I think I played the matching Epic pinball game more than the original. In that vintage for sidescrollers it was Duke Nukem or Commander Keen for me.
"If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight! Sun Tzu said that, and I'd say he knows a little bit more about fighting than you do, pal, because he invented it, and then he perfected it so that no living man could best him in the ring of honor. Then, he used his fight money to buy two of every animal on earth, and then he herded them onto a boat, and then he beat the crap out of every single one. And from that day forward any time a bunch of animals are together in one place it's called a zoo! (Beat) Unless it's a farm!"
--Soldier, TF2
Maybe you can find... right around then was a shareware Tetris variation with animated bricks. The colors were like no other version I have seen since .... hypnotic. Can't remember the name though.
"If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight! Sun Tzu said that, and I'd say he knows a little bit more about fighting than you do, pal, because he invented it, and then he perfected it so that no living man could best him in the ring of honor. Then, he used his fight money to buy two of every animal on earth, and then he herded them onto a boat, and then he beat the crap out of every single one. And from that day forward any time a bunch of animals are together in one place it's called a zoo! (Beat) Unless it's a farm!"
--Soldier, TF2
Things would be fine until mom unplugged the game so she could plug in the vacuum cleaner.
Lots of 13 yr olds in the late '80s lost their mother that way. You know. Waking up in a pool of blood after the blind rage.
The happy part of the story is that those kids were inspired to grow up and become better game programmers and invent things like the ability to save your game at any time, and unlimited lives, and programs that could sense when you're about to snap and kill everyone around you and skip the game past the infuriating hard part.
Good thing too. A generation of serial killers was created from this game:
The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.
This game however nearly drove me to murder. Three lives, impossible jumps, and you couldn't even pause. You die, you go right back to the very beginning. If you picked up armor, you were allowed to get hit once, but after getting hit once, you would lose all your confidence and die soon after.
Fucking zombies would pop out of the ground at random. I think I made it to level 3 out of 8 once, but didn't get very far.
Brings back memories of a 1980's-derived IBM CRT computer my uncle got for me from the hospital he worked in. I even had a collection of floppy disks and I played those types of games for hours. It seems familiar so perhaps I played it. The computer still works.
I'm allergic to woo. I break out into rant. --Miles B. 07/04/2014