Games From Your Childhood

[Meatwad]

Games for the Amiga 500/600/1200.

Another World

Lemmings

[Guybrush]

Games for the Amiga 500/600/1200.

Another World

Lemmings

Yup, remember both well 🙂 and also enjoyed the sequels, sorta, being Flashback and Lemmings 2: The Tribes.

[Meatwad]

Yup, remember both well 🙂 and also enjoyed the sequels, sorta, being Flashback and Lemmings 2: The Tribes.

Most courtesy of X-Copy. 

[Meatwad]

Yup, remember both well 🙂 and also enjoyed the sequels, sorta, being Flashback and Lemmings 2: The Tribes.

Have you noticed they've released an Amiga 500 Mini https://www.amazon.com.au/The-A500-Mini-Electronic-Games/dp/B09BW8N7JZ/ref=asc_df_B09BW8N7JZ/?tag=googleshopdsk-22&linkCode=df0&hvadid=464128055449&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=4609987307986142279&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9070529&hvtargid=pla-1409801168871&psc=1&mcid=79ca662b62c7365c92d1ba878751d218 ?

I was thinking about getting another A1200 or a A600 with a decent accelerator, but its probably a better idea just to get this Amiga 500 Mini or play the games on emulator since the Amigas seems to have a problem with capacitor longevity (like a lot of retro machines appear to do) and a lot of them need recapping. Plus, floppy disks aren't all that durable so a lot of them are defective now. Good times. And the games were a lot more fun than a lot of the ones I see now and I dont think Im being overly sentimental either. 

Haven't had an Amiga since the early 2000's (my last was a A1200) but it was the computer I first used on the internet, mainly to talk to my best friend in the next town over. Even though Australia has some god awful connections speeds traditionally, with enough patience we could connect to the internet in the early/mid 90's. All of my friends had Amigas and we all thought they were here to stay and take market share away from IBM. Clearly Commodore dropped the ball with that one as the A1200 should have used a much more improved chipset but it was still a great computer. Still a very strong Amiga community out there with genuine enthusiasts but there is a lot of scamming going on too, with people selling knowingly faulty goods to other people. Makes me a bit reluctant to buy a 2nd hand Amiga due to this. British sellers seem to be the most reliable from what I've seen, but the freight cost to Australia is usually horrendous.

Can also remember another fun moment on the Amiga 1200 when I gained access to our high schools website on my mates Amiga once, since website security back then was pretty much non existent and only relied on whoever was the head of the computing department keeping a very mediocre password safe. One random kid who we didn't even hang out with got it and was too scared of logging in, in case he got into trouble. My friend and I on the other hand had no problem with this. We had complete control to edit the entire website  . Ended up renaming the school something juvenile and decided after a couple of hours that we'd had our fun and changed it back to what it should be and never logged into it again. Playing games was more fun that screwing with the high schools website so I doubt it ever got tampered with ever again. 

[Meatwad]

Yup, remember both well 🙂 and also enjoyed the sequels, sorta, being Flashback and Lemmings 2: The Tribes.

On the subject of Another World, although Flashback looked and played very similarly to it, it actually wasn't a sequel (although the video game magazines at the time seem to imply this). Pretty sure they were developed by the same company but aren't supposed to be related.

[Guybrush]

On the subject of Another World, although Flashback looked and played very similarly to it, it actually wasn't a sequel (although the video game magazines at the time seem to imply this). Pretty sure they were developed by the same company but aren't supposed to be related.

Yes, that's why I added the word "sorta" after sequels 🙂

I haven't seen the Amiga mini, but I'm not surprised it exists as it seems new versions of old computers and consoles have been making something of a splash lately. I got a new "commodore 64" for my last birthday. It has USB support and can load ROMs from a memory stick, so that's kinda nice. Only annoyance is the controller is cabled and seems to have the original cable length. We don't sit on the floor right in front of a small TV like we used to. We have big TVs and sit further away, so not sure why the manufacturers haven't caught on to that.

I've tried emulating AMIGA games, but the process seemed to me more fiddly and less reliable than most other systems. I assume Commodore may have changed the hardware / specs around a bit depending on years, region and so on? So maybe one of these new gadgets makes emulating and playing those games easier 🙂

Most of the great games are already on PC or other systems, but there was of course a time when the AMIGA versions were superior, even with the added disk swapping 🙂 the music / sound with the Amiga mods were at least pretty great.

[Lexi Darling]

I think Amigas were more popular in Europe than they were over here. I've never seen one or known anyone who had one. My dad had a few 80s home computers always lying around our house when I was a kid but we never booted them up. I know my dad used to use those to browse Usenet newsgroups back in the late 80s/early 90s, though I'm not sure if he used them for gaming.

I did play Lemmings in the 90s though, I believe this exact version for Windows '95 was the one I had.

[Skittler]

The first games I remember playing was The Legend of Zelda, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, and Super Mario Bros.on the NES around 1993. Then a little later playing Chip's Challenge and Destruction Derby 2 on the PC. I didn't really become a huge gamer until the PS1/PS2 era. I remember spending hours playing the original Tony Hawk and Tomb Raider games then GTA 3 was released and I became obsessed with it. I don't game much anymore but I still have some older consoles collecting dust.

[Lexi Darling]

Number Munchers, baby. I played this on the DOS computer in the my kindergarten/first grade classroom (it was the same room). They had it on floppy disk, and this would have been circa 1994-95. Love that sh*t eating grin on the red monster.

[Dianne W]

Just was a great funtime GAME playing as a youngster...HOP SCOTCH..

You took a chalk and painted the pavement with squares and numbers to 10...You took a stone or similar and would takes turns to throw the stone to hit a square that you had to jump to..hop to one square and leap two feet onto the next square without stepping outside the Chalk lines..First to get up the top number 10 and back was the winner...

Parents would moan just a bit about the mess we made...that was my only sibling Jacqueline that I played with....one time we played lock out the house and she ended up in Hospital with 30 odd stitches in her arm....childhood back then was free but not without accidents.

[Lisnaholic]

^ I loved hopscotch too, and played it repeatedly with my brother and sister. It required a good balance of skills: careful throwing and careful jumping, and each turn became more challenging as different squares became off-limits: if you didn't "own" them yourself, you had to jump right over them.
Thanks for reminding me of a genuine pleasure that I haven't thought about in years.

For rainy days, Monopoly was the favourite I remember best. The official notes go up to $500 denomination, but we worked out some inflated version with $1 000 notes which made the game last for so long that even we finally got bored with it.

[Guybrush]

We played a lot of Monopoly (and also some hooscotch) and it was fun, but I've since realized that Monopoly's game design isn't particularly good. Especially, your loss of the game is likely to be a slow, downward spiral that takes a while where you lose all your buildings and land over time. Every round puts you at further disadvantage and you're unlikely to get out of it. This prolonged death isn't good game design or very child friendly 😄

[grindy]

We played a lot of Monopoly (and also some hooscotch) and it was fun, but I've since realized that Monopoly's game design isn't particularly good. Especially, your loss of the game is likely to be a slow, downward spiral that takes a while where you lose all your buildings and land over time. Every round puts you at further disadvantage and you're unlikely to get out of it. This prolonged death isn't good game design or very child friendly 😄

Monopoly was originally a game to showcase that landlords have too much power. The bug is a feature.

[Lisnaholic]

Yes, with its focus on acquisition and money-making, Monopoly can be seen as sending a dubious message to kids - or perhaps it's just a harmless outlet to discharge your avaricious tendencies, to play at being a powerful businessman so that you can then go back, refreshed, to the typical state of childhood, with a few pennies of pocketmoney being your only financial assets. In that sense, it worked the same way as the ever popular cowboy movies which gave you the chance to live out the fantasy of being a gun-toting man of action for an hour or so.

I liked your description of losing at Monopoly, Guybrush ! It reminds me of some real-life years that I spent on a low income 
But in Monopoly, even losing can be fun: hoping the dice will let you survive another round, and in our own case, always having a benign banker who would periodically hand out $1 000 of bonus cash, just to keep the game going.

On the topic of badly designed games, does anyone know the Yu-Gi-Oh card game? I mention it because I noticed that it always caused heated arguments among my son's 12-year-old friends. The prob being that every card has its own complex rules and conditions of play, so the children descend into bitter arguments about the rules, instead of enjoying a game where the rules are simpler, and known to everyone before going in.

 
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I think this Four-In-A-Row game was one of the best toys I bought for my son: very cheap, no fights, and it gets those young brains working:-



 

[Lexi Darling]

@Lisnaholic I never really got into Yugioh, but I did play a lot of Magic the Gathering, another card game that has complex rules like that. Those kinds of games can be really fun and stimulating if everyone is clear on the rules, though yeah, it's hard when some cards interact with each other in convoluted ways. I played Magic regularly from ages 10 to 19, even co-hosted a group for it.