Golden Axe (1989) was one of the first arcade games I remember pumping quarters into until I either won the game or ran out of said quarters. On a handful of occasions during those lazy pre-driver's-license Hagerstown summers, Ryan and I had been known to ride our bikes clear across town and out to the Valley Mall. Keep in mind, this was before there was a Wesel Boulevard, so we'd ride through the alleys of downtown, past City Park, and all the way out Virginia Avenue to Halfway Boulevard. I think once we may have even taken the County Commuter bus to get out to the mall. Anyway, I believe it was during one of these treks to the mall that we discovered Golden Axe at Time Out, the mall arcade.
In this game, you could pick from one of three characters: a dude with a sword, a hot chick with a sword, or a hairy dwarf with an axe. I always liked to play the dwarf because I thought his battle axe was pretty cool. One of the best parts of the game was that you could mount different animals that you could then use as weapons by whipping their tails, etc. Also, you were able to collect potion bottles throughout the game that you could use to dispense a killer bolt of lightening affecting all enemies on the screen if you were in a pinch.
When I first discovered MAME and the joys of playing old arcade games on my PC, this was the first ROM I searched for. It's not quite the same when you can just press '5' instead of dropping a quarter into the machine, and it doesn't feel like as great of an accomplishment to win the game when you didn't have to pedal 10 miles on your bike just to play the game, but it sure is a lot of fun.
4 comments:
Holy crap, you've been busy. Someone would think that you don't do anything useful at work or something. B-)
I do remember this one. I wish that more arcade games today were like this. Now they're all fighting games (which are fun too), gun-shooting games (real money hogs), or the 'speciality' games such as DDR. Oh well.
Yes I remember this game very well also. Everbody wanted to be the Dwarf, because after all the game was called Golden AXE and he was the only one with an axe! Sadly if you play this game today, its just not the same. Maybe its because you need that crazy video arcade atmosphere.
Wasn't this supposed to be a weekly feature? You are going to run out of games, man! Think of the children!
Oh...do you remember that game on the Atari you had that involved some sort of ship that had to descend down through these forts and stuff? I think there were some sort of cubes that looked like engergon cubes the transformers? Eh? Eh? Do you remember? DO you do you do you?
Also, I like your profile picture. :)
I do intend for this to be a weekly feature, but I will likely feature a classic PC game every week and hopefully a classic NES game every week. Then, I'll sprinkle in some arcade games, Atari 800 games, classic GameBoy games, or even a random Atari 2600 game.
Speaking of Atari, I do remember that game you're talking about, although I can't recall the name. I seem to recall it having some pretty cool music too, maybe a Beethoven piece? I'll dig around sometime and see if I can find some info on it.
Glad you like my profile pic. I took the original picture I had up there and edited it to look like a classic video game character. I was inspired by all the classic gaming talk going on here! :-)
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