Nickelodeon Arcade (or Nick Arcade) is another awesome game show from my childhood. Hosted by Phil Moore, this video game-themed game show pits two teams of two kids against each other to see who will go into the Video Zone to take on one of three Video Game Wizards (Merlock,Scorchia, or Mongo). To do that, they go through two rounds of controlling Mikey The Video Adventurer, which makes up most of the game, as each episode has Mikey in a different scenario, with a different enemy to match the theme (like smooch aliens for space scenarios, a hammerhead shark for the underwater scenarios, and so forth).
This was advanced for its time. The show not only had original games for the Face-Off starting each round (although most of them are Pong clones), the Mikey rounds are interesting, especially the Video Challenges, which has the contestants play actual video games from consoles at the time to beat a challenge, with points wagered won or lost depending on the outcome (some of the games used would be in the beta stages, like Sonic The Hedgehog). The Video Zone is amazing, as it has the contestants in a video game (while they are in a greenscreen room, we can see the result, as humans are put inside a video game).
