The Fool’s Errand

Synergy is a situation where the sum of the whole is greater than its parts.  Cliff Johnson’s classic puzzle game The Fool’s Errand is an example of this principle in action. Read more

NetHack

I first played Hack on a VAX 11/780 in the summer of 1985. In gamer parlance, Hack was “rogue-like”, meaning its provenance descends from the old Unix game Rogue. In practical terms, this means it is a turn-based dungeon crawl, on a tiled playfield, where ASCII characters represent the monsters, treasures, and the player. The player interacts with the world using the keyboard: “q”, for example, quaffs a potion, and “r” reads a magic scroll. Moving your character into the same square as a monster attacks it. Most levels in contain randomly generated monsters and loot. Read more

The Elder Scrolls I: Arena

Bethesda Softworks has released their newest game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but I haven’t bought it yet. Instead, I’m playing the first game in the series, The Elder Scrolls I: Arena. Let me explain why. Read more

Intellivision

It seems almost quaint, the idea that the best way to sell a home video game system would be to say it would make you feel smart, rather than say it was fun. But that was Mattel’s line, and they played it to the hilt. For their TV commercials, Mattel chose effete journalist George Plimpton. The commercials compared the Intellivision to the Atari, and emphasized how much more sophisticated it was. “Sure,” they seemed to be saying, “you can buy an Atari. If you live in a trailer park.” Read more

Ultima IV

The Ultima series of computer role-playing games created many of the idioms that still suffuse modern RPGs. The apotheosis of the series, in terms of pure gaming satisfaction, is unarguably Ultima IV: Quest For the Avatar (xu4). Thanks to the hard work of a team of dedicated fans, and the generosity of its publisher, today’s generation of game players can enjoy Ultima IV for free, on computers running Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. Read more

Hacker

There are a select few titles out in the great gaming wilderness that have the uncanny ability to draw you into a far off world. It’s usually role playing titles that manage this with the most dazzling aplomb, but back in ye olde gaming days of 1985, Steve Cartwright developed a title on the Commodore 64 that managed to drag you kicking and screaming into the world of the unscrupulous computer hacker… aptly named, Hacker Read more

Earthbound

What are the first images that pop into the average gamer’s head when they hear the word “RPG”? Swords, magic, dragons, burning villages, pubescent heroes with spiky hair. Ask any die-hard fan of Earthbound for the Super Nintendo what comes to mind when they hear the word and you’ll get a response that’ll make you want to reach for the number for the nearest insane asylum Read more

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