Friday, July 11, 2014

Xmas in July, Day 11: SUPER PONG IV

Why just settle for regular 'ol PONG when in '76 you could have SUPER PONG IV! Bigger numbers, squarer squares, beepier beeps, and bloopier bloops! The mind blowing attention to detail will have you forever leaving PONG 1 in the... ok ok, as dumb as it probably looks now to everybody, this was still a tons of fun game back in the days of old. Hell, I'd rather play this than any of that repulsive, pompous ass Grand Theft Auto horseshit. (Sears Xmas Wish Book '76)



9 comments:

Craftypants Carol said...

we never had video games when i was a kid but for some reason we had this. i dont remember how or why but i remember playing on a tv that look pretty much exactly like that

Mr. Karswell said...

Same here... I actually played a real PONG arcade machine once at the Redondo Beach Pier in CA. I wonder if they still have it?

Mr. Cavin said...

Man, I totally got a little nostalgic shiver from the ol' woody TV in that ad. The last pretend-wood set we had was a Hitachi with push-button controls. Actually came with a corded remote that clicked when you pressed channel -up or -down. It was so convenient! Couldn't possibly lose the remote. The problem with televisions is that they last for two decades, so we still had that model long after it had become a terrible embarrassment to me all through high school. I played an Atari 2600 on that nineteen-inch. I had Pong.

Not this one, though. I can't even imagine spending a hundred bucks for one measly game. But then again, I can't tell you how many quarters I dropped though Asteroids, Missile Command, Gyrus, Defender, and Joust either. Way more than four hundred for sure.

Chris Sobieniak said...

Being born in '77, my folks probably had one too, but when I was 5 we had the Odyssey 2, the Atari VCS, the ColecoVision and the Intellivision!

JMR777 said...

High tech back then ends up in the thrift store bargain bin today.

I remember having Atari back in the days of my youth, no one could have predicted how the games would change over the coming decades.

Mr. Karswell said...

that's what I had too, the Atari 2600. Fun games, especially the Activision stuff

Mr. Cavin said...

I loved Berserk! My eight-bit capital L was a genius at depopulating a simple floor plan!

Mr. Karswell said...

Berserk was bad ass, I ruled the joystick on Chopper Command (Activisions answer to Defender). Chris mentioned ColecoVision, I remember my neighbor was the first (and only) person to get that system, and it was killer when he got the home version of Donkey Kong-- man we played that pretty much non stop for like a year or so. Another neighbor had IntelliVision which I never liked much because the controllers were so weird and wanky

Mr. Cavin said...

Same. Those little keypad controllers with the slide-in cels that gave you custom functions for each game? Ugh. I guess it looked good on paper. On the flipside, that's exactly what our Hitachi wired television remote was like, only the pad only had two keys.

Coleco was fantastic. So high fidelity (fidelity to the arcade versions) after the Atari. I never had anything but the 2600 till I got an N64 under my own steam. I begged and begged for an Atari 5200, too, and history vindicates me even though it never caught on much at the time. But thank god for friends, where I could go play all the games I didn't have. I tried to even the score by being the first person I knew with a VCR.