know what, I’m just going to spoiler tag this whole discussion. Nobody wants to read about this. The Human Centipede was almost fifteen years ago. Nobody wants to think about it anymore.

*Oh, by the way, did you know that Tom Six, the auteur of the Human Centipede trilogy, actually did another movie in 2020 called The Onania Club which is about women who gain sexual gratification from misery. I don’t know if it’s their own misery or someone else’s misery because if you think I’m clicking more than one link about that movie, you’re out of your mind.

*So, anyway, if you’ve seen ALL the Human Centipede movies, there’s something to look forward to, I guess.

*You know what, this is actually just gross. Let’s skip it. I did have a genuine idea for a game, but I kind of don’t actually want to talk about it. But since I don’t edit these bullet-point reviews, the above discussion will stay where it is, I guess.

*Okay, so on to the actual video game Centipede.

*So, about the release date. The book states that the game was released in arcade format, which was its original format, in 1980; Wikipedia, on the other hand, states that the arcade game was released in 1981, specifically on June 6th. That kind of specificity would make me think the Wikipedia article is right. But . . .IMDB, which does have a lot of good info on video games if you didn’t know, has a very specific date as well, July 26 1980.

*I’m tempted to do more research, but no.

*LOOK IM NOT A JOURNALIST

*Anyway, I went with the book. It’s the list I’m using, so I’m putting Centipede here in 1980. Also, I played it at this point before I knew there were different release dates out there, so, yeah, I’m going with this.

*So, Dona Bailey, born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1955. Real bright girl. Graduated high school at 16 and she plunged into college, taking classes all year-round, leading to her graduating college at the age of 19 with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, with three minors in English, Math & Biology. She then went on to get a Master’s in math.

*And then, after briefly working at General Motors as an assembly language programmer (because why do something that actually connected to any of her five fields of study?), she heard a little song by a band called The Pretenders, a song called Space Invader.

*So, yeah, back when I reviewed Space Invaders, I talked about how a lot of the titans of the game industry directly trace their entry into the field back to Space Invaders. Guess I should have included Dona Bailey, though I don’t know that she exactly went on to be a “titan;” what she unquestionably was, however, was historic.

*Because after playing Space Invaders at a local bar, she did a little investigating and found that Atari arcade cabinets used the same microprocessor she was working on at GM. So, off to Sunnyvale, California for Dona. And she became the first woman hired in the arcade division at Atari.

*She wasn’t the first woman game designer at Atari (or, in fact, in the industry as a whole). Carol Shaw is, I think, pretty widely considered the first female commercial video game designer; in 1978, she designed 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe for Atari, specifically for their 2600 home console.

*Dona Bailey became the first female designer of an arcade game, I believe, when she looked over a list of game ideas and decided that the only one that looked interesting to her involved a bug making its way down a screen. While she was a bit turned off by just how much “lasering and frying things” dominated the list, she would later say that it didn’t seem bad to kill a bug.

*So, Bailey and Ed Logg headed up the development of Centipede; Logg would later say that he did most of the design and Bailey did most of the programming. And Bailey was responsible for some of the color design of the game which was more pastel than most games of the time. Think about Galaxian, which feels like the most colorful game to this point; I suppose it’s all very bright and poppy primary colors. With Centipede, Bailey chose the pastel color scheme herself.

*This was because Bailey and Logg very purposely set out to make a game that would specifically appeal to women.

*Which is honestly kind of weird to me. Like what about killing a centipede seems to speak directly to women? Is it because it’s related to gardening? Seems weird, but whatever.

*And, I guess, yeah, I don’t know what I’m talking about, because Centipede became the first arcade game with women making up more than half of the players.

*I have no idea how they even did the numbers on that. I mean, it seems a little sus, as the kids say, but okay.



*Holy ****, is this an actual ad from the period? I take it all back. This ad would absolutely get women in arcades playing this game.

*Anyway, all that sociological and historical context aside, is Centipede a good game? Sure.

*On its face, it is yet another in a long line of Space Invaders inspired games, but this one is, as Galaxian is, more than just a clone. It makes some pretty cool mechanical innovations.

*So, you’re at the bottom of the screen and the centipede starts at the top and does the classic side to side descent. But the screen is also copiously littered with mushrooms and when the centipede hits a mushroom, it doubles back. So, it doesn’t go all the way to the end of the row always or even most of the time. If it hits a mushroom in the middle of the row, it turns and moves down.

*As you can see, on higher levels the mushroom count gets really high and if a cluster of mushrooms is arranged in the right way, it can lead to the centipede just moving very quickly toward the bottom of the screen.

*This also leads toward one of the things I really liked about this game, which is just the aesthetics of the centipede. I like the way it moves. Something about the way it turns and goes through some of the smaller openings between mushrooms does feel really insectile to me. It has some personality. It’s the first video game enemy I’ve encountered that really feels . . . alive maybe? Like more than just pixels moving on a screen. When it suddenly hits a cluster of mushrooms and it just slithers through them and comes down several rows very quickly, it does kind of give me a spike of panic. It’s pretty cool.



*As you can also see from that gif, every time you shoot a segment of the centipede, the centipede breaks. The segment you hit becomes a mushroom, the segment right behind that segment becomes a centipede head and suddenly you’ve got two centipedes coming at you.

*Strategically then it’s obviously best to try to take them out quickly. You don’t want too many different centipedes moving independently on the screen. So, take them out from the rear, which is not always easy. And when smaller centipedes break off, take them out quickly. About the worst scenario is like fifteen different centipede heads all moving independently around the screen.

*Trust me. I know.

*One final mechanical innovation is the ability to move forward and backward as the player. Even in Galaxian, which makes a ton of innovations, you can still only move back and forth across the very bottom line of the screen. In Centipede, you can move forward a few lines so that gives you some extra play, which is helpful, especially in dealing with the supporting characters: spiders, fleas, scorpions, etc., all of whom move in various different ways. They also interact with the environment in different ways; some of them remove mushrooms when they pass over them; others drop mushrooms at random times.

*It should also be noted that you don’t automatically lose when the centipede hits the bottom of the screen which is cool and surprising. If you can dodge the centipede while it’s in your play area, it will start moving back up once it hits the bottom and you have more opportunities to shoot it.

*I also forgot to mention that I was fortunate enough to be able to play this game on an original arcade cabinet. If you’re ever in the Tulsa area, check out the Max Retropub; it’s a bar with an eighties theme and as part of that theme, it’s got a ton of vintage arcade games in it. It has some of those retrofitted machines where they’re machines with a lot of games loaded on them, but it also has some really old cabinets, like a really old Space Invaders that is still playable. And, of course, Centipede.

*Anyway, at the end of the day, what about Centipede? It’s really good. It’s obviously inspired by Space Invaders, but that’s no crime. And I think it brings enough new innovations to the Space Invaders model that it feels like its own thing. The mushrooms and the way the various insect characters interact with them feels very unique. And, as I said above, the centipede itself feels like the closest thing to an organic video game enemy, by which I mean that it feels like it has a personality and its movement feels organic, not routine.

*I played the arcade cabinet for about thirty minutes and never got tired of it. It’s still not quite the sweat-inducer that Space Invaders is; I’m telling you, it’s the music.

*So, there we go. Centipede! Next time, we’ll be sticking with 1980 and hitting up another arcade classic and this one’s from a company I don’t think we’ve encountered before, namely the Williams company, branching out from pinball to video games with Defender!

 

Now that game brings me back. Used to play it all the time back in the 80s when I was in an amateur bowling league. That, along with Bubble Bobble.

 

Pretty easy to see why women would love a game about squashing bugs, it's something they've historically depended on men for. That makes it totally feminist and empowering.

I liked it as a kid, too. It did feel alive and creepy and made me very nervous as it got closer to the bottom.

 

I'm almost positive the local Round One arcade venue near me has one of these machines there; though I haven't seen anyone actually playing it.

 

Centipede, Galaga and Defender beat any of today's shooters. Who's your daddy? Also review Arkanoid; that game will change your life.

 

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

Biggest disappointment in recent memory. Game should’ve been great, but the developers rushed and put out an inexcusably unfinished product that glitches at almost every turn and renders the game nearly unplayable (literally in some cases). I’m disappointed that I spent money on it, but lesson learned.

 

Rogue1-and-a-half Plays Through the History of Video Games



Defender (1980) – Williams

*Okay, so I thought we had some confusion here on the release dates again, because my research was initially saying Defender was released into arcades in 1981. But it looks like it was playable in 1980 and demoed. So, I guess the book is saying the game was technically released in 1980 and then “widely” released in 1981. You know like when a movie’s release date is the year before it comes out in theaters because it technically debuted publicly at a film festival or something?

*Williams was a company that manufactured pinball machines. In 1973, they dipped their toe into the world of video games with a Pong clone called Paddle Ball. Then they kind of went quiet on the video game front until 1979, when they decided to create original games. The brief on Defender was a to create a game influenced by Space Invaders (1978) and Asteroids (1979) and what they did was . . . well, they really did something.

*Eugene Jarvis was tasked as the lead developer and given a tiny team, but almost total creative freedom. They came up with a couple of very early developments; one of the coolest things about Asteroids, they thought, was the wrap-around feature. A ship being able to fly off the screen was pretty cool. Likewise, they enjoyed the advancing enemy design of Space Invaders, but by 1980, that formula was pretty standard. We’ve already talked about Galaga and Centipede, both of which mimicked the top-down formatting of Space Invaders. For Defender, which didn’t yet have a name, the team decided the movement should be horizontal.

*Some of the other decisions they made, I’ll talk about when we get into the actual game play.

*Hmm, I wonder what the response to the game was at the time. I wonder if I can find any reviews. Oh, here’s one from Softline Magazine in 1983 . . .

*Defender “remains one of the hardest arcade games ever developed . . . attempts lasting less than ten seconds are not uncommon . . .”

*well that’s just f

*Fu . . . n isn’t that just going to be fun

*Okay, let’s jump to the gameplay. You are a ship and you can move left or right on a horizontally scrolling map, thus making this the first side-scrolling shooter.

*At the top of the screen is the most detailed mini-map we’ve yet encountered. I feel like Lunar Lander and Battlezone both had a mini-map, but this one shows the length of the map with enemies noted on the map and brackets that helpfully indicate what part of the map your screen is currently located on.

*Meanwhile, in come the alien ships. There are people on the surface of the planet below you and the alien landers are coming to abduct them. Your goal is to destroy those landers before they can abduct the people or, push comes to shove, to destroy them while they have the people, but before they get too high off the ground.

*Obviously, if the ship is too high off the ground, the abductee will plummet to their death below when the ship is destroyed.

*This is the reason the game is called Defender. Eugene Jarvis said he felt like the game needed a layer beyond just blowing up enemy ships. He wanted the player to feel like they weren’t just destroying things, but were also SAVING things. So, he came up with the idea of protecting people from abduction and chose the name Defender.

*Of course, if that was all you were doing, this wouldn’t still be considered one of the most difficult video games of all time, would it? You are also being attacked by a variety of ships that you have to dodge and also destroy. Some of them fire missiles that are seekers, meaning that they continue chasing you even if you blow up the ship that fired them. And they do chase you, meaning they will go up or down on the screen as you do and you have to shoot them as well.

*So, I’m just gonna say it. This game feels like kind of a jump into light speed. This is both the most complex and the most difficult game we’ve yet encountered by . . . quite a large margin in my opinion.

*There’s just always so much going on and no game has thrown this much input at you at one time. At any given moment, there might be two landers on your screen going for humans at the bottom, two enemy ships firing at you, three or four seeker missiles already inbound toward you and, oh, yeah, by the way, one screen over, landing ships are also abducting people there and there’s an enemy ship headed from that screen toward your screen.

*Have I mentioned the controls? There are SEVEN buttons that you control your ship with. And a joystick. You’ve got the joystick to control your ship’s direction, but there’s a button to push for thrust and also one to kick your ship into reverse. There are two buttons for firing your weapons, one for your laser and one for your smart bomb which will destroy everything on the screen with you. Those are very limited, however, so you want to save the smart bombs for truly desperate situations. Also, there’s a hyperspace button, seemingly inspired by Asteroids, that just blinks your ship to another random position on the map. Again, use only in the most desperate of situations because the darn thing might just blip you into an even worse situation.

*I mean, I’ll own up to it. I sucked at this game. And that “ten second” figure above is no lie. My first run was probably about five seconds.

*I should say that I was, once again, incredibly lucky to be able to play an original arcade cabinet of this game at the Max Retropub in Tulsa. I tried looking up some emulated versions online but they seem to mostly be of the Atari 2600 port of the game, not the original arcade.

*And, let me tell you, trying to play this game on a keyboard is ridiculous; you’ve got seven keys mapped to the buttons as well as directional keys. It’s insane. It makes an very hard game nearly impossible. Certainly impossible for me.

*So, I don’t even know entirely what makes up a level . . . is it once you clear the entire map? I don’t know because I never did it. I played for thirty minutes or so and while I did eventually start to have some fun as I got a little better and able to feel like I was actually taking out a few enemy ships and saving a human or two here or there, I was never really, you know, “in control.” I can’t even estimate how many times my ship was destroyed in that thirty minutes or so. More than thirty, you know.

*Look, I’m almost forty. Those reflexes are just not there anymore.

*Narrator: They were never there.

*If you mastered this game back in the day, respect. Because it is super hard.

*And, in the same way I respect From Software games, I respect Defender. Because I did not really have very much fun playing it and it would take a ridiculous amount of time for me to ever get “good” at it. But it’s a masterpiece, I think. It’s a genuine jump into hyperspace in terms of the kind of complexity these games are able to generate and throw at the player. It’s mechanically precise, very intense and, yeah, just . . . man, it’s a hell of a game forty years later. I’d love to see some serious gamers who are genuinely really good at modern games have a go at this one on an arcade cabinet. I think it would still be difficult for them. It holds up.

*So, is this the “best” game so far? I mean, it’s a serious contender. It’s not for me, but it’s pretty amazing and the fact that it just roundly kicked my butt over and over again on the very first level means I have to tip my hat.

*Judging it by the fun I had . . . it’s pretty near the bottom of the list. But judged objectively on its merits as a work of art . . . it’s right at the top.

*If you mastered Defender back in the day, talk about it. This is a game that deserves some love from someone who actually managed to play it properly and I can’t really give it that.

*Okay, so next time . . . wow, it’s a really interesting one and one that makes a lot of history. Join me next time as we get to the most story heavy game so far and log on to the Apple II (?!) to play Eamon.

 

Out of curiosity what were you playing it on? My brother played on PS5 and has loved it and never mentioned any glitches.

 

I must admit I love Defender but am positively awful at it. They had it at my local pizza place in the 80's. My ship often blows up in seconds.

 

Yeah, Defenders had a real originality to it, for one of the early abstract arcade games.

 

Yep, can confirm, it was hard and frustrating, with a lot quick, cheap deaths. Even my brother would get rage pissed at the game. I would also die in seconds. It felt cool if you could a decent run going, but you'd ultimately quit out of frustration. There wasn't enough lives, you'd get a Game Over too quickly. I always felt the control of your ship was just a little loose, which I found frustrating.

The map was really, really cool, and really helped. It felt way ahead of other games. Did you know you could catch the people as they fell? You even get good points for it.

Okay, so I just played in a browser for a few minutes. The basic start, with the green aliens and a few hostiles (purples), isn't hard at all. I managed to clear several waves by wiping out everything on screen. But once you clear a few waves and the number of enemies gets high, it gets really hard and frustrating. The difficulty increase is kinda exponential, not linear. If the aliens manage to abduct a human, they turn into brown, fast moving mutants that seek you out. Were these the missiles you were talking about? They were a pain in the ass. Once you get a lot of green aliens on the screen, it becomes really hard to protect all the humans, and usually one gets taken off screen, spawning a brown mutant. The more green aliens, the more humans get abducted, the more brown mutants you get following you. That's when you need to drop your bomb, but I kept forgetting.

The game also likes to spawn aliens literally right in front of you whenever you respawn, so there's a high chance of instant death the moment you move your ship forward. That's super frustrating.

Keys:

Fly low, that's where all your humans are, and hostiles at the top will come up from the bottom anyway.

Go slow. Let them come to you if you can. Seriously, go as slow as you can while also protecting humans. Only put on a burst of speed to avoid those brown mutants or save a human who is about to turn into one. Once you get moving fast, you're basically out of control and you're going to die quickly.

Spam your laser. You should be hitting it constantly. You can actually hit things from offscreen using your radar. I managed to accidentally kill a human with my own laser, but it's better than them turning into brown mutants.

There are keys to destroying the brown mutants. You can move up to them, hit reverse and blast them. They'll run into your firing path. You can also get them to run right into your laser at the last second.

 

Defender looked really good for 1980. Not to sound old, but most games then were black and white or a few colors like a Gameboy game.

 

Many of the early shooters did that thing where you could only have one projectile on screen at a time. As a gamer who still often relies on the "spam your weapon" style of gameplay that was incredibly hard to get used to. The ability to just blast wildly in Defender is definitely a point in its favor.

Also, I forgot to mention the sound design which is also, in my opinion, a big step forward for video games to this point. The lasers and variety of explosions are super satisfying.

Oh, the missiles I was talking about are apparently just their own ship. Swarmers, the little red ones. They're so small I thought they were just seeker missiles fired by other ships.

 

Xbox Series X. Literally every single time I play it there’s a new glitch that causes me to have to close the game entirely and restart. It’s… I’ve never played a game so broken before. I’m kind of notorious amongst my friend group as the guy who has the worst luck with games (we often joke that I missed my calling as a QA tester because if there’s a bug, I will find it), but this is a new low.

 

Virginia
This is a basically a first person walking simulator where you play a FBI agent who has been tasked to solve the case of a missing young man, whilst at the same time investigating your FBI partner. The game is a bit surreal in places, where peculiar events happening, and whilst during them you are like, what the heck! It plays more like a silent movie, than a game, there is no dialogue, only music and it is up to you to infer from the scenes and ultimately interpret the ending as you see appropriate. It is a super short game, but definitely a fun one. The only negative of the game is that if you miss a collectible, you have to play the whole game again, as the chapter select does not work as you think! If you go to a chapter, it clears all progress, which was infuriating! Got the platinum trophy though, after discovering this bug? design feature?

Edit: the soundtrack is phenomenal, it was done by the Prague philharmonic orchestra, some really stunning pieces.

 

Frostpunk
Quite proud of succeeding in a first-time, blind run And I "only" killed 45 people to keep the coal mines running through the final blizzard. Nobody else died, I got through somehow with only two amputees.
On the other hand, I installed a terrifying religious dictatorship in the process

 

What other hand?

 

We-l-l-l, the game allows you to opt for a path on which you preserve the corpses of your dead until you need to chop off one of their limbs and use it as a prosthetic for someone still living, so... are you sure you want an answer to that question?

 

Using Fatburt's link, I just played Oregon Trail, and I think this is the first time I actually managed to make it to Oregon. Only one person left alive, though.

 

Yeah I played it like two years ago and made it to Oregon first try.

Conclusion, kids are just dumb

 

In my case, I always ran out of time. I never played it outside my elementary school computer class.

 

Finished/gave up on Immortals: Fenyx Rising. I just...I really really hated this game. Hated the humor, the story, the gameplay, the puzzles. Just wanted it to end. Resorting to a walkthrough every 10-15 minutes was aggravating. Recommended against.

 

The Pillar: Puzzle Escape
This was a super short puzzle game, with quite simple puzzles, and felt just like a rip-off of The Witness. It was a fun little time waster, but if you want something more in-depth and challenging, definitely go for The Witness. Probably not one I would recommend on the whole, but if you can get it super cheap (like I did) then don’t be too afraid to give it a shot. The music was very nice, which is always a plus!