Nostalgic Childhood Computer Games

Hello Everyone, its the festive season once again! Hope you are getting along well and spending quality time with friends and family during this vacation season. After a super duper hectic involvement for my project, I finally have the chance to write this blog which has been long overdue. Although I really had the urge to write this blog couple of months ago, time did not permit. When I mentioned hectic work, it meant working continuously for 40 hours without rest, which is a record I have broken this year and I shall not ever do that again. Alright, enough of the whining and lets proceed to the main topic for this blog post.

Recently my brother bought a game console from Qoo10 website for only SGD 20.00 which consists of many retro 8-bits games such as Super Mario Brothers. Most games are similar to those found in the old Nintendo NES video game console which is the first one being manufactured by this renowned game maker. If you grew up in the 80s like me, you would have known or probably played games on this Nintendo NES video game console before. Its signature game, Super Mario Brothers has been awesomely successfully and well-known throughout the world.

Although there more advanced and fanciful computer games available today, you probably miss and is thinking of playing your favourite childhood games once again. However, the problem is that your old game console is no longer working or have been sold away. There is no worry on such issues as you can still purchase these old game consoles online. Even without doing so, you can still play them online without installing any additional software. All you actually need is a web browser with the required plugins installed. The only drawback of playing these games online is that you can't save the game and continue playing them later. Nevertheless, playing them even for a little while relive your childhood memories.

Here are 2 such nostalgic games which I wish to share in this blog post.

Super Mario Brothers

Play online at http://www.8bbit.com/play/super-mario-brothers/851

This game which was developed by Nintendo in 1985 became so famous that probably no one who grew up in the 1980s never knew or heard about it. Even the Kris World entertainment system on-board Singapore Airlines flight included this game. I am not exactly sure if this game is still available on the latest version of Kris World entertainment system but I do remember having a hard time playing this game when I traveled on a Singapore Airlines flight several years ago. The processing speed of the Kris World entertainment system were slow and thus resulted in latency during the game play. Secondly, the directional controls of the system were so stiff that the game character, Mario did not move immediately after pressing the arrow button. Even at the main menu, pressing the arrow button to toggle between movies, games, radios and maps were frustrating enough, not to mention about playing games. I really hope that the airline can improve both the hardware and software of this entertainment system to provide better experience for passengers to kill boredom during long haul flights.

Wolfenstein 3D

Play online at http://playdosgamesonline.com/wolfenstein-3d.html

This is the first-person shooter (i.e. the player experiences the action through the eyes of the shooter) computer game that was launched in 1992. It came pre-installed on the first personal computer which my dad purchased when I was in secondary 1 (in the year 1994). During those times, having a DOS-based game running on a personal computer with sound card were considered pretty impressive and I considered myself lucky to own such "infrastructure" for entertainment. The objective of this game was to navigate through an indoor maze (to be exact, in a building consisting of multiple levels and many doors on each level) and ultimately progress to the highest level to fight against the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler. As a player, you need to find your way to the elevator to get to the next level. Along the way, you would encounter Nazi soldiers (in brown uniform armed with pistol) and special force personnel (in dark blue uniform armed with machine gun). Occasionally, there were wolves that could bite the player to death. There were 4 type of weapons (knife, pistol, machine gun and chain gun) with limited ammunition. The player's health decreases each time he got shot or bitten by wolves and eventually "dies" when the health level hit 0%. However, the health level could be increased by grabbing food (meant to feed the wolves) along the way. The player is also expected to refill his ammunition by killing his enemies (except wolves) or grab any ammunition found along the way. There were many cheat codes for this game which I came to know one of them. A hilarious aspect for this game is that whenever the special force personnel (in dark blue uniform) got shot to death, he would hurl some weird phases (probably in German) before dying.

Just like many people find it hard to forget their first-love, you probably find it hard to forget the first few computer games you played during your childhood. As soon as you click on any 2 of the above-mentioned hyperlinks, I am sure you are likely to be addicted to playing them. Leave a comment if you have played or came across any interesting nostalgic computer game.