DRAGON'S LAIR

Before Dragon's Lair a truly cinematic gaming experience could have only taken place in the imagination if the player while they were mentally traversing magical kingdoms inside the confines of textual adventures.The game appeared almost a decade before interactive movies would become a thing  (and would fall from grace soon afterwards) and heralded the genre in the best way possible . I'm not really sure what kind of processing power a laser disc could have provided an arcade cabinet with , but my personal impression at the time was one of sheer awe. In the years when cheap animation reigned supreme on TV (MOTU,Tarzan etc). the emergence of a game that was visually even more appealing than the series was a huge thing. At that time the animated series wasn't being broadcast anywhere in Yugoslavia, so imagine my surprise when I first laid eyes on the game. Who could resist playing out a cartoon, being at the same time entertained and annoyed with a myriad of excellent ways to die. Nowadays people say the game is nothing more than a series of movie sequences you become an able director of after spending a fortune on your trial-and-error learning curve. Memorising steps to  victory wasn't something that was unknown to 80s gaming anyway (one can easily evoke  memories of titles that taunt the player in a number of largely similar  ways). so a credit should be given where it's due , and this game surely deserves the credit and pomp it got.  Whining about coins lost in the local arcade isn't the way to go about writing a  game review.

BAD MOJO

BAD MOJO is a Kafkian tale of an insect expert embezzling grant money to find himself  turned into a cockroach  by his mother's magic locket the minute he's about to flee his rented apartment and his current life.The locket-mother becomes an oracle guiding the roach through an astonishing world of  tubes, holes, fuses, appliances, furniture, carcasses of other roaches and small animals,oozes and leaks of various kinds and other wonderful features of a nasty old landlord's building and the bar beneath it.
The roach-you solves puzzle after puzzle  and is addressed by the oracle after unlocking each part of your quest until finally presented with a choice -to save the landlord or yourself or both (in which  a family reunion is in order).

Interactive movie games became one of my favourite genres the minute I found out about them in the 90s and I enjoyed playing each and every one of them (The Klingon Academy, The Ripper, Burn: Cycle etc). The reason I value this title more than others is that it took the bizarre elements and used them consciously moving away from the prevalent cyberpunk and  movie franchise tendencies of the day, thus creating a singular outing in the world of interactive movies. Highly recommended!