Donkey Kong - Nintendo 1981
Donkey Kong was the first game I decided to play. I’m familiar with the entire Mario universe and have played with Donkey Kong in other games like Smash Bros or other Mario games, but never a main game starring DK.
The main takeaway from playing this game was that it feels quite similar to Pac-Man, meaning you trying to avoid an obstacle is the main strategy of the game. I like how simple the controls are and how Mario is able to gather objects to eliminate barrels from DK. I can see how something like this could’ve been enjoyable in an arcade setting when it first released, but it does feel quite repetitive.
1942 - Capcom 1984
The next game I played was 1942. I hadn’t heard of this game but I was super curious to see how a flying mechanics may have looked back in the ‘80s. Compared to Donkey Kong, the movement on this game was super smooth. It was super satisfying to be able to move diagonally across the screen by holding the left or right arrows in combination with the up arrow. I found myself playing this longer than Donkey Kong simply for this reason. The shooting mechanics were fun as well, just being able to spam it makes for fun replay value. I never found myself using the barell roll function, but the animation was smooth to look at.
Track & Field - Konami (Japan) / Centuri (North America) 1983
The final game I played was Track & Field, since I grew up playing a lot of sports games. This one for sure has the most replay value compared to the previous games since you have a multitude of Olympic Games to choose from. My favorites to play were the javelin and long jump games, since both had similar controls. What I found interesting was that each game had a speed bar, which was determined by how fast you can press a button. The controls for this game were fairly simple, but compared to 1942, for instance, there isn’t a whole lot of action going on. The narrative of being able to play various game modes makes the game have replay value however.
https://hewmcclane.itch.io/hospital-horror-demo
I used Flora AI to generate pixel art from real images.