Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., and other trans-generational video games

<--- is still addicted to Tetris.

I'm not sure what the newest equivalent is, but I'm fairly sure it's about the score rather than the time.

Right now the most recent Mario game for the Wii is Super Mario Galaxy, but they are making New Super Mario Bros. Wii for the console with four-player capabilities. These days the game focus more on things like stars collected and the current world you're in. Super Paper Mario for the Wii used a score, admittedly, but that mostly stood for experience points.

I believe Final Fantasy made it's US debut on Nintendo and the newest one is coming out or came out recently.

But yeah, Mario bros, donkey kong, version of the old games are everywhere, updated and sparkly such as tetris like another member mentioned.

Zelda. I've played all of the zelda games and they are still good.

It takes me about a week to beat the first 2, about 2 hours to beat the third and just a couple of days to get the rest.

Zelda is scored by what dungeon your guy is in, or what boss you are about to fight.

Also the nerd term "Sucks like a water temple" I from the Zelda games. I've admittedly never heard this in real life but I've seen in on the net a few times. This comes from the fact that the water temples (I call them dungeons) are full of ice covered floors, flowing rivers, and deep pits. Your guy constantly drowns and the boss is normally harder than the final guy. You often have to re-route water like a dozen times just to open one door, and then do it again in a different order to open the next.

Normally people who play the same game don't care where the other person is unless one of them is stuck in the game. Or really far behind.

When I wanted to compare how far I got in comparison with someone else, we just counted worlds and levels...

Use Super Mario Bros 3 for regular Nintendo. It's classic and any gamer worth his salt has played it off and on for years. A good time for beating it would be within eight hours... and if you want to sound really authentic, say that someone beat it in six hours with no warp whistles.

That would totally blow my mind

Doodoodoo doo-doo doo, DOO!

not_HarryS said:

Use Super Mario Bros 3 for regular Nintendo. It's classic and any gamer worth his salt has played it off and on for years. A good time for beating it would be within eight hours... and if you want to sound really authentic, say that someone beat it in six hours with no warp whistles.

That would totally blow my mind

Doodoodoo doo-doo doo, DOO!

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Six hours, no whistles? Psh. Try four, maybe three. My family = Mario 3 experts.

I don't believe that's possible.

Prove it.

http://speeddemosarchive.com/Mario3.html

Eleven minutes.

Nintendo came out in 1985 in the US, so there aren't any early eighties Nintendo games! Maybe pick an Atari 2600 game (1976-82), Atari 5200 (1982-84), Colecovision (1982-84), Intellivision (1979-83)

Barb D said:

I think I'm annoying my son with all my phone calls with video game questions. I'll try annoying you all for a change!

I need a video game (preferably Nintendo) that would have been popular in the early 1980s and is still popular (even if in another form) today. Then I need to know how the game is scored/timed/whatever, and what a decent score/time/whatever for a 12yo tech-savvy kid would be.

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~*Kate*~ said:

Tetris.

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Came out in 1989 on NES.

Matt Willard said:

Right now the most recent Mario game for the Wii is Super Mario Galaxy, but they are making New Super Mario Bros. Wii for the console with four-player capabilities. These days the game focus more on things like stars collected and the current world you're in. Super Paper Mario for the Wii used a score, admittedly, but that mostly stood for experience points.

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Super Mario Bros came out in 1985 on NES.

icerose said:

I believe Final Fantasy made it's US debut on Nintendo and the newest one is coming out or came out recently.

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Final Fantasy came out in 1990 on NES.

Nivarion said:

Zelda. I've played all of the zelda games and they are still good.

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Zelda came out in 1987 on NES.

not_HarryS said:

Use Super Mario Bros 3 for regular Nintendo.

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SMB3 came out in 1990.

Kitty Pryde said:

Nintendo came out in 1985 in the US, so there aren't any early eighties Nintendo games! Maybe pick an Atari 2600 game (1976-82), Atari 5200 (1982-84), Colecovision (1982-84), Intellivision (1979-83)





Came out in 1989 on NES.



Super Mario Bros came out in 1985 on NES.



Final Fantasy came out in 1990 on NES.



Zelda came out in 1987 on NES.



SMB3 came out in 1990.

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Someone can use Google. I just assumed that she meant games that were popular for people growing up in the eighties. I was born in 1984, and those were all of the games that I and my peers were absolutely obsessed with growing up.

And Matt, that 11 minutes thing has been proven to be fake.

not_HarryS said:

Someone can use Google. I just assumed that she meant games that were popular for people growing up in the eighties.

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It's possible, I suppose. But she said "a video game (preferably Nintendo) that would have been popular in the early 1980s", not "a video game that would have been popular for kids born in the early 1980s". And all I'm saying is that no Nintendo games existed in the early eighties.

n+1 on Tetris, which does have high scores and such. It is also extremely addictive.

There are a zillion games featuring Mario and/or spin-offs, and I couldn't name half of them. Someone mentioned Super Mario Galaxy, but there are also spin-offs like Mario Kart (which has a Wii version). It's a racing game, but it re-uses characters from the early Mario games (Mario, Princess Peach, Donkey Kong, etc) and it is intended to be competitive. You can race against other people or you can race against the computer, but either way, you know if you've won or not.

Zelda . . . don't get me wrong, I love the Zelda games, but I don't think they're the sort of thing you're looking for. There's no real element of competition. You just sort of follow the story (or the subquests) and if you get killed, you reload. You could talk about how far along you are, though.

There is one bragging-rights thing in the latest Zelda game: the optional dungeon, called the Cave of Ordeals. I did it. It's worse than the Water Temple, for entirely different reasons. (Nothing in the Cave drops hearts. Nothing. You do it with the healing items you bring in or you don't do it. And it's fifty floors deep. They do give you high spots from which you can snipe some monsters, though.) Thing is, I don't think this is a feature common to all Zelda games, so it might not have enough points of commonality.

If the sense of commonality is more important to you than the ability to compare scores, another long-runner is the Metroid series. Again, it's a solo game "scored" by how far you've gotten. Common newbie mistake: "Metroid" is not the name of the protagonist. Metroids are monsters that look like jellyfish. The protagonist is Samus Aran and she's an interstellar bounty hunter.

Izunya

Speed runs of these games can also be competitive. There are a bunch of gamers always trying to get the fastest times in video games. That site I linked to earlier, Speed Demos Archive, has a bunch of runs of these games, including the ones you've listed. (Just don't confuse them with tool-assisted speed runs. Normal speed runs are done on a console using your skills, while tool-assisted uses the functions of emulators like save states to achieve times no human could get.)

I actually work as a "for-realz" game designer as my day-job, so I might ramble on here, but I have some thoughts.

So, the real problem (as you've seen) is that most modern games do not keep score in the same sense that old-school games did. Even the latest iterations of 80's franchises. The idea now is more or less to:
1: Beat the game (meaning to complete it)
2: Beat your friends (in a multiplayer competitive sense)

I do have a possible solution for you depending on what you're trying to do. The XBox 360 has a points-system called Gamer points -- You get Gamer Points by completing achievements in various games. For example, in Halo 3 if I managed to kill 3 opponents in less than 4 seconds, I'll unlock the "Triple Kill" achievement which will grant me 5 Gamerpoints. Gamerpoints are "meta" meaning they're attached to a user not a specific game -- so the more games I play, the more achievements I'll unlock, and the higher my Gamerscore will be. I can say that there are people who take their Gamerscore very seriously.

Now, to take this a step further to help you, XBox has a service where you can purchase games online (many of which are ports or updates to old-school games). These games will have achievements, which means playing them will improve the gamerscore.

Now, a problem you're going to run into here is that you are NOT going to find any Nintendo owned IP on XBox live. It won't happen, but from a fictional standpoint you would be safe dredging up any "semi-famous" coin-op from back in the day and say your character's playing the revamped XBox live version, trying desperately to unlock the "Titan's Revenge" (or whatever) Achievement. It's worth 80 Gamer points (which would be a HUGE achievement, probably very difficult and requiring hours and hours to do).

Izunya said:

n+1 on Tetris, which does have high scores and such. It is also extremely addictive.

There are a zillion games featuring Mario and/or spin-offs, and I couldn't name half of them. Someone mentioned Super Mario Galaxy, but there are also spin-offs like Mario Kart (which has a Wii version). It's a racing game, but it re-uses characters from the early Mario games (Mario, Princess Peach, Donkey Kong, etc) and it is intended to be competitive. You can race against other people or you can race against the computer, but either way, you know if you've won or not.



Izunya

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We have Mario Kart for the Wii. I never played any of the other Mario games, I wasn't even familiar with the characters, but I love Mario Kart. It's my favorite way to avoid actual writing. Well, maybe second favorite, after this website.