The game play of Pac Man is possibly the simplest of any video game.  You guide the Pac Man character through a maze, eating the pellets while avoiding the four ghosts chasing you.  There are 4 “power” pellets that when eaten turn the ghosts blue, allowing Pac Man to eat them for points.  Also, each level has a fruit that appears in the middle of the maze, twice per level.  Eating the fruit gives you additional points and these points rise with each level.

Pac Man made it to the home console on the Atari 2600 in 1982 and quickly became one of the most popular games, despite its terrible depiction of the action of Pac Man.  Atari over-produced the Pac Man cartridge leading towards the video game crash of 1983.    The ports of the game were much better on the Atari 5200 and can now be played on both the Wii and Xbox 360.

I pumped plenty of quarters in to Pac Man and it’s most famous sequels – Ms. Pac Man and Super Pac Man.  I don’t think it is possible to find someone between the ages of 30 and 40 who has not played a Pac Man game. 

Read more about Pac Man at wikipedia and the Killer List Of Video Games.

The original Space Invaders game was an upright arcade game that quickly became a classic.  The basic premise was that there where these Invaders from Space and they are about to land on a planet (never knew if it was Earth or not).  You are the sole protector of the planet with your glide tank, you can move from left to right shooting your laser cannon and you have 3 bunkers to hide behind spaced across the play screen.  Thankfully, for you the Invaders are very orderly and only attack in formations of about 6 battle lines.  The Invaders march across the screen from left to right and when they reach the edge of the screen, they move one line closer to the planet, all the while, dropping laser rays to destroy you in your tank.  As you destroy the Invaders, they start to move faster and faster.  Once one remains, it moves very quickly across the screen with the sole mission of reaching the planet and destroying your tank.

Occasionally, a ship would appear as the very top of the screen, making its way across – destroying this ship gave you extra points.

The game was an instant cult classic in the arcades and once the 2600 version came out, it was a classic in homes.  The game play wasn’t much different and if you were like me you found a way to beat the invaders every time.  Here was my favorite trick.  Each time you destroyed a wave of Invaders, the next wave would start a line lower.  There was a point however, where they couldn’t start any lower – but if they made it to the edge, they would move down one line and you would be destroyed.  There was a trick to this stage of the game.  I called it “tap-tap-press.”  After hundreds of games, I figured out that you had just enough time to destroy two Invaders in each column across the screen before the wave made it to the point where it would drop down a line.  So the “taps” were pushes of the fire button and the push was slightly pushing the joystick to the left just enough to get under the next column of Invaders.  I would “tap-tap-press” across the screen and then make my way back to the right destroying the rest of the columns. 

This technique took the fun out of the game because it became almost impossible for me to lose.  And like with all video games, boredom sets in and the excitement of a new adventure takes your attention away.  Regardless, Space Invaders got a lot of my quarters at the arcade and I’m sure our electricity bill was slightly higher with all the juice spent playing this great game.

There are countless ports of this game on just about every system including the PSP and many cell phones.  It shouldn’t be hard to find a Space Invaders game if you want.  There is a nice history of the franchise on wikipedia

The action in Dig Dug starts out slow and simple but picks up very quickly.  You are armed with a pump and apparently some sort of digging apparatus.  You can freely walk through the dirt vertically and horizontally creating tunnels.  Your job is to rid the area of the monsters by pumping them up until they explode.  Some of the monsters are trapped in small encased tunnels – but they will phase through the dirt to attack you.  Your reflexes have to be quick and your puzzle/maze abilities up to par to make it to the later rounds.  The other weapon you have are a number of rocks spread throughout the playfield.  By luring the Pookas and Fygars to a tall vertical tunnel under a rock you can smash a group of them for extra points. 

In later rounds you get more monsters and they get a lot faster.  The key to mastering the arcade was the double pump and release.  It took several pumps – 5-6 to kill a monster.  This took time and when you had multiple monsters after you, there was no way to pump each one to explosion.  However, when you pumped them a few times they would be suspended in the air while the air left their bodies for a few seconds.  This would allow you to release and then attach your hose to another monster and pump it up for an explosion.  But you had to watch out, because the Fygars would cook you with their flame breath!

I haven’t seen an upright Dig Dug machine for many years. However, you Xbox 360 owners can relive one of the great games of the 80’s on Xbox Live.  It’s a perfect port of the arcade version, with a few Achievements thrown in to keep it interesting.

Games like Dig Dug, Mr. Doo and others like them took the idea of the Pac Man maze a step further.  By digging your own maze and then hunting the monsters, these games allowed players to be more aggressive, in a slapstick cartoon sort of way.   The console had the classic layout of the joystick and one button.  In fact, the button was only on the right so I would cross my hands so that I could use my right hand on the joystick and my left on the button.  Ah, such memories!