But there was the Personal Computer, too! Wolfenstein 3D had just been released, and the whole of the FPS genre was just starting to congeal into Doom (to be released the next year). The arcade gave way to the domination of the console, and now Sega and Nintendo were battling it out. Ten years later, in 1992, the face of gaming had irrevocably changed. Q*Bert does not have a bonus jump, “punch”, or other abilities. He changes block colors simply by touching blocks, and his only “offensive option” is baiting a malevolent snake into a bottomless pit. Q*Bert only need move from block to block in a generally diagonal manner. Pitfall was a revelation for everything its protagonist (and by extension, the player) could do, even if this was still the era of extremely blocky dudes puttering around monochrome backgrounds.Īnd 1982 also saw the release of Q*Bert. Harry didn’t simply jump over opponents, he leapt to swing across vines, or hopped over the heads of gators. Harry had much to do in his (certainly not Mayan) adventure, and, while his moveset was limited, it was contextually sensitive to all sorts of challenges. Nearly four decades ago, Pitfall Harry explored a large world of tricks, traps, and treasure. This would become the norm for practically all of gaming to come.īut if one game presciently granted a glimpse of gaming of the future, it was Pitfall. Unlike Pac-Man or Mario that had to rely on sporadically distributed powerups, Taizo the Digger was hunted and hunter all in one. This had the dual purpose of inspiring a generation of bizarre fetishes and featuring a hero that always had the ability to turn the tables on his opponents. And speaking of offensive options, Dig Dug first started digging in ’82, and he had the ability to “pump up” his opponents until they popped. Kangaroo could punch out monkeys and apples alike, and one could argue this simple act was the start of “videogame violence” for years to come (sorry, dead monkeys, you gotta start somewhere). Kangaroo, for instance, was a game that was very similar to the likes of Donkey Kong, but added an all-important offensive action to its heroine’s repertoire. Pac-Man and Pong had blazed the trail with their joystick/wheely thing controls, but now we were seeing new and innovative ways to play. In 1982, gaming was just taking its first, tentative steps towards Gaming as we know it. Let’s look at the evolution of gaming/Q*Bert over the years.
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