16. Bokosuka Wars (ASCII, PC (Famicom), 1983)

My first experience with Bokosuka Wars played out like this:

You start the game and you are a small character in a forested area (think top-down view like Zelda) and there is a counter at the bottom of the screen that says 597m. Oh, when I move left, that counter goes down, that must be what I'm supposed to do. I continue to move left and eventually other characters (which I assume are enemies) begin to appear. I walk around them, continuing forward, but eventually I step on the same tile as one. Some swords appear on the tile, followed by a capital "B", followed by an explosion. The game smash cuts to a game over screen. "WOW! YOU LOSE!" it proclaims in blocky letters that take up a good 1/3 of the screen. At this point I decided to look up how to play, and it turns out once you know what's going on, this game becomes pretty fascinating.

So this is basically an extremely simple early real time strategy game. Your goal is to vanquish an enemy king who is 600m to the left, and you can recruit 2 kinds of allies to aid you in battle. Allies are found by bumping into rocks and trees, and you can either move all unit types at once, or select a single type.

Enemies eventually appear, and you fight them by just bumping into them, with the stronger unit prevailing (there is some randomness to this). Units get stronger the more battles they win, so there is a risk / reward to every fight.

I found an area with 2 enemies behind some purple blocks, and behind them was a small building with a bunch of allies in it (I'm assuming this is supposed to be some kind of POW situation).

The farther I go, the more allies I recruit, but the obstacles also increase so the game becomes part strategy RPG and part tile sliding puzzle (the game takes place on a grid) and I love that. The whole one strong main character with lots of weak minions is giving me proto-Pikmin vibes as well.

4/5, this game has so much going on for a console game from 1985 (and PC game from 1983!)

Update: Wow there's a sequel that just came out in 2016 (33 years after the original)