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Star Wars: Demolition PlayStation categoryRacing categoryShooter category

Title screen from Star Wars: Demolition

When The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, it was the first Star Wars movie in 16 years. The franchise had been through a dormant period, and in the years leading up with a real new Star Wars film on the horizon, Lucasfilm launched a bombardment of merchandise, tie-ins, and spinoffs to support the brand. There had always been Star Wars games, and now there would be many more, encompassing a broad assortment of formats and genres like a fighting game, several strategy games, a CD-ROM encyclopedia, and a whole bunch of software for children under the new Lucas Learning label. After The Phantom Menace, the engine kept roaring.

At the same time, multiplayer car combat games were having a brief heyday. While the peak lasted only a few years, titles like Activision’s Vigilante 8, halfway between driving and shooting, acted like a edgy, destructive companion to the era’s kart racing games. Inevitably, the aggressive blockbuster merchandise campaign laid its sights on the hot new violent game genre, and so became Star Wars: Demolition.

Cars shooting each other, as you could imagine, is not a practical fit for Star Wars. The game goes through contortions to justify its existence, and it tries very hard to assemble a serviceable roster of characters and explain why they’re fighting on Dagobah or the Death Star. It just isn’t organic. It was never going to be. The pretense does at least give Demolition an opportunity to play with some Star Wars-ier ideas. » Read more about Star Wars: Demolition

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Aaargh! Condor Arcade category

Title screen from Aaargh! Condor

In Aaargh! Condor, you play as a man who really hates a large bird.

There’s a condor flying around, and in about 10 seconds, it’s gonna steal a dude. According to one of the only contemporary reviews of Aaargh! Condor – a name that I will repeat as many times as possible in this short post – the dude is actually a damsel in distress, but it’s irrelevant. You’ve gotta kill that condor.

At the top of a hill, there is a spear. Hazards litter the road to the top. You’ve got snakes, porcupines, fires, falling condor eggs, a strange man who shoot arrows at you, and something that looks like a pair of eyeballs sticking out of the ground. Once you dodge all of them and climb to the top, you hurl the spear off the hill at the condor. If you kill it, another condor appears, and you do it again. Aaargh, condor!

Screenshot from Aaargh! Condor

Aaargh, condor!

Aaargh! Condor goes extremely quickly. You only get a fraction of a second to react to the hazards, especially the arrow man, who comes out of nowhere. The challenge depends half on reaction time and half on memorizing when something will jump out. You get points for dodging attacks too, so you can run up a decent score even if you let the damsel get eaten.

This has to be one of the most inane premises for a game like this, and god help me, I wanted to keep trying to get that condor. It was almost a compulsive reaction. Aaargh! Condor wastes absolutely no time between the start of the game and fighting a huge bird. And then fighting another huge bird. Aaargh! Condor!

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Biosys Adventure categorySimulation category

Title screen from Biosys

On its face, Biosys hits all the clichés of a mystery first-person adventure game. You wake up with no memory. Something has gone disastrously wrong. The last survivors left clues and diaries that explain what happened. We’ve heard this story many times before in many similar games. But it’s a template, and Biosys takes the clichés in an unexpected, genre-twisting direction with one hell of a setting.

The entire game takes place in a self-contained biosphere experiment. Instead of using that solely as a backdrop, Biosys simulates the artificial environment – temperature, humidity, water level, plant growth, the systems powering the biosphere – and makes it an integral part of the game. It creates a simulation in the form of a mystery adventure game, attempting an unusual, ungainly cross between adventure and earth science. Parts of the experience even seem like a precursor to the survival game genre. The game has some trouble balancing those elements, but it shows how elastic the adventure format can be. » Read more about Biosys

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Factory: The Industrial Devolution Macintosh categoryPuzzle categorySimulation category

Screenshot from Factory: The Industrial Devolution

When factory automation was ramping up, the 1993 game Factory: The Industrial Devolution imagined what could go wrong. When all work has been automated and nobody needs a job anymore, what happens when the machines that build everything break down?

The answer, according to Factory, is the most stressful job on earth. You’re a specialist called in to operate broken factories, manually routing products around so kids will get their boxes of cereal on time. The last time the cereal plant shut down, the kids went on a riot.

There are some creepy implications in that premise about the distant future of consumerism. Mostly, that stays in the manual. In its heart, Factory is a hectic multitasking challenge that always goes wrong, and it drags you along for fun. » Read more about Factory: The Industrial Devolution

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Music Highlight: Realmz Music Highlights category

Music Highlight

Realmz has distinctive, sonorous sound design. The sound effects resonate, and they sweep, like a fast-moving magical aura. It fit excellently with game’s ornate sword-and-sorcery theme, which makes it stranger that the soundtrack is mostly house music.

The Realmz soundtrack seems to have been taken from demoscene tracker music, a homemade computer music style that leans towards techno. The music selected by developer Fantasoft straddles the line between wizards and club bangers, which can be jarring depending on the scene. The shop theme is one of the best of the bunch – a laid-back, trip-hop groove that, from the description, sounds really wrong for a shop in a role-playing game.

This piece, originally titled “Balthasar,” was composed by Antti Kujanpää, a member of the Finnish Amiga demoscene group Banal Projects. It was written for the Finnish demoparty Assembly 1995, where it placed 11th in the 4 Channel Music competition. (None of the composers appear to be credited in Realmz, which raises concerns about whether their music was used without permission.)

In its second life as background music for Realmz, “Balthasar” fits better than it should. RPGs shops are a place to regroup, and the music matches up with that mood. The main melody noodles with a calm, jazzy electric piano, while the dirty drum loops build anticipation for whatever comes next. “Balthasar” cools down and pumps up at the same time.

The game’s upbeat electronic soundtrack is a risky choice, but this track makes a case for the times when it can work. It helps that “Balthasar” is super smooth. Who can deny that keyboard break?

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Knights of the Crystallion Other category

Title screen from Knights of the Crystallion

Bill Williams called Knights of the Crystallion “the game I threw the most of my soul into. […] It was going to be my epic, it was going to be my masterpiece – we called it a cultural simulation – and I thought I could pull it off.” It has a scope so ambitious that it’s absurd for one person to have undertaken: it tries to create an entire society.

Ages ago, a colossal sea monster called an Orodrid died in a canyon passage. Millions of years later, after the valley was eroded, a nomadic people found its hulking skeleton, “incomprehensible” in size, and declared it their new home. “Orodrid, the city of bone” became more than a shelter. It was the new center of their world, their source of spiritual energy.

In Knights of the Crystallion, you live within this society. That’s the game. It combines a group of confusing, seemingly random activities – like a Nine Men’s Morris-style board game and an action sequence set in twisting cave – to depict the many sides of the communal, religious life of the Orodrim. » Read more about Knights of the Crystallion

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Magus RPG category

Title screen from Magus

Somewhere in the world of Magus, the Dark One awaits you, cackling in their evil castle. If you don’t want to bother them though, that’s fine. The castle’s tough to find anyway.

Ronny Wester’s role-playing game Magus takes place in one big, open location. It has a single quest – to wander. There are no stories to follow, mythologies to uncover, or people to meet, just a big place. It’s a simple, lighthearted RPG, and it gives you room to enjoy how great wandering can be. » Read more about Magus

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Professional Underground League of Pain Sports category

Title screen from Professional Underground League of Pain

Pop culture seems convinced that we’re going to end up with a violent arena sport in the future. Not just ordinarily dangerous levels of violence like the NFL, but something totally destructive like Rollerball or Zephyr. It makes sense. They’re an exaggeration of our own sports and entertainment (plus a convenient way to stage action in a dystopian setting). We probably won’t get to that point, thankfully, but if we do, it might look a little more like Professional Underground League of Pain.

PULP has a lot of problems, mainly related to the evolution in controls and graphics happening when it was released. But its most insightful fault might be how, even with “Pain” right there in the title, it’s really not so extreme. » Read more about Professional Underground League of Pain

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Preservation panel recap and Awesome Con 2018 Blog category

A few panel-related updates! Our game preservation panel from Super MAGFest 2018 is up on YouTube now:

Two things I wish I’d done differently. One is letting all questions wait until the end of the panel. This was my first time moderating a group discussion; lesson learned!

The other thing is, when talking about community-focused archiving and the importance of preserving smaller games, I forgot to mention how important sensitivity is. A lot of smaller games are very personal, or their creator might not be proud of them (think of dumb things you made as a teenager). Having them preserved outside the creator’s control, with their name attached, could be insensitive, disrespectful, or harmful. That’s one of the reasons why to collaborate with communities.

The panel went really well. The organizers let the Q&A run 10 minutes over the original panel time, and then we spilled over into another room to continue talking with attendees. It was an amazing experience, and we were glad to get so many people thinking about game preservation (plus the surprise appearance from the Internet Archive’s Jason Scott). Once again, I’m very grateful to the other panelists for participating! Thanks to all who attended.

Additionally, I’ll be running another panel very soon! Next week on Saturday, March 31st at 3pm, I’ll be at Awesome Con 2018 in Washington, DC hosting Gaming in the Grey Zone: Fangames, Hacks, and Mods. I’ll be speaking about the dubious DIY world of fangames and fan-made game modifications and how they interact with gaming culture. If you’ve ever wanted to hear about a Biblical Sonic the Hedgehog fangame at a comic convention, this is your chance!

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Secret Writer’s Society and the worst bug ever Educational category

Title screen from Secret Writer's Society

Panasonic Interactive Media’s game Secret Writer’s Society was supposed to teach kids how to write well. Instead, it became infamous. The game had a text-to-speech feature that would read back what you wrote, and under the right circumstances in the Macintosh version of the game, it would read a list of obscenities instead.

“Computers are revolutionizing education, sometimes in surprising ways. Now there’s software that can teach kids how to cuss like a drunken stevedore,” raved Robert Cwiklik for the Wall Street Journal.1

According to PIM marketing manager Kari Gibbs, the company had begun replacing copies of Secret Writer’s Society by June 17, 1998,1 four months after it originally shipped on February 10.2 Panasonic blamed the issue on “an undetected bug” that would accidentally read words from the program’s language filter if the computer was slow or having memory issues.1,3 But there was another story. Andrew Maisel, who was the first to discover the supposed glitch and reported it on his educational software review website SuperKids, says he reproduced it on “healthy Power Macs with lots of memory.”3 Could something else be at play here?

In a shocking, hilarious twist, anti-corporate activist group RTMark claimed in October 1998 that it was a work of internal sabotage. According to their statement, an anonymous programmer contracted by Panasonic said they were trying to call attention to the dangers of parents handing their responsibilities to a computer game. “Letting a third-rate piece of software take over for you is wrong because it violates that contract,” they said. “What I did isn’t a crime. The crime is letting profits get in the way of education.” RTMark said they awarded the programmer $1000 for their action.

Panasonic insisted that the rogue program was just the result of a bug, nothing as salacious as industrial sabotage. Elizabeth Olson, Panasonic’s communications manager, told The Independent in November 1998 that, “To our knowledge there is no truth to this claim. [RTMark] seem to be claiming responsibility for something they didn’t have anything to do with.” (“It could be that they really do think it’s a bug,” RTMark’s Ray Thomas responded.) Either way, the damage was done, and when Panasonic Interactive Media was shut down months later in March 1999, Consumer Electronics blamed Secret Writer’s Society for harming the group’s reputation.4

Secret Writer’s Society was quickly forgotten after that – probably to Panasonic’s relief – and has been missing ever since… until I managed to get a copy this week. And yes, it’s the version with the swears. » Read more about Secret Writer’s Society and the worst bug ever

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