Spy Hunter

With its smart weapons, awesome cars, Spy Hunter was viewed as a very stylish game back in the arcades on the early 1980s. It was a title that playing into any boy's fantasies- secret agents, nasty weaponry, and a driving lincese. Make no mistake though, it was the action packed gameplay that kept people coming back for more again, again, and again...

1943

The year that the war ground on may have been 1943, when rationing continued to bite down hard, construction work on the Pentagon was completed, and the Japanese forces were driven back from Guadalcanal, but it's a whole lot more enjoyable if you think of it as this wonderful little vertical-scrolling shooter from Capcom, released for the delight of the arcade-going populas in 1987...

Diablo

The game isn't just a good looking isometric dungeon crawler, it is THE best dungeon crawler. A simple - almost brainless trek through caverns and catacombs filled with vile creatures, not to mention all the loot. Blizzard spent a lot of time working on the generation of the game's spaces, making items, enemies, and geography be different every single time you load up the game...

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

The Elder Scrolls games are best known for the fourth chapter in the series, Oblivion, released in 2006. In comparison,The Elder Scroll's Morrowind is altogether more of a curate's egg, neither as commercially successful nor critically applauded as it's successor. Perhaps because of that, however, it's also a much more interesting game...

Rogue

Rogue first appeared on college Unix systems in 1980. It contains an infinite variety via a series of randomly generated, ASCII-rendered dungeons that must be explored in a bid to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor (Rodney spelled backwards) from somewhere behold the twenty-fifth level -- an unlikely achievement given the imposing difficulty of even the earliest dungeon layers.

Showing posts with label Mac. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mac. Show all posts

04 November, 2011

The Incredible Machine

6:33:00 AM  D_Homes  5 comments


  • Release Date: 1992
  • Platform: MS-DOS, 3DO, Macintosh
  • Developer: Dynamix
  • Genre: Puzzle

Emergent game play and physics-based interactivity may seem like fresh concepts, but it was The Incredible Machine that really introduced these major game components almost twenty years ago.

Without a doubt inspired by the ridiculously elaborate contraptions imagined by cartoonist Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg, The Incredible Machine tasks players with inventing their own devices to carry out a series of simple actions. On each level an objective is give, ranging from popping a series of balloons to launching rockets to re-housing goldfish. A range of "useful" components is provided in limited quantities, which can be dragged and dropped onto the game space to construct the relevent machine. Basketballs, flashlights, and pulleys all figure -- as do mice, cats, and monkeys on bicycles -- and all can be variously combined to complete the tasks.

The beuty of the game is its accurate simulation of gravity, inertia, and other vital physical processes. Just as important, there is no one way to complete each level, and emergent approach that encourages endless exploration. The game also comes with a sandbox mode in which users are free to construct their own machines from scratch.

The game was a huge success on the PC (later appearing on the Mac and 3DO console), and creators Kevin Ryan and Jeff Tunnell would carry on to oversee two sequels, as well as a range of spin-offs, before their company, Dynamix, was dissolved in 2001. The series would surface again in 2007 as a mobile adaptation, courtesy of Vivendi. Two years later, Tunnell brought back the rights and further titles were planned. After a decade-long hiatus, the machine is finally being switched back on.

Incredible Machine can get wild sometimes.

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05 September, 2011

Battlefield 1942

7:57:00 AM  D_Homes  5 comments


  • Release Date: 2002
  • Platform: PC, Mac
  • Developer: Digital Illusions CE
  • Genre: First-Person Shooter


Battlefield 1942 puts intelligence into multiplayer team-based shooters. PC players had been ganging up since Half-Life Team Fortress, and limited coordination was hinted at as early as Starsiege: Tribes. But by placing multiclassed team combatants within cunningly designed Word War II arenas, Battlefield 1942 forced the issue, making for an epic multiplayer behemoth that rolled over and crushed the opposition.

The core action takes place in loosely authentic theatres of war in the game's "Conquest" mode, which pits two historically appropriate armies against each other: the British versus the Germans in Europe, or the Japanese versus the United States Of America in the Pacific. Each team is assigned control points, typically villages or islands, where action begins, from which fallen soldiers can re-spawn as one of several specialized character classes. Fighting side-by-side with other players -- up to thirty-two in total -- you battle to seize control of these strategic points, forcing back the enemy and depleting the tickets that end the game at zero. Every death reduces tickets too, nearly forcing players to fight for their lives rather than go on suicide missions or camp at home.

The game also plays smart by dumbing down, enabling you to drive, pilot, or plunge to your death in dozens of vehicles -- from jeeps and tanks to aircraft carriers and airplanes -- but it rids fussy control variations in favour of a cartoon-like equivalence. The graphics engine copes well, with ceaseless cinematic moments emerging from the random actions of you and your comrades.

It all conspires to unite far-flung and (often idiotic) online gamers to give the illusion of a cohesive fighting force locked into battle. Think Wacky Races meets Medal Of Honor -- and don't get too snooty, because the result is a blast, and it spawned a true masterpiece.




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03 September, 2011

Age Of Mythology

9:08:00 AM  D_Homes  8 comments


  • Release Date: 2002
  • Platform: PC, Mac
  • Developer: Ensemble Studios
  • Genre: Strategy


Ensemble didn't take risks. It didn't have to. From the moment the historical strategy game Age Of Empires launched in 1997, its course was set: It would be king of real-time strategy, absurdly successful, regardless of whatever naysayers might claim about the PC and Mac platforms. The studios owner Microsoft closed the studio in 2009, and it didn't seem to add up. No developer knew how to be a reliable money-factory quite as well as Ensemble.

Age Of Mythology, the studio's first game for Microsoft, doesn't take risks either. It does quite the opposite, dragging the fantastical elements that less successful rivals tend toward into its own straitlaced but highly polished strategy structure: harvesting wood and stone, building bases in exact order, deftly making every unit a precise rock to some other soldier's paper or scissor. Ensemble took someone else's risk and made it into the most sensible thing in the world. It has Minotaur and sphinx and Valkyrie, but somehow they arn't an outlandish pretense among the more familiar cavalry, swordsmen and archers. Instead, they're smart, strategic high-end units, vital to tipping the game's mathematically precise balance into your favour. Age Of Mythology knows exactly what it's doing, and being in the company of mythical beasts doesn't change the solid formula one bit.

Age Of Mythology may have played it safe, but it did suggest Ensemble might be a little more playful from thereon in. That didn't happen. Next in line came the button-downed Age Of Empires III, and then Halo Wars as the studio's last dying breath. That leaves Age Of Mythology as an aberration; perhaps the only game where this one-time king of studios allowed its own character to appear alongside its unsullied strategy-design skill.


The Trojan Horse

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