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.
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.
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.
My brother introduced me to my love of computers. I played Test Drive, Jet Fighter, F-19 stealth and Falcon 3.0 on my brother's 286, and wanted a computer for myself. That Christmas I got my first computer, a 386DX-25Mhz, 4MB of RAM and an 80MB hard drive. I graduated to a 40Mhz upgrade ($400 upgrade..shesh) a year later, then a 486DX2-66 when Strike Commander came out, then a Pentium 90Mhz overclocked to 100Mhz... my first overclock.
Thick 250-page manual. CHECK. Flight stick, throttle and rudder controls. CHECK. Ray Ban aviator classic sunglasses mixed with a hot-shot pilot attitude. CHECK.
Joystick jocks. You know who you are. If you played Falcon 3.0 in the early 1990s you might be just now looking in the mirror and noticing the fine-white hairs sneaking out of the side of your head. Yes, you are that old and so is Falcon 3.0. But perhaps some of those silver hairs are well-earned from the hundreds of hours of flight time you have logged in your virtual cockpit.
What's New?
2024-05-04
Galleons of Glory: The Secret Voyage of Magellan. Never heard of it? As a total addict of any "new world exploration" type game, I had to fill this knowledge gap, obviously. This one was easy to get into, unlike certain… ahem… other games which may or may not appear in this place at a later point.
Which year has this been released? Any guesses? No, no, no. The correct answer is: 1989. Double Dunk is a very late entry to the Atari 2600 library. How much care would you assume has been put considering the small remaining market? Surprise, it's quite a decent one. Not up to the technical standards of the time, but with good ideas and well playable.
Sentient Software, probably a typical American garage company – or a start-up, as we would call it today – was founded solely for the purpose of publishing the text adventures produced by owner Michael Berlyn himself. Reportedly already addicted to science fiction literature as a teenager, the game he first published, Oo-Topos, was naturally also from this genre.
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.
...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.
