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Thursday, July 1, 2010

Starcade and Wild Western

I keep hearing a lot about Red Dead Redemption but I've been in an arcade mood lately, so I've been checking out old west themed arcade games on the MAME cab with the tentative idea of doing a "Who Needs Red Dead" type of post. Last night I tried out one called "Wild Western" for the first time. To make a long story short the game was mediocre at best so I won't feature it, but I came across a video of it being played on an old episode of Starcade and my brain switched gears on me - "hey do a post about Starcade" it said. So I did.




Starcade was a 1982-1983 game show where contestants (typically kids or teenagers) competed against each other by first answering trivia questions about arcade games and then by playing a selection of arcade games to see who could get the highest scores. The winning contestant then played a bonus round where he had a chance to win the grand prize - usually an arcade game of their own.

I was watching an episode tonight of one contestant with coke bottle glasses with goofy looking hair and equally goofy clothing and I told my wife "look it this poor dweeby little kid". Her response - "it looks like those pictures of you as a kid". I took another look - "Oh shit, you're right. Damn, I even had a velour shirt just like that. OK."

It's not exactly riveting action, but it definitely has a certain kitschy appeal. You can view 41 full episodes (or as many as you can stand) on their website here:
http://www.starcade.tv/starcade/tv/starcadetv-shows.asp

They have lots of other goodies on their website to check out too:
http://www.starcade.tv/starcade/one.asp

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4 comments:

Fallguy40 said...

You pretty much run that same train mission from Wild Western in Red Dead Redemption. Who needs Red Read? You do. RDR is at least in my top 4 for this gen. I'm trying to decide where it falls.

I remember Starcade. That's some cheesy TV, but cheese is good!

MadPlanet said...

yeah - yeah - I know you love it. But you loved GTAIV and I was meh, so I'm uncertain. But I do plan on getting here pretty soon.

Fallguy40 said...

Actually, I loved GTA 3, VC and San Andreas. I was kind of meh on IV too.

MadPlanet said...

oh yeah - I stand corrected. I'll get RDR. I think the more exotic wild western setting will make it more interesting to me than the urban setting of GTA. I hear the story is better too. To me GTA IV just seemed like a bunch of disjointed missions strung together punctuated by minigames of darts and bowling.