Only the 80s

Play Qix online

Qix was released in 1981 by Taito. The aim of the game was to claim a majority (75%) of the playing field with your little marker. You could draw fast or slow (thus gaining more points) lines to claim your land.

Trying to stop you was the Qix, a randomly moving object (and quite adavnced for it’s time) and two sparx that would travel along the same lines the you would move your marker on. The Qix could only touch you while you were drawing a line, and once you started you could not stop otherwise the fuse would get you.

The were many strategies used in claiming your land/trapping the Qix and required much planning ahead of time in trying the avoid the Qix and sparx.

Play it online here ….

(more…)

Play Frogger online

Frogger was a very addictive arcade game released in 1981 by Konami. Simple in Gameplay, but hard to master.

The object of the game is to direct frogs to their homes one by one. To do this, each frog must avoid cars while crossing a busy road and navigate a river full of hazards including crocodiles and disappearing lillies.

Play it here ……

(more…)

ET – “Phone Home”

E.T. (Extra Terrestrial) was the top grossing film of the 80’s.

The Steven Spielberg film, released in 1982, is the story of Elliot, a lonely boy who befriends a friendly alien, who is stranded on Earth. Elliott and his siblings help the alien return home while attempting to keep it hidden from their mother and the government.

E.T. learns to speak English by repeating what Gertie (played by Drew Barrymore in one of her early movies) says in response to her watching Sesame Street .

It enlists Elliott’s help in building a device to “phone home” by using a Speak & Spell toy, hence the infamous line repeated even to this day.

Elliott and E.T. ride a bicycle to the forest on Halloween, where E.T. makes a successful call home. Again, something else synomonous with the film and the 80’s is the picture of them flying in front of the moon.

According to Wikipedia, after his parents’ divorce in 1960, Spielberg filled the void with an imaginary alien companion. Spielberg said that E.T. was “a friend who could be the brother I never had and a father that I didn’t feel I had anymore”. Hence the movie was born.

The A Team

“In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire… The A-Team”

Sound familiar? This was the voice over (first 4 seasons) for the very successful TV series A-Team that ran from January 23, 1983 to December 30, 1986. The show was an action adventure television series about a fictional group of ex-United States Army Special Forces personnel who work as soldiers of fortune while on the run from the Army after being branded as war criminals for a “crime they didn’t commit”. Each week was a different story (I think from memory there might have been a couple of multi-episode stories) but what I enjoyed most was the methods they went to at the beginning of each episode to disguise themselves to the new ‘clients’. This was done to be sure they were not being tricked into a trap by the military police who were always after them. Despite being thought of as mercenaries by the everyone else, the A-Team always acted on the side of good and helped the oppressed.

The Characters

The leader of the A-Team is Lieutenant-Colonel/Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith, whose plans tend to be unorthodox but almost always work out in his favour. Lieutenant Templeton “Faceman” Peck, more often referred to as “Face,” is a smooth-talking con-man who serves as the person in the team who manages to ‘acquire’ vehicles and other large items and equipment. The team’s pilot is Captain H.M. “Howling Mad” Murdock, who had been declared medically insane. Last, and by my no means least, is the team’s muscle Sergeant First Class Bosco Albert “B.A.” played my Mr T.

George Peppard ………. Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith
Dirk Benedict ……….. Lieutenant Templeton “Face” Peck
Dwight Schultz ………. Captain H.M. “Howling Mad” Murdock
Mr. T ………………. Sergeant Bosco “B.A.” Baracus

For its first season and the first half of the second season, the team was joined by reporter Amy Amanda Allen (Melinda Culea). She was ultimately replaced by fellow reporter Tawnia Baker (Marla Heasley) for the rest of the second season.

The A-Team was constantly pursued by the military police. In the show’s first season they were led by Colonel Francis Lynch (William Lucking), but he was replaced for the second, third, and earlier fourth season by Colonel Roderick Decker (Lance LeGault) and his aide Captain Crane (Carl Franklin).

Enjoy the video below of the opening sequence.

In June 2010, a movie based on the TV series was released.

Rubik’s Cube

The Rubik’s cube was a simple puzzle, where a 3 X 3 cube with six colours had to be twisted and lined up so you only had one colour per face of the cube. The cube (and you should be ashamed if you haven’t seen one before!) looks like this:

It was actually invented in 1974 by Erno Rubik, and In September 1979, a deal was signed with Ideal Toys to bring the Magic Cube to the Western world. The puzzle made its international debut at the toy fairs of London, Paris, Nuremberg and New York in January and February 1980 – hence the entry here in onlythe80s.

The challenge was always how fast you could solve the puzzle. I was hopeless, and found it was easier at first to actually pull it apart and line up all the coloured cubes in their correct positions. But for the record, The current world records for both average and single times were set by Edouard Chambon. He set an average of 11.48 seconds and a best time of 9.18 on February 23, this year.

There are plenty of sites on the net that systematically show you how how to solve the cube. None better than here.