28 June 2025
Sharing Saturday - Favorite (video) games
Somehow the topic of video games came up in the comments the other day, and that seems like a fun thing to share today. If you’ve never played or never liked video games, what other kind of game is your favorite?
As I mentioned in the comments, my favorite arcade game was always Ms. Pac-Man, because it was the only one I was good at.
Even though I had an Atari 2600 system, I wasn’t very good at the few games I had cartridges for either. (Remember when those came on cartridges?) I only loved Adventure, but once you had solved the game and found all the Easter eggs (like trapping the dragon in the wall), there was no point in playing again.
Once it was possible to play games on my Atari 800 computer—mostly text adventures (think Zork) and strategy/simulation games—I spent way too many hours on that. To the point that I eventually simply gave up playing video games for decades, because it was too big of a time-suck. The only one of those old games that I’d still like to play (and would probably spend hours and hours on if I did) is M.U.L.E.
What was your favorite game?
Skee ball, or as we kids always called it, skeet ball, was more my thing. And pinball. When my parents and I went on winter vacation to this place in the Pocanos, before dinner they would sit at the bar drinking a cocktail and send me (well supplied with quarters) to the kids' place, where I'd perform feats of wizardry.
As children, my cousins and I played Monopoly, Clue, and Chinese Checkers, and card games like Go Fish and War. Later, backgammon.
Is this the sort of thing you mean? Video games are beyond me.
(After dinner, sometimes this place in the Poconos had entertainment; once, The Amazing Kreskin performed. I have a photograph of him and my mother on stage each holding one end of a rope, Mom dressed in a pretty winter outfit. He actually was amazing. Good old days.)
Oooo one of my favorite topics! Some of my favorites back in the day were Galaga, Centipede, Phoenix, and Dig Dug. On Atari it was Pitfall and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. On my Commodore 64, it was International Karate and Space Taxi. I skipped the whole Nintendo era in the 90s while in college and picked it back up when the graphics got a lot better in Half Life on PC. After that, I got into the Far Cry series and the other famous Ubisoft series, Assassin's Creed. Other favorites are the Elder Scrolls (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim), The Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption, and recently, the Yakuza series. I know some people think it's a juvenile but I find it endlessly fun and a good way to blow off the stress from work.
When I was a kid, I had a Commodore 64 and took a programming class at the Y. I was obsessed with programming and would spend hours typing in the code for a video game from the pages of Compute magazine. I wanted to design video games, but they didn't have any specialized programs when I went to college (1987 - 1991), so I majored in Computer Science. Well, that turned out to not be quite what I imagined, and though I loved programming, I was more interested in designing and writing a storyline, so I ended up dropping out. Anyway, I still enjoy programming and video games as a hobby, and think it was probably a blessing in disguise that I didn't go into either one as a career. Might have ruined the fun.