Them's Fightin' Words

I think it’s high time we wasted some time at work guys, seriously.

Like I may have mentioned once or twice already, I’ve been working my ass to the bone recently and dealing with all kinds of stress that manifests in a lot of horrible ways I don’t think we should go into.

So let’s give the finger to the man as we jump in the time machine and zip 30 years back to a time when games were played on devices the size of your wallet and gameplay just consisted of moving left or right.

Some genius website developer out there put together this site called “pica-pic” which is a collection of 36 of those old crusty hand held games our parents bought for us to stop us from whining for Game Boys / SNESes.

To be honest, I only remember one of these – “Parachute”. Here’s a screen grab:

The backstory here is that you’re Chuck Boatman, top Navy Seal special ops commando and you’re on a mission to save as many of your men as possible as they jump out of the chopper above the palm tree on the right.

Succeed in your mission and your reward is more men jumping haplessly out of the seemingly infinite space that is the inside of the chopper. Fail, and you’ll have to watch in horror as sharks eat your men alive.

You can afford to lose only three men but will be expected to save at least 1700 (no shit, I checked the high scores) to be the best there is at this game.

I saved 66. The bar has been set.

But don’t let the fun stop there, no!

Why not travel back to prehistoric times and play as Ugga Dugdug, a simple caveman on a mission to gather precious dinosaur eggs to feed your starving family from a mighty fire-breathing Diplodocus?

Or gear up in a badass suit of armour as you go head to head with a horde of Nosferatu who are hell bent on landing on the ground and walking from left to right to feed off the blood of a beautiful maiden who moves left. Then right. Then right. Then left again. Then right.

Brandish the burning sword of Naelfalger as you slay the undead and avenge the ancient realm of Gartangen!

The sky’s the limit here guys. With over 30 different games to choose from you’ll be moving left and right like your very LIFE depends on it!

TOTAL TIME WASTED: The time it took to write this post. So let’s call it 30 mins
TOTAL ENJOYMENT LEVEL: 22%
FINAL VERDICT: The one massive disadvantage the digital versions of these games have is that you can’t throw them as hard as humanly possible against the wall when they piss you off, a HUGE drawback considering that’s really the only fun any of us ever had playing them.

-ST