HoverSki 

Don’t let the 80s stock photography scare you away!

HoverSki has the foundations of a great top-down racing game. You get a track, a jet-ski, and you go fast. You’d struggle to find anything simpler. But the game shakes that modesty and tip-toes into the world of extreme sports, and that’s a big misstep. Read more »

Seize the Day 

Planner programs are one of the many relics of 90s computing. Nowadays we can happily default to Google Docs, Outlook, iCal, or whatever we have on our phones, but before we synced up with the cloud, the competition was fierce. If computers could do nothing else right, they would still store contacts and remind you about that appointment with CompuServe. Each planner had to outdo the others with a richer feature set or a more exciting interface.

Enter Seize the Day. Forget the “daybook” part of this program. The biggest and best feature is its rotating gallery plug-in. Seriously, it’s beautiful. Read more »

Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong-Nou 

Playing Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong-Nou for the first time is a life-affirming moment. In a world where games need to be marketable, along comes one so incomprehensible that I mistook it for a fevered dream for nearly a decade afterward.

Eastern Mind is, unquestionably, the strangest game ever made. It’s the interactive equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting. The narrative waxes philosophically and jumps around like a seismograph. The gameplay changes with extreme inconsistency. It defies explanation.

So uh… where do we start? Read more »

Big Rig 

Not many simulation games from the 80s earn their genre’s moniker like Big Rig. The creator, Bill Pogue, must have had a thing for freight trucking when he set out to recreate an accurate cross-country cargo trip. For goodness’s sake, this is a text-based driving sim that keeps track of the weight of your fuel. To the game’s detriment, all that engaging detail reminds you how monotonous the subject matter is. Read more »

Star Wars Pit Droids! 

Hear me out on this one.

Star Wars Pit Droids! is a kids game based on the widely panned pod-racing segments from Episode I. If this game was produced by serial rapists, it could not have any less going for it. You’d be excused for passing it over.

Against all odds, buried beneath a vile exterior, some designer at Lucas Learning put together a decent Lemmings clone. Read more »

Roller Coaster Factory 

When I was a kid, I had this deep obsession with wanting to get a roller coaster video game. The object of my affection was Ultimate Ride, which looked incredible and extensive for its time. The demo took a full day to download on my dial-up connection, but in spite of my fervency, my old desktop computer didn’t meet the system requirements.

Flash-forward a few months to a trip to Office Max with my family. While rifling through the bargain bins, I found a copy of ValuSoft’s Roller Coaster Factory, which looked pretty awesome from the jewel case. It would have to do.

This time, it’s personal.

Roller Coaster Factory is awful. It’s one of the crappiest, undercooked bargain games you could come across. Read more »

MissionForce: CyberStorm 

Some games are forgotten by time because they’re awful, weird, or just don’t work right. As much as I appreciate quirkier, experimental games, mainstream game-consumers usually had some credible reason not to play them. Most of the games I write about for this blog are in that vein, even perennial favorites and beloved underdogs like The Journeyman Project.

I say this to underscore how seriously I believe that MissionForce: CyberStorm is one of the best turn-based strategy games ever released, an absolute milestone for the genre that deserves a place on the same pedestal as X-COM. Nevermind that it’s the spinoff to a clunky mech combat game. Few games past or present show this kind of visionary disregard for rules, taste, difficulty, fairness, and genre conventions. Read more »

Don’t Go Alone 

Haunted houses never get a fair rap. They might be cheesy and schlocky, but you’re getting what you pay for. Sometimes you just want cheap scares and creepy decorations.

So thank goodness that Don’t Go Alone doesn’t put up any pretensions. It takes place in a haunted house, and you fight ghosts. Doors burst open and scary things crawl out. There’s a fairly fun RPG here, even without the corny spookiness, and it does justice to the roadside attractions and B-movies that inspired it. Read more »

Frogger 3D: He’s Back! 

The 90s reboot of Frogger kicks ass. I swear to god. This game is great. As great as Frogger can be, anyway. It’s like someone took the original and injected it with shark hormones and nitroglycerin.

Hyperbole aside, the Frogger remake (occasionally subtitled Frogger 3D or Frogger: He’s Back!) is easily the best in the series. It expands upon the original in clever, interesting ways without betraying its roots or stretching the formula to absurd lengths. Read more »

Back to basics 

You might’ve noticed the lack of activity in the past half-year. I do this in my spare time, and there hasn’t been as much of that lately.

But the real issue is the videos. Putting up videos for each games takes an exceptional amount of time. It’s hard enough to get a good video that captures a game in 10 minutes or so, but when it involves editing or recording something outside of DOS, that can be an arduous task. It’s terrifically satisfying to see the nostalgic reactions from YouTube, but I enjoy writing about classic games much more than I do putting the videos up.

I’ve been sitting on several articles because they were missing videos, and I don’t want to keep putting that off anymore. The blog comes first now. I’ll still put up videos when I can, especially for Music Highlights (which I really enjoy doing!).

Like a terrible undergrad student, I will now cram and turn in all my essays by the end of the year. Expect a deluge of content shortly!