name that game

[ZokesPro]

Originally posted by schmosef
Yep. It was free at Tour of the Universe but you weren't allowed to continue and the lines were really long.

Now where I played, was considered to be very expensive at the time and there were never any lines, then again it was hardly ever played.

[Mcollector]

Originally posted by schmosef

Originally posted by Mcollector
Not an arcade version of The Last Starfighter, was it?

I think your post hit just before mine.

It is Galaxy Force I/II.

From what I've now read, they're the same game. GF I had an expensive sit down cockpit and GF II was the same game but in a stand-up arcade cabinet.

Thanks again Rob!

So can I assume that you played the game back in the day?

Damn! Thought I won something.

The Last Starfighter was a movie that came out in 1984 that featured a Starfighter arcade game as an alien recruiting tool. It was the first movie, as far as I know, to have all the special effects (or at least all the outer space effects) computer generated. The effects company bought a Cray supercomputer specifically to generate graphics for movies, apparently the first one to do so. Though TRON had some computer graphics in it, there was no effort to make it look "realistic," and a lot of the effects frames in TRON had hand ink work done.

I think they made a video arcade game out of The Last Starfighter to mimick the game in the movie (and the movie). A video game was made out of TRON, too.

My favorite game back in the day was this Red Baron game. You sat in an arcade cabinet and had a joystick with a machine gun button. There was a propeller effect on the screen in front of you at all times. I played that for hours. I was good at jinking around, so I managed to keep it going for quite a while between quarters. The graphics were just wire frame as I recall, but it was a lot of fun.

A somewhat similar wire frame graphics game was Tank (I think that is what it was called), which I think originally ran on an arcade game, then atari, then on a PC XT. Came across that same game again on an old P-II recently.