Obscure Games I've Played
I should probably flesh out these game pages.
List items
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I played the HELL out of this game on my older brother's Atari 800. No manual, no faqs (that term didn't exist back then), just me and a keyboard, a joystick, and a 5th (or was it 4th?) grade education trying to figure it out. No, I never did get off that damn planet, but I did manage to kidnap the leader of one of the factions. I'll have to write a wiki page one of these days.
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Played this on the Atari 800. I was too young to really figure it out, but looking back I did have a good sense of the 'space', and I think I made remarkable progress. I didn't save the game progress (maybe it didn't have that feature) and always started over from the beginning.
I should find and emulated version and finish it.
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Another game I had to figure out for myself on my brother's Atari 800. Looking at the screen shots, this was clearly the superior version. I only managed to harvest a couple of hulks in each play through, I never understood enough of the mechanics to even find out that there was an end. I can't imagine my kids having a similar experience, playing a game with no guidance, no manual. No, scratch that, they figure stuff out all the time on their own on the ipad and the PC, I just have difficulty seeing it as the same thing because they are manipulating a GUI while I had to bang away at a keyboard to even find these games.
The Lucasfilm splash screen was cool, too!
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I have difficulty thinking of this as an obscure game, it made a very strong impression on me when I was young. The dramatic mission briefings made the most lasting impression, and maybe why I found Freespace to be so affecting.
I was very proud to be able to complete all the missions AND land back on to the aircraft carrier at such a young age, it must have taken an immense amount of practice, the kind of dedication I can see now in my son (now a toddler as figures out the ipad through trial and error.
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The Amiga version. I "bought it" for my older brother at Babbage's. Yeah, it was for me. It has a manual based copy protection system, which is terrible since it was a computer game and didn't come with a case to store the manual. The game play was like Gauntlet with only one character class and a few spells to mix things up.
There was co-op, of a sort: joystick 2 could control summoned elementals (Kraken, Strone Golem, etc). They didn't have projectile attacks, so you'd just push into enemies to damage them (or maybe I just missed that mechanic). I managed to beat it!
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One of the last games I bought for the Amiga. Only played the first couple of levels, it had all the Amiga hallmarks: technically impressive graphics and sound, clunky controls, frustraiting game play. I think having an Amiga really helped me become a better (i.e. more critical) consumer as an adult: being technically impressive does not guarantee a game will be good, or even fun.
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It was called Killing Game Show when I played it on the Amiga, probably because it was a pirated European copy my brother got off of a BBS. The music is phenomenal, anyone thinking of the Genesis version has no idea, check it out on youtube! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJcHtqaxOAM
The game itself was only okay. It was very difficult, requiring memorization of the levels and enemy placements, I only made it past a couple of levels.
Games like this and Shadow of the Beast spoiled that whole generation of console graphics for me. Too bad the game play never had the responsiveness associated with the best console games of the time, it was all so clunky!
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