Games Beaten In 2015!

[Games Beaten In 2015!]

I don't generally like double posting, but I've got another game to add to my Games Beaten In 2015 list and this is one that I'm particularly excited about!

 

 

45. Freedom Force (NES)

 

For the longest time, and I by that I mean the better part of two decades, Hogan's Alley (Game B in particular) was always my favorite NES light gun game. That remained true up until last month, when I stumbled on a copy of Freedom Force for the NES and decided to give it a try. In short: This game is awesome! It's got great graphics (for the NES), killer music, a good variety of power-ups and weapon upgrades, mini-games between stages, plenty of hidden secrets to find, and a smooth difficulty curve that ramps up to a "Zapper masters only" level by the final stage. It also happens to be the only NES game I can think of to actually have blood in it when you shoot an enemy. Freedom Force took me a good month or so practice a few times a week to beat, but I'm sure it's a game that I'll come back to play again and again. Once you beat the game—after you're awarded with a neat ending cutscene and some well earned congratulations—the game loops back to the beginning on a higher difficulty level and with the graphics changed up a bit to make it look like a different time of day, so there's definitely some good replay value here that I'll be looking forward to enjoying.

[PRGE 2015 - The convention pictures thread!]

I guess no more purchases today. I just wasted 70 bucks trying to get Rev the horny purple one.

1445186052802.jpg

I don't think any of those plushies are worth $70, but kudos on your choice of which to go for!

[You made any collecting mistakes?]

My biggest mistake was one that I'm sure many people out there have made, and I made it long before I was a retro game collector. Back in the year 2000 I was a teenager and desperately wanted one of the newly released PlayStation 2 systems, so in an effort to gather enough money to buy one I took all of the old video games and systems that I used to play as a kid but didn't care about anymore (at the time) to a local game store and sold them off for store credit.

 

Little did I know that the perfectly functioning and complete R.O.B. the Robot that I got $7 or $8 for would be worth so much one day, nor did I know that the complete boxed copies of Kid Dracula, Stop That Roach, and Mega Man IV for the Game Boy would ever be worth more than the $2 or $3 that I sold them for back then. Now those three CIB games go for around $800, $200, and $500 respectively. I try not to beat myself up over it though, since it's totally normal for a teenager to want the latest and greatest technology and at the time I had no idea that some 15 years later I would come to consider the Game Boy one of my favorite systems and find myself collecting for it. You live, you learn.

[Breaking News. Your fearless leader Albert has jumped ship to Intellivision]

Your Vision is our Vision: Col... wait wait! No, that's a different Vision I was thinking of. They're all good Visions though. Heck, pretty much any 8-bit gaming system or computer is good in my book. Glad to see Albert diversifying his video game interests.

[PRGE 2015 - The convention pictures thread!]

Scramble... Video?

 

 

My wallet is ready!

Or at least it would be if there weren't so many other fantastic Atari 2600 games coming out right now and I didn't need to shell out $80 to have a spinner installed in my multicade. It's probably for the best (for my bank account at least) that Scramble isn't ready for release just yet, but it definitely looks like it's going to be a "buy the moment it's released" title for me. Thanks for sharing the tantalizing video preview!

[RF Box On 2600 Constantly Going Out Of Tune. Any Fix?]

It's been the better part of a month since I updated this thread, so I figured I'd update it with what may be the weirdest news of all. After having the RF modulator go out of tune every night for the first week or so that I owned my latest Atari 2600, one day it just suddenly stopped going out of tune and has worked perfectly every day since then. For the last three weeks I've been playing the Atari every day with zero problems whatsoever, so my best guess is that something in it just had some dust buildup or needed to get broken in again after sitting in someone's closet unused for the last 30 years. Either that or it was ghosts. When all else fails, "ghosts" is always a plausible explanation.

 

Either way, everything seems fine now and I'm not complaining.

[What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2015 (Season 8)]

Got a big list of stuff!

 

EDIT: Excel lists don't translate over well (derrrp) so I made it into a text file... let's see if this works. Yeah I know it's not neat but whatever

 

*snipped*

Woah! And here I thought I was going to make thegoldenband's life miserable with the enormous list of games that I played a few minutes here and a few minutes there this week! Suddenly I feel aa little better about the size of the list that I'll be posting Monday morning, though something tells me that we may be waiting until Tuesday or Wednesday for this week's statistics post. I think our friendly record keeper might have his work cut out for him this week.

[Last 3 games you played?]

Double Dragon (Game Boy)

Operation C (Game Boy)

Super Breakout (Arcade)

[Emulation accuracy of Ms. Pac-Man on iCade 60-in-1 PCB & Namco Museum?]

The original Ms. Pac-Man definitely had difficulty settings. It has to do with how long the ghosts/monsters/whatever stay blue, primarily. There's a bit of an explanation inside one of my blog entries:

https://pacmaniax.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/so-how-long-are-the-ghosts-blue-anyway/

Thank you very much for that link to your blog post Dauber! That was exactly what I needed to confirm that the difficulty settings on my 60-in-1 PCB were working correctly and that any difference I was perceiving in the ghosts' movement speed and tactics was just due to going from playing Ms. Pac-Man on the small screen of the Game Boy Advance SP to a full 17" vertical monitor. It turns out that playing on the larger screen was making it appear that the ghosts were moving faster even though they really weren't. And playing on a smaller screen just let me take the whole maze in and track/anticipate the ghosts' movements more easily.

 

I still can't score half as well on my arcade cabinet as I can on the Game Boy Advance, even though the game plays exactly the same on both, but at least now I know why.

[Games Beaten In 2015!]

43. Super Mario Land (Game Boy)

 

This is another one of those games that I like to go back and play through a few times a year, when I've got 30 minutes or so to kill and I'm not sure exactly what to play. The platforming action is great, I love the horizontal scrolling shoot 'em up stages too, and the

is just wonderful.

 

 

44. Mechanized Attack (NES)

 

When most people think of NES light gun games they think of Duck Hunt and maybe Hogan's Alley, which is a darn shame because SNK's Mechanized Attack really deserves just as much recognition in my opinion. The graphics are great for the time, the action is fast and intense, there's a huge variety of power-ups to collect, and the branching paths you get to choose from between stages allow for a whole lot of replay value. Did I mention there's also some seriously awesome boss fights at the end of around half the levels? This game will give your trigger finger some serious exercise, but the difficulty curve is very reasonable and it's just an all around fun and polished light gun game with a distinctly SNK style. I had to use one continue to beat it, but I think with a little practice I should be able to do a 1CC play through before too long.

[How to beat the pterodactyl in Joust?]

(Stupid story...)

 

I just got a 2600 this year, after almost 30 years of wanting one. I hear Joust is great, so I get it. People were right, it is. I immediately become hooked. Played it a bunch ever since.

 

The FIRST time the pterodactyl shows up, I kill it. Completely by chance.

 

And it's been tormenting me ever since that I can't do it again, except on purpose.

 

Unfortunately, this thread has only made me realize that I could be waiting another few decades.

 

Good luck to you all.

The timing of this thread getting made is kinda funny for me, because I had a similar experience this week. I've had a copy of Joust for the 2600 for a good two years or so but never really played it since I remembered not liking it all that much as a kid when I played it on my older brother's ColecoVision with an Atari 2600 expansion module. But, this week I was bored and looking for a new game to play on the 2600 so I decided to pop in Joust and give it a try.

 

Needless to say I quickly realized that the game was awesome and that I had no idea what the childhood me was thinking. I played it for a good hour or so, always dodging the pterodactyls because I didn't think you could kill them, and then one time I slipped up and ran into one head on. Much to my surprise the pterodactyl went "pop!" and I didn't die! I spent the next half hour attempting to recreate this feat with no success, and I still have no idea how exactly I managed to kill the thing. I'm pretty sure I landed right on the tip of it's beak when it's mouth was closed, but even after dozens of attempts I haven't been able to do it again.

[Emulation accuracy of Ms. Pac-Man on iCade 60-in-1 PCB & Namco Museum?]

Me neither, but maybe Jin has the game set to 'hard' or defaults that way unless you change it? Almost all the games have virtual dipswitch settings and difficulty is one of them on Ms. Pac.

Changing the dip switch settings on the 60-in-1 board is as simple as powering it on while holding down the Test button, then using the Test and Service buttons to cycle through the menus until you find the game you want to change. From there you use the joystick and first fire button to change settings and the Player 1 Start button to save any changes you've made.

 

I've triple checked the dip switch settings for Ms. Pac-Man and it's definitely set to Easy, so who knows. Maybe I am just imagining it or maybe the Namco Museum ports that I'm used to are actually a little easier than the original arcade version.

[Emulation accuracy of Ms. Pac-Man on iCade 60-in-1 PCB & Namco Museum?]

Hey there everyone.

I'm writing this post because there's been something bugging me for the last month or so ever since I got my 60-in-1 multicade setup, and that's the difficulty level of Ms. Pac-Man. Every review I've read on the iCade PCB says that Ms. Pac-Man is emulated flawlessly perfect, and it certainly looks and sounds perfect to me, but I feel like the difficulty level is way harder than I'm used to when playing Ms. Pac-Man on the Namco Museum ports for the PS1 and Game Boy Advance.

 

Both Namco Museum ports are supposed to be, from everything I've read at least, perfect ports of the original arcade version of Ms. Pac-Man with the difficulty dip switch set to Easy. They play really well and seem identical to the Ms. Pac-Man game that I've played so many times on the official Ms. Pac Man / Galaga 20th Anniversary Reunion machine at a local pizza shop. But when I play Ms. Pac-Man at home on my iCade 60-in-1 multicade I swear it seems like the ghost AI gets way smarter and the ghosts start moving much faster than usual beginning on level 3. I've never heard anyone else mention this though, so I'm really wondering if it's just playing Ms. Pac-Man on the larger 17" vertical monitor compared to the smaller screens of the Game Boy Advance or the 20" Trinitron CRT TV that my wife's PlayStation is hooked up to making it seem like the ghosts are moving faster and using smarter tactics when they're really not.

 

So, what I'm wondering is if anyone else has noticed any difference in difficulty level between the iCade 60-in-1 board version of Ms. Pac-Man and the official Ms. Pac-Man PCBs or any of the officially licensed home console ports? It might be all in my head, but I swear the iCade version feels way harder than this game is supposed to be.

[What did you buy today?.........]

Double Dribble is awesome!! I used to kick the snot out of all my friends that played me in it. I always got a crackup of the title screen. "Double Dibble!!"

 

Free throw!

[What did you buy today?.........]

Got a couple eBay pickups in the mail today! First up is Double Dribble for the NES (my all time favorite basketball game, my original copy of which I had lost many years ago when financial necessity caused me to have to liquidate my previous retro gaming collection) that I scored for a very fair price of $5.49 shipped. Next is a copy of 1942 for the Game Boy Color, which I got a pretty fantastic deal of $12.95 shipped for. Both games have immaculate condition labels.

 

[Doxcade.com Custom Centipede Themed 60-in-1 Bartop Arcade Machine Review]

On the site it states that you can't continue games. What does that mean?

 

As Racerx mentioned, it just means that if you're on the 5th level of Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, or most of the other games on the board and you run out of lives you can't just hit the Player 1 button for another credit and keep playing; it just kicks you back to the game selection menu when you run out of lives on your one credit. There are a few games on the board that can be continued though, including 1942, 1943, 1943 Kai, and Arkanoid. There may be others that I haven't discovered yet, but those are the ones that I know you can continue from the level you left off on.

 

 

That thing looks pretty slick. At $440 I bet tire-kicker types would complain, but having built two MAME projects myself from scratch, I can attest that you burn through $440 in a big old hurry. And that doesn't even account for the few hundred hours of time a first-time builder would spend on getting a good project completed.

 

Does that tiny trackball have enough inertia to spin for a few seconds after a "swipe"?

 

Thanks Cynicaster! When the misses and I were thinking about ordering this machine I tried pricing out what it would cost me to build it myself, and not including the cost of the all the tools I don't own and would have needed to buy for the job I still don't think I could have done it for $440. It's a hefty sum of money, but I think it was well worth it to have the luxury of being able to play the real arcade versions of so many of my favorite 80's video games in the comfort of my own home on what feels like a real arcade machine.

 

As far as the trackball goes, I'd say I get about one second of free spinning time out of it after a good swipe. It is much less than I get from the Wico trackball that I like using with my Atari 2600, but when you unscrew the trackball retaining ring and take a peek inside it quickly becomes evident why the spin time is so short.

 

 

 

The trackball rollers and bearings are the epitome of "tiny", with the rollers measuring right about 1/8" in diameter and the bearings not being much larger. Fortunately they do seem to be made of good steel though, since I've been giving them a pretty heavy workout playing Centipede, Millipede, and Arkanoid on a daily basis for the last month and they haven't bent one bit. As it stands it takes two good swipes to get from one side of the screen to the other in Centipede, though the movement is very fluid and making small micro-motions feels just as precise with this little guy as it does on a full size trackball. I might make a run down to the hardware store to pick up some 3-in-1 oil and give the bearings a little squirt of it next week, just to see if that makes the ball spin a touch faster, but I'm not in any rush on that since think it does work quite well as is.

[What videogame gifts have you gotten from your significant other?]

For our two year wedding anniversary a few months ago the misses pitched in 50% of the cost and we ordered this custom Centipede themed bartop multicade for our retro gaming center.

 

 

 

 

She also knows that I'm an absolute fanatic for light gun games and picked me up a mint condition copy of Operation Wolf for the NES a couple weeks ago.

[Best Joystick for Atari 2600]

I don't think we will be able to determine what the best stick is. It really all comes down to prefrence. Personally I like my wico bat for a joystick and my genesis controller for a gamepad. I'm not a huge fan of the cx-40 but I do like the coleco Gemini controllers. It just depends on the game which controller I favor. I am defenently gonna try to get a silk stick at the Portland retro gaming expo.

You're definitely right about there being no "One stick to rule them all", as it's very much a matter of personal preference, but it's still fun to discuss and see what other people like best.

 

Personally I tend to bounce back and forth between using a Wico bat style stick and a Flashback 2 stick. I really love the robust arcade quality feel of the Wico stick, but it can be a bit stiff on the diagonals so I feel like it's really best suited to games with 2-way or 4-way movement. For games with 8-way movement I like the Flashback 2 sticks, which give a really classic 2600 feel but with much smoother control and less resistance due to the more modern membrane contacts in them. You just have to put a little thread locker on the joystick itself to keep it from coming unscrewed during frenetic gameplay.

 

 

This is my homemade Sanwa joystick I built years ago. Expensive, but worth it as I will never have to buy another joystick again.CX40 joysticks break easily.You may stare at the above pictures in awe. For you will never hold a joystick that equals it's profound greatness.

Beautiful stick! Can I ask what you used for the enclosure? I've often thought about making my own stick but I've been having trouble locating an enclosure that would not only look nice but accommodate the size of an arcade joystick and button's innards and still fit comfortably in the hand, but yours looks to fit the bill perfectly! It looks super clean and I imagine that it must play just as good as it looks. Again, wonderful work!

[Last 3 games you played?]

Ms. Pac-Man (Atari 2600)

Joust (Atari 2600)

Millipede (Atari 2600)

[What 2600 games are you playing right now?]

I've been on a big Super Breakout kick the last few days. I used to think Super Breakout on the 2600 was too hard to play for any reasonable length of time, but then I got used to the arcade version of Super Breakout on the household multicade and all of a sudden the Atari 2600 version seems way easier and more relaxing.

[AtariAge New Releases and Demos at PRGE!]

The long awaited Zippy is almost here!

I'm also really looking forward to Brik and seeing more on the Collector's Edition release of Lady Bug for the 2600. I don't normally go for boxed/collectors variants of games, but Lady Bug in a Coleco shell sounds just way too cool and I'll be interested in seeing what graphical changes were made as well. I won't be able to make it to PRGE this year, but I'll be hoping to pick up all three of the aforementioned games once they hit the AtariAge store.

[What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2015 (Season 8)]

Before I get to my household's play time statistics for this week, I have to give a huge "Thank you!" to Carlsson, Kurt, and Opry99er for all the great TI-99/4A advice they provided. I'm still not sure I really "need" one, since almost all of the games from that era I like the most I can already play on the household multicade arcade machine, Atari 2600, or NES; but you guys do make the TI-99/4A sound like a really attractive piece of hardware. Plus I could always use to have more versions of Centipede and Ms. Pac-Man around. If I ever decide to wet my feet in the world of classic computing I'll probably pick one up, since even after factoring in the cost of an Atari joystick adapter and modern A/V cables the TI-99/4A still comes out to well under half the price of a complete Commodore 64 or Atari computer; and the TIs do seem to be much more durable. I also like that most popular TI games come on cartridges, so there's no need to worry about or make shelf space for old and potentially unreliable disk drives like I'd have to do with a C64, and the voice synthesizer is pretty darn cool too. Thanks again guys! If I feel the need to scratch the classic computing itch at some point the TI-99/4A will most likely be the first computer I pick up.

That all said, on to the play times for this week!

Ineligible

The Pinball Arcade (Android) - 39 minutes

Arcade

Arkanoid - 69 minutes

Centipede - 19 minutes

Donkey Kong - 63 minutes

Donkey Kong Junior - 31 minutes

Frogger - 77 minutes

Galaga 3 - 15 minutes

Gun.Smoke - 5 minutes

Lady Bug - 54 minutes

Millipede - 4 minutes

Ms. Pac-Man - 42 minutes

Ms. Pac-Man (Speed-Up Version) - 29 minutes

Pac-Man - 48 minutes

Pac-Man (Speed-Up Version) - 6 minutes

Pac-Man Plus - 4 minutes

Pengo - 6 minutes

Phoenix - 14 minutes

Pinball Action - 10 minutes

Pleiads - 8 minutes

Scramble - 10 minutes

Shao-Lin's Road - 12 minutes

Space Invaders - 36 minutes

Super Pac-Man - 25 minutes

Time Pilot - 10 minutes

Xevious - 12 minutes

1942 - 22 minutes

Atari 2600

Frogger - 10 minutes

Ms. Pac-Man - 8 minutes

Game Boy

Skate or Die: Bad 'N Rad - 7 minutes

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan - 18 minutes

Game Boy Color

Super Pac-Man (played on Ms. Pac-Man: Special Color Edition) - 4 minutes

720° - 16 minutes

NES

Dragon Spirit: The New Legend - 315 minutes

Freedom Force - 13 minutes

Kirby's Adventure - 35 minutes

Metroid - 302 minutes

Xevious - 14 minutes

Total Play Time This Week
1,412 minutes (23 hours 32 minutes)

Individual System Play Times This Week

NES: 679 minutes

Arcade: 631 minutes

Android: 39 minutes

Game Boy: 25 minutes

Game Boy Color: 20 minutes

Atari 2600: 18 minutes

It was a pretty big week for gaming around here, with the household multicade and NES making up the overwhelming majority of the play time. The misses and I are still exploring and getting a feel for all the games on the iCade 60-in-1 board in our multicade, thus the huge list of arcade games with 5 to 10 minutes of play time on them, but at this point I think we're both starting to settle in and find our favorites on it. For me those games are Centipede, Lady Bug, Ms. Pac-Man, Arkanoid, Shao-Lin's Road, Xevious, and 1942; and for the misses it's Donkey Kong, Frogger, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders. There's still a lot more games on that board to explore though, so I wouldn't be surprised if either of us found some new favorites over the next few weeks.

On the NES side of things, my wife and I each picked up a new NES game this week and we both spent a whole lot of time playing our respective games. I finally got my hands on a copy of Dragon Spirit: The New Legend, and oh man was it ever worth the wait! I think it took all of about 5 minutes for Dragon Spirit to become my new favorite vertical scrolling shooter on the NES, and though I still haven't beat it after the 5 hours of gameplay time I've put into it, I do get a little farther into the game (I can actually get to the last level now) and my skills do noticeably improve every time I play; which is always a hallmark of a good shmup. I love the fluid control, huge variety of power ups, and the really neat high fantasy storyline that's told through anime style cutscenes between levels. It's just an all around wonderful game for any fan of vertical scrolling shoot 'em ups!

The NES game my wife picked up this week was the original Metroid, which neither of us have ever played before, and she's been having an absolute blast with it. She quickly discovered that this was one NES game that it was absolutely necessary to read the manual for before playing in order to know what you're supposed to do and where to go, but after downloading and reading a PDF copy of the manual she's been having a great time spending hours and hours exploring the cavernous underworld of the planet Zebes. Thus far the only complaint she's had about it is how little health you restart with after you die, but that hasn't stopped her from monopolizing our retro gaming TV at every available opportunity since she got Metroid a few days ago.

Anyway, that's all for this week!

[What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2015 (Season 8)]

Jin,

 

Please do get one... They are excellent computers and deserve to be played with and utilized, programmed on and enjoyed. they're made out of adamantium and space steel, will survive nuclear fallout and the zombie apocalypse, and have thousands of available programs and an awesome enthusiast community.

 

Yea, I am a homer fanboy, but it is well deserved.

 

Not to derail this thread (and feel free to shoot me a PM in response if you'd rather not take the thread further off topic), but as someone who has never owned a classic computer outside of the IBM PC-XT that I grew up with, what are the big selling points of the TI-99/4A over other popular classic computers like the Commodore 64 and Atari 130XE? The C64 and Atari computers seem like they have a larger variety of games available on them, most of which are less expensive than the TI-99/4A versions (not to mention that they don't require a $30-$50 adapter to use an Atari joystick with), and yet the TI-99/4A appears to be massively more popular among the classic computer users who participate in this tracker. So I guess I'm just kind of wondering—as someone who has never owned a classic computer is considering picking one up—what reasons are there to go for a TI-99/4A over a C64 or Atari computer? Aside from the obvious fact that the TI has the competition beat by a mile in the external aesthetics department that is.

[Favorite Morning Games?]

What a neat idea for a thread! There's a lot of mornings (about half of them probably) when, after returning from smoking my morning cigarette out on the porch, I come back inside and sit down to play a game. What makes early morning gaming a little different than my usual gaming sessions though is that there are certain criteria I look for a in a "morning game" that are quite a bit different than what I usually look for in a game. For instance, one of my favorite genres of video games is vertical scrolling spaceship shooters; but in the early mornings I just can't play those kind of games because there's always too much flying around on screen for my foggy half awake brain to keep track of.

 

The criteria I look for in a morning game is: Easy starting difficulty, slowly ramping difficulty curve, relaxed game pacing, not too much happening on screen to keep track of, and that the game can be completed in half an hour or less. That said, here's my Top 10 favorite morning games.

 

 

10. Pitfall II: Lost Caverns (Atari 2600)

This is one of those games that I've played through and beaten so many times that I could almost play it with my eyes closed, which is a good thing since my eyes are usually half closed in the mornings. I know where all the treasures and enemies are, so I can just sort of play this one on autopilot and not really have to worry about running into anything until that final climb up to rescue Quickclaw at the very end. Even then, I've played Pitfall II enough times that I can usually get through the final challenge in two or three tries. It's just an all around nice game to fill the first 20 minutes or so of my day with.

 

9. Mortal Kombat (Sega Genesis)

Fighting games aren't usually what I would consider a relaxing way to start my day, but this old familiar favorite is much slower paced than most fighting games and pretty darn easy on the Normal difficulty level. The special moves and fatalities are also simple to pull off and don't require very precise timing, so this is one of those rare fighting games that I can actually play through and beat on one credit first thing in the morning.

 

8. Freedom Force (NES)

There's nothing like a light gun shooting game to get your arm muscles warmed up and ready for the day ahead, and this one has a great pacing and difficulty curve for first thing in the morning. The music is pretty awesome too, and it scores bonus points for being the only NES game I can think of off the top of my head to actually have blood in it. Freedom Force is just an all around great game for any time of the day, but it's definitely become my favorite "first thing in the morning" light gun game.

 

7. Space Invaders (Arcade or Atari 2600)

These days I often plunk down in front of the household multicade arcade machine for early morning gaming sessions, but for the longest time the Atari 2600 was my go-to gaming system for early morning video game fixes. Regardless of the platform it's on though, Space Invaders is always a great way to start my day. It offers up a good challenge that starts out slow and gradually gets harder as you begin to wake up and your reflexes improve, and… I'm not really sure there's more I can say about this one that everyone doesn't already know. It's Space Invaders!

 

6. Ms. Pac-Man (Atari 2600)

In spite of most of my morning gaming sessions occurring on the aforementioned multicade arcade machine, this is one game that I always prefer to play on the Atari 2600 if I'm going to play it first thing in the morning. Why? The arcade version is just way too difficult for me to handle right after waking up, but the ghost AI in the 2600 version is much less devious and the gameplay is more forgiving because of it. Besides, who doesn't love waking up to the sound of "waka waka waka waka"?

 

5. Super Breakout (Atari 2600)

This one is a little faster paced than my usual morning fare, but there's just something so simple and zen like about the very basic gameplay of "bounce the ball off the paddle, break the breaks. Break them all then break a new set of bricks." Super Breakout is a game that I can really zone out and just let my mind wander while playing, so it's well suited to the mental fog of early morning grogginess. This is another one that is on the household multicade, but as with Ms. Pac-Man the arcade version is just way too difficult for me to handle first thing in the morning. Best to stick with the 2600 version.

 

4. Lady Bug (Arcade or Atari 2600)

Another maze game along the lines of Ms. Pac-Man, but I just like this one a little better due to the larger variety of gameplay mechanics, slightly slower pacing, more gradual difficulty curve, bright and colorful graphics, and the inherent charm of playing as a Lady Bug going around munching flowers. It never fails to make me smile and, whether played on the arcade machine or the homebrew Atari 2600 cartridge, Lady Bug is always a great way to start the day.

 

3. Frogger (Arcade or Atari 2600)

Another great morning game regardless of which platform you play it on, but I like the arcade version the best for it's large variety of cheerful little songs that play throughout the game and it's fanciful graphics. No matter what it's played on though, Frogger always starts out slow and simple and takes a good 8 or 10 minutes before the pacing ramps up enough to start giving me a real challenge. Thankfully that's usually about how long it takes me to shake off the early morning grogginess!

 

2. Adventure (Atari 2600)

Come on now, who doesn't love starting off their day by slaying some dragons and saving an entire kingdom from an evil wizard? The third game mode in Adventure, which randomizes the locations of every item in the game, has been a longtime favorite way to start my day. In 15 minutes or less you can go on a high fantasy adventure, solve some basic "find the key" puzzles, get a moderate challenge from trying to locate the sword and battle the dragons guarding the items you need to complete your quest, then finally return the magical chalice to the golden castle where it belongs. What I love most about playing this game first thing in the morning is that no matter how many times you die (I.E. get eaten by a dragon) you can always hit the reset button and try again with all the items right where you left them. There's no real punishment for failure, and that makes it a wonderfully frustration-free way to start your day.

 

1. Dungeon (Atari 2600)

Coming in and number #1 is a homebrew Atari 2600 game that I've started off more days than I can count with, and I can count pretty darn high. Much like Adventure this game sends you on a short quest (15 to 30 minutes on average) and tasks you with completing variety of classic fantasy genre objectives: Rescue a princess, slay a dragon, pull a legendary sword from a stone, battle a black knight, and so on. Dungeon is a marvelous game any time of the day, but what makes it so well suited for playing first thing in the morning is it's turn based combat system. Since you and the creatures you battle on your quest take turns selecting and making attacks (á la Final Fantasy and just about every other JRPG ever made) there is zero pressure to do anything in any sort of time frame, and you can always set the controller down for a few minutes to wander off to the bathroom, make some coffee, go have a cigarette, cook breakfast, or whatever else your morning routine might include. That combined with the randomized location of items, characters, and monsters throughout the game—giving it infinite replay value—and the relatively short length of the game's quest make Dungeon my #1 favorite game to start off my day with.

[What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2015 (Season 8)]

TI-99/4A:

 

Micro Pinball: 5 hours

...lee

 

The more I see it show up in this thread the more I feel like I should really get a TI-99 at some point to check out the games on it. They're about as affordable as classic PCs come, and—if this thread is any indication—seem to have a ton of great games on them.