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.
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.
Game mechanics? Controls? Challenge? All secondary, as long as the overall mood of a game is engrossing. One of the main drivers in this respect being its music.
Loom is interactive poetry. I'm not talking about the dialogue or text itself (which aren't bad), but the overall realization: the harmonic presentation and development of an idea using graphics, sound and timing, with emotion in mind. Scenes and situations are crafted in a delightful and very subtle manner, which make some very well-known story clichés take an completely new form and uniqueness. And that is the most positive aspect of Loom: it's something you've seen before, but in a way you have never thought of. The talent of Brian Moriarty brought us a game that is both simple an refined. That's its true beauty.
What's New?
2023-06-03
"Ouch! The evil aubergine wizard threw an aubergine at me!" That, or something like it, must have gone through the mind of the hero Pit in Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters when he turned into a defenceless waddling aubergine and set out to search the hospital room to regain his original heroic form. And this is just a small sample of the flourishing imagination that Nintendo put into this game.
For decades, where did all chess world champions come from? Correct the USSR. Yet, it seems this clean-shaven US boy wants to play the Russian chess computer for world dominance. Representing game's player. Geopolitique 1990 does not allow to take over the "other" side. Even though it should really have been possible. It is a minor oversight in a game which is full of very good ideas and paved the way for other, much more commercially successful re-interpretations.
Yes, it is the incredible John Hurt! In the 1990s, he actually appeared in several so-called FMV games. In spite of the horrible hairpiece the makers of Tender Loving Care made him wear, he graces the game with his presence. Giving it a degree of credibility it otherwise surely wouldn't have reached. You'll be remembered!
Already in the days of the home computers, smaller software houses were that extra something. The resourceful name Pandora obviously promises a big surprise when opening their products. This became a reality for me after playing Into the Eagle's Nest. Because a few years later, I had a déjà-vu as I regard the much more famous Wolfenstein 3D only its logical sequel.
It's a little bit ironic. Starship Traveller is a game with a technobabble science fiction theme. Yet, it is presented in fully analogue format itself. A Fighting Fantasy entry from Steve Jackson, be prepared for experimental gameplay…
You know what I dislike just as strongly as people dismissing anything "old" as automatically bad? Elitist retro-ists treating all kinds of later developments the same way. For instance, there are tons of people claiming "all FMV games are crap". Well, yes, ok, maybe not the greatest example. FMV games not exactly being all that recent anymore. Nevertheless, the point remains. The presentation of things does not make or break a game, unless it is an extreme case. In each format, gems can be found. "Gem" probably doesn't describe The Dame Was Loaded, but it is quite a decent game nevertheless.
Piloting a spaceship in the vastness of the universe has always stimulated the imagination of game designers. With Crazy Blaster, a Finnish programmer has also made a contribution in the spirit of this overflowing continuum of creative energy, not forgetting to aim a few completely earthly and not less satirical arrows at his (un?)beloved communist neighbouring state, which, as we know, shoots cosmonauts and not astronauts into the sky.
A roleplaying game on the Atari 2600? A real one? Featuring an overworld, including swamps, forests, wilderness and villages, as well as an underground dungeon? It may not be Ultima, but Dragonstomper comes dangerously close! If you squint your eyes, you may already be able to read its secret, of course.
Germans and their business sims… Das Haus (The House or The Building) is not even is not even about managing a department store, as the title screen may suggest, but it's literally about running a boarding house. Not the crazy type.
The name Soulless doesn’t speak for itself. The piece of software, which was published about 10 years ago and fits on an old fashioned 5¼ floppy disk, contains a lot of heart and soul. The developers of Soulless have laid the foundation for a small fantasy realm. Action-oriented game principles from well-known classics of the C64 era – the soul, so to speak – were adapted and implanted into this world. With Soulless II, the first offspring appeared 2 years ago. Expectations are high to see whether the series will continue.
...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.
