Back to the arcade

The mother of all time wasters was the arcade, that noisy and flashy yet gloomy and a little wicked place not far from the high school. The tinkling of a handful of coins in your pocket; a new strategy to defeat that unbeatable final boss and several friends with no cash, no skill and a too soon hour to get home were all together the best known way to spend evening after evening. Even when, and here comes the best of it, you can be thinking to yourself you could have done something a little bit more fulfilling, those retro games still inspire the whole videogame industry. Keep an eye on the fact that we call them retro nowadays: at the time, they were the most wonderful thing ever invented, as if a mad scientist or the NASA itself had developed them.

In case someone hasn’t noticed it yet, we’re paying homage to those first videogames. When the word vector ruled time before its multifaceted son polygon was born.
Some developers have seen the chance to bring back to Android some of those old games. However, a small elite has dared to not only bring them back, but also update them without letting their essence vanish. Throughout this week we’re picking out a few of these privileged examples.

When we talk about arcades, the first that comes to mind is Space Invaders. Maybe it wasn’t the first or the best, but there it is, having become an icon of an era. In its own way, Space Invaders represented the anguish of loneliness and the stress of fighting an overwhelming tide of enemies. For the first time, the fate of the Earth was on our hands and we had to do our best.

To revive that feeling there’s Radiant, which mixes parody, homage and gameplay.

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Asteroids was a classic since day one and introduced what we call now “physics”. Game was based on mastering the ship’s inertia; the rest was either sangfroid or incredible luck. If we learnt something from Asteroids, it should be that anything can get out of control in a matter of seconds. It’s obvious that it wasn’t a deep game, and maybe the controls were too fussy, but it well deserves to come to live again, new and improved, through Meteor Blitz. .

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This top three wouldn’t be complete without Pacman, which we don’t need to present. The metaphor of a maze guarded by ghosts was so strong by itself to have an influence on a whole generation of youngsters. EVAC HD tries to recreate how it felt to be pestered through a maze of flashy pixels., though adding a little humor and some new features such as doors.

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Neither the original nor the aforementioned modern games feature last generation 3D graphics or surrounding symphony orchestra soundtracks. They make due use of utilitarian resources, focusing on gameplay, gameplay and gameplay because, what may matter more than gameplay?