I gotta go bomberman on the assumption that this is like the invention of basketball if you get my drift
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My anti bomberman pitch:
- The original arcade game is from 1983
- The NA NES port is from 1987
- The real Bomberman that we all know and love is the PC Engine remake from 1990
The only 1985 version is the Famicom version and this isn’t my friend mr bomberman:
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This being said, you do you. My 1987 pick is going to require a short essay worth of temporal justification.
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I do not like that man. Where is my friend. What a frightening visage
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No Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (arcade) love here? Nobody?
But seriously, I’d have to nominate Thexder, originally released for the PC-88 but ported to literally every PC platform through the 80’s and early 90’s. At least one version of it is on Switch via EGG Console! It was tempting to choose Gradius but for me, it’s far from the best game in the series, and I think Thexder was more impressive for its time, even though it feels somewhat clunky now.
Look at that font, too!
I’m very excited to gradually become more relevant to the conversation as we go back year by year! Wait till you hear what my pick for GOTY 1977 is!
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Have trimmed a few “not really 1985” from the list of notable games.
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I have to admit, before @Kiki’s post, I was not familiar with City Connection. I watched some YouTube footage and have three takeaways:
- I need to play this game.
- That is some damn fine animation on that car.
- I may have been wrong about music only getting good in 1986.
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Surprised there isn’t more Gradius going on here. Though I guess that’s because it’s the Famicom version, but that’s still a great version.
Though I’m with Xanadu this time, that’s my vote. If we’re talking GoTY, that’s the must-have, AAA elden ring of 1985.
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Gradius
- 1985 = Arcade
- 1986 = NES, MSX, PC-88, etc
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This is precious.
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There are several I’d probably place above this for true game of the year but the one I want to mention is Little Computer People, a C64 title that David Crane was involved in creating.
I found this one fascinating as a kid and I was always hoping to uncover some new surprising behavior that I’d never seen.
If you stop giving your little person any food or water, he’ll get sick and eventually stop getting out of bed. I used to wonder whether he’d eventually die but I don’t think I was ever willing to fully test that.
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This is a blatant copy of The Sims from 15 years later.
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Have you ever seen the Famicom Disk System version? The graphics are super cute!
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I love this.
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It was adapted by Square? That’s great.
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I hope these GOTY threads eventually result in us being polled for our Greatest Year of All Time
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Good idea.
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My vote was going to Binary Land FC, before I read it had released earlier (without the penguins) on MSX.
And now I can’t decide so I’m going to have to dig deeper.
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Looking at one of those lists of games, one jumped out at me:
Although I didn’t play the 1985 ZX Spectrum version, I played the 1988 DOS version. I looked up a video of the spectrum version and it was exactly as I remembered it:
Then I looked up the DOS version and remembered it’s in CGA:
Either way, it’s a beautiful game that I played a lot of as a kid, never getting anywhere. You play as the bio-logically operated being (the blob with eyes, legs, and antennae in the images) exploring a mysterious planet looking for random bits of junk needed to fix something. From memory I thought you had crashed your ship and needed to find its scattered parts, but looking it up now you’re on a mission to repair the core of the planet before it explodes and destroys the universe. Either way doesn’t matter because the game is impossible, at least for child me, but that also doesn’t matter: it’s a dense maze of mysterious passages full of mysterious things. You can walk left and right and shoot lightning (if you have the batteries for it). You can’t jump. Instead, you create little platforms that disappear after a few seconds. Each one boosts you up slightly, and you can create them repeatedly to climb into the air, but again there’s limited platform ammunition so you can’t go everywhere that way. Instead you can get around by hovercraft, but can only get on and off at docks. There are also teleport rooms which each have a code (five letters, for example MORIA). Go into one and type in another’s code and you’ll warp there. The map is persistent and so are the warp codes but the items required and their locations change each time you play.
I could never figure it out as a kid and would just explore as far as I could, and I think it’s a great game just for that. I’m sure it can be beaten, but trying to do so seems a fool’s errand. What I like about it is the novel gameplay and amazing atmosphere.
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Out Run may have been the consensus choice for 1986, but I would argue that Space Harrier was Sega’s best arcade game of the 80’s, and it gets my vote.
The baddies actually match the drawings in the instruction manual. It has a wildly cool hydraulic arcade cabinet. It was forward thinking in a way that absolutely nailed the experience of what 3D games might feel like in the future, kind of reminds me of how 2001: A Space Odyssey had shots of what the earth looked like before anyone had been to space. And it’s REALLY FUN!
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