Barrack seems a good of a point as any to introduce the unusual work of Ambrosia Software, a software and game company that hit its heyday developing for Macintosh in the 90s. Ambrosia specialized in weird, idiosyncratic arcade-style action games, usually remakes of classics like Centipede. They never preferred simple design when they could throw in gaudy CG graphics and in-jokey sound effects. Their games are an acquired taste but an important addition to the strange pantheon of 80s and 90s Mac games.
So we come to Barrack, Ambrosia’s 1996 remake of JezzBall. The premise is identical if you’re familiar with the original. You have to subdivide a field of bouncing balls into increasingly smaller sections while hitting as few of them as possible. The original JezzBall had a fatal flaw, in that the clutter of balls in the later stages made progress close-to-impossible. Barrack overcomes this problem with a neat selection of gimmicks and power-ups. The trademark Ambrosia overproduction pays off and brashly improves upon the original. Read more »
This weekend, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art opened an exhibit on The Art of Video Games. I hugely recommend it; though physically small, it’s enormous in scope and successfully curates the entire four-decade history of video games into a manageable, hour-long primer that sums up the artistic limits and triumphs of the game medium.
Most interestingly, the opening ceremonies included a series of panel discussions with notable video game dignitaries such as Hideo Kojima and Ken Levine. I had the honor and privilege to attend the first panel, a discussion of the halcyon days of computer and video games featuring some of the key figures in the development of early terminal games and the Intellivision, as well as Rand Miller, the creator of Myst. Apart from the novelty of hearing from such distinguished professionals, the panel offered a few tantalizing insights. Namely that all the early days of game development were indeed chaotic, improvised, and eked out under the technical limitations of the day. Read more »
The Labyrinth of Time is a beautiful, forgotten game. Luckily, the artist is still going at it, and he has a new book coming out! But he needs some money before he can start publishing it.
That’s where you come in. If you have some spare change, please send a little money to Bradley W. Schenck’s Kickstarter project! He has 30 days to raise $7,800. Any amount you can kick in will help the effort – and as with all Kickstarter projects, the money won’t transfer until he’s raised it all.
As I’ve been over, Schenck’s art has greatly personally affected me. It’d mean a lot if whoever’s reading could send over a few bucks.
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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Posted on May 17th, 2012 by Shadsy
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