Longtime contributor and verbose commentator. Loves Roleplaying Games, Adventures and Puzzle Games. Gets strangely nostalgic when he enters a DOS prompt, hears a Gameboy *ding* or sees horrible colour palettes. Always good for a second opinion on everything.
Played together with his little brother cute Nintendo games and gambled undercover Wolfenstein and Larry on the PC. But real nostalgic feelings only come up with the C64 and 8-bit consorts. Passion for everything that is cyberspaced, fun and fast.
Website founder. Likes adventure and strategy games. Enjoys perfection, but cannot help finding the fly in the ointment. Has a weak spot for the obscure and loves the beauty of imperfection.
When SSI started publishing officially-licensed Advanced Dungeons & Dragons games in 1988, the "Gold Box" series came out swinging with Pool of Radiance, which made up for what it lacked graphically with a slavish recreation of the AD&D tabletop rules (including the availability in-game of pages of inscrutable polearms) and an engaging tactical turn-based combat system. The D&D game was no stranger to computer games, having served as the template and rules engine for the earliest hobbyist and even commercial CRPG titles like Ultima, Wizardry, and The Bard's Tale and had been licensed for "official" games in the past.
What's New?
2024-04-13
Into the mine, out of the mine. Descent 2 repeated the original game's formula with very few changes. I remember being quite annoyed by it at the time. Time passes, I got older and more forgiving. The game not being all that expensive anymore may help as well. You should play it!
You're about to embark on an epic journey through several kingdoms. On a mission of no less than to save the whole world. But, you know, as the main evil henchman says at the end, himself and the hero are not that different. Yes, it's a huge bag of trite clichés. Though presented in a self-aware, ironic way. At its core, Xeonjia: Ice Adventures a humble, entertaining game.
Appointment with F.E.A.R. took me a longer time than usual. With more sections than your normal book and no less than four mutually exclusive paths inside, plus a mechanic which makes parts of the solution impossible to brute-force, it is no wonder in retrospect. The surprising thing about it: I felt entertained the whole time!
Soon, this land will be mine! In today's indie gaming world, there are so many things to discover. The issue being to find them. Or, from a developer perspective, to receive any attention. Having discovered this humble little game called There is Only Power through semi-random browsing on itch, and having enjoyed it, here is a recommendation for you.
Yup, it's Sonic! But, of course, it would be too easy to take the one everyone knows. Let's be honest, nothing to add to the public opinion about that one. Though the semi-recent release of a C64 port motivated me to take a look. Hoping to raise some awareness of this amazing work.
In Quack A Jack, the player encounters many weird opponents, which are loosely based on a rather strange story and somehow seem to have nothing to do with the actual game. The crowning glory of the bizarre humour, however, is a nose. Yes, a nose. But not just any nose, but Sue's nose, who is even mentioned in the credits and was supposedly also responsible for food and drink. So much for the female role in the 80s.
Diving into my own past of (virtual) warmongering again. Well, sort of. By the early 2000s, it was not even remotely my favourite genre anymore. But old love never dies. After enjoying Paradox Entertainment's Europa Universalis immensely, it was a given I would also buy their next title, Hearts of Iron.
Have you ever seen such colours on the C64? Mayhem in Monsterland was a brave attempt to bring a console style jump'n'run, modelled closely after Nintendo's and Sega's mascots, to the best-selling home computer of all time. While at the same time, paying homage to one of the iconic games of that system: Wizball.
The mid-80s were a good time for Activision in a creative sense. A good number of unusual titles which at the same time were highly professionally produced came out in '86 alone. One of them: Alter Ego.
When Sierra handed over the development of Space Quest V to Dynamix, they let appear the logo of their company's own brand in more or less hidden places in the game. On top of that, they integrated the logo of a real sponsor. The brand name of the American telecommunications company Sprint appears on the spaceship terminal after every intercom transmission. You can read here whether the outsourcing has affected the usual quality in any other way.
...that everything you see here has been coded from the ground up? We're not using any generic Content Managament System - those things never fit any specific purpose anyway. The same goes for our forum which has even been released under a Free Software licence in its current incarnation.
So what is this site? To put it in the most simple way imaginable: It's a site about digital games. Not about the latest gaming news, but about the games themselves, and - as you've already surmised from the site's name - specializing in what's usually considered 'classic' these days. Of course, definitions of 'classic' differ widely. However, if you browse around a little, you'll find us covering pretty much everything (with varying intensity) from the earliest home systems (late 1970s) to the end of the last millenium.
