14 Retro Arcade Games to Power up Your Brain
We’re consistently being told of ways in which we can improve our mind and our overall intelligence. One of the most common ways in which we’re told we can do this, is to regularly exercise your brain. By maintaining positive mental stimulation, it’s quite possible to prevent cognitive decline and to enhance one’s own “brain power”. Just as regular physical exercise can maintain your overall fitness in body, so can regular mental exercise maintain your overall fitness in mind. Some ways in which your mind can improve are linked to (but not limited to) the following things.
- Spatial-Temporal Reasoning: Also commonly called Spatial Awareness, this refers to the general awareness of one’s environment, be it a physical one or an environment of data. It is the ability to visualize patterns of a sort and to be able to mentally sort and process them. Simply put, it can refer to an awareness of things around us.
- Hand-eye Coordination: This is the extent to which a given person has the ability to properly coordinate their motor functions with what they can see with their eyes. Essentially the relationship their eyes share with their “hands”, neglecting practice of this cognitive function can eventually lead to mal-coordination, as a person may not be used to coordinating in a certain manner. However, this skill is fairly easy to practice, as we use it in everyday activities.
- Reaction Time: The time it takes for a subject to display a response to some sort of sensory stimulus, or basically the time it takes for you to react to something you see/hear/taste it, etc. Jedi were shown to exhibit such heightened aspects of this ability, that they appear superhuman.
- Pattern Recognition: Whilst also the title of a William Gibson book, it refers to the ability to identify patterns (much as the name suggests) and respond accordingly. Pattern recognition is broken down into subsections, but you’ll mainly want to be focusing on the feature analysis category, which is the brain’s ability to break down and process stimuli, and can essentially be linked into all the other cognitive functions discussed here.
Listed below are several retro games that could – at one time or another – be found in the video game arcades that are now mainly consigned to our childhood dreams of nostalgia. So here they are, each in their own way uniquely capturing the zeitgeist of the time they were created.
- Pac-Man: Commonly thought to have originated from a pizza with a slice missing, creator Toru Iwatani has said that this is only partly true and that the idea also came from the combination of the Japanese character for “mouth” and the slang word for the opening and closing of the mouth – “paku paku”. As many will know, this game features the player controlling the eponymous yellow guy, evading ghosts whilst simultaneously eating lots of dots (as well as the occasional fruit and power pill). The game required good spatial awareness to avoid the ghosts, and a reasonable ability to be able to work your way through the mazes at the same time.
- Asteroids: A game so popular that video arcade owners had to alter the machines to be able to accommodate the number of quarters people were putting into them. This game placed you in control of a space ship that could rotate and move forwards, and fire directly in front of itself. Your mission was to destroy the on-screen asteroids, with each shot making them split into consecutively smaller asteroids that would increase in speed. Occasionally, one of two varieties of enemy space ship would appear in an attempt to hinder your progress. As there was a constant onslaught of moving objects that proved to be a threat to your craft, coupled with the ability to move your ship, it would seem that players would require a good degree of spatial awareness, along with being able to effectively judge the momentum of the player vehicle in accordance with the movements of the asteroids themselves.
- Marble Madness: One of those games that a lot of people found incredibly frustrating while others completed them in something silly like 3 minutes, Marble Madness is nevertheless a classic staple of arcade history. So popular that the arcade cabinets became expensive to maintain due to the controller (a trackball which required spinning to make the in-game marble move) wearing out and having to be replaced after excessive use. Requiring good mental dexterity, along with quick reflexes (to dodge those annoying grey marble guys, amongst other obstacles), and the willingness to practice until you weren’t embarrassed by your lack of skill, Marble Madness is certainly to exert some sort of workout on your brain.
- Ikari Warriors A classic that introduced the rotary joystick, allowing players to rotate and fire at the same time. This shoot-‘em-up saw players take control of one of two commando-types and wage a one (or two) man war against army of perhaps the most bizarre final bosses in arcade history. Good reflexes, spatial awareness and a whole lot of quarters were required to overcome the challenges posed by this game.
- Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins: A simple premise: Control protagonist Arthur, defeat demons, rescue the princess, experience side-scrolling action. This game has reached legendary status as being perhaps the most difficult (and frustrating) arcade game in history, not just because it was hard, but also because upon beating the final boss, you were then informed you’d have to do the whole game all over again. Nice. You’d need to employ all mental faculties at your disposal and prepare for a serious workout, as well as having an almost god-like ability to withstand frustation. If you can survive 10 minutes of this game without shouting expletives, then you have the strength of mind to hold your own in any difficult situation.
- Klax: Klax’s mental benefits are obvious; it’s a simple puzzle game using colored blocks. The aim of the game is to match up the blocks in rows or columns of three or more similar colors, causing them to disappear and points to be awarded. As with most block-related games, it seems likely that regular participants of the Klax game would start to experience symptoms of the Tetris Effect.
- Centipede: A shooting game that took place from a vertical point of view, the aim was to destroy a centipede creature that wormed its way all over the screen by shooting it. Gradually the screen filled up with mushrooms whilst at the same time you had to take on incoming swarms of insects. Strategic planning and a certain amount of cunning, combined with judging where the centipede and/or mushrooms would appear next were all needed to best the many-legged foe in battle.
- Arkanoid: Similar to Breakout but more awesome and in space, this classic even has a modern remake in the works. All you have to do is control a paddle at the bottom of the screen and bounce a ball in a given number of colored blocks in the top segment of the playing field. This requires a high level of hand-eye coordination, as missing the ball with the paddle will result in the game being well and truly over.
- Frogger: The game in which you control a loveable little frog and have to guide him to safety across various perils (including cars and a river of floating logs). The objective seems simple enough, but if you falter in concentration, you may inadvertently find your frog on the underside of a truck.
- Donkey Kong: So-called because the creator thought that “donkey” was another word for “stupid” and that “kong” evoked imagine of large ape King Kong, this is the original game to star this Nintendo staple character, along with the ever-popular Mario. In this game, you had to jump over barrels to reach the princess and defeat the irritating titular character. So much jumping was involved, that Mario was nearly called Jumpman for precisely that reason. Players must use skill and timing to avoid the barrels and navigate the oddly-placed scenery.
- Gauntlet: One of the original cooperative games that caused you to get incredibly angry at the friends you played it with. If the announcer’s cry “Elf shot the food!” doesn’t invoke either feelings of fear (because you were the Elf that had just shot the food) or of rage (as you witness a hapless Elf shoot your chance for more health), then you quite clearly missed out on this arcade gem. Guiding your band of fighters around a seemingly endless selection of mazes would indeed require a great deal of spatial awareness (especially when on the lookout for that persistent Death character), and a whole host of strategy-related brain skills, not to mention endurance if you were trying to survive for any length of time.
- Contra: Also cited as one of the hardest (read: most brain-challenging) games ever made, this run-and-gun shoot ‘em up was almost impossible to beat without the life-giving cheat code and even then it was hard enough to finish. Requiring superhuman levels of brain activity, this is the ultimate workout, mental and physical alike.
- Bomberman: It spawned many sequels and spinoffs, yet always remained a strategic game in which you controlled a guy (or sometimes a girl, or even a “thing”) that can drop bombs in order to dispose of obstacles and enemies alike, you needed to be a quick-thinker and a master planner to get to the very end. A common problem was suddenly realizing you’d blocked yourself in an inescapable situation by using your own bombs!
- Gain Ground: Combining strategy and action in a surprisingly unique and challenging way, featuring an extensive cast and many strategic combinations, Gain Ground will certainly challenge the player through all 50 of its levels. Requiring a sharp mind, spatial awareness, good player selection and a pile of quarters, this would be a humbling experience for many out there.
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