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.
I'm a former 90-2000s gamer and presently an old school enthusiast from Eastern Bloc. Like most people from my generation I was introduced to computer world beginning with 8-bit family machines.
If I had to describe this game with just one word it would be simply "AAARGH!". But later to that. Ahem. Thou art Casanova, the infamous venetian dandy and the legendary playboy of the XVIII century. Who knows him not? Alas, in this adventure thou art not to seduce and conquer more and more damsels despite thy highest expectations, but rather tend to the consequences of thy many practical jokes, knavery, heresy and fornication. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. Tonight is the night that thou flee from Venice and avoid contact with some of thy old "friends", vexed customers and besotted wives.
What's New?
2024-03-23
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.
It's Fighting Fantasy time again! Well, Sci-Fi-Fantasy. The Rings of Kether are not magic artefacts to battle an evil sorcerer, but rather drug trafficking "rings". And that creature on the cover is a woman, by the way. She, at least, is defying all stereotypes. Bravo!
The large lettering of Chinese characters on the splash screen is pretty much the only thing that makes DIF-1 Laser Tank recognisable as a title from the Far East. With a good American publisher, the game would certainly have been much better known to Western audiences and might even have been a success there. In any case, the developer softstar – not to be confused with sunsoft – still exists on the market today.
What could lend itself better as source material for a jump'n'run game than the Looney Tunes? All the slapstick, coupled with cartoon graphics as it became possible on home systems in the early 1990s, what could go wrong? A lot, as Taz Mania illustrates.
...that although Home of the Underdogs closed its doors long ago, we have archived the database in order to preserve the massive reference?
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.