Memory Lane

You must have played it. There must be someone on here that has.

I was just idly dreaming and wandering along the route my mind was apt to take when I remembered a game that peaked my imagination many years ago.

If I remember correctly it was about the time I discovered things as word processing software in some class we were in. I mean this was revolutionary stuff. "You mean it can work out that the word will be too long to fit on the line and will automatically move it to the line below?"

Maybe it was a bit later than this, but anyway it was in a class like this, (ages before I got to play with Window's for the first time) that there appeared a game with a little ship that you could hover and fly around the landscape of green islands and palm trees. It was fantastic. A leap in whatever I had come across before and the discovery of which is one of those moments that has stuck with me through time. But bugger me, can I remember what it was called? Not at all. I mean this game was cool. GTA did not invent sandbox games. Maybe not as deep as something we'd find today, but here were degrees of freedom not seen before by me. You could go where you wanted and blow shit up! This wasn't Lotus or some other driving game where you could go left or right. This beat the living daylights out of platforms or shoot me ups of the time. It was like a little epiphany where those little rails all the other arcade type stuff ran on were thrown out of the window as you flew about wherever you wanted.

There was also a cool tank game that came along shortly after with germans vs the allies. That Tiger tank rocked! Very similar graphics and may well have been the next evolution to the flyer game.

It's funny how little things like this stick with us and how they tie into our memories. I saw a documentory the other day. One of the million about WWII that fill the history channel and its ilk. They mentioned Tiger Tanks and how hard they were. They first thing that came to my mind as I remembered what a Tiger tank was and what I knew about them was a little game with me racing a tan coloured set of polygons in between trees as I hunted down those nasty allied tanks so I could give them what for.

Maybe they weren't all that great, especially when compared to what we have now, but who cares!?! In my little aging mind they were the best thing since bread (sliced or otherwise) when I first came across them and they laid down a new level of cool (in my mind) that stayed with me through the years.

My Google-Fu has been weak so far. Maybe yours is better. Failing that, maybe you have a better memory for names than I appear to. Either way, if you know what I'm on about and can help jog my memory that would be nice.

Anyone else have similar little moments of personal "Wow! That's *&£$ing Ace!" that have stuck with you as cool even though they'd not even be noticed were they to occur now?