Okay, second quiz answers now. Find the questions here. Two more quizzes left. Can you smell the excitement? You might want to check your oven.

Wheels 1 – Pole Position

This was the first driving game I saw in the arcade that looked pretty cool, with a nice use of perspective. It’s been done a thousand times better since, but this was the thing back in “the day.”

Wheels 2 – Moon Patrol

This is one of my favorite games. It’s a helluva lotta fun, and you really feel the motion and excitement as you’re driving while being attacked by spaceships, molecules and clods of dirt.

Wheels 3 – Paperboy

I still think this is one damn fine looking game. It’s kind of difficult throwing papers and have them hit people’s porches/mailboxes, as perspective is kind of funky. Still, you haveta love a game where the young boy protagonist drops some profanity after hitting a fire hydrant.

Wheels 4 – Stocker

I could be remembering wrong, but I think that my brother was into this game. One neat thing about the game is that when you drive off the road, your car leaves dirt tracks across the grass. A dumb movie fact: in The Color of Money, Tom Cruise’s character Vincent is introduced playing Stocker, so that’s something, I guess. I was going to include Spy Hunter in my quiz instead of this game, but wasn’t able to capture a decent sound sample. Ah, well.

Wheels 5 – Kick

This game is a lot of fun. You control a clown on a unicycle, moving him left and right with a trackball. You catch balloons on his head — sometimes they pop, sometimes they stick to your head and you slowly build up a big hat o’ balloons. One of my favorite games, though it kind of sucks playing through a MAME emulator on the keyboard, as you can’t whip the clown back and forth as fast you would be able to via a trackball.

Next quiz… guys with guns (including my all-time favorite arcade game)!

Okay, here are the answers for my first entry in an ongoing miniseries of videogame sound quizzes.

Ready?

Not yet?

Okay….

No, really, I have to do this. It’s that or take my meds.

Awww Cute 1 – Donkey Kong

I’m not good at this game, but I really love its sounds and music — the nice little ditty right before you start playing a level, the sounds of Mario’s feet hitting the metal girders, the happy little flourish as you successfully jump a barrel.

Awww Cute 2 – Frogger

Oh, this game… The music, the hoppity hop hopping, all so happy. This game could cure clinical depression, if only those goddammned doctors would just listen to me. However, there is a bit of darkness in the game. The sound of the frog dying when you get hit by a car (or do something similarly stupid) is quite jarring, especially in the midst of all the happiness. You can hear Frogger’s death throes for yourself at the end of the sound file in the quiz. And look at this mean ol’ skull-and-bones that your poor l’il froggy turns into! Oh, mercy.

Awww Cute 3 – Dig Dug

Dig Dug is another personal favorite of mine. The sound effects are secondary to the music for me in this game. One thing I like about the music, and you can hear it in the sound file I uploaded, is that during parts of the game, the music only plays if you are moving. The gaps in the music are me just poised, waiting to kick some Pooka ass.

Awww Cute 4 – Burger Time

I’d be hard-pressed to find a game I didn’t suck at more than Burger Time. It would always make me nervous that this chef never seemed to be in much of a hurry to get anywhere, despite the fact that a gang of anthropomorphic fried eggs and hot dogs was trying to kill him.

Awww Cute 5 – Q-Bert

I almost suck at this game as much as I do at Burger Time. This is the one game in the quiz that doesn’t have some sort of music underpinning the gameplay. It’s just the bounce-bounce-bounce of impending doom.

But hey, look, Q-Bert doesn’t actually die when he runs into a red ball, he just swears like a surly truckdriver!