1982 Ranked
The thing with making these lists is it forces you to consider what, exactly, is going on in Joust
List items
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Mr. BurgerTime's got it all. Food wants to be him, AND food wants to be eaten by him
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I treat fuel the same way the River Raid fighter jet does. Right before I've filled up my gas tank, I punch the fuel pump as hard as I can and drive away. I never pay
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Pitfall is so obviously a classic, but ultimately there are like four rooms you jump through over and over again. What I'm saying is, it ain't no Pitsprawl
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Satan's Hollow is a Space Invaders-like top-down shooter with a satanic aesthetic. The game can only handle the player firing two bullets onscreen at any given time, so a lot of the challenge comes down to landing shots so that you can keep a consistent rate of fire. Obviously, that's not great. But...I think Satan's Hollow is sort of...beautiful? I'm not sure how to put it. This game's got an *aesthetic* man, like, the designers really put their whole ass into giving this game a look and feel. It's unlike any other arcade game from the era, the closest equivalent probably being Midway's other weirdly creepy arcade shooter, Sinistar. But Satan's Hollow looks cooler than Sinistar. I spent more time with this game than I planned to purely as a result of how weird and consistent its look is. An ancient contender for a Giant Bomb Best Styyyyle award, for sure.
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When I was six I slept in a race car bed, so you better believe I think Pole Position is good
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It just now occurred to me that Xevious is a Roman thing. What's going on here
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Dig Dug is a more brutal killer than anyone on the Mortal Kombat roster. Picture how ballooning someone to death would work. Look at the dragon on the right over there. He's HORRIFIED
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Guys, I love Joust, but what the fuck are you talking about. What's this bird, what are we doing here
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Wait wait wait. If OG Donkey Kong is actually Cranky Kong and Donkey Jr. is now Donkey Kong...HOW DID OG DONKEY KONG GET SO SMALL. WHAT HAS MARIO DONE TO HIM
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I am not afraid of the robot tron
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I was going to pretend to know the difference between Centipede and Millipede, but I don't. Really, though...does anyone?
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One of the weirdest and most obscure arcade games released during an era dominated by weird and obscure arcade games, Bubbles is the kind of game you don't forget after you've played it. It takes place entirely within a kitchen sink. The player is a bubble that destroys grime and also...ants? For some reason? There's not a whole lot to Bubbles but it's a pretty charming arcade game.
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In Super Pac-Man, the developers got tired of making mazes and added fruit, eggs, house keys and all other manner of foodstuffs. Turns out, it was never about running from the ghosts. It was always about putting shit inside Pac-Man
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One of the great grifters in video games. They advertised the arcade machine with the slogan "You can bank on BAGMAN." Truth is, Bagman banks on you. Bagman's takin your cash IN REAL LIFE
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Whatever you did to Yars must've been pretty fucked, dude is BOILING right now
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Every single thing about PooYan suggests it is not a video game but instead a delivery mechanism for designer ecstasy
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While it's likely the most basic representation of automotive racing in the history of video games, Grand Prix is nonetheless...functional.
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The spookiest thing in this game is your enormous eyes. I think they remade this years later and scaled the Haunted House guy's head up to anatomically comport with his enormous eyes. He looked like Jimmy Neutron. Terrifying!
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Atari 2600 Version
The Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man is an infamous failure, so I'm not breaking any new ground by calling it the worst game of 1982. You can pretty easily reduce this game to 'this was a terrible version of a classic game, but the best part about it is that it's enlightening to pick apart the reasons why it's so bad.
First, aesthetically, it's '80s video game vomit. The developers, sensing they couldn't recreate the original Pac-Man's iconic arcade blacks and blues, opted instead for burnt orange and broken tube-TV blue. The sound effects, for their part, are the audial equivalent of an Atari 2600 construction site, or like an Atari 2600 eating raw granite. It's awful. An enormous part of the original game's appeal - not unlike the original Super Mario Bros. - is that it's aesthetic was completely unlike anything else. Despite how abstracted the graphics were, when you look at Pac-Man, even for the first time, it's really easy to determine what is happening and why. Pac-Man 2600, on the other hand, is both unpleasant and interminable.
Second, Pac-Man's genius is that it's built from so few moving parts, a video game simple machine in which every aspect of its design is an essential aspect of the play experience. As such, manipulating those parts is potentially hazardous. The easiest aspect of the game design to manipulate would be the maze, but even here the 2600 version fucks up, opting for a much wider, more open version of the Pac-Man map that heavily utilizes 'roundabout' sections that make for more haphazard play.
Thirdly, the game *didn't work well,* suffering from a brutal flickering effect during play that made the game difficult to look at, let alone play. That's probably the worst thing you can say about a video game, isn't it - it's so ugly and broken it's *literally difficult to look directly at.
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