Help out the artist from The Labyrinth of Time! 

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.

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 »