Sounds like Express Raider:Originally Posted by Buyatari
http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7735
Sounds like Express Raider:
http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7735
I know it goes against what the OP is considering to be "classic" but I'm throwing out a few games I enjoyed playing way back when that AFAIK never came out on a home console even in some form on a "retro" collection. I might be able to think of a few others if I thought about it but these are a few games not mentioned yet here that come to mind right away that I always wanted to see released on a home console, Black Tiger could be included on this list if not for being included on a few of the Capcom collections.
Rail Chase (adding this although it realisticly couldn't be 100% recreated on a home console)
Wrestlefest
Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder
Solar Warrior - This one came out in '86 so it's close to the era that the OP was looking forMix between run and gun & shoot 'em up for anyone who's never played it before.
Last edited by FOnewearl; 01-19-2009 at 01:19 PM.
I've always been of the pre-crash = classic, post-crash = something else mindset. While things never completely stopped, for all practical purposes there was a clear break in the videogame industry. That's a perfect delineation for "classic".
Anybody who isn't an idiot knows that that the Famicom came out in 1983, but typically only big Nintendo fans try to argue that it should be considered a pre-crash/classic system. One has to remember that the industry looked a lot different in those days. While Japanese games were a big part of the arcade scene, the console scene was virtually non-existant. Sure Atari released the 2600 and later tried the repackaging as the 2800 and Bandai released the Intellivision, but the home systems that were dominant in the rest of the world didn't do squat in Japan (funny how we still see symptoms of this today). You can't build a timeline that combines the Japanese home market and that of the rest of the world because the lines didn't intersect until after the crash. The Famicom might have been released in Japan in 1983, but it didn't impact the worldwide video game scene until 1986 - despite being released in the US in 1985, it was limited and it didn't make a splash until a year later.
Before the crash the industry was dominated by the US. After the crash Japan would dominate. Stuff from the US dominated era is classic, things from the Japan era and today's mixed yet separate US/Japan era are something else (I don't have a good name for it - I kind of see everything post-crash as one continuous thing anyways as there's never been a major paradigm shift, so it is all modern stuff).
Perhaps the use of "classic" was a poor choice back when we started using it in the early 90s. But look at any other use of classic to describe something - it almost always refers to something of a certain time period or style, so something does not become classic with age. Every time someone tries to expand classic through the passage of time it raises a stink, no matter if it is classic video games, classic rock, or classic cars. When the use of "classic" in conjunction with games came into vogue it was used to distinguish the post-crash, Japan centric industry from the pre-crash, US dominated video game world. Despite being available in Japan at the time, nobody considered the Famicom a part of that world.
Since we've had the tired Famicom is classic argument brought up, anyone want to bring up the equally incorrect Euro centric argument that there was no crash, that people just moved to gaming on computers instead of consoles? I always get a kick out of how people in the US started making that argument after the WWW took off and they saw how good the stuff in Europe was in the mid to late 80s.
kingpong: I'm talking strictly dates here. "Crash" or no crash regardless, the TECHNOLOGY is what I am referring to. It makes no sense to call the Colecovision a classic when the NES technology upon worldwide release was less than a year later, and call that a "neo" classic.
I was fully aware of arcades/consoles since I was going to the arcade 7 days a week back in the mid 80s, and Zody's (a crappy department store), had a Family arcade next to it, and every single grocery store/casino/pizza parlor within a 2 miles radius of me (and there were numerous) had arcade machines.
This "crash" is just really referring to the ET Atari 2600 game, and a lot of companies were dumping "some" games, but it wasn't as crazy as you think. People still carried games normally (in my area) and not everything was dumped. The 2600 was reboxed later on for $49.99 in that red box in the mid to late 80s right around the time the NES was in full distribution, but those 2.5 years of supposed crash might have affected retail, but arcade still remained decent. Sure, it fell off slightly, but there was an even BIGGER crash for arcades in the 90s and for some reason video games as a whole are only referred to market crashes for console.
The point is, the NES technology was already in arcades. The system came out in Japan. I don't care if it came out in Antarctica, most of the VS arcade games came to the NES later, so to determine that the technology does not fit in to the same category because of ET failing to sell is ridiculous.
I was there through this whole thing, and I have to say not everyone thought video games were a "fad" still from retail. Arcades were still around, people were still releasing games, console stuff was just stagnant for a bit, but that does not denote that the technology was not classic by any means, and I was around through this whole mess....I know our department stores sure didn't have a blowout of all Atari games for $1 in 1984-85....
Regarding DreamTR's post:
Its a question of naming and Capitalization, methinks.
"Classic" is pre-crash.
"classic" is just a good game no matter when it came out.
so games can be "Classic" and "classic" like Robotron or Tempest
"Classic" but not "classic' like Mythicon 2600 carts
or "classic' but not "Classic" like Star Control 2, Halo, ect.
We've all been using this method, and I think it's just stuck on us. The core of us are refugees from rec.games.video.classic; old habits, hard to break, ect.
EDIT: this was posted before I noticed there was a 2nd page, and the corresponding dialog.
Last edited by Sanriostar; 01-20-2009 at 11:21 AM.
Lick me! LICK ME!!
One of the hopeless idiots that runs SC3; (Southern California Classic Collectors):
www.sc3videogames.com
Buyatari: What did you mean by "classic"? I thought of classic in terms of how good it is not in terms of era.
What did I mean by "classic" well isn't it obvious.
lol
::Grabs the popcorn and enjoys the rest of this::
Anyway the game was called Iron Horse and put out by Konami.
Is a Gremlin or a Pento considered a classic car?
Is Nirvana considered classic rock?
The term classic applies to both date and quality/style.
"Game programmers are generally lazy individuals. That's right. It's true. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Since the dawn of computer games, game programmers have looked for shortcuts to coolness." Kurt Arnlund - Game programmer for Activision, Accolade...
Now we got the crash in quotes, ehh?
The industry was in such poor shape that Nintendo had to release the NES with A ROBOT so people would not notice it was a video game console.
You're not talking dates. But we got two posts of "THE NES CAME OUT IN 83 IN JAPAN!"
And Guns n Roses, etc, okay, okay, okay.
I still think the argument for the NES as a classic is reasonable. Just not reasonable in the manner that YOU are presenting it.
i want to say Tapper, i dnot have it for console, so idk. I also dont have Carnival...
oh and Zoo Keeper! (no, the DS one is completely different)
It's not like that Robot was not released in Japan earlier. Console crash did not take as much of an effect on the arcade stuff since those were still plentiful everywhere. I'm just trying to get the date thing through. People at the CGE for years would never consider the NES a "classic", and it bothered me to no end.
Probably just as many times I've heard that gaming didn't "really" start until the NES, and those old primitive systems aren't even worthy of consideration as really being video games.
Your experience is actually very much like mine. It wasn't really until 85-86 that it felt like the crash hit where I was, and that was mainly because the NES was pushing the remaining Atari and Colecovision stuff off the shelves. What I would later come to know as the crash was actually a great time for me to be a gamer, as it meant that there were games for under $5 at the drug store. There weren't any toy stores close enough to be visited with enough regularity to notice the big sales, but I did notice that the department stores didn't seem to be getting any new games, and the few new games that I heard of couldn't be found anywhere. The biggest change was how many places that used to have games that now didn't. Sears and JC Penney got rid of their game sections. The hobby shop at the mall no longer had a 2600 kiosk. Heck, even Lowe's once had a 2600 kiosk (that's where my Track & Field came from, the only store I ever saw it in).
So a few years later when I could look at it a little more critically, it all kind of clicked. Going back and rereading the issues of Electronic Games I had during that period and read endlessly I now saw the significance of things like when they said that the closing of Apollo could be the first of many to come. It could tell while it was happening that the video game scene of 1984 was different from 81-83, but it didn't seem like a crash to the guy on the street. To the guy in the boardroom though, it was a disaster. It was much more than just E.T. tanking, that just became the scapegoat in later years. The plummeting revenue at Atari, Mattel abandoning the market, the death of all but the biggest third party publishers - that was a definite crash.
Between the lag between the business side of the industry crashing and the normal person feeling it, the fact that arcades generally kept on going fairly strongly (there was a decline, but certainly not like the fighting game era collapse), and confusing factors like the Famicom release and the 7800's stop and go release, it is hard to put a definitive break between things. Living through it there was clearly a change in the nature of the games, the origin of the games, the size of the support industry (magazines, merchandising, etc.), and so on. Pre-crash vs. post-crash doesn't quite capture it. Maybe saying the Atari era vs. the Nintendo era is better. Maybe it was when we went from predominately score based gaming to progress/completion based gaming ("beating" the game became the goal), or when we went from position-centric mechanics to action-centric mechanics. Wherever that squiggly line is drawn, whatever you want to call it, there was a change from one era to another. Maybe the eras even overlap. To me, "classic" means that first era. Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the next era, doesn't mean there aren't great games. But like I'll never call any rock music from the 80s "classic rock" and no cars from after the early 70s "classic cars", "classic" games will always be everything in the era before the post-crash/Nintendo/whatever you want to call it era, regardless of when the Famicom was released.
Things I still hear from time to time, and still fly me into a murderous rage.
Lick me! LICK ME!!
One of the hopeless idiots that runs SC3; (Southern California Classic Collectors):
www.sc3videogames.com
What about games like Victory Road, which had a console release on NES that was more of a "re-imagining" than a port. Bomb Jack comes to mind, too.
"Ambitious, but rubbish."
Historically, I agree that it's worthwhile to use various qualities to divide things up, whether it be pre-crash versus post-crash, US-dominated versus Japan-dominated, score-based versus completion-based, or hardware generations (second versus third in this discussion). The NES is different from the 2600 or even the Colecovision in all of those areas, and it's worth pointing out. Obviously, the NES was a much more powerful piece of hardware, and its games were generally developed with a completely different mindset.
However, what intrigues me is the psychology behind why precisely the word "classic" is used and how it is used. Granted, maybe I should be questioning the older hobbies that use the same term, since video game collectors and historians probably just took inspiration from them, but there is still something about it that doesn't sit right with me. I've been around video game collectors for a long time, maybe not as long as some, but long enough to come to a conclusion that the use the term "classic" is virtually always tied to childhood nostalgia. No matter how many times someone may say that they find later games enjoyable, there is still that deep down desire to deny something from all post-crash gaming. I mean, just the very fact that they'd see fit to lump all gaming from the NES to the present in one group is very telling, or that systems like the Dreamcast would be brought up as if that's a suitable comparison to the NES. Of course the Dreamcast isn't classic; it's basically just one generation removed from modern gaming.
And for all the pre-crash collectors that grew up in that era and play more modern games, consider how many that don't. I've never seen a more closed in, stubborn group of gamers. Talk about taking nostalgia to the absolute extreme. It seems as if all of their playing and collecting is focus purely on bringing back childhood memories. They appear to value games in the same way one might keep an old G.I. Joe collection around or a Teddy Ruxpin. The only group I can think of that even comes close would be diehard NES collectors that grew up with the system, but even they generally branch out to other hardware generations and appreciate gaming just as gaming, not as something that necessitates nostalgia.
I'm not as deeply involved in any other "retro" hobby to know if fans of other collectibles are the same. Since "classic" rock has been brought up, I'm going to assume that it's generally defined as rock from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, so imagine if a radio station playing such music, which would frequently play tracks from 79, slipped in a song from 1980. Would they get an onslaught of complaints? I don't really think so, but perhaps I'm wrong. Look at how wide that era is too. I bet those that grew up with 50s rock must really get peeved that 70s rock is considered "classic". Maybe that's why there are terms like "oldies" to break it down further, but in that case it feels more like the era is being insulted rather than praised, haha.
The whole argument with the Famicom versus Colecovision isn't about saying it should be considered a second generation console or pre-crash or anything of the sort. It's like my theoretical song from 1980. If it's that extremely close and nearly just as old, why does it get denied the same treatment? If a song that first aired December 31, 1979 is considered undoubtedly "classic", isn't it silly to say a song from January 1, 1980 is undoubtedly NOT classic? And the whole "But I didn't play it as a kid back then, so it doesn't count!" argument is kinda pathetic. I mean, we're talking about history here, not personal experiences. What, should there be different standards in every country? As long as I'm in the US, the NES isn't "classic", but as soon as I step foot on Japan, it is? Saying the 1983 release of the Famicom doesn't matter is just as ignorant as a Japanese gamer saying that all the systems prior to the Famicom don't matter because none of them caught on over there. I'm sure any video game historian in Japan worth his salt would recognize the importance of the US-developed pre-crash (or pre-Famicom to them) consoles, regardless of how they did over there.
That's funny. I've never heard that before (no one has ever referred to that situation to me), but everyone else has already confirmed the NES should be a part of this whole conversation because of the date. Just way ahead of its time.....
The Simpsons and Pac-man Jr and X-men
Jr. Pac-Man came out for the 2600.
Has anybody mentioned:
Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters
and
Radical Bikers Pizza Delivery (Not classic in the traditional sense, but a favorite of mine.)
I love both of those ... I wish my MAME CPU was fast enough to handle Radical Bikers.
Also notable that there has never been an ARCADE PERFECT version of Donkey Kong and DK Jr. either by themselves or on a compilation (DK was unlockable in DK64 but it was a pain to do and was hardly "accessible" right out of the box).
Last edited by Frankie_Says_Relax; 01-26-2009 at 09:40 PM.
"And the book says: 'We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us.'"
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