They don't make them like they used to. Ok, not true, but still - 80s and 90s are replete with oddities that made your usual genre of preference a unique gaming experience. Paperboy does exactly what it says on the tin, and not only will it cater to those Generation Xers who knew exactly what it meant to flip a burger or deliver newspapers to "learn to appreciate the value of money" and afford a new 8bit or 16bit gaming system, but it will also appeal to Millenials, and not just to those Millenials who search for gaming document of days gone by.
The premise is simple- a paperboy has to deliver his round and throw papers to as many houses of subscribers without being bit by dogs, or hit by a myriad of moving objects, cars, carts, raving neigbours, breakdancers, toys etc. With some time needed to get acquainted with controls and the scrolling, it plays well and you slowly grow to like evading death traps while trying to keep Daily Sun's readers happy. Even if you do get fired , you get fired to an awesome soundtrack playing in the back.
One can easily of a counterpart from the 90s it inspired. Less death and less guns , though. And, uhm, don't play the Commodore 64 version , it's really bad.
Elite needs no introduction. It was the title that introduced the space-sim genre and cemented it in the minds of eager players worldwide. Like many other classics from the 80s, it was a college project that ran on pure imagination , limited only by the hardware limitations of the day.This space-faring , space-trading marvel that also introduced an open-world concept outside a text-adventure was a bit too much for a 6-year old with a poor command of English trying to make sense of what he saw on the screen playing it on his C64. 14 years and two sequels later, I revisited the original Elite game and realised how incredibly important it was. Ships travelling at sublight speeds, alien pirates, space trading, following or disregarding missions altogether, finding trade runs in various star systems and trading -just so many things that were introduced in a single pioneering game.Granted that the layouts do get repetitive, with just a tiny bit of imagination you can explore an open world that takes up less than 400kb. This is a feat in itself, and not even a poor plot or some clunkiness in controlling you spaceship can take away from what the game represents. Oh, did I mention it's really addictive?
Though it was later ported to several systems and its life was prolonged well into the early naughties, this gaming phenomenon is largely associated with the good-ole c64. It is still regarded by many as the greatest c64 exclusive ever to have graced the screens of our TV sets. Hostile service robots have "gone mad" and taken over a spaceship killing its entire human crew. Your robot is beamed aboard with a mission to sweep the ship clean deck by deck, removing the unruly robots and investigating everything before pressing the ship's self-destruct button. Unlike many c64 multidirectional shooters, Paradroid doesn't overdo it on desperately trying to make the best possible shooting experience for a player ,and makes up for graphic limitations with suspense and nervous anticipation instead, as other units become visible only after you've entered a room. The in-game puzzle of invading other robots CPUs and busting their circuits is a great complement to the shooter and makes this one of the most intriguing gaming experiences of old. Body snatching and destruction never had a level of sophisticated presentation that high in a game up to that point. The beeping sounds adding to the nervous anticipation and the cold hollowness of an abandoned ship and the conscious decision to not include in-game music further highlight the masterful presentation and enrich the gaming experience. Paradroid remains a ground-breaking classic and it's easy to realise its value once you've tried it.
Does what it says on the tin.It's neither about its minimal design and simple graphics, nor about the unnervingly monotonous sounds of an engine thruster.The plot doesn't affect the gaming experience at all. It was done by one man from start to finish. But it's about physics and inertia and breaking a sweat while grapling the controls of your spacecraft, avoiding cave walls and thinking about your movements before you moved. It's graceful and addictive. it's timeless and unique.The cold design of the world traversed gives the player a common feel of a dystopian world without the usual landscape and machinery visuals.It's truly an inspiration to hundreds of games that came afterwards. A game that could do with more in-game sounds and music, but hey- Rob Hubbard's title theme for the c64 version still rocks hard enough to make you ignore the above mentioned thruster sounds.
Does humour belong in music and games? It certainly does as it distorts and makes fun of a canon developed around an approach. Metal Slug is no exception - instead of coming up with an entirely different concept of a side-scrolling shoot 'em up, the game makes fun of our herd-mentality understanding of wars that others fight somewhere in some developing countries. The comedy is implied in derision, in the awkward movements of the characters, their fear of losing lives in a battlefield that gets masked by their love for carnage and war toys, the thin storyline that cartoonish bodycount scenes try to make up for, the background that resembles a HOPA game that supports the bodycount approach - it's all hillarious and works incredibly well. The gameplay itself is addictive, the controls are just smooth enough to keep you glued to your seat while being sluggish enough to irk you. It is also one of those games that become even more interesting in a 2-player session as you can now both recreate your childhood dominated by cultural heroes of cheap animations and movies (wrestlers,MOTUs,Cover Ups, Rambos, Commandos and all those other moments in popular history of the 80s that other games had immortalized as well). Every bromance naturally has to include jumping on boats, wearing machines and wreaking havoc upon a made-up world. Another few thousand coins and your muscle memory reclaimed and you're there.
Not the most perfect choice for a New Year's post , but certainly an important moment in gaming history. I was about to write something about this game yesterday when I heard that one of my 16 year-old ESL students took his own life by jumping off a balcony of his family apartment. A great kid who was far superior to me at everything he undertook and was gracious and kind.
The game starts with all the questions a living human faces - fear, doubt, transience of one's physical existence, reality and fabrication in one's life, one's place in the grand scheme of things, the lack of purpose, the loneliness etc The idea for a game is unique - an old car with a young woman inside is balancing on a cliff overlooking the vast ocean. Aware of the predicament she got herself in, she tries to make sense of it all and reflect on her own life, first on her own and later in a company of a wise deer.The author gravitates heavily towards and builds the girl's character around his own philosophical views, namely those of naturalism and transcedentalism. The girl came to a place she used to visit as a kid, and you can almost see the storm that goes through her mind as she reflects on her failures and inadequacies. It takes a deer talking nature and natural phenomena such as rain and lightning and thunder to bring her round to a different understanding of life and Universe.
A high level of interaction is successfully achieved solely by using dialogue and life story building around the main character which is close to impossible to achieve in textual adventures. Animations liven up the pace, every details serves the narrative.The game could do without additional intermezzos of poetry, but unlike those recorded lectures in EVERYTHING they are not that demanding and don't grab your attention that forcefully. The conscious decision to not include voice acting and limit the game to texts and background music and ambience is another brilliant way to keep the emphasis on Nature and its grandeur. The intellectual clash between the deer and the girl is reflected in their different use of language, but the rift seems to be growing smaller as the story unfolds. Or not?
Despite this being a game changing title for me, I feel the author is trying to impose his views on us and grin derisively at the world and I think it would be even more ground-breaking if he developed several different characters adhering to different philosophies the player could choose from. This way we only get to see the author's views as the story unravels and him toying with a young mind who might have had enough. Free will, yes, but moral responsibility first and foremost.
This inventive board game by Robert Kiyosaki , a successful entrepreneur and business lecturer, was built around his own views on success in business, and he did it so successfully that even if you don't necessarily subscribe to his point of view you still end up being partially converted after a few runs. True, the first few spins on "how money works" will probably awaken the deep and long-supressed frustration about not achieving success and financial stability before 40 (or 30) and the remorse about taking up Humanities instead of Maths and Accountancy, but then you start having fun and learning about cashflow and assets and liabilities, about the fact that a bigger car or house you buy is not necessarily an asset, and that being a good employee climbing the corporate ladder isn't going to make you rich in the long run. Absolutely hated it when I first tried it. Only after reading Robert's book entitled "Rich Dad Poor Dad" did I give the game a second chance, Everything Robert wholeheartedly believes in is perfectly integrated into this game. The "rat race" track of losers/employees and the "fast lane" of intelligent people/ business owners, the situations that force you to recognise assets and liabilities, dealing with taxes and financial problems , saving money, opening and managing accounts etc. The video game version just transfers the perfect playing experience from the board to the screen.
A true business simulation classic if there ever was one.
