Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis Macintosh categoryRPG category

Title screen from Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis

There’s nothing new to the idea that, in a world overrun with grotesqueries, humans may be the real monsters. Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis, a role-playing game for the Macintosh, brings a level of specificity and empathy to that concept. Rather than swing into allegory, Odyssey roots its big ideas and moral choices in the lives of individuals.

The game has room to try different permutations of this theme – new people, new troubles, and new ways to end them. Though the confusing attempts to extend that variety to the game’s combat come close to ruining the experience, Odyssey‘s playground of extreme human behavior and its believable writing pair terrifically together. » Read more about Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis

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Enchanted Scepters stream with Keith Kaisershot Adventure categoryMacintosh categoryStreaming category

Screenshot from Enchanted Scepters

This Saturday, February 25th at 3PM EST, I’ll be streaming the Macintosh RPG Enchanted Scepters with Keith Kaisershot (Other Ocean Interactive, The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime, and all-around Mac enthusiast).

Enchanted Scepters was among the first games for the Macintosh, created shortly after the computer’s release in 1984. It combined text-based adventure and role-playing mechanics with one of the earliest uses of a mouse in a game. The ability to interact with an object by clicking on it has become a universal feature that feels strange to single out as an achievement, but Enchanted Scepters tried the idea (imperfectly) before almost anyone. Developer Silicon Beach Software later adapted the interface into World Builder, a popular game creation tool.

On top of its historical value, it’s also a sprawling, continually surprising game that I’m looking forward to sharing. Keith has a far deeper knowledge of Enchanted Scepters than I do, so I’ll probably need some coaching to get through it.

See everyone on Saturday on the Obscuritory Twitch channel!

UPDATE: Thanks for watching, and thanks to Keith for joining! A replay is available here. I really like this game’s stream-of-consciousness. Please don’t mistake my comparison of it during the stream to amateur game design as a negative; I appreciate that it channels the same liberating sense of blowing up the usual rules of world-building.

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Alpha Waves Platform category

Title screen from Alpha Waves

Alpha Waves (Continuum in America) was one of the earlier computer games to allow players to look and move in three dimensions. Like other virtual reality analogues that run short on processing power, it’s abstract – simple, flat, and polygonal with no feints to the real world. The game takes place in a 16×16 grid of boxy, solid-color rooms, grouped into regions with metaphysical New Age-y names like Stimulate or Awaken. Your vehicle, called a “mobile,” has six different appearance options, and they all look like fancy triangles.

Appropriately, the player has abstract goals. You need to get somewhere. Anywhere. » Read more about Alpha Waves

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Executive Suite Simulation category

Title screen from Executive Suite

Executive Suite isn’t a conventional business simulation. You don’t track money or statistics or care about helping the company. Instead, you roleplay a newcomer hustling for the top seat at your company. You’re in this for yourself. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure story not far from the movie Wall Street and its stressful lifestyle. And although Executive Suite mocks the business world, it appreciates that your problems, no matter how small, don’t always have a clean solution. » Read more about Executive Suite

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An outlook on 2017 Blog category

Screenshot from The Labyrinth of Time

Welcome to the new year! After a break to focus on panels and behind-the-scenes work, I’m ready to hit the ground running. I’ll share more about the panels once videos are available, but for now, I want to talk about what The Obscuritory will be up to in 2017.

Last month, the excellent Melissa Ford wrote about why you should “post in your own space.” Ford offered up a New Year’s resolution: publish anything on your blog at least once a week. That’s a bit of a stretch for what I post here (and I’m already a few weeks behind!), but I’m at least going to try to write more often. There are so, so many games I want to share, so much overlooked history to learn, and constant developments in game preservation worth talking about. I have a lot of thoughts rattling around on those subjects that I’d love to nail down.

And as always, I’ll continue posting daily screenshots and other tidbits to the Obscuritory Tumblr. I might stream a bit more frequently, and I’ll try to share those events as they come up.

The response to The Obscuritory over the past year has been amazing. More than ever, I’m committed to this project and using it to make the world more interesting and thoughtful. Thank you for reading, and I’m looking forward to what we discover next.

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Hell Cab Adventure category

Title screen from Hell Cab

Hell Cab isn’t short; it’s brief. The infernal Hell Cab whips through a Roman coliseum, the trenches of World War I, and a prehistoric jungle in only a few minutes before returning you to the present day. You’ll probably spend most of the game’s running time checking out the Empire State Building before the world’s worst cab ride begins.

The tone-setting and breakneck linearity of Hell Cab share less with the adventure genre than with a high-end theme park ride. As with many early multimedia CD-ROM titles, Hell Cab is above all else a spectacle, an outlandish idea staged as loudly as possible. It also demonstrates what a roller coaster of a game loses when it reaches a little too far. » Read more about Hell Cab

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A game preservation primer Blog category

Hi folks! You may have noticed a dip in post frequency in the last two months. I’m hard at work on my panel and exhibit for MAGFest 2017, which have taken most of my spare time. There’s a bunch of games I’m excited to write about, but I want to make this MAGFest showing extra special. I can’t wait to share what I’ve learned with everyone!

In the meantime, though, I wanted to share a great recent article by Heather Alexandra about the challenges of game preservation. Preservation and archiving are vital for continued discussion of older games – especially those that don’t receive much attention – and Alexandra does a good job outlining those challenges. Her article includes interviews with leaders in the field, including including the Internet Archive’s Jason Scott and the Video Game History Foundation’s Frank Cifaldi. If you’ve ever wanted to learn a broad overview of the topic, this is a must-read.

The article also briefly touches on curation, an issue on the save wavelength. On top of archiving old, forgotten games, we need to “keep games alive in the public conscience” to give them context, purpose, and currency. Everyone can help with that. That’s what I’m trying to accomplish here, and I hope anyone reading feels the spark to do it too.

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The Obscuritory comes to MAGFest 2017 Blog category

MAGFest logo

Tomorrow is the eighth anniversary of The Obscuritory, and I’ve got some great news to share.

I’m excited to announce that I’m joining the MAGES panelist team at MAGFest 2017!

MAGES is the Music and Games Educational Symposium, a panel series dealing with academic topics and cultural issues in gaming. It’s a great mini-event for meeting people who like to engage thoughtfully with games, and I’m honored to be part of it.

MAGFest 2017 takes place January 5-8, 2017. If you haven’t gone before, it’s worth a trip. It’s less a convention than a four-day gaming-themed sleepover. This’ll be my sixth year attending.

The panel breakdown is still being finalized, but I wanted to talk about one thing in particular…

SimEverthing panel logo

As part of MAGES, I’ll be running SimEverything: Lessons in Curious Game Design from Maxis, a panel about the history and philosophy of Maxis.

When we talk about Maxis, we tend to focus on their two marquee games, SimCity and The Sims. With this panel, I want to dig deeper and explore the radical ideas about player creativity and education we can find across their entire body of work – not just SimCity, but less-renowned and harder-to-explain titles like SimHealth, SimGolf, Widget Workshop, and Zaark and the Night Team. It’ll be part history lesson, part analysis. This is the product of a year-long deep dive into Maxis, and I hope it’ll be both entertaining and insightful.

But hearing about it isn’t the same as trying it yourself. I want to get these games off the shelf and into more hands. So, I’ve partnered with the MAGFest Museum to let you play them throughout the weekend. I’m curating a special exhibit about Maxis with titles from my collection, including a playable showcase on vintage computers. After the panel, I’ll be at the Museum to answer questions and walk attendees through the games. If you’ve ever wanted to try any of the Sim games, this is your chance!

This is a surreal opportunity. I’m ecstatic to join MAGES, and especially, I can’t wait to share all the Maxis goodness with attendees in January. Stay tuned for specific dates, times, and other updates!

UPDATE: My Maxis panel will be at 3pm on Saturday, January 7th, followed by the Museum visit at 4pm. I’ll also be on the panel at Building Better Games Literacy at 1:30pm on Saturday. Please reach out and say hello!

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Halloween Night II Macintosh categoryOther category

Title screen from Halloween Night II

My love for Halloween started with suburban trick-or-treating. It wasn’t just the candy or costumes. For one night, the town transformed into a weirder, spookier place. We would walk further up the street than we’d ever normally venture – and in darkness, when strangers lit their houses in eerie colors and papered their walls with skeletons.

Our clean-cut neighborhood turned shadowy and scary for a single evening. The next morning, Christmas decorations may as well have gone up.

Halloween Night II bottles the giddiness of that fleeting Halloween makeover. The game is a sweet tribute to a night when, maybe, there could be ghosts outside your window. » Read more about Halloween Night II

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Knight Moves Puzzle category

Title screen from Knight Moves

There’s no point skirting around the very, very silly premise of Knight Moves. It’s a puzzle game where your character moves in an L-shape like a chess knight. In each stage, your knight character (an actual knight) collects coins or swords to open the exit to the next room of a castle. This concept has no business being stretched out to dozens of levels, but you have to love the game for sticking with it despite that.

Screenshot from Knight Moves

Grab the swords in the right order. Mind the pumpkin men

The chess movement doesn’t present much challenge, surprisingly. Although you can’t always move your knight directly to a space with a coin, you’ll eventually land there after futzing around it in circle for a while. Though the game adds minor variations, like tiles that turn into hazards if you land on them too often, the differences are usually washed out by all the futzing.

More intriguingly, your knight never stops and always needs to move to a new space. You can jump to your next spot immediately, or the knight will slowly, automatically leap to another tile. This sets up some enjoyably awkward situations with the spooky creatures that roam the board. You have to adapt to enemy movement patterns while staying in motion, which complicates the little dance you do around the coins you’re trying to collect. Landing anywhere precisely can be a bit of a crapshoot.

So, maybe it mixes equal parts quick thinking and dumb luck. And maybe the whole thing barely makes sense to begin with. Oh well! If Knight Moves isn’t a well-thought-out game, by god, at least it tried something.

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