I like Metroidvanias and the prices are so low on switch I've picked up many.
#54 - Gold Rush!
Back in the day if Sierra Online put out a new adventure game, I bought it or at the very least played it. Growing up, my best friend and I pretty much had a system in place so that between the two of us, we would get all of the Sierra games. I think the only exception was Mixed Up Mother Goose, because we weren't 5. But everything else was fair game. That said, Gold Rush! was still kind of a hard sell. It wasn't linked to any particular series, and it was already kind of dated when it was released, as Sierra had moved its bigger properties to a new interface with better looking graphics. In the PC world at this time, that pretty much made it look archiac. The one thing it had going for it though? It was cheap. Sierra knew it was a tough sell, so it came out at a discounted price. And as a broke middle school kid, that was appealing to me.
Good thing it was cheap, because if not I would have missed out on a delightful adventure game and fun bit of edutainment. The game starts in New York where a guy gets a mysterious letter from his brother who disappeared years ago, and hints that he found gold. Thus begins an adventure of trying to leave NYC and travel to California either by land, sea, or taking a shortcut by hiking through Panama. Adventure games with multiple paths like this were pretty rare, so that was a nice way to get some reply out of a genre that didn't usually offer much. It was also pretty damned hard. It was made by some different developers than most of the games Sierra put out, so as a result the puzzles felt different than anything they can come up with before. As a result, you had to think differently and the usual tricks to figuring out a puzzle weren't much help. But the game also dropped hints at a pretty generous rate, if you were smart enough to recognize they were hints, and once you figured that out, it made for a good time.
Perhaps most importantly Gold Rush! helped me get an A on a report in 10th grade. I can't really say how accurate the history was in the game, but it came with a small book from some local northern California historical society. Between the game and that 40 page tourist book, I wrote up a paper about the California Gold Rush. It was pretty easy to write up, and also taught me that often times teachers will give you an A if everything sounds right, because who the hell has time to fact check each student?
I too really enjoyed Guacamelee! but never picked up the sequel.
Q*Bert Will always go down as one of my favorite arcade games of all time. I think my brain has always been inherently drawn to striking geometric shapes, so a pyramid of multicolored cubes is always going to get my attention and get my synapses firing for some reason.
So combine that with a strange looking hero, snakes, swearing, and a surprisingly good Saturday morning cartoon and it's really hard to see why I couldn't get enough of the game. Granted my time in arcades was always limited, but I do remember having a blast playing it at Chuck-E-Cheese the few times I went there for birthday parties.
Where I really got addicted to the game though was on the Atari 2600. My family were very late adopters with the Atari 2600. We got at Christmas of 1982, during the last big push when they released Pac-Man. Over the next couple years we never really picked up many more games. I think when all was over and done with we had a total of five. Q*Bert was the last one, and the only one I actually picked out. And unlike a lot of other 2600 games, it was actually a halfway decent port of the arcade version.
Also, your Robio Fun Fact of the day is, back when I was chatting on IRC in the late '90s, my user handle was Qbert. So if you ever travel back in time and want to talk to me, that's who you need to look for.
I bought an Qbert Rebooted on Steam years ago solely because it included the arcade original.
Qbert Saturday Morning cartoon was really good.
Ravenprose said:
Qbert Saturday Morning cartoon was really good.
The Qbert segments of Saturday Morning Supercade were the only ones to ever get a DVD release. The rights for all of the other segments on the show - Pitfall, Donkey Kong, Space Ace, etc. all had complications or unwilling copyright holders. But if someone who's gone back and watched a lot of those old episodes, I can also tell you that the Qbert pit on es were probably the best segments on the show. We definitely didn't miss anything by not having the Frogged cartoon available. Seriously, who cares about frogs that are reporters in a swamp?
As much as I loved the original, I never felt the need to play the sequel. It was all nicely wrapped up, and adding more to it just seemed unnecessary.