video game

It's the end of another year and I think it would be a good time for me to recap my personal best of lists for 2009. In case you haven't noticed, much of this site is devoted to keeping track of all the media I digest. I review and rate just about every movie, game or book I finish.

This weekend I played through No One Lives Forever again to see if it still holds up. I have long considered this to be one of the best games I have ever played.

After posting Malfunction, my text adventure game for the Apple ][, I have been spending a whole bunch of time tinkering with my old Apple ][ software creations. Another one of my better creations was a golf game that I titled, Dippy Golf. This game featured nine holes which were loaded in from external graphics files and, even more impressive, was the use of audio samples of my voice! The game worked but still felt somewhat unfinished, so I decided to complete the game and post it here on the Pages of Fun!

My overview of the video game classics continues with the LucasArts adventure game, Grim Fandango. In many ways Grim Fandango can be seen as the high point of point-and-click adventures. The genre, at least as a commercially viable entity, has since retreated into the more uncomfortably geeky corners of gaming world—the gaming world's parent's basement as it were. Rather than calling these adventure games, these keepers of the flame prefer the term interactive fiction. The hardest of the hardcore scoff at the notion of representational graphics cluttering up the ASCII purity of a command prompt. However, even these holdouts can't deny the artistic vision and narrative brilliance of Grim Fandango.

If it wasn't for the fact that the game requires a user to click and solve puzzles, Grim Fandango has the makings of a Pixar-type animated feature. We all know the tried and true Pixar formula. Take a group of non-human things: ants, toys, cars, fish, etc. Anthropomorphize them, and show us the secret workings of their society when the people aren't around. In the case of Grim Fandango, we get to see the secret life of Mexican Day of the Dead statuettes.

Well, I just finished The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and I have to say that it does live up to the hype. I've always noted that whenever they come up with top ten lists of the greatest games of all time, this one is always near the top of the list. And by they I mean game reviewers and critics... you know, those bespeckled nerds who provide the four pages of non-advertisement content in the video game magazines. By the way, is it me, or is the top-ten list the primary literary device of these publications? Whatever happened to the plain old 500 word, rhet 101 essay about a topic of interest? If Swift were alive today would he be known for his Top Ten Most Modest Proposals... year after year, number one would always end up being Citizen Kane.

Onward on my journey through the King's Quest saga I go. Part III was the first in the series to really try to present a narrative. There are many more non-player characters to contend with, most notably Manannan the wizard, who has enslaved you to a life of household chores. These characters don't just run on to the screen and steal your possessions (although there still is that in this game). There's a genuine attempt to give them personality.

Recently I have discovered the joys of DOS emulation on my Windows XP machine. DOSbox is an open-source project which provide MS-DOS emulation that is tailored to gaming. There are builds for Win XP, Mac and Linux.