Remember when video games cost a quarter and arcades gave you atleast 5 tokens for a buck? What happened to that? Some people have said it's inflation, others that the technology of the games has caused the machines themselves to cost more, and this in turn causes the arcade operators to charge a dollar a game.
The first games that I recall costing more that a quarter for play are Mach II and Dragons Lair. They were both laser disc games and they seemed to universally cost fifty-cents to play one game - in someplaces it cost more. I remember compaining at the price, and I only played each game a small amount because of this.
Nowadays it's not uncommon for new games to cost fifty-cents for the first credit and in some cases i've seen machines charge up to a dollar-fifty for the first credit of play. That's just way to much in my opinion.
Well, that's my beef for the day. The real subject of today's article is the new trend of taking old games and remaking them onto newer machines. This is an interesting trend I've been noticing of late, and decided to finally remark on when I saw Super Space Football for the SNES. Now, if any of you owned an Apple //e or Atari 5200 back around 1985 you might have played a game called BallBlazer by Lucasfilm games. This game has always been a dear favorite of mine if nothing else because of its incredible speed and two-player action. The premise of the game is you are a person inside of this pyramidal shaped vehicle and in front of your ship you have a gravity field that you can grab a floating plasma ball in. The object of the game is to get this ball into the goal at the far end of a huge checkerboard field. Two-player is fun, but One-player against the computer can be downright vicious. The playing field is always displayed on a split game-screen. Now, back to Super Space Football. Aside from the fact that the graphics have been beefed up 1000%, this is essentially the same game. This makes me happy, and hopefully any of you out there who also liked this game might want to check out this title.
Another remake that I saw recently is again on the SNES. Called Kablooey, after I started this game up I realized it is the game originally titled Bombuzal which had some time out on the Amiga and Atari ST computers.
There are many more titles that are now making their ways from the vaults of antiquty of both other video game systems as well as computer systems. -More than you can shake a stick at to be sure! I wonder though why, on titles that are just re-issues, they change the name of the game? Most of these games where popular the first time around, you would think that companies would want to keep the name association.
Ah well, these are not questions for us the humble gamers to understand, I suppose. Maybe someday we'll see more classic titles from the past reappear. Personally I'm watching for old Activision titles to start poping up. For instance suped up versions of Pitfall I & II, or Hero. Until next issue...
Originally appeared Vol 1, Iss 2 (06-07/92)