| Awhile back, before I had a "real" computer, I had an Apple II. These early 80's machines were more interesting and odd than what's out there today... I don't think there was ever an Apple 1...but the Apple II was invented in 1977 by Macintosh founders Stephen Wozniak and Steve Jobs(see Jobs' picture on right). If you click to Wozniak's website, you can see him rant on and on about the quality of these "modern" computers...and curiously, he has written "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" on the banner......... I had a lot more fun with the Apple than most of today's computers, mainly because everything was so hackable. There was a simple computer language called BASIC, which I'll get to later. For those who missed out, here are some of the games I played on this thing: |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| MARIO BROS: As I said before, this predated Super Mario...and if you haven't played it, you can do one of three things: 1. Get an old NES and a rare Mario Bros. cartridge 2. Find an old Virtual Boy on E-Bay and get Mario Clash(which is the same game as Mario Bros, only repackaged) 3 Get a Game Boy Advance and Super Mario Advance(which is the same game as Mario Bros. PLUS Super Mario 2 repackaged) And FORGET about links; yer on your own. BUG ATTACK When my cousin first saw me playing this, he said, "Oh gimmee a break, that's a ripoff of Centipede!" Well, it was, but I played it a lot in my 7th grade class.... There were two types of games released for the Apple: arcade classics, and ripoffs of arcade classics. DEATHMAZE Ho-boy, where do I begin? Let's see... This was a 3-D maze that you had to wander through in first-person view. And it was harder than the title suggested...it was downright annoying. On my first try, I rounded a corner and "the invisible guillotine beheaded me." See, the problem was, for a lot of this you had to enter word commands that one could only know if he or she owned the Deathmaze MANUAL. But I did not. The goal was to find the elevator and tell it to raise you to the next level. And the location of the elevator "wasn't always obvious," according to the game's title screen. This pretty much screwed ME, because I had no idea what command you even GAVE the elevator, let alone where it was hidden. To make matters worse, if you left the game on too long it would cut you off and say you "died of starvation." There were various treasure boxes in the Deathmaze, but I could never figure out what each thing you got was supposed to DO. There was a "rotten moldy old sneaker," a frisbee, and a bowling ball, among other things. Once I had spent too long in the game and it started to warn me by saying "YOUR STOMACH IS RUMBLING!!" So I tried typing in the command "EAT BOWLING BALL." The computer displayed, "YOU EAT THE BOWLING BALL AND IT GIVES YOU HEARTBURN!!" Another time I tried throwing the frisbee. I typed, "THROW FRISBEE," and this is what I got: "THE FRISBEE SAILS AROUND A NEARBY CORNER. THE MONSTER GRABS IT, THROWS IT BACK, AND IT SAWS YOUR HEAD OFF!! GAME OVER." Somebody must have been really bored to program a game this impossible. The problem is, whenever you buy a PSX or a Nintendo game, you at least have the security of knowing there is SOME way to reach the end of the game. With Apple, you never had that promise. NIGHTMARE #6 This was the game in its entirety, starting from the title screen(this is true)... NIGHTMARE #6 THE GOAL OF THIS GAME... IS TO TRY AND FIGURE OUT HOW TO PLAY THE GAME. WHAT IS YOUR MOVE? I would type in, uh.......7A? WRONG!!! YOU HAVE 9 MORE CHANCES TO GET POINTS!! Whee. DRAGON MAZE Someone came up with this in the very early days of the Apple, and it was an interesting idea. The computer draws a random maze on your screen, and you have to get from one end to the other before the dragon, who's also in the maze, finds you and eats you. Unfortunately, the maze took forever to draw. And the dragon was one large red dot on the screen. WUMPUS 2 Oh yeah...this was the best. As many as 11 people could play this. You searched in a cave, with 97 different rooms, hunting the "Evil Wumpi." The goal was to get as many as possible. If you shot an arrow into a room where another player was, you could kill that player(!!!) Even MORE cool was one of the best things I've ever seen programmed into an Apple game...if you were standing in a room, and chose the command "Climb out of pit"... ...it would tell you, "You are not in a pit." "But it can be arranged. YOU ARE IN A PIT!!" OREGON TRAIL My teachers forced me to play this crud every year in the computer lab, because it was educational. I was in Oregon after all...the worst version of this was the text version, with no pictures. If you'd planned badly(which usually happened), it would tell you that you died and then ask you a bunch of questions about how you'd like your funeral to go, and what you'd want on your headstone, and.....man, depressing.... NUMBER MUNCHERS Apple Ii fans have yet to find a ROM of Number Munchers on the Internet. For some freaky reason, nobody's uploaded this. And that's a shame, because THIS educational title was actually FUN. I was forced to play it too, but it was good. Every three rounds, the program would go into a short cartoon, "Great Moments in Muncher History!" In one film, Number Muncher took a jackhammer to Mount Rushmore and carved himself in it. That joke had been done, but Number Muncher did it with style... FLOBYNOID Sadly, I didn't have Arkanoid....I had something from Canada that was part-French and part-English. Flobynoid was more than just a ripoff though...every level was named! Although they were in Canadian Frenglish... "ET UN BIG MAC!!!" --a burger-shaped puzzle "MASSACRE A LA!" --a chainsaw-shaped puzzle "OH! MON BATEAU!!" --a boat-shaped puzzle "A BEER?" --a beer "HETEROZYGOTE RECESSIF!!" --I forget "L'ESCARGOT INFERNAL." --a large snail COOL, I BROKE HIS BRAIN I didn't have it but I heard about it...it does exist. There's a disk out there that does nothing, except playing a voice sample of Bart Simpson saying "Cool, I broke his brain." This more than likely came out when Bart was hot, so you could get away with charging $19.95 for a disk that had nothing but a short recording, and still make sales charts. BURGERTIME Chris asked me what the weirdest game I had for Apple was. I told him it was this thing where you were a chef, and you had to walk over toppings to make them fall onto burgers, while bring chased by living condiments and olives and burger patties. "Oh, you mean BURGERTIME??" Chris said. He knew? It turns out this thing was actually a POPULAR ARCADE GAME. Huh... SKYFOX Think Starfox running at 4 frames a second. BAKED APPLE USERS GROUP The Baked Apple group was from Japan, way before anything Japanese was hot. They translated all their games themselves. Oi... One of their many programs was "Fly Killer," where you moved a hand holding a spray can around a room and sprayed fast-moving flies. "YOUR MISSION IS TO KILL ALL THE FLIES. DO'T YOU LIKE A FLY, DO YOU!!! PLEASE KILL MANY FLIES WITH AN INSECTICIDE SPLAY." Your score was measured on your splay accuracy. Believe it or not, I actually spent more time on this than on other games, ha...it was so weird that it was great!! Baked Apple produced many space alien zap'em games as well...and on their instruction screens, almost every time it would end with "May the force be with you." It's too bad you can't download Baked Apple games from anywhere, not that you would want to anyway. BOMBING MISSION You have to hit the computer's fort by guessing the right coordinates and firing, before the computer gets YOUR coordinates right and fires at you. This was cool. No modern game is like this...pity. (Then again, entering in the coordinates requires a keyboard, and the only console that has one is Dreamcast.) |