exQUIZitely 🕹️
@exQUIZitely • 17,156 subscribers
Not everything was better in the past, but I post about the things that were - mostly 80s and 90s games. I also created exQUIZitely, a retro quiz & trivia site.
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One of the most fun racing games ever for the NES! Who remembers this one?
exQUIZitely 🕹️95,879 views • 9 days ago
To me, Blizzard is the undisputed king when it comes to the best game intros. The amount of effort and sheer awesomness that went into StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm still blows me way and gives me nerd chills, even 13 years after its release. The camera angles, the pacing, the landed Viking being swatted away by the Ultra, the Nydus popping up behind the line of marines and tanks... and then seeing that massive Battlecruiser crashing into the city in the background. Simply everything about it is glorious perfection. If they ever decide to make a movie in that exact style with all the StarCraft lore, boy would I pay good money to see that. One can dream...
exQUIZitely 🕹️379,904 views • 1 month ago
I played World of Warcraft for many, many years (stopped around early Cata days). The one thing that stood out to me more than anything was its massive size. It was literally a world. And it felt huge because you had to explore everything by foot (to start with anyway). This might be a hot take but I always felt that some of the magic got lost with the flying mounts and teleports later on. The upgrade from walking to getting your first mount was nice (it felt like a real milestone) but the flying mount and teleports turned a once massive world into a set of waypoints. I know it's all under the umbrella of convenience but I felt that the world really started to shrink and lost a big chunk of its charm. It wasn't about exploring anymore, it was about getting to the next dungeon or raid as fast as possible, relegating everything else to secondary importance, including all the little details, NPCs, caves, coastlines, mountains, and everything that that was once so wonderful to explore.
exQUIZitely 🕹️728,489 views • 2 months ago
The very first baskteball game I ever played was Double Dribble (NES) from 1987. What looks rather clunky today was extremely playable at the time, especially in two-player mode. Dunking on your little brother, followed by trash talk and eventual rage quitting. All essential parts of 80s gaming experience. 🏀 Cinematic slam-dunk cutscenes 🏀 Digitized speech 🏀 5-on-5 full-court basketball Top notch for 1987!
exQUIZitely 🕹️59,746 views • 8 days ago
Exactly 37 years ago on October 3, 1989, a game was released that took the world by storm. Prince of Persia (by Jordan Mechner) had such fluid and lifelike animations, that gamer-jaws were dropping left, right, and center. Rightfully so. But that alone wouldn’t have made the game such a massive hit and gaming-culture icon, I think. Prince of Persia also popularized the “cinematic platformer” genre (Karateka, Mechner’s earlier game, introduced it, though on a much smaller scale), with its immersive atmosphere, deadly falls and traps, and a real sense of weight and physics in movement. Jumps and sword swings had to be timed precisely; mistiming felt punishing but realistic, and also far less cartoonish than typical platformers. It wasn’t just a straight left-to-right platformer either. You had to go back and forth, open pathways through hidden mechanisms, and more. It always felt like it had some Indiana Jones moments with adventure and exploration elements. The one-on-one duels were more tactical than button-mashy, again diverging from the arcade-style norm of other platformers. You had to read your opponent’s stance, parry, and strike at the right moment. Brains over brawn. The sense of realism is ultimately what set it apart from the stereotypical platform genre of that era. Prince of Persia felt more “human,” had greater story depth, and made you think, not just react. You could argue that it paved the way for Another World, Flashback and other greats of the 90s. Mechner is one of the very few true pioneers of gaming history.
exQUIZitely 🕹️163,814 views • 21 days ago
It’s 1983 and you're playing Star Wars at the arcades for the first time, after watching the movies. Words cannot describe it. For perspective: other popular games around that time were Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Qbert, Joust, and BurgerTime... all great in their own way. But Star Wars literally catapulted you into a whole new universe. The graphics were nuts, and so were the digitized voices and sound effects straight from the movie (“Use the Force, Luke!”). To top it all off, John Williams’s iconic score delivered maximum nerd chills. This game will forever be linked to one of the best arcade eras ever.
exQUIZitely 🕹️132,032 views • 24 days ago
Sensible Software didn't shy away from a controversial tagline for their game Cannon Fodder from 1993: "War has never been so much fun!" The dark humour is present throughout the game, but not everyone got it - some criticised its "brutality" and supposed glorification of war and killing. I never understood that notion, since most action games involve blasting through hordes of enemies and killing the bad guys, don't they? Regardless, it became one of the Amiga's most successful games ever, with a crapload of awards. Great graphics, an epic soundtrack, and excellent gameplay. A near perfect game. Did you know it was actually built on a modified Sensible Soccer engine?
exQUIZitely 🕹️21,577 views • 4 days ago
There were first person shooters before and after Doom (1993), but I think we can all agree that it's THE most influential and iconic one ever made. LAN co-op and competitive “deathmatch” (a term popularized by the game) turned offices and computer labs into battlegrounds. Doom wasn’t the absolute first FPS or 3D game, but it was the one that packaged superior technology, excellent gameplay, a kickass soundtrack, free distribution, and multiplayer/modding, which helped to firmly establish the PC as the ultimate gaming machine. id Software's impact can't be overstated. They were true pioneers and made themselves immortal.
exQUIZitely 🕹️19,483 views • 4 days ago
Imagine seeing this for the first time in 1983! In terms of graphics, this wasn’t just miles ahead… it was basically a whole other dimension. Yes, the difficulty level was insane, but even just seeing one more screen or getting past one more trap was so worth it.
exQUIZitely 🕹️394,653 views • 2 months ago
Desert Strike by Electronic Arts (1992) is a perfect example of an asepct of early 90s gaming that I miss from modern games: Isometric design. The iso look will always have a special place in my heart, especially when it's combined with classic pixel art. It shows plenty of detail but leaves enough room for your mind to imagine the rest. Other examples that come to mind are: The Immortal, Cadaver, Marble Madness, Zaxxon, The Last Ninja... all incredible games if you ask me. Desert Strike certainly didn't win any prizes for complexity, but it had a very high "hell yeah, let's just blow stuff up" factor - which made it great fun and easy to get into. It's closing in on 35 years and still looks pretty awesome to me.
exQUIZitely 🕹️31,150 views • 7 days ago
Duck Hunt for the NES from 1984 felt like magic. The actual technology behind it - though not magic - was pretty smart and relied more on how the human eye works (or in this case: doesn't work). The NES Zapper is a simple light gun that contains a photodiode (a light sensor) and a trigger button, it doesn’t actually shoot anything itself. When you pull the trigger in Duck Hunt, the game briefly turns the entire screen black for one frame, then immediately shows a white box exactly where each duck or other target is. The Zapper’s sensor checks whether it sees that sudden bright light, and if it does, the game counts a hit, and if not, it’s a miss. The reason why you don't see this? It simply happens too fast (a fraction of a second), so you barely notice the flash, especially not in the heat of the moment. This only works properly on old CRT TVs because of how they draw the image. Illusion perfected!
exQUIZitely 🕹️40,199 views • 11 days ago
An average picture that you save on your phone or PC has a size of around 400 kilobytes. It doesn't do anything, it's just a static image. Now divide that by the factor 10, so you drop to 40 kilobytes. That's the size of The Last Ninja, developed by System 3 and published in 1987. I still struggle to comprehend, even in the slightest, how programmers back then did what they did - and the worlds they created with the limitations they had to work with. I was simply blown away by the graphics (isometric on the C64 with such an amazing level of detail - simply gorgeous) and absolutely mesmerized by the kickass sound. What Ben Daglish and Anthony Lees conjured up musically will forever be part of gaming history - an iconic masterpiece. 40 kilobytes man...
exQUIZitely 🕹️635,957 views • 6 months ago
The most "claustrophobic" game ever? Descent (1995) is a first-person shooter developed by Parallax Software, notable for being the first FPS with fully true 3D graphics and six degrees of freedom movement. Players pilot the Pyro-GX spaceship through mineshafts on various planets, infected by a virus that has turned mining robots hostile. There you go, the whole story in one sentence! Movement is the game's hallmark: full six degrees of freedom allows free flight in any direction - forward/backward, left/right (slide/strafe), up/down, and 360° rotation - creating disorienting, stomach-churning zero-gravity combat. For someone like me, being claustrophobic, this was both tough to play yet highly fascinating. I feel Descent is an underrated game that got a bit lost in the shuffle of other great games around the mid 90s.
exQUIZitely 🕹️866,186 views • 9 months ago
20 KB of RAM could make all the difference in the world… once. MemMaker was a memory-optimization utility included with MS-DOS 6.0 and later (especially common in 6.22). Its job was to free up as much conventional memory as possible for DOS programs and games. It did this by analyzing your system and automatically moving device drivers into the upper memory area (the region between 640 KB and 1 MB). MemMaker was once a life-saver. After Windows took over, it became obsolete.
exQUIZitely 🕹️16,307 views • 5 days ago
The majority of games from the 90s would show you a rather generic "game over" screen when you died. Your character would freeze, disappear, maybe even flicker or change colour... but it was rarely a core mechanic or spectacular death animation. Enter the 1991 classic Another World (also known as Out of This World). It wasn't just famous for its beautiful in-game animations but also quite notorious for its high degree of difficulty. It partially made up for the frustrating "game over" moments by presenting the player with a rather large number of unique, rotoscoped death animations, 16 distinct scenes to be precise. These include: ☠️ Being dragged under by tentacles at the start ☠️ Poisoned by a slug bite ☠️ Mauled by the large beast ☠️ Shot by lasers (crumbling skeleton) ☠️ Impaled on spikes ☠️ Falling from height resulting in a broken neck ☠️ Blasted by steam vents ☠️ Crushed by rocks or boulders ☠️ Strangled by an alien ☠️ Various other environmental or combat deaths Quite possible the most visually stunning death animations at the time?
exQUIZitely 🕹️97,624 views • 1 month ago