where are the new Carmen Sandiego games?With the technology of today they could make an awsomely fun and educational game. With Blu ray you don't have to just look at pictures , you can see video of the place and interact with the surroundings and have the cartoon overlays run around the city. It would be great! And all in High Def!

Several thousand more visitors came over once the post made the front page of Propeller.com. I even got 50 Diggs, a personal record. Many other sites picked up the story, including Aeropause and The Gadgets Page. And for a couple days, Educational Games Research made the top 100 Wordpress blogs. Briefly it was mentioned on the homepage of Wordpress.com, bringing in more visitors.

Several bloggers linked to the post, including Karl Kapp and Interesting Pile. Benny over at 4 color rebellion had some nice words for the list (“one of the best (if not THE best) gaming top 10 lists I’ve ever read”). Thorien at Epic Coalition had a flashback to his phone phreaking days. A commenter over at The Geek Show Podcast contributed some nice words:

Mavis taught me to type. Oregon Trail taught me to leave as early as possible and be as rich as possible. Math Blaster taught me that number punching means blowing cr*p up. I learned most of my American History, Geography, World History, and deductive skills through the chasing of that elusive Carmen Sandiego.

I really did like these educational games growing up. It's really sad to see that there aren't a lot of these kinds of games anymore.

phaesty over at Propeller.com had some additional nice comments:

Seeing the screen shots for NumberMunchers and the classic Oregon Trail just made me screech "OMG! I remember that!" in my office. I'd forgotten about NumberMunchers. Gosh, I loved those old educational games I used to pay in the MacLab at my elementary school. Nostalgia overload.

Lots of commenters injected some levity into the discussion. One over at Kotaku said:

It's all fun and games until Carmen Sandiego munched some numbers and died from dysentery.

Another over at Propeller.com said:

The 5th grader in me always got a little bit of joy when the school bully died from Dysentery .

Feelings were mixed over the inclusion of Zork and Windows Solitaire. Some commenters felt one or the other should not have been included, while others expressed enthusiasm with the last two choices. Several games I failed to mention were brought up, as to be expected with any top 10 list. The best and those consistently clamored for, mainly M.U.L.E. and Rocky’s Boots, I added to an honorable mention category. Others were good educational games for their time, but never gained the popularity or influence of those in the top 10. A few were not worthy of consideration. For instance, Custer’s Revenge would fit better in The Top 5 Most Offensive Video Games, at least if anyone still played it.

Finally, errors and clarifications were caught by the multitude of readers, and thanks to the power of blogs I was able to quickly correct mistakes. Thus, the time I noted MECC stood for the Michigan Educational Computing Consortium instead of the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium was quickly noted, especially by residents of Minnesota. (In my defense, I’d recently watched the Wolverines play football, so the State of Michigan was on my mind.)

All told, it was a fun and exciting month for this little ol’ blogger. Who knew old educational games could garner so much attention?

]]> http://lostlevel.wordpress.com/?p=168 Sat, 06 Sep 2008 23:42:50 +0000 Andy http://lostlevel.pt-br.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/remembering-infocoms-enchanter/ Congrats to jeffro on beating Infocom's Enchanter! (OK, that's a really old post, but sometimes I get way behind on my blog reading.) I played the Zork trilogy like crazy back in junior high and high school, but for some reason I never picked up any of the Enchanter trilogy. It's too bad, because playing it now I think I might actually have enjoyed Enchanter even more than I liked the Zork games—the Zorks are essentially gonzo Gygaxian dungeon crawls, whereas Enchanter seems a bit more traditional and plot-oriented, and in general I prefer the latter to the former.

I played Enchanter for the first time ten or so years back after acquiring a copy of the wonderful Infocom Classics collection. I got maybe two-thirds of the way through before getting stuck and then distracted by school, but I've always intended to revisit it. The puzzles that I recall were a little less... random than those in Zork, and I didn't encounter any that exhibited the sheer nasty near-unsolvability that some of the Zork puzzles did. (Jeffro mentions Zork III, which was the game that finally made me break down and consult InvisiClues for help: that stupid maze with the movable walls still makes me angry just thinking about it.) I really like Enchanter's central gimmick—you're a magician who knows a handful of low-powered but useful spells, which must be put to unorthodox uses to solve puzzles. Some of the puzzles made really clever use of the spells.

Ahhh, now I'm in the mood to dig out Enchanter and see if I can solve it this time. It's strangely comforting to know that should I ever want to dig into Infocom games again, I've got an entire unplayed trilogy to explore.

>leave webpage

I don't understand the word "webpage."

>go back

You can't go in that direction.

>go back to google

You can't do that to a google.

>please

What do you want to please?

> please god

God hears your plea.  But he is busy around the globe fighting evil.  Like in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, making sure kitties don't get caught in the crossfire.

>close window

There isn't a window here!

>exit firefox

You must tell me how to do that to a firefox!

>restart

Restart again?  What's the matter with you?  You've restarted this DT Log like a gazillion times before.  Why don't you commit to something and do it?  The residents of middle Minnesota would likely welcome another plumber to their ranks.  How about daycare management?  Biodiesel conversion engineer?

>quit

That's what you always do.  QUIT!  When the going gets tough, you stop what you're doing and hide in the back bathroom with the lights out.  You should QUIT WRITING!  You're not very good at it  You can't even finish Timebox!

>cry

Boohoo!  Boohoo!

>wait

Time passes... jeez, did you forget you could just type "z" and save three keystrokes?

>z

Time passes... like your youth, into the great nothing of past accomplishments, which there are none.

>z

Time passes... you really want to be eaten by a grue, don't you?

>z

Time passes... okay, grues don't really exist, but bacteria does!  And it's ALL OVER YOU ALL OF THE TIME!

>z

Time passes... you're really going to post this, aren't you.  Do you really want to start off a new blog by being so uncool as to reference Zork?

>hello sailor

Hey!  You're not in California anymore!   Stuff like that can get you beat up here in the Midwest.  Thank God you're not in Texas (anymore).

> light candle, open book to page 13, ring bell

You can now see.

A vast world has opened up to you.  But like in Zork I, it is hell.

The prevailing wind blows out your candle, leaving you in darkness once again.

You have been eaten by a grue.

You think I'm kidding?

You thought all this time that Gary Gygax invented Dungeons and Dragons?

You would be mistaken! Gary was doing archeology one summer in Egypt and dug up some dice in a leather bag, including a 20-sider, and found a stone carved with hieroglyphics near by. He and some of the guys stayed up late translating the inscription on the stone and found that one side of the stone was directions of r a game that used dice, and the other had the start of a story about a guy named Conan who was fighting in a colloseum against 3 lions. So for the next 3 weeks they stayed up until 2 or 3 every morning playing this game. Eventually the crew boss caught on that they weren't translating anything new, so he gave them an ultimatum: either get with the program or go home. Gary decided to go home, and on the plane he wrote out what he remembered from the inscriptions. When he got home he enrolled several of this buddies to do some research one weekend, after which he had the basics for the game, the monsters, what kinds of dice to use for which weapons, hit probabilities using the 20-sider, and how critical hits and fumbles worked with the 20 and 00 sides. The rest is history. Well, I guess the start was history. But Gary got the credit for the find, but not the way most people think he did, and not the find of that table in Egypt.

But Gary's gone now, so we'll never know exactly how the details got worked out.

The other guys he was playing with? They were working in a tomb one day when their battery died. Only one made it out, though on the way out he smashed the top of his head on a stone, rendering it completely flat; he said that the rest were eaten by a Grue, though there was never any evidence that they had been in the cave despite the crew boss's record that that was their assigned work area for the day.

However, we do have 20-siders from Egypt and Rome, so we know that part is true.

Al parecer el alcohol y una computadora cerca puede crear cosas muy bizarras, Pac-txt fue el resultado de esta combinacion.

Segun el autor, una noche con algo de alcohol en su sistema penso en hacer una combinacion entre el estilo de juego a base de texto de Zork y Pacman, ¿porque no?, claro, comer a travez de puntos en un tablero imaginario a base de comandos no suena como lo mas divertido pero quien iba a juzgarlo o detenerlo a las 2 am.

Y asi nacio Pac-txt.

Y basicamente eso eso, Pacman en texto, es solo una pantalla con texto donde se insertan los comandos como forward, back, eat, look y cada uno te va avisando que esta pasando en perspectiva de nuestro heroe amarillo. Lo impresionante es que el nivel esta completamente detallado, desde los limites con sus paredes justo como el diseño original y hasta los fantasmas y su movimiento para buscarte esta simulado.

Puede que es imposible encontrar gente sana que en estos dias disfruten los juegos a base de texto pero esto es un experimento bastante interesante.

Pac-txt

-decoyOctopus

1) Magic: The Gathering Starter Kit

What is it: Magic the Gathering singlehandedly created a business in the collectible card game.  I was there almost when it started, buying packs of Antiquities.  Players build decks and fight it out using a a handful of the thousands of cards available in the world.  Unfortunately, all digital attempts have not been nearly as successful.

What the Community Gets: Give us the tools, the software, and a tournament-legal starter kit.  The first hit is free, and after that we will buy pack after pack and deck after deck.  This one is a complete no-brainer.  The only problem is that Wizards of the Coast may not want to play nice with MS.  Solution: MS should just buy them, and in turn own the ips of MANY successful franchises, including Dragonlance, HeroScape, etc.  Would Hasbro sell?

What Microsoft Gets: Millions of dollars in digital sales of random decks and packs.  Run special promotions where past sets are available only one month out of the year.  Create special promo packs featuring MS characters.  This would be a major win if it was a first-party release.

2) You Have to Burn the Rope

What is it: One of the best commentaries on gaming, ever.  Go, now.

What the Community Gets: Achievement Unlocked: You Burned the Rope.  200pts.

What Microsoft Gets: Build it in XNA, turn it into a marketing piece.

3) MMO Pong

What is it: Pong controlled by the average input of all users in the game... truly social gaming.

What the Community Gets: A giant way to waste time.  Imagine a giant hall of voices.  Or the background made up of images fed from the XBox Cameras.  Yes, it's just a time waster... but sometimes that's all you need.  Or, perhaps this could just be the loading screen for an online games?

What Microsoft Gets: A live test bed for connections.  They can test the stress of how many concurrent connections can happen in a game before hiccupping.  How many audio feeds, video feeds, etc.  Who doesn't love live statistical data?

4) Zork HD

What is it: Zork, a text-based game, was first released in 1980.  Essentially, it hearalded the way for interactive fiction and storytelling via digital gaming.

What the Community Gets: A trip down memory lane and a piece of gaming history.  Plus, an actual gaming use for the Chatpad.

What Microsoft Gets: A second round of marketing for the Messenger Kit.  Surely it couldn't take THAT much effort to convert Zork to an Arcade title?  Would definately generate more interest and noise from the gamer community about the messenger kit than any magazine or web ad would.

5) Zune Store

What is it: ok, so it wouldn't really be an arcade game, but more of a utility.  If I can stream any song I want to my computer when I have a Zune Pass, and my Zune Pass is tied to my GamerTag... why can't I straight stream via the XBox, too?

What the Community Gets: A great way to create playlists on the xbox for background listening.  Just load up a playlist from ANY song on the service, save it, and the Xbox become the center of any party involving music.

What Microsoft Gets: More Zune Passes sold, and deeper integration between the Xbox and Zune communities.  If you have the Zune software installed, Microsoft could push you playlists for the music of any upcoming game easily...

I grew up playing text-based adventure games, as well as their progenitor, the tabletop pen-and-paper roleplaying game. This might make me a little biased but I always felt that the medium had too much to offer for it to be cast aside in favor of flashy graphics and multiplayer fragfests.

Like Paul, I hope that todays gifted writers will see the medium's limitless possibility as an opportunity for invention.

Just a disclaimer -- This picture obviously has nothing to do with the game! This is my avatar!

Other commands such as "attack" or "climb tree" or "pick up wrench" also work. This game of adventure and excitement is great!

However, just because this game is all-text, don't think it's easy. This is probably the #1 hardest game I've ever played. It requires you to touch -- not break -- an innocent mirror to teleport you somewhere else... How would you do that without looking up a walkthrough?? (Not me :D)

If anyone loves Zork as much as I do, tell me :)

There is also a Zork 2, Zork 3, and I believe there are more that are not text-only, but I think that would take all of the fun out of it :)

Zork is basically like a huge storyline, with you controlling it. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure book! The game is like a book, it lets you imagine the dungeons and the monsters... The forests and lakes...

Anyway, if anyone has more questions about Zork, ask me :D

See you all later...

MC Frontalot relates.

MC FRONTALOT :: It is Pitch Black.

• Some of the Scott Adams Adventures just don't work. I verified this by checking a walkthrough -- the program just didn't let me go where I needed to go. Very odd.
• None of the save options worked.
• From what I've found, the downloadable versions of Zork I, II, and III only work on the Mac Classic OS.
• Language barriers. The older games are too word-specific. I said "Dig". It said "How?". I said "With Hands". It said "Can't". Turns out "Use Hands" was the proper command. Needed a walk through to find that out.
• The text disappears on some computers when you scroll the main window

However, I have not lost my fervor for using these in the classroom. Especially when they are so much darn fun! I'll post more about that later...

And with those words started my real interest in computer gaming. I spent years playing games from Infocom. They had some of the funniest, immersive games on the market in he 80s for computers. I spent hours upon hours trying to get through the original Zork. I don't think I ever did. I think the Ur-Grue ate me a number of times in the process. These text adventures opened up a whole world of imagination and were cleverly crafted to take whatever instructions you typed and take you on a journey that lasted forever. I spent so much time just trying to figure out all the little puzzles that I often lost track of time. You could do some of the most stupid things and get some sort of response, and usually a smart ass one when you tried to do something really off the wall. I think I still have copies of most of Infocom's games floating around on 5.25" disks. Somewhere along the way though, the immersive factor was replaced by the instant gratification that drives today's world.

A lot of the games now pretty much cater to the short attention span youth that grew up with the internet and the other attention deficit disorder objects of the late 20th and early 21st century. Long gone are the days where people actually sit down and do something that takes a long time. People over the years have had their brains replaced by the little pixels dancing across their TV or computer screens at a maddening pace, oblivious to the fact that they can't even have a conversation with someone without twitching to do 100 other things at the same time. Once upon a time you could get lost in some of the games that people used to play. Now a days it's a need to "pwn u in teh face" as fast and repeatedly as possible. I think some of that started with a lot of the first person shooters. Unreal was a good example of that. The online play of constantly zerging your opponents to get as many frags per second as possible really turned a lot of online gamers into the instant gratification zombies they are now.

Granted a lot of us that play online games have real lives, and can't spend every waking moment playing a game like we used to be able to when we were kids. Now we have to actually go do stuff or someone comes a long and takes all your stuff because you didn't pay them on time. There is something to be said for emersion though. A lot of the trends I'm seeing in the market of online games seems to be pointing to the "quick fix", ADD type game play that a lot of people seem to want now. I'm seeing it specifically in EQ2, and it's kind of frustrating to some extent. A lot of whining over the lack of "solo" questing, or the lack of content for those who want all the uberness that takes hard work normally to achieve has started to make some disappointing things happen with EQ2. The latest expansion seems to be just chock full of solo content, but not much in the way of stuff that people can go out an enjoy together. A lot of the quests seem kind of disjointed and just tossed in to fill up time and give people their instant gratification. I don't know if it's just the method of running the quests with a group of people that makes it seem kind of disjointed or maybe it's more along the lines of the long quests being broken up into "quest lines" now. There was sort of a trend started with Kingdom of Sky on that. Lots of little quests that got you to an end goal. Maybe I'm missing the point of them, but as of late I'm finding myself going back and working on a lot of the previous expansion quests instead of hanging out in the new expansion.

There's always the same couple of subjects popping up on the forums. There's the solo vs. group content, then there's the raid vs. non-raid loot issues. Personally I think it's fine if you want to solo all the way through a group oriented game, go for it. But don't sit there and demand the content designed around groups be nerfed because you want to be antisocial. A lot of people want to be able to play with their friends, not spend all their time by themselves. It's not like they don't have plenty for you to do solo. I spend about half my time soloing and I'm happy with amount of content for solo play, just as the other half of the time I'm doing stuff with my guild. Just because you CHOOSE to limit the amount of content you can participate in doesn't mean the rest of us have to suffer. If you don't want the group content, you don't want the challenge, then you're not "entitled" to the "uber lewtz" the rest of the population that likes a challenge gets. It isn't all that difficult to get a group going, especially if you join a guild. I think that if you really want to just solo your way through a game there are much better alternatives than to go play an MMO. There's a reason it's an MMO, that's why it's called "massive MULTI-PLAYER". If you want solo, go play Diablo or Dungeon Siege, or Starcraft or whatever it is you're going to play. The other issue of people calling for raiding to be nerfed really gets under my skin sometimes. I never really used to raid or really like it, but I had no problem with people getting better gear who chose to do it. They put forth the effort to get it, they deserve it. Screaming for the same gear for group content or solo content is just plain stupid. There is no need for fabled gear if you're fighting stuff that can be easily handled in player-crafted gear. There is a reason these games have content designed around each play style, trying to get it changed so you can have everything handed to you is just lame. I have a problem with people that sit there and expect everything to be just "given" to them. It seems that people just don't understand what working for something is anymore.

Just because someone else has something you don't doesn't give you the right to demand it. They worked for what they got, and if you want it you better damn well put forth the effort to get it. Saying "I pay just as much as they do, so I'm entitled." is a load of crap. People make the choice to do the things required to get that stuff, it doesn't mean because you're unwilling to put forth the effort that you should get it too, simply because you pay the same subscription. That's totally not the point of these games. These games are supposed to be fun and provide a challenge to those who wish to accept them. The achievements you make are directly related to the effort you put in to accomplish them. Your money doesn't entitle you to anything other than access to play the game. That's it. It doesn't mean you're going to get everything you want, and right away. If it did there wouldn't be any point in playing, you'd be better off going to an arcade or buying the latest single player game if that's what you want. That same mentality also contributes to the viability of RMT as a business. If you are so lazy that you have to go buy your currency, then you really should be playing a single player game and using whatever cheats you can find on the internet. The sheer laziness of people has made the same crap that shows up in your email on a daily basis, also show up in these MMOs and annoy the hell out of you. I seriously wish people could just be banned from every MMO on the market when they get caught participating in RMT.

Anyways, before you go running around telling people that you should have easy-mode just because you pay a subscription, remember that the rest of us don't necessarily feel the same way. Stop and think about someone other than yourself for a change and shut up, or you might just be eaten by a Grue.

But seriously. Macs are amazing. I guess it really depends on what you grew up with. I grew up with Macs, and that's what I love. Actually, my first computer (which still exists and functions) was a green and black screened computer made by that famous manufacturer of personal computers, AT&T. I had no idea they ever did anything other than telecommunications... But this computer was amazing. Oregon Trail, ThinkQuest, all these old games that are just amazing, regardless of their crappy graphics. They had to rely on interesting narratives, ideas, etc. We had so many of those text adventures — Zork, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and so on. The other thing about this computer was it was so easy to program. GWBasic was the main language, and me and my brother made all sorts of things with it, from a rodeo program to a simple greeting program, in which you entered your name, and it responded with a personalized response. This last one started with the names of our family and friends, and soon expanded onto stranger characters, such as the muppets, cartoon characters, books, etc.

But I digress. Macs. Yes, Macs are superior. They are more expensive, but the hardware and software is advancing faster than it appears to be in PCs (I have nothing to base this on, so correct me if I'm wrong). And, well, already film and photo and other artsy projects are much better on macs, so if the software manufacturers catch on and start making more programs for macs — which they are, more all the time —, the Mac could conceivable take over the market from the PC. Because that's the main thing they have that we don't — software. In fact, the takeover has already happened some places. Just recently, it was revealed that in Japan, Apple received 53% of the market share (of software operating systems, that is, not computers in general), beating out PCs for the first time. Which is pretty cool. And they always say that Japan is more advanced, that future technologies come out of Japan. Let's hope that that future tech has a nice big apple on it.

http://pac-txt.com/

But I'm a working adult now, and I can't afford to be spending six hours a day on a MUD or MMO: so enter Play-By-Email games. Play-By-Email games are the electronic equivalent of the old-style Play-by-mail games, in which players send their input by postal mail (Usually chess, but can also be RPGs). Play-by-email games are casual by nature, and therefore don't require a lot of user input aside from perhaps a weekly character post to the game. It's best played with an intimate group of 5-6 players, especially if the campaign you choose requires active GM (game master) involvement.

I'm currently involved in a small gaming group running a Continuum play-by-email campaign. It's set in any time period set by either the players or the GM and features time travel and time-based combat. The whole campaign is the "anti-Back to the Future"; in other words, when something is supposed to happen, it will: no changing it. But the spanners (time-travelers) can come up with wild ideas to require history to run its course: replace dead people with clones or past versions of themselves, make certain people forget what happened...it can all be very creative and fun.

If you're a working adult or a responsible kid who loves to role-play but hates to waste precious time, a play-by-email campaign could be for you. If you're interested, there's an excellent list of current PBEMs looking for players and a website to help players write better PBEM posts.

Anyway, the brown and tan "breadbox" was a big part of my childhood. It was released in '82, but hey, I was only born in '81, so my recollections of the system probably start somewhere around '87. My first association with it was due to the family business. No, we didn't use it to keep track of how many kneecaps we had broken, we used it for… Well, I don't remember what it was used it for. I'm sure there were some facts and figures and data and bookkeeping and spreadsheets involved though because that's how you run a business!

The World Famous Commodore 64 Blue Load Screen

Now we didn't have many games for the system. I was all about the Nintendo Entertainment System back in my misspent youth. But the C64 was a close second. Forget about the fact that the Commodore 64 had games that were tougher to beat than a World War II draft. And speaking of world wars…

While being shoveled off to the family business to spend the day there just sitting around, what did I look forward to most? No, not going across the street to the convenience store and getting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles popsicles—although they were delicious. No, no, I liked to sit down with a cold and refreshing can of Sprite from the vending machine inside the shop (which always had a unique taste due in some part to that particular soda machine) and heading to the back and playing Blue Max!

Just take a look at that cover! Are you caught up in the EXCITEMENT yet ?!? There's freakin' sperm jumping up from the ground at you! If that's not a game worth playing, then I don't own a Richard Marx CD. This game was great, you had your machine gun to *try* take out of other planes, but the problem was you had to match your altitude with theirs to do it, and if you were skilled enough to do that, you probably ended up smashing into each other anyway. Oh well. The best part was dropping bombs on these sick perverted SOBs. Warships, bridges, tanks, runways, buildings, innocent moving vehicles… just destroy it! Factoring in how much damage your plane had taken and where, your fuel could run out quickly or your wings may get damaged thus causing you difficulties in piloting. This is considered by many to be one of C64's best, and I can't disagree.

The next game that I have early C64 memories of would be Zork. Or more importantly, "Zork I: The Great Underground Empire". Now there's actually a version just called "Zork I", but why there is no great underground empire in that game, I'll never know. Did the empire crumble? Was it yet to be a force to be reckoned? Thoughts like these keep me awake at night and stuck in the 80's. Anyway, this game was text-based. Yes, forget all about your Xbox360 or PS3 or spiffy PC graphics card-- Zork comes from a time when men were men and women knew their place and all fantasy-based games were in TEXT format. Just like radio, you had to use your imagination.

What a creepy coverbox!

The game had a humorous slant (at times), but I must confess as child roaming dark cellars, fighting trolls, and being warned of being eaten by a "grue"… Well, I was a little bit frightened! Maybe it's because I was so young when playing it, but there's a definite eeriness to the game. And how ANYONE was ever able to beat it I'll never know. I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to go and at first sight of the thief hanging around in the caves, I always attacked him. And he always killed me. Oh well, that's what walkthrough guides are for! YES, in the Year of Our Lord, two-thousand and six, I have mastered Zork I: The Great Underground Empire! It took me almost 20 years, but I just hate having failed at defeating any game I own. Stick it, Infocom.

But wait—there's more! In what was to become a lifelong affair with comic books (aka- "sequential art" for you high society types), I got an early taste of Marvel Comics with two games: Doctor Doom's Revenge and X-Men: Madness in Murderworld. I enjoyed the heck out of Doctor Doom's Revenge. You alternated each scene playing as Spider-Man & Captain America. I guess they were trying to seize Dr. Doom's castle because that's where all the action takes place. Shouldn't it have been called 'The Revenge of Spider-Man & Captain America' then? To call it 'Doctor Doom's Revenge' seems to imply he had a plan and was actively pursuing these Marvel icons, but he wasn't. He was just kickin' it in his Latverian castle and the fact that Cap & Spidey showed up was incredible luck on his part. But Doom always has a plan. Always. He really throws everything but the kitchen sink at you in this game! Gorilla robots, regular robots (sorry, no extra crispy robots), Rhino, Batroc the Leaper, and some guy called Machete (who carries a… wait for it… machete). Now, in my over 15+ years of reading comics, I've yet to ever hear of or see Machete, besides in this game. His costume is a total rip-off of the old Doctor Octopus green & yellow spandex. Maybe this was the best Doc Doom could do considering Spidey & Cap showed up out of the blue? Never beat this one game, it was like running the gauntlet. The fights were incredibly tough and an exercise in button-mashing and even if you did win a battle against a villain, you always carried on with the damage dealt to you. That's fine in real life, but this is a GAME! Where are the power-ups? The mysteriously refilled health bars? I did enjoy the comic book cutscenes though.

..tking81/doctor_dooms_revenge_09.gif">

If Batroc the Leaper and a robot gorilla are giving you trouble, maybe it's time to retire, Cap...

So THIS is the cause of the apes coming to power on our planet!

X-Men: Madness in Murderworld is quite a different "beast", hehe. Sure it features the classic Claremont/Byrne line-up, but what the heck are you supposed to do? I never got past the first level! There's all these commands on the screen but I couldn't even figure out how to open the darn door to get into Murderworld! How can I get in on the madness if I can't find the key?! How can I find the key if I don't get in on the madness?! Anyway, I was probably just stupid at the time and that's why I couldn't figure it out. But, I loved the idea of playing as the X-Men and the manual came with some cool illustrations and bios of the featured characters and it also had a comic book based on the game included as well. I wish I still had that comic, it's probably worth some $$$ these days. A quick eBay search confirms it being sold for $10 and it had art by Mark Bagley. Awesome!

The final game we owned, and the one that got the most play from me, was Family Feud. What an awesome game and it still beats every single other video game variation of Family Feud. The great thing was that it was so easy to be get first response during the face-off; all you had to do was hit the spacebar. I hit it without even reading the question first. I would play this game for hours. You would be asked to enter your family name and I'd type stuff like 'WWF', 'X-Men', and 'Avengers', and 'JLA'. Then you'd get the game calling your family members names like 'Dad X-Men' or 'Brother X-Men'. It was great! This game was always challenging, and it's what I like about the Feud in general, you can dominate in the early rounds, but all it takes is a few wrong answers and the competing family could win the whole game. I just played a few games of this last night and I still love it. The questions and even answers are definitely outdated in this day and age. One survey asks you to name fuel companies, some are easy (Shell, Texaco, Exxon), but for others I had to think about the 80s because some aren't even around anymore and one of the companies I had never even heard of. Needless to say, since the game was made in 1984, by the time I was playing it somewhere around 1990, some of the answers on the board left me scratching my head. My only question is this… what are The Simpsons doing on the game?!

One of the Greatest Games Ever.

Check out this old C64 commercial and feel... the... POWER !!

If you haven't ever played a text-based game - you're really missing out. These games were cool before cheesy graphics enthralled us into moving chunky pixels around the screen for high scores. The games are usually called "interactive fiction" (abbreviated as "IF" for short) by the aficionados and are still being developed. (You can make you own too - I'll write more about that later.)

For now, I wanted to post a link to the place that started it all for me. (not back in the 80's as would be the case for many lovers of this type game) but more recently - a few years ago, right after I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A friend told me that Douglass Adams had created a text-based game to go along with the story so I looked around, and found a very slick version on the BBC's site. Granted, this particular game is a cross over - a hybrid IF game since it also incorporates images. Traditionally the games didn't display images... well, look into it some - you'll be pleasantly surprised. :)

The BBC's Hitchhiker's site will tell you everything you'll need to know to begin playing, but knowledge of the book/story would definitely help your success with this particular game - - should you decide to accept the mission.

free online sources to play some of the originals:

infocom
ZORK (play online)
ZORK (download)