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游戏列表：《1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die》（10）
整理自 Tony Mott 的著作《1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die》
创建会员：
月球着陆 Lunar Lander
添加于：2024-12-13
Cold and actually rather serious in tone, Lunar Lander may sound like a knockabout science-fiction romp, but this classic arcade game is tainted with a very slight whiff of education. In essence, Atari’s offering is a bare-bones physics simulator in which you balance fuel consumption, thrust, gravity, and momentum to land the titular spacecraft on a brightly abstracted moon, frantically recalculating your strategy on the fly, to avoid blowing yourself into pieces in the process. It may sound fairly dull, but—surprisingly—it isn’t at all. In its peculiar mixture of abstraction and precision, Lunar Lander actually feels real in a way almost none of its competitors ever have. Other space games may offer flashy nebulae, swift pirouetting craft, and intergalactic adventure filled with alien encounters and laser battles, but Lunar Lander is the only one to allow you to briefly lose yourself in the fantasy, that you’re genuinely onboard an Apollo mission, staring feverishly at the control panel, praying that you aren’t about to get your away-team buddies comprehensively pulverized before they get to plant their flags. And, in its own modest little way, Lunar Lander was forward thinking, too. Physics is now one of the great battlegrounds of modern gaming, a backof- the-box bullet point in everything from shooters like Half-Life 2 to quirky puzzlers like Boom Blox. Lunar Lander got there first, when other games were still drawing childish mazes or trying to convince you that a large letter X was actually a racing car. Atari’s classic might be light on genuine fun, then, and a title that appeals to the more bookish, solitary manner of children, but it’s also an early indicator of the potential scope and quirks of games that the industry is only now reaching to embrace.
小蜜蜂 Galaxian
添加于：2024-12-13
Galaxian was the first release by Namco, a former merry-go-round manufacturer whose later hits (perhaps you’ve heard of Pac-Man) would leave this debut in the dust. To the modern gamer, Galaxian looks like an evolutionary step that’s best forgotten: the missing link between the groundbreaking but rigid Space Invaders and Galaxian’s own successor, Galaga. On release, Galaxian was revolutionary, boasting a full-color display and replacing the clumsy aliens of Space Invaders with sharp-winged, sinister, yet vividly colored, ships. (The flagship enemy type became a minor icon and a bonus item in both Pac-Man and Dig Dug) Another significant advancement was in the movement of the enemy’s attack, the robotic to-and-fro motion of Space Invaders enhanced by squadrons of fighters unexpectedly peeling out of formation to dive-bomb your positions. Namco’s game even had a theme tune. Clearly it represented a step forward (something certain arcade operators recognized by making one game of Galaxian cost twice as much as what players expected to pay). But it didn’t step far enough. You’re still limited to just one shot at a time —and with so much happening on the screen, that limit feels unnatural. You have to plan every shot and watch every attack, even as kamikaze line up for a crack at you. And even the dive-bombing mechanic feels limited next to the complex and graceful patterns that would emerge in Galaga, the sequel that endures as one of the most highly regarded classics of the golden age of video gaming. But Galaxian is still worth a credit or two, even if you’re not a history buff. With its appealing visuals and well-balanced game play, Galaxian delivers a well-executed shooter game that, in truth, can only be faulted for what its maker hadn’t yet invented.
爆破彗星 Asteroids
添加于：2024-12-13
Games these days tend to have complex stories; three-dimensional characters; and rousing, near-cinematic soundtracks. They start with a bang, pace themselves carefully for a big finale, and leave you wanting more— generally even teasing a sequel as the fireworks die down. They have epic drama, decent performances, and elaborately detailed worlds. Asteroids doesn’t, and never did. Asteroids has boulders, unforgiving physics, and very little else. Oh, yes. You play as a triangle. Despite such inauspicious details, Atari’s coin-op champion remains more than just a dusty curio today. At the time of release, the sharp laser-etched vector visuals and frantic rock-blasting explosions made it quite the looker, and it’s proved rather timeless in its simplicity, blinking out of the screen in the twenty-first century with a chic sense of stripped-back assurance a lot of modern games have tried, unsuccessfully, to emulate. More important, though, is the quality of the game play itself. Asteroids is still good for a sweaty half hour as you blast chunks of space matter into shrapnel, dodge the oncoming debris by boosting cautiously around the screen, and lie in wait for the points-heavy flying saucer that twitters through the mayhem every so often, just itching to be blown to pieces. A stark hi-scoring compulsion, Asteroids is a lot smarter than it looks. Veteran Atari developer Ed Logg was something of a perfectionist, paying attention to everything from the heft of the game’s physics to the peculiarly memorable leaderboard font, and his craftsmanship shows in every facet of the game itself. These rocks may be made from nothing but light, but even now they remain entirely capable of bowling you over.
魔幻历险 Adventure
添加于：2024-12-13
All the early adventure games on home computers were purely text based. Players would type in commands, such as “go north,” “drink potion,” “throw rock,” “kill snake,” and subsequently be rewarded with a paragraph or two informing them of just how their plan had played out. You needed a keyboard to make them work properly. In other words—and unless you were a fan of computer fonts—there wasn’t much in the way of spectacle along the way. Everything relied on imagination—a dangerous foundation on which to build a business. In 1979, however, all that changed when Atari effectively ported Will Crowther’s legendary text adventure, Colossal Cave Adventure, to its VCS home console. Somewhat basic graphics replaced the time-worn prose, the VCS’s controller stood in for the keyboard, and a rather primitive—but wonderfully evocative—genre took its first baby steps toward the elaborate and florid fantasy worlds available to today’s players. A programming marvel at the time, the game fit into the space of just 4K (by way of comparison, the standard Google logo takes up 8K). Adventure also provided the gaming world with one of its first Easter eggs. Designer Warren Robinett, tiring of his years of anonymous toil spent at the coal-face of game production, hid his name within one of the game’s rooms—a chamber that could only be opened by using a single-pixel key known as “The Dot.” Stiff as the challenge was, and slight the reward, it wasn’t long before someone had uncovered the secret and told everyone about it—proof that even in the early days of the genre, adventure games were already capable of generating real devotion in their audiences. Some things, then, never change.
太空侵略者 Space Invaders
添加于：2024-12-13
Everybody knows Space Invaders. Almost everybody’s played it too, struggling through wave after wave after deadening wave of planet Earth’s least imaginative attackers; firing at endless wobbling drones, who track back and forth, getting ever closer until mankind is reduced to a single turret, scurrying around the bottom of the screen, taking its last few careful potshots from behind the slowly disintegrating shield. If Pac-Man is about memory and Donkey Kong is all about story, then Space Invaders is fascinated with panic: the unshakable twitchiness that picks up as the last invaders evade your frantic shots; as the speed increases and the nasty little deep-space squids get lower and lower until you’re within touching distance of their mandibles. The game’s controls are simple to the point of being invisible, and the objective so direct that Space Invaders couldn’t help but be a classic. (It was so successful in Japan that the Ministry of Finance was forced to mint more of the 100-yen coins the arcade machine ate in such staggering quantities.) That said, Space Invaders does have a few subtleties in store—from the passing UFO that can give you a much-needed points boost (particularly if you’re using one of a handful of well-used methods to predict its arrival), to the matter of locating the best places to aim and fire as you keep ahead of the descending horde. Sparse and monochromatic, Space Invaders is one of those games whose appeal younger generations will struggle to understand. At the time of release, however, this was nothing less than a full-blown phenomenon. Clones, such as Galaga, would go on to break bold new ground of their own, but without Taito’s humble mega-hit, video game history would most probably be unrecognizable territory.
战斗任务 Combat
添加于：2024-12-13
Anyone buying one of the seminal Atari VCS gaming consoles would find the Combat cartridge bundled as a part of the package. So from the five years following its launch in 1977, millions slammed the plastic wedge into their faux-wood-grained machines and thumbed away at rubberized joysticks, lobbing square electronic bullets at the person on the couch next to them. And yet the chunky tanks, jet fighters, and bombers eternally warring in Combat never quite managed to enter the public consciousness in the same way as Pac-Man, Space Invaders, or Mario. That’s because the enemy in Combat was us. It’s easy to forget that before games evolved into predominantly singleperson experiences, they were more usually player-versus-player contests. Combat is an early, vital example of the multiplayer shooter. Atari claimed that Combat was able to deliver twenty-seven different games, but back then the addition of a cloud, barrier, or different kind of bullet was considered dramatic enough to earn another tick on the back of the box. There are really only a couple different ways to play: with tanks or with planes. The most game-changing variation adds bullets that ricochet. The “tank pong” flavor transforms volleys into trigonometric contests, making a connected bank shot mandatory to score a hit. Game play itself is simple: Opponents tilt joysticks to jockey for position, aim, and fire. Hits score a point and put the enemy in a debilitating, momentary tailspin. The formula isn’t all that different from the kill, spawn, and repeat of the contemporary first-person shooter. The end result was the same in 1977 as it is today—when players are evenly matched and competition gets heated, the graphics and sounds fade into the background. It’s just you against them.
布特山 Boot Hill
添加于：2024-12-13
You could argue that Boot Hill is really just Pong redesigned by a John Wayne fan. Two players take on the role of cowboys on opposite sides of a Western backdrop lined with cacti and the odd wagon. Just as in Atari’s landmark bat-and-ball game, you can ricochet your shots off the top and bottom of the screen. Yet unlike Pong, with its famously concise instructions to avoid missing the projectile at all costs, the aim is to dodge everything your opponent fires at you. With only six shots in your revolver and a merciless time limit set on the action, the game is surprisingly realistic. Just as in a real-life gunfight, you’re torn between coming out blasting (and unwisely emptying your clip in a flash; there’s no reload) or taking your time and trying to plug your CPU or human opponent with a single, wellaimed shot. Designed by Dave Nutting, as a jazzed-up semi-sequel to his earlier Gun Fight (1975), Boot Hill builds on Pong’s simple projectile physics and lets you fantasize about becoming a quick-draw shooter. One of the problems of resurrecting retro coin-op games is that you can’t always recreate the tactile realities of their cabinets—emulation on a modern PC only goes so far. Back in the day, a large part of Boot Hill’s attraction came from its cabinet’s low-tech approach, which used mirrors to project its monochrome action onto a hand-drawn overlay of a frontier town. Playing without it isn’t half as fun, especially since you don’t get to see Boot Hill itself—a graveyard where dead players are transported and turned into headstones while a funeral march blasts from the speakers. The graveyard is a cheap trick, yet it does nod to the high-stakes at risk in every Old West gunfight: bang, bang, you’re really dead.
打砖块 Breakout
添加于：2024-12-13
Nearly four decades on and video games still regularly draw inspiration from Atari’s formative, blockbusting arcade game. In a very real way, Breakout defined the proto-vocabulary of its medium: taking the paddle and ball of Pong’s redacted approximation of table tennis and repurposing it into something unique, novel, and only possible in a video game. Conceptualized by Atari founder, Nolan Bushnell, and one of the company’s most influential engineers, Steve Bristow, the top third of Breakout’s screen is lined with bricks. You bounce a ball off these bricks to make them disappear, one by one, catching the ball on its rebound with a sliding paddle to prevent it from disappearing off the bottom of the screen. The skill comes in directing your shots in such a way as to hit the remaining bricks at the top of the screen, scaling up from Pong’s need to simply hit the ball to take into greater account the angle at which you strike it. Walls too must be used to bounce the ball around the play area, introducing yet more scope for strategy and showboating. Originally played on a black-and-white monitor in arcades, cabinet screens had strips of tinted acetate applied to give the impression of color. Increased difficulty was introduced to the game by having the paddle shrink to half its size once the ball has broken through the top row of bricks and hit the top of the play area. The understated elegance of both the core idea and its execution ensures that Breakout remains a playable classic to this day. One of the cornerstones of the medium of sports games, its influence can be felt in countless contemporary titles from PopCap’s pachinko hybrid Peggle to Q-Games’ Reflect Missile.
乓 Pong
添加于：2024-12-13
According to legend, shortly after the first Pong prototype was installed at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, Atari received a phone call from the bar’s owner, who complained that the machine had broken. The engineer who’d built the game, Al Alcorn, drove to the pub to take a look. He found that the hardware was working just fine. The problem was an unexpected one: Patrons had fed so many quarters into the coin slot that the machine could take no more. An industry had been born. Pong conquered bars and arcades, and, eventually, living rooms too, with a dedicated home version. A game whose instructions can be summed up in one sentence, “Avoid missing ball for high score,” is easy for anybody to pick up and immediately understand. Players control one of two rectangular paddles along either side of the screen, trying to prevent the ball from escaping their side of the playing field, and sneak it past their opponent’s paddle on the other. As an electronic version of table tennis, Pong is simple and intuitive. Its lineage as a pub game is obvious—the rules are hardly different from those of foosball. Pong also demonstrates a subtle and important lesson of good game design, still applicable today, which is that the little things matter. Depending on where the ball strikes the paddle, players can give it “English,” changing the angle of its trajectory to keep opponents off balance. Pong’s other unheralded accomplishment is its creation of credible artificial intelligence. Though playing against a human opponent is preferable, Pong’s computercontrolled second player is a worthy substitute. Good without being great, it’s capable both of great saves and boneheaded mistakes. Though, unlike Andy Capp’s customers, it’s still on top of its game at last call.
俄勒冈之旅 The Oregon Trail
添加于：2024-12-13
Millions of children grew up in the 1980s with The Oregon Trail installed on a classroom PC. Notionally presented as educational software, students learned almost nothing about the actual Oregon Trail—mostly that it was a place where you shot bears, forded rivers, and occasionally died of cholera. Yet for a generation, The Oregon Trail was a glorious Trojan horse that somehow made it okay to play computer games during school hours. It’s a solid turn-based strategy game in its own right, too. So while it may have been a terrible history lesson, it did teach kids how to make a game plan and manage the balance of risk versus reward. Surely that was more important than some dusty old pioneers, anyway. You begin in the city of Independence, where you choose your lot in life: farmer, carpenter, or banker. The cushier jobs may have more cash available to them, but even as a banker, the game is punishingly difficult. The pioneer life was no cakewalk, after all, so you have to manage resources carefully as your wagon lopes toward Oregon. Do you keep your family fat and healthy or starve them to stretch the food budget? Buy more bullets for hunting or grab a spare part in case of a breakdown? The long grind of the trail is broken up by landmarks, most memorably river crossings. It’s here that many foolhardy players have met their demise by wading into eight-feet-deep waters just to save a buck on ferry fare. The Oregon Trail has seen countless ports and remakes since its 1971 debut, but the canonical version is probably the 1985 version for Apple II computers. It’s this edition, with color graphics that were remarkably detailed for the time, that most players remember as their first encounter with that strange beast known as “edutainment.”