Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Here is an odd one that I just discovered.

Like most who grew up in the '80s I was addicted to coin op arcade video games. Had I spent all the money I wasted on those machines on a real hobby like guns or wargaming, I would have much more to show for it in my collections today. So it goes...

Recently a friend turned me on to to a program called "MAME" which stands for "Multible Arcade Machine Emulator" which uses original arcade game ROMs to emulate the performance of the original machine. Now, I'm officially an addict and have been reliving my teen years on a regular basis using this nifty little program.

(please, please let's not get into a tiresome argument here about the legality/morality/copyright issues regarding the long abandoned IP of 20+ year old arcade....often from defunct companies! That's not what this thread is about.)

The two games that I have been playing the most of were amongst my favorites back in the day. The first is Capcom's "Gun.Smoke", a Western themed vertical scrolling shooter that is insanely hard. It's widely regarded as one of the hardest games ever made..and with good reason. Check out this youtube clip of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsSim...eature=related
It's with some pride that I relate that back circa 1987 or so I was the only person I knew who was actually good at it...although I never managed to finish the game. The other game is "Shinobi" a martial arts themed side scrolling shooter that was created back during the "Ninja craze" of the '80s. It's not NEARLY as hard as Gun.smoke, and I got quite good at it. In fact before it was removed from the local game room, I got to the point that I could finish the game on one quarter.

Of course we all know that aside from good reflexes, the biggest asset one can have in being good at games with scripted enemies like these two is to have a good memory and be able to anticipate were said enemies will apear.

Flash forward to today.
Something I have noticed in playing these old game on MAME (in particular Shinobi) was that my old reflexes had not died. After a short learning curve I found myself starting to react almost automaticly and anticipating the apearance of targets. Keep in mind that I have not played either of these two games in 20 years! Granted, I'm not nearly as good as I once was (something I put down to a combination of being badly out of practice, aging reflexes, and having to play the games using a keyboard rather than a joystick) but I find the odd phenomenon of having long dormant memory based reflexes reapear quicly like that to be amazing.

Or perhaps I'm just easily amused....

Thoughts?

"Trench Raider"

While I don't have any 20-year-old gaming experiences to test this on, I do find that if haven't picked up a game in years, and try to play it again, it feels instantly familiar. I normally don't even have to give a second thought to the controls (kind of inconsequential for older arcade games, but anything involving 12+ buttons is a little bit different).

It's very interesting that videogames find a way to imprint themselves into our brains.

Well, I'm about to beat Ultima Underworld, which while it was one of my favorites, for some reason I never got around to beating it. I'm only 18 years late or so on that one. It was really odd because I pretty much started a new character and just fell right into it, just as I had left off of it, oh I guess 15 years ago.