One of the earliest genres of video games is the shooter.
Why?
Simplicity.
Here’s the concept: Fire a projectile at an enemy or obstacle, watch it blow up, rinse, repeat.
You see? With such a relatively modest list of goals for a group of programmers to try to achieve, the appeal is obvious.
And for the gamer, the idea of blowing crap up is fun too.
So, shooters’ explosion in popularity in the 1970s and 80s was probably inevitable, and they’re an important part of gaming history.
I included the wack-a-doodle Air Zonk earlier in this countdown, but I also knew, given the genre’s importance, I should probably include a more traditional shooter somewhere in my Top 20.
How did I settle on Soldier Blade?
It’s really stinking good.
Soldier Blade
Genre: Shooter Released: 1992 Platform: Turbografx-16 5/5 from GamePro
So for fun I sometimes sit around and tweak the list of games I’d like to include in this feature. Games get moved up and down all the time, but the overarching principle I use is this: What games should a person experience before they die? And more presently for myself, which games would I want to write about before I die?
It’s morbid, but then, so are many games.
Which leads us to one of the most brutal lessons many people of a certain age ever experienced via the educational game The Oregon Trail: that life is constantly trying to kill you.
It’s not what I’d call a subtle lesson either.
It cracks me up to this day that educators saw fit to knock this lesson into kids’ heads for something like a generation of kids (maybe more?).
“Hey kids? Want to learn about the world? Well here’s this ‘history game’ [wink, wink] that’ll show you how much life sucks sucked. Have a good time getting adjusted!”
The thing is, this game was wildly addictive anyway.
Yeah, it was borderline impossible to avoid snakebites and/or cholera. But the point of the thing was to try to win anyway, and when someone in the class was finally able to confirm that, yes, it was possible to make it all the way to the end without sustaining complete disaster, well that was just the perfect brew of crack cocaine the rest of us needed to continue to come back to it.
Plus it was a video game. In class. As opposed to math worksheets or some other mundane task like collecting rocks.
OF COURSE everyone loved this game.
The Oregon Trail
Genre: Educational Released: 1985 Platform: Apple No. 9 on Time’s 50 Best Video Games of All Time
That saying gives me the shivers, as it denotes fan entitlement. But there’s no denying that many of George Lucas’ changes to “A New Hope” he debuted with “The Special Edition” in 1997 continue to create frustration for a great many fans.
On this episode we dove into why, whether any of the changes are good, and how this problem came into being in the first place.
