Kid Games, Part 1

AsmodeusXI

United States15536 Posts

May 29 2014 01:44 GMT

I played a lot of games as a kid. Many of them were incredible. I was lucky that the first games I ever played were amazing ones like Final Fantasy VII and Starcraft. I spent hours enjoying games that are now considered “classics” such as Super Mario 64, Goldeneye, and Super Smash Bros. (my first system was an N64). However, only a portion of the games I liked when I was young are well remembered. Many of the games I used to love were absolute crap. From obscure PS1 fighters to the most stupidly-named racing game ever made, my childhood was full of weird games that were bad in retrospect but beloved by my younger self. These are games that are almost entirely forgotten, the ones that will never be on a “Top #100 Games” list. These are the games I played back when I thought games were just games, regardless of quality.

Gridz (Mac)

I wasted hours on Gridz (http://www.gridz.com/), an unorthodox real-time strategy game. Your avatar was a wacky-looking robot that lived on a single red (player one was always red) square on the titular “grid.” This grid, called “NetSpace” (because the 90’s), also contained a number of other “controller” bots with different colors and patterns. The object of the game was to control all of NetSpace by placing pylons at the grid's intersections and activating them to claim to the territory while destroying the pylons of other "players.” You created a small army of “ToolBots” to accomplish this goal. The ToolBots came in three varieties: Builders (who activated your pylons), Strikers (who eliminated other ToolBots), and Hackers (who destroyed enemy pylons). There were five strength-levels of ToolBots, with each level more powerful and more expensive than the last. Since you accrued resources based on the size of your NetSpace domain, you had to make the choice between weak and easy-to-create minions and strong but slow-to-field ones. The game was not very difficult, but it was colorful (for the 90’s) and full of goofy sound bites that still pop into my head on occasion. While the game’s website still exists (and is itself a brilliant relic of the early days of the internet), I can’t seem to find a place where this game can be downloaded.

Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls (N64)

Racing games are a tried and true genre, and after the incredible success of Mario Kart 64, it’s no small wonder that other developers wanted to create their own unique and profitable racing titles. Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls was an attempt to do just that which utterly failed. In this weird take on racing, you played as one of the “balls” (how this got past an editorial staff is beyond me) and raced to the top of a long spiraling track by rolling over it, climbing it by extending some kind of… hook appendage… to jump between levels, and swinging on that appendage to leap over gaps and other obstacles. On one hand, this was definitely a new take on racing due to the multiple ways you move through the course, as well as the overall verticality of the tracks. On the other hand, the game was slow, repetitive, and populated with THE WEIRDEST CHARACTERS WHO WERE ALSO BALLS. Despite this, I played it for a long time, proving once again children will play literally anything.

Croc: Legend of the Gobbos (PS1)

The first 3D platforming games were published on the N64 and PS1, the first consoles with the technology capable of creating them. Some of these games, such as Super Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot, and Spyro: The Dragon are still played, discussed, and fondly remembered to this day. Others, such as my Blockbuster-rental-favorite Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, are not. Unlike the other games on this list, Croc wasn’t really a bad game*, just one that was not nearly as popular as the bigger games of the era. Ironically, Croc was originally intended to be a 3D Yoshi game; it only became “Croc" after Nintendo rejected it. It was a charming game that starred a “vegetarian crocodile” who collected gems and little fur balls (the Gobbos) through each level. I remember that it was pretty challenging, but I didn’t own a memory card back in those days so I got really good at the few levels I could play through whenever I rented it. However, when I finally bought my N64, my Croc days concluded and I moved on to (generally) greener pastures.

* I will acknowledge the possibility of rose-tinted glasses for this statement.

Robo Pit (PS1)

Robo Pit. My god. Robo Pit. Even the name (which I only recently rediscovered) reeks of crappy 90’s gaming, but only because it was a crappy game made in the 90’s. Robo Pit was a 3D-fighter for the PS1 in which you built a mechanical brawler to climb to the top of a computer-generated robot leaderboard. In theory, you could use a plethora of parts and weapons to create a robot with a unique fighting style tailored to your strengths. The various chassises, armaments, and locomotive parts for the bots meant that there were thousands of possible robots the player could use to take on the 100-robot ladder. The game possessed no story or campaign-mode of any kind. It was just you against the hordes of AI robots. Of course, as a seven year old, I threw all the potential strategy and creativity out the window when I learned how to break the whole game. I quickly discovered that the best way to KO your opponents was not to bring their health to 0, but to equip two Level-1 Shields and use them to push them out of the arena and into a “Ring Out” loss. This trolly bullshit actually got me all the way to the “end game” and is how I know the game was bad. Nevertheless, the local video store got tons of money from my parents for this very game because I played it over and over and over again.

You can read this nostalgia trip and a few more current things at the N3rd Dimension.

vOdToasT

Sweden2870 Posts

May 29 2014 05:26 GMT

You can download gridz here:

http://www.gridz.com/ordering.html

oo_Wonderful_oo

The land of freedom23126 Posts

May 29 2014 18:22 GMT

Damn it, Croc was so sick.
I remember playing it with brother and writing codes for levels on the paper on cover.
But then when we were going to load, i misread the code, entered OO instead of triangles and it was code for whole game ;_;

Playstation 1 really had sick games.

vult

United States9395 Posts

May 29 2014 22:38 GMT

Croc had an awesome soundtrack! Fun game as a kid!

Cool read, thanks for this!

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