Q*bert
I love those moments when I get an unexpected blast from the past that causes me to reminisce about some enjoyable childhood memory. This happened to me yesterday afternoon while visiting Nickelodeon's website with my kids. Nickelodeon offers a handful of free games that kids can play online and yesterday we stumbled upon SpongeBob SquarePants' Pyramid Peril.
Pyramid Peril is a Q*bert remake. If you've never heard of Q*bert, I'm almost certain you didn't grow up in the 80's. I couldn't resist playing this reincarnation of my once favorite childhood game, all the while grinning joyously at the thought of the hours spent playing the arcade version of Q*bert at Carroll's
Bowling Lanes in Fort Erie, Ontario, as an 11 or 12 year old girl. I bowled in a children's league every Saturday, and I'm not entirely sure if I was there more for the arcade games and snack concessions, as I was the bowling itself. "Kristin, you're up!" was commonly heard being shouted by my little bowling comrades, necessitating a momentary disruption of my current game of Q*bert so that I could obligingly fling the ball with two hands from between straddled stance, in order for the next person to have their turn. I could then return to the beloved quirky orange protagonist bobbing rather inertly on his square. Sometimes, I returned to find the masked expletive "!%#@?!" on the screen, having recently been snuffed out by Coily the snake. I vividly remember the utterances of Ugg, the purple warthog, which was only one of several bad guys out to get Q*bert; kay yug yug, is the best phonetic approximation that I can come up with.
After playing a few levels of the SpongeBob game, I decided to see if I could locate the original Q*bert game online. A visit to Google and a few keystrokes later and I was in business. If you're interested in giving it a whirl, you can find it here. It's the simple things that make life so good. 