William Rieder describes his creation Bananoid quite fittingly as a ‘wall-block-paddle-pill game’ with which he wanted to demonstrate that MCGA graphics work on DOS machines. And that is exactly what you get, nothing more and nothing less: A nice looking Breakout clone – or as the name already implies rather one of Arkanoid. To some this might be actual proof that back in the late 80ies the capabilities of PC graphics were underused and underestimated (most DOS games of that era where still stuck in EGA or even CGA mode), to others it plays like one of the hardest games of its kind.
Curious about new homebrew games for DOS computers, I browsed through various game jams on the itch.io website. Mainly because of the promising screenshots, I got stuck on a game called Joe Starman on Planet X. As it turned out, the code is written in QuickBasic and can be viewed openly via an editor. In terms of structure and style, Starman is modelled on the typical top-down view of early role-playing games such as Wasteland, in which the hero always remains in the centre of the screen and the screen section is recalculated at every step.
On a normal workday, research chemist Caren discovers a headless human body in one of the biologists' tanks. Who does it belong to? What has happened? And why does anybody make a new Adventure game on the C64 in 2015? At least the last question is easy to answer: because they can!
Inspired by early Lucasfilm Adventures, Caren offers a very slick game experience. You move a cursor around the screen with a joystick. A simple button press will make Caren go there (if possible). Keeping the button pressed for a second or so (configurable) will open an action menu, from where you can either examine or handle ("use") something or combine it with an inventory object.