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The funniest thing triggered some great old memories of 80s arcade games . Last night I went to a store, a 24-hour convenience one, to get a cigarette lighter and asked for the difference between Bic lighters and Scripto lighters. Unexpectedly the boy on shift was helpful and kind enough to inform me that as per their reputation the Bic works much better. That's when I made my decision to go for the good old, never failing Bic.

That is how I remembered an old TV ad with Peggy Fleming. And I told the kid about it, about her skating on a Bic pen attached to the blade of her skate and after a round on the ice the pen was still writing. Obviously that story I told him made him calculate quickly, and he made me laugh with the question asking if that was back in the fifties. But he wasn't scoffing, on the contrary, he actually confessed that he would have loved it to be born and raised in this age, in the time when things have been new and cheap as the first video games and even McDonald's.

This on is turn made me think about the things we had as children and how very few kids nowadays will consider them worthy to even look at. Unlike the twenty-something generation now that only know computers and the latest video consoles, I've experienced first hand how the 80s arcade games were played, and how they paved the road for PC games and the portable handheld games.

It is true that for 80s arcade games, Pong itself was a big thing - the first ever thing to be done virtually, but it was far in the 60s and what I am really fond of are the memories of actually going to an arcade in order to play games. Real arcade with a change machine only apart from the stand alone, full sized games with their handles and buttons, such as Asteroids, and Donkey Kong, Pac Man and Mr. Pac Man.

As there was nowhere else to go after school actually, because apart from the malls that e didn't like t hang into, the 80s arcades games were the only places for under 21-year-olds. And we devoted both ourselves and our free time to spending every last quarter there.

There was one 80s arcade game that I liked much more than the others. It was called Quix and I never managed to find a copy of it again, neither in the internet, nor on a CD-R. The task was to part off pieces of a huge rectangle that was on the screen, using a stylus controlled by the joystick, avoiding the electrical sparks/fuses moving around, because in case they get to you, your score returns to zero and you start from the beginning. It was just a simple game or people who were not fond of all the killing and shooting and in was much easier to move in the limited 2D space.

But in fact I still have a place in my heart for the times (a few months only) that I was totally addicted to the great Space Invaders. Boy, the more I think about it the more I realize just how much I loved those 80s arcade games.