The Retro side of Pengo

I adore a lot of retro games. My very first "game system" was our Tandy 1000 computer (I missed out on the C64 sadly). On this I played a sort of side-scrolling shooter (I haven't re-found this one yet, but it had a top down view and a side view at the same time and you blew up trucks and planes and stuff) and a couple of games that my grandfather programmed straight in assembly code. He was an engineer and could write directly in assembly, so they ran very fast, even back then, but that's a story for a different time.

Some time after that I received a NES from my dad for one of my birthdays or christmas or something. I think I had just turned 8 and they were still relatively new. I played the hell out of my Mario/Duck Hunt cartridge and I wore out my Legend of Zelda cart (the shiny gold one, I wore the gold right off of it in places). Around this time I had a mini-tape recorder and me and a friend of mine would record game music off our tv's and take it to school with us.

This started my addiction to video game music. At my lowest point, I borrowed my friend's copy of Taboo: The Sixth Sense, a tarot based NES game (which was HORRID) and recorded music from it because frankly, while the music, the graphics, and the game were all horrible, the music COULD be a little catchy and I had tons of tapes. Mostly my friend and I laughed and laughed and laughed at the horrible, horrible grammar in the game.

So eventually I moved on to a Sega Genesis that I bought half of, my dad bought the other half, just because I wanted it so badly. This is where I really started playing games and letting the character sit there just to hear the music. Sonic the Hedgehog, that came with the Genesis, had very good music at the time. Genesis had a much better music chip than the NES did, being 16 bit and all, but the real kicker was when one of my friends let me borrow his SNES in exchange for my Genesis (which we ended up doing a lot after that). At this point I got to play Final Fantasy II, which as we all know is really FF 4 but named 2 because of the transfer over to us poor RPG-less Americans.

All in all, I've been a real freak for old school chip-based music, or chiptunes if you would rather.

My blog-buddy EV over at The Forgotten Gamer has posted a couple of things about game music, go read his posts. But I have something he doesn't! HAH! Take that EV! In yo' face... or something.

I have the Videogame Music Preservation Foundation in my speed-dial... I mean favorites list.

So today I was playing the new Bionic Commando game again, just for the nostalgic feeling that the music gives me, since Bionic Commando's music is awesome... and I got SO nostalgic that I went over to the VGMPF and loaded up Bionic Commando. You can also listen along here. Just click on track 6 and let it play. It's arguably one of the best chiptunes on any NES game. Fun Fact about Bionic Commando. In Japan it's called Top Secret: Hitler's Revival and has swastikas and nazis and you get to blow up zombie-Hitler's head.

So then I started reminiscing about all the games I used to play, and one stuck out in my mind. It was a little known game for the PC, dos-based of course, called Master of Magic. This was a strategy title in the vein of Civilization and it was amazing, if mostly unheard-of at the time.

It was a swords and sorcery type of strategy game. You are a wizard who knows different amounts of the 5 types of magic (you got to customize if you wanted) and you are leader of one of like 10 races of people, all with their own unit types and strengths/weaknesses. It was an incredibly deep game with many different strategies and a couple of different ways to win. There were some game-breakingly unbalanced racial units (paladins with flight/invisibility cast on them) and some horrendously powerful magical units you could summon (Great Drakes) that let you stomp all over everyone else. All in all though, it was terribly fun and definitely worth all of the trouble it took me to configure my autoexec.bat and config.sys in just such a way as to open up 600ish kilobytes of memory out of 640 and still have my soundblaster working. And I did it too. I was a DOS God, lol.

If I remember correctly it was nearly 20 1.44MB floppies to install. It took forever. I didn't get my hands on the CD version sadly. Be careful, there is a tiny bit of nudity in this game. The witch-doctor looking female wizard is topless. I don't know how they got away with that back in the day.

You can play this game for free now. It's Abandonware, which means the company has given up the rights to it to the public domain. You can find it here on Abandonia along with a solid review of it, and it plays on DOSbox, which is a DOS emulator for windows which you can find here in 16 different languages if you are into that sort of thing. Remember kiddies, SoundBlaster has better sound effects and AdLib has better music (though not much better). But the music in this game was pretty good. At this point I had stopped recording music on my tape player because I used it into oblivion. That's right, I used my little Radioshack mini-tape player so much it died.

So I ended up thinking about what other nostalgic games had good music. I remembered a little game called Flashback (also on Abandonia), by the same company that made a little gem called Out of This World. I remember the intro music to this day, and it's really a very interesting little intro if you take into account the era the game was in:



Oddly enough, this game doesn't have much music in it. Only during the animated cutscenes is there any music. The game just has ambient sound in it. It's punishingly difficult, but masterable, just like Out of This World before it.

For fairness' sake:



Out of This World, called Another World everywhere but the U.S., had a sequel on the Sega CD (and other platforms if I remember right) and was just as brutal, but more action oriented than platform oriented, again if memory serves. They have re-released Another World in glorious high resolution here.

I ended up acquiring a Sega CD from a friend of mine after staying the night at his place. His parents had bought it for him, not realizing it wouldn't hook up to his new style Sega Genesis. It hooked up to mine though, so he just let me have it. The Sega CD was my video game platform for years later, through great games like Shining Force CD and one of the penultimate games of the system, Lunar: The Silver Star Story. Lunar was remade on the Playstation in a much better version, but the one on Sega CD was the one that I played over and over and over. It was a lot more difficult too. I also played one of the best rail-shooters of all time, Silpheed.



An interesting little piece of info on this next one. There's a dude that goes "They got the carrier!", but in the sound test you can hear the full voice file and he says "Shit! They got the carrier!" but they edited it in the game by cropping the audio file instead of removing the file completely from the cd.



(Really I think it's just an awesome all around SHMUP [Shoot-em Up] that got less credit than it deserved. It had cool music too, sorta...) Silpheed is BLISTERINGLY difficult.

Note that I played PC games just as much, if not more, than my console games.

So that's just a few of my Retro Credentials for ya. I've got more than I can even list really without taking up hours and hours of your reading time, so I'm going to leave it there. Go check out DOSBox and Abandonia and get your retro-fix like I'm about to do. :)

Edit: I almost forgot. One of the greatest space-simulation games ever is one I played a lot. Frontier: Elite II. Sadly this one is not abandonware yet. It's sequel, Frontier: First Encounters IS however, so go grab that one. It's even bigger and has some of the best graphics of it's day, considering it's target PC's were 386 models. Make sure you find the patch for it though, it's INFESTED with bugs.

Edit:

Frontier: First Encounters is not abandonware, it's shareware put out by the original designer.