So, in my first post, I pretty much focused on one game. This time, I'm going to talk about the first system I personally owned, the Atari 2600.

The year was 1987. For those of you that know your gaming history, this was the dawn of the NES age. While I knew of the NES, and knew maybe one person that had it, I was more familiar with the older systems, mainly because of the crash, the ones that were still around were *gasp* affordable! Atari, in particular liked to trumpet that fact with TV advertising. The one that sticks in my head I call the "under 50 bucks" rap. Luckily, with the power of YouTube, I can share it with you all below.

Yeah, it's pretty bad, but it ingrained itself in my 8 year old head. Luckily for me, one of my grandmas had just gotten an NES and decided that she didn't need her backlog of 2600 games anymore. So, for my birthday, I got a 10-inch black and white TV, a new Atari 2600 Jr. and about 100 games (they were really cheap after the crash, I imagine).

As you can imagine, I was the happiest kid ever, I spent all of my free time in the worlds of Pitfall, Yar's Revenge, Stampede, Keystone Kapers, and many others. I inexplicably also had a copy of Strawberry Shortcake. I swear I had at least 3 copies of E.T. Someone must have been giving them away.

I didn't care that it was outdated, I didn't care it was on a tiny black and white screen. All I cared about is that I was having the time of my life, and it was all mine.

Sadly today, the 2600 is oddly one of the systems I don't own, and I have yet to buy a compilation or anything to relive those gaming memories. At least I have the internet and nerdcore to help me relive the glory days.

Hi there! This is my first blog here on TAG, I've decided to do a series on my personal gaming history, just for fun.

First, and introduction. My name is Josh Mayfield, I recently joined TAG as a news writer on the site. All my friends call me Bean. I am a retro gamer and proud of it, but that doesn't mean I hate current games.

I am not certain what my very first videogame experience was, a lot of my early experiences blend together, so for the first part of this series, I thought I'd just go with my most vivid early rememberance.

Back when I was about 5 or 6, I lived with my uncle on a naval base in Florida. He had a Mattel Intellivision. I thought it was amazing! The controllers were really cool remote controls, where you could insert a game specific card over the telephone-like face buttons. On a simple game like Astrosmash, it wasn't really needed,  but on other games it was essential, and makes using certain games nowadays a chore if not on original hardware.

Astrosmash itself is a pretty cool hybrid of Asteroids and Space Invaders. You're a ship that can move along the bottom of the screen shooting upwards. Instead of alien invaders, your opponents are the never ending stream of falling, multi-colored asteroids. As you might expect, said asteroids split into smaller chunk when shot, which then must also be shot. If an asteroid hits the ground, you lose points as opposed to a life. The real danger lies in the spinners and homing missles. Spinners make a falling bomb noise as they drop, and if you don't take them out, they'll kill you no matter where they land. Homing missle are self explanitory, but at least they don't kill you if they hit the ground.

It's really fun and addictive. My very favorite memory of this game is the household high score leaderboard my uncle made, all of us livig there would try our hand at beating each other's high score. I remember playing all hours of the night just to practice.

This game is a real milestone in my life for a few reasons. First of course it turned me on to gaming as a whole, and it will always hold a place in my heart for that. It also ignited my competitive streak, which really only extends to games, but can still be pretty intense. Lastly, it got me to appreciate so-called"underdog" systems.My uncle always used to say, "This is fun, but I really want an Atari instead." I didn't understand that. I knew of the Atari 2600 vaguely, but if you were having fun with Intellivision, wasn't that enough? It's stuck with me all my life. In my mind, hardware doesn't matter at all, as long as the games you play are fun.

Anyway, I think think I'll wrap this entry up, but if you want to try Astrosmash for yourself but don't want to track down a system from 1981, the game is available in various Intellivision compilations for PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, and PC.  Xbox link is for a 360 points card, as it is available as an Xbox Original download.

Confession time. I freaking love point and click style adventure games. Everything from King's Quest to Leisure Suit Larry to Monkey Island and beyond. It makes me really happy that they're coming back in force. What with Sam & Max, Strong Bad, Wallace & Gromit, and the new Monkey Island, there is more to choose from now than there has been in the last 10 years combined. With that being said, I want more.

When I say I want more, I don't mean I want more adventure games out there (although that'd be great). What I really want is for the genre to expand a bit. The humor is always there, the puzzles are always there, the story is always there. These things are good, but it can get stale after a while, and it's such a solitary experience. That's why I've come up with the concept for a multiplayer adventure game.

For this new venture into adventure gaming, I took the base of the first one I ever played and one of my all time favorites, Maniac Mansion. This game is screaming for a multiplayer remake! Let me explain. For those of you not familiar with Maniac Mansion, it's a game where you play as Dave and two of his friends. You explore a creepy mansion because the mad scientist Dr. Fred has kidnapped you girlfriend Sandy. You go through the mansion collecting items and solving puzzles encountering various sentient tentacles, meteors, the occasional sex-crazed nurse, and a mummy in the bathroom. The game had multiple endings, that could be triggered based on what kids you picked to hang with Dave. You see, each kid had a special ability, to do stuff like write, or fix phone, or develop film. Depending on who you had the story would wrap up differently.

In a multiplayer game, you wouldn't be limited to just three kids. I'd make it so you could have up to 8, with each kid controlled by a separate player. They would each start out the game with a cell phone as well as their various abilities, and you could only talk to the other people playing on the cell unless you were in close proximity. I'd vastly expand the mansion. In the original, the mansion was relatively small as mansions go. If you had a full on 8 player game, it'd need to be substantially bigger to accommodate them.

The story itself would be the same as the original game, making this more of a multiplayer remake, just with more stuff. I figured if it isn't broke why fix it. If someone say at LucasArts actually wants to attempt this and make up a new story, that's cool too. The only mechanic I would change is the fact that someone would always be stuck in the dungeon. That's all well and good when you are controlling multiple characters, but in a multiplayer experience, it'd suck to be stuck sitting in a dungeon, twiddling your thumbs.

Anyway, this blog post kind of turned into a ramble, but I figured I'd post it anyway. If you think this is a cool idea, or have suggestions on how it could be made better, leave comments! Maybe someone in the industry will see, and we can get this thing made!