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You know how sometimes there were certain toys which no matter how many times you added them to your Christmas List, Father Christmas (he was still Father Christmas when I was a kid, not Santa Claus as he seems to be called these days) never seemed to bring them?
One such toy for me was Screwball Scramble, which I must have asked for several years running. Sadly I never got one of my own, and had to be content with playing on the ones they sometimes put out in the shops in the run up to Christmas.
Screwball Scramble was an obstacle course for ball bearings, the aim being to get your ball bearing from the start of the course to the end as quickly as possible. You controlled the game via a series of buttons and switches at the front of the maze which were all mechanical in nature – no batteries required here.
Stabbing the buttons and flicking the switches caused various parts of the obstacle course to be activated, so with careful timing and a modicum of good luck you could move your ball bearing about without actually touching it. That is assuming the ball didn’t jump off completely and you had to replace it!
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One of things you did as a kid when Christmas was just around the corner was to start making a list of things you wanted Father Christmas to bring you (I try to resist the urge to call him Santa Claus. It was always Father Christmas when I was little). Invariably of course you didn’t get everything on that list, but you might have got a few things that weren’t on your list.
It’s probably fair to say that the 1970’s and 1980’s was the era when role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons were at their most popular. This popularity saw certain films and comic books get their own role playing game, and Ghostbusters was one such film that the made the transition from celluloid to statistics.
Downfall was one of those games that I always wanted, but no matter how much I hinted or wrote it on my Christmas list Santa somehow failed to bring me my own copy. Luckily a cousin of mine did get one for Christmas one year, so I did get to play it, but I liked it so much that just made me want my own one all the more.
It’s funny how some games have stood the test of time, whilst overs have faded away. One of the latter is Mr. Pop!, and I’m surprised that it’s no longer available given that it was a lot of fun to play.
I must say it surprised me to learn that Jenga! was actually a product of the 1980’s, as I thought it was a much more recently invented game. In actual fact its origins actually go back to the 1970’s, but it was during the eighties that the game hit the big time.
Connect Four is a game whose roots lie within the old pen and paper game of Naughts and Crosses (better known as Tic Tac Toe in the US). It is a game for two people played on a 7×6 grid and as the name suggests the idea is to try to connect four of your playing pieces in a straight line.
