kartooner

Super Mario Broth­ers (1, 2, 3 and so on and so forth) were my favorite video games of the past. If given the chance I would play them not only in the con­fines of my room but within the walls of the local arcade which was encased in a build­ing that looked like a cas­tle. The arcade was appro­pri­ately named Cas­tle Park and included (dur­ing the mid to late 80s) the coolest arcades this side of the world.

Here are a few of my favorites;

Drag­ons Lair - Don Bluth and Gary Gold­mans’ excel­lent and some­what novel game star­ring Dirk the Dar­ing. The great­est achieve­ment in regards to this game was it’s use of full-motion ani­mated sequences cou­pled with time-reaction game­play. To play you had to pay atten­tion to your flash­ing sword and hit a but­ton in cor­re­spon­dance for an action. (ie. swing your sword at the ten­ta­cle beast, jump to a spe­cific area, etc.) It was truly one of a kind.

Pac­man (clas­sic) — Every­one knows the power of this sim­ple game. Con­trol Pac­man to gob­ble lit­tle energy tablets and in the mean time avoid the ghosts. The smaller ones had no affect on game­play other than attain­ing points while the large tablets changed the ghosts into “edi­ble” ghosts. This way you could switch your direc­tion and give those ghosts a taste of their own med­i­cine. Let’s not for­get the cher­ries and other fruit varieties.

Mario Broth­ers — This was the orig­i­nal Mario game. Instead of the game being split into sev­eral worlds (like other Mario games), this game con­sisted of a hand­ful of lev­els where Mario and Luigi could bat­tle eachother using their adver­saries or you could work together to beat the chal­lenges. I can remem­ber the spiked ene­mies and the infa­mous Goom­bas. Good times, great gameplay.

Holo­gram Time Trav­eler — Cre­ated by Rick Dwyer, the man behind the tech­nol­ogy for Dragon’s Lair, this game was some­thing never-before-seen and while the nov­elty lasted for merely a few months it still remains an inter­est­ing con­cept. More­over, the game was more fun to watch than it was to play.

It was the first Holo­graphic arcade game uti­liz­ing the now cliché’ mir­ror Holo­gram effect. I can remem­ber try­ing to actu­ally touch the inter­ac­tive char­ac­ters in the game (namely the cow­boy and Princess Kyi-La).

For even more Mario Broth­ers fun, check out this cool Flash ani­ma­tion.