KATAMARI DAMACY

You're on a mission from your father, the mighty King of All Cosmos, to rebuilt the stars that he accidentally destroyed for no known reason., and you do so by using adhesive balls called katamaris, sticking many objects trolling the katamari over them until there's enough material for a  new star amassed. Naturally one has to make sure the overall shape of your "creation" stays  as "rollable" as possible in order to complete the task more successfully. Sometimes it's about a time limitation to do a task and other times it's about about specific materials used for particular stars.

With engaging soundtrack of various styles, odd and funny cutscenes, easy-to-master controls, blocky graphics that allow you to appreciate the concept and attention to details even more, its high replay value , and its absolutely magical  child-like quality, Katamari Damacy quickly proves to be a fun and unique experience for anyone who tries it. With  characters like  Kings and Princes of the Cosmos one would think a  fantasy world  would be the only obvious choice as a setting of choice, but making the Princes whereabouts mundane and common only makes the contrast suit the story even better. The fact that the game is about "mass consumption" (Takahashi) might make you look at events in the game with a new set of eyes, but this information does not tae away from your play sessions.

CARMAGEDDON

A relatively open world you can explore and demolish while driving in your car, racing against others or disregarding the track was a huge revelation for us back then. Sure , its elements were already present or implied in other racing and non-racing games, but it is the sum of these ideas and the presentation that made CARMAGEDDON a legendary game. It is gory, funny, replete with out-of-this-world characters and pimped vehicles with crazy add-ons that help you score destruction bonuses, Carmaggedon was a bold mainstream venture into the unknown that defied the racing genre and its narrow confines where  racing track was god. Finishing the race meant either clean racing , or destroying cars and property or killing all people in the streets.Sure, its outdated graphics might belittle its importance, but its pioneering  concept inspired hundreds of games in and outside racing genres, most important being the original GTA. Loads of fun , even today
Oh, and featuring Fear Factory's music in the game was the most natural thing to do at that time :) 

ELITE

Elite needs no introduction. It was the title that introduced the space-sim genre and cemented it in the minds of eager players worldwide. Like many other classics from the 80s, it was a college project that ran on pure imagination , limited only by the hardware limitations of the day.This space-faring , space-trading marvel that also introduced an open-world concept outside a text-adventure  was a bit too much for a 6-year old with a poor command of English trying to make sense of what he saw on the screen playing it on his C64. 14 years and two sequels later, I revisited the original Elite game  and realised how incredibly important it was. Ships travelling at sublight speeds, alien pirates, space trading, following or disregarding missions altogether, finding trade runs in various star systems and trading -just so many things that were introduced in a single pioneering game.Granted that the layouts do get repetitive, with just a tiny bit of imagination you can explore an open world that takes up less than 400kb. This is a feat in itself, and not even a poor plot or some clunkiness in controlling you spaceship can take away from what the game represents. Oh, did I mention it's really addictive?

PARADROID

Though it was later ported to several systems and its life was prolonged well into the early naughties, this gaming phenomenon is largely associated with the good-ole c64. It is still regarded by many as the greatest c64 exclusive ever  to have graced the screens of our TV sets.

Hostile service robots have "gone mad" and taken over a spaceship killing its entire human crew. Your robot is beamed aboard  with a mission to sweep the ship clean deck by deck, removing the unruly robots and investigating everything before pressing the ship's self-destruct button. Unlike many c64 multidirectional shooters, Paradroid doesn't overdo it on desperately trying to make  the best possible shooting experience for a player ,and  makes up for graphic limitations with suspense and nervous anticipation instead, as other units become visible only after you've entered a room. The in-game puzzle of invading other robots CPUs and busting their circuits is a great complement to the shooter and makes this one of the most intriguing gaming experiences of old. Body snatching and destruction  never had a level of sophisticated presentation that high in a game up to that point. The beeping sounds adding to the nervous anticipation and the cold hollowness of an abandoned ship  and the conscious decision to not include in-game music  further highlight  the masterful presentation and enrich the gaming experience.

Paradroid remains a ground-breaking classic and it's easy to realise its value once you've tried it.

CUPHEAD

There's been a lot of nitpicking about this game. It's nothing more than a collection of bosses, the Cuphead character lacks character, we've all waited too long for this and it doesn't live up to the hype etc.Forget that.

From an era of animation that produced hundreds of cartoons that are now banned for their social,racial,chauvinist undertones  comes a game celebrating the years of uncertainty and fear dressed in cuteness and duelling with the devil.The distorted world Cuphead's living in is a map, a menu for the voracious and lost,  depicted with faded colours. Characters are monomaniacal and blind to anything around them.The authors have they even toned down  the racial  and chauvinist stereotyping of  some of  Max Fleischer and Tex Avery's cartoons  (Mexicans, East-Europeans, Italians).They softened it down but still retained the characteristic physical features for characters and bosses. The fact that the devil is also entitled to the souls of the bosses you fight with to free your soul of smelling your own flesh roast till there's no tomorrow only goes to show you how thorough the game makers were in outlining the story. Why go there? Why not?An era that had dance marathons  deserves to be presented in the form of a game as it is eerily similar to contemporary experience.There's almost an educational value to this game.

But there is so much more to this than making a threnody for the Roaring 20s and the frightening 30s - it's a fun and highly addictive game  requiring skill and alertness acquired through trial and error, just like the favourties from the 80s and 90s we loved as kids. If nothing else , Cuphead should be praised for all the love, painstaking exploration and creativity put into it.

DRAGON'S LAIR

Before Dragon's Lair a truly cinematic gaming experience could have only taken place in the imagination if the player while they were mentally traversing magical kingdoms inside the confines of textual adventures.The game appeared almost a decade before interactive movies would become a thing  (and would fall from grace soon afterwards) and heralded the genre in the best way possible . I'm not really sure what kind of processing power a laser disc could have provided an arcade cabinet with , but my personal impression at the time was one of sheer awe. In the years when cheap animation reigned supreme on TV (MOTU,Tarzan etc). the emergence of a game that was visually even more appealing than the series was a huge thing. At that time the animated series wasn't being broadcast anywhere in Yugoslavia, so imagine my surprise when I first laid eyes on the game. Who could resist playing out a cartoon, being at the same time entertained and annoyed with a myriad of excellent ways to die. Nowadays people say the game is nothing more than a series of movie sequences you become an able director of after spending a fortune on your trial-and-error learning curve. Memorising steps to  victory wasn't something that was unknown to 80s gaming anyway (one can easily evoke  memories of titles that taunt the player in a number of largely similar  ways). so a credit should be given where it's due , and this game surely deserves the credit and pomp it got.  Whining about coins lost in the local arcade isn't the way to go about writing a  game review.

BUBBLE BOBBLE

My sisters loved playing this classic, my dad loved it , hell, I even  got my mom to play it once - and she hated video games.What was so enticing about this title? Was it the fact that it was one of the few genuine 2-player experiences from the 80s that did it for this classic? Aside from trapping enemies in a bubble and popping them and jumping platforms, the two B brothers must have offered something je ne sais quoi  to earn the status of a classic. It must have been the head-spinning and the cuteness that did it for all of us.The cute factor and the world that displayed this cuteness worked just as well in the arcade or an amusement park or on my friends NES whenever I would play it - there was always somebody asking to join me in my Baburu Boburu adventures. And yes - the iconic game soundtrack was heaven!

For all that it’s a great game inspired by a merely good one, Bubble Bobble was not, in itself, hugely influential—with the possible exception of the magnificent sequel Rainbow Islands. Between them, perhaps, they simply managed to perfect the formula. RS

MARBLE MADNESS

Marble Madness aged incredible well, as if its makers knew there would one day be a retro-mania spanning across media such as music,film, gaming etc. So all the innovations used on the cabinet - the trackball used instead of a joystick to help you immerse into the game's world and its unique physics (and no buttons- a sincere thank-you to whoever came up with this idea!), the stylish graphics that could pass for some contemporary nostalgia-driven graphics of today, the interesting soundtrack that used a unique Yamaha audio chip that propelled  this 1984 title  to an almost 16-bit era soundwise. And it's as hard as an 80s' game gets- I remember being entertained and frustrated at the same time playing this in the arcade.

I have yet to try it on some emulator and although I guess it won't feel the same, it'll  still be worth revisiting for its architecture and physics.

QIX

One of those games quickly achieving cult status that you both hate (for being too damn hard to play in an arcade full of people yelling around you) and love (because it breaks new grounds).
You're a drawing marker (though I like to think of it more in terms of a futuristic vehicle as seen from way, way up) marking area by area of a rectangle screen with the aim of claiming  at least 60 percent of the rectangle, all the while avoiding direct contact with the Sparx who thread the same paths you did and claiming an area without it being touched by a mysterous entity the game was named after.

It's a fun and exciting play, so I guess its quick decline in popularity has to do with somewhat abstract graphics that didn't clearly indicate what you were seeing on the screen. Being a game ma(r)ker has always been hard. To me this is as essential in the history of gaming as Tetris, Pang, Block Out and other like-minded games. Try it for yourselves on any of the browsing game sites with classics nd you'll see how great it is.

ROGUE

I've been a fan of roguelike games for a while now, but it wasn't until the local computer magazine ("Svet Kompjutera")  went into the nature and the origins of the genre  that made me go back and try the game the whole genre was named after. Boy was I  surprised! What I thought was the result of an amassed experience of a history of titles within the genre basically boiled down to one single game. Everything one loves about a roguelike is here: permadeath, text terminals, procedurally generated levels, ludicrously hard gameplay, procedurally-created levels,suspense,looting and dungeon crawling, sprites positions etc. Let go of your thirst for the graphically demanding games and try this gem, you'll enjoy it immensely. The rudimentary ascii graphics will spark your imagination beyond anything you've seen in this genre  so far.