Extreme Rock Climbing Sports category

Title screen from Extreme Rock Climbing

Niche sports should get to be games too! The extreme sports game boom in the late 90s and early 2000s turned skateboarding into its own genre, and that opened the door, however briefly and unsuccessfully, for more games based on smaller solo sports, like Wakeboarding Unleashed featuring Shaun Murray. And why not? They’re athletic challenges that emphasize personal growth and achievement, which is a perfect fit for a style of game where you practice something over and over until you finally nail it in record time.

What sport is better suited for that than rock climbing? It’s a literal representation of that struggle to improve yourself and surmount an obstacle, in this case a giant wall or a cliff. Given the popularity of the sport, it’s surprising that more games haven’t explored rock climbing outside of a few motion-controlled sports titles like Kinect Sports Rivals and Wii Fit U or something intentionally silly like the slapstick control scheme in GIRP. At the moment the extreme sports genre exploded in 1999, there was at least one climbing game. Alongside other games in the Extreme series like Extreme Rodeo, Head Games Publishing released the small and surprisingly clever Extreme Rock Climbing.

But how do you translate the physical challenge and dexterity of rock climbing into a computer game? To find out, we need some help from a delicious, energy-boosting PowerBar®. » Read more about Extreme Rock Climbing

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Join The Obscuritory Charity Tea Party Marathon 2019 for Trans Lifeline! Blog categoryStreaming category

The Obscuritory Charity Tea Party Marathon 2019 banner

Tea icons by Pixture

It’s happening again!

On November 9, I’m hosting The Obscuritory Charity Tea Party Marathon 2019, an all-day stream to raise money for Trans Lifeline.

Trans Lifeline is a non-profit organization that provides microgrants for trans people to cover the costs of name changes and updating IDs to affirm their gender, as well as running a support hotline by and for trans people. It’s a great cause, and it will be great to stream for y’all to raise money for them!

The last time I did a charity stream, I said I’d go for 24 hours, and I did not make it. So I’ll just say that I’m starting on November 9 at 10am EST, and we’ll go from there.

In keeping with the mission of The Obscuritory, I’ll be streaming weird old games and software. But this time, I’m going to try to play a few games at length. I haven’t settled on what we’ll be playing, but it will include a full playthrough of Wrath of the Gods, an extra-cheesy educational live-action adventure game that I want to share with as many people as possible. There will probably be some bonuses too, to be determined.

As the name of the stream promises, I’ll be drinking lots of tea over the course of the day. Bring your own tea too, and we can talk about how great tea is! It’ll be a relaxing, silly, and hopefully thoughtful time.

See you on twitch.tv/obscuritory on November 9! Sign up here for a reminder on Twitch.

UPDATE (11/8): Here’s a rough schedule for what I’ll be playing all day:

10:00am Alien Logic, a surreal RPG set on an alien world. Alien Logic was based on a tabletop ruleset from 1984 called SkyRealms of Jorune, where humans and aliens co-exist on a distant planet thousands years after the collapse of human colonies. I haven’t played Alien Logic apart from testing it for the stream, so this will be a fun one to explore together!
1:00pm Treasure Quest, a puzzle-adventure game starring Terry Farrell (Jadzia Dax on Deep Space Nine) that came with a grand prize of $1 million. Treasure Quest is a methodical puzzle game that can take months to work through, which makes it a bad choice for a streaming marathon, but I want to play it for a little bit because I want to share the unusual story behind this game.
1:30pm Enigma, a marble game with over 2000 dense, challenging levels. It’s a doozy, and fitting the chill stream, we’ll play some of the slow-paced Meditation levels, which are more about patience than puzzles.
2:30pm Ballistics, the fastest racing game ever made. Ballistics is faster than you can possibly believe, and I’m gonna try to play it without getting sick.
4:00pm Wrath of the Gods, an FMV adventure through Greek mythology. This is the main event of the day. We’re gonna play through the entire game! Wrath of the Gods is so corny and earnest, and I want to share this goofy thing with as many people as possible.
9:00pm Roly-Polys Nanakorobi Yaoki! By request, I’ll be playing a bit of this recently unearthed game by Osamu Sato, creator of Eastern Mind and LSD: Dream Emulator. I know there’s some Sato fans on here, so I’ve been waiting to play this one for the first time for the stream.
10:00pm The Journeyman Project, a utopian time travel adventure. If you haven’t seen this one, you’re in for a treat. The Journeyman Project is a stone cold classic and one of my favorite games, and it seems like a great, upbeat way to end the day.
??? …and a mystery game! If we raise our goal of $400 for the stream, I’ll play a mystery educational game that, to my knowledge, hasn’t been made available online yet. What could it be? Don’t you want to donate to help trans lives to find out?!

I might mix in a few more games for variety’s sake, but this is the general schedule. See you there!

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Marble Drop Puzzle category

Box art for Marble Drop, courtesy of MobyGames.

When I read picture books as a kid, my favorite part was following the illustrations. If there was a cross-section drawing of a house, I would trace my finger up the staircases and through the doorways. That’s probably why I loved illustrated mazes, or the busy scenery in hidden object books, or puzzle books where you had to untangle a bunch of strings, because it’s fun to follow a winding path and see where it goes.

Marble Drop taps into that same sort of fun. It gets you to follow the path that a bunch of marbles are about to take through a complicated maze of gizmos. You don’t even have to finish solving it correctly to enjoy it! » Read more about Marble Drop

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When a re-release gets unreleased Essay category

Registration reminder screen from Barrack

The registration reminder screen from Barrack. There’s no way to register it anymore though

One of the post tags on this blog is “still sold,” which I use to indicate games that are still commercially available in some form. Usually, the games were re-released on a digital platform like GOG.com, or they’ve been ported to mobile. Occasionally, they’re still sold through the original developer’s website. It’s worth supporting developers and publishers who go through the effort to make old games available and working on modern platforms, even in cases where the rights might have been snatched up by some larger publisher.

From time to time, I’ve gone back to older posts to add the “still sold” tag them, like Lighthouse: The Dark Being, which was officially re-released a few years ago. But there’s also an alarming movement in the other direction – games that go back out of release. » Read more about When a re-release gets unreleased

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Boom Arcade categoryMacintosh category

Title screen from Boom

What do you get when you combine Bomberman and Doom? Chances are, it looks like Boom, a game that certainly does not infringe on intellectual property.

This was a shareware game that was sold for $15, not a free fangame. And despite whatever risk it opened up for the developer Factor Software, Boom doesn’t shy away from the fact that it’s basically Bomberman with Doom characters. It even calls the games out by name. You play as a space marine in a green suit of armor who fights aliens – not demons – that look like human soldiers. One of the enemies named Thick Lizzy is almost identical to the fireball-throwing imps from Doom, except that it’s named Thick Lizzy. Technically speaking, these weren’t actually characters from Doom, which must have given the developers just enough of a cover to call it a parody if they needed to. The likelihood is that since the game was for the Macintosh and it was distributed through shareware CDs and the late-90s internet, nobody’s lawyers knew or cared about Boom, and under the cover of obscurity, Factor Software got to see what it would be like to map one franchise over the other. » Read more about Boom

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The Legend of Lotus Spring Adventure category

Title screen from The Legend of Lotus Spring

The Legend of Lotus Spring has more in common with a poem than an adventure game. The big moments are intimate and quiet – feeding a fish, playing a musical instrument, finishing a piece of needlework. There are no puzzles or challenges to overcome. The main action of the game is to remember.

In Lotus Spring, you walk through a palatial garden, dreaming about a lost love. The idea was something intentionally outside the expectations of gaming in the early 2000s. It was originally a project by a group of 3D artists to recreate the old imperial gardens of China, and through happenstance, it became the only title produced by a short-lived company dedicated to making games for women. They created an elegant game that takes you on a short, emotional journey through memory and acceptance. » Read more about The Legend of Lotus Spring

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SoulTrap Platform category

Menu screen from SoulTrap

In several ways, SoulTrap is a nightmare.

For Malcolm, it’s a literal nightmare. He’s become trapped inside his own mind by his deepest fears, and apparently, he’s scared of everything. He’s afraid of death. He’s afraid of clowns. He’s afraid of fast-paced life in the big city. He’s afraid of robot sharks… which I guess is fair, I’ll give him that one.

And so he must conquer them and escape. His fears have manifested as a dreamworld, so surreal that it borders on abstract. » Read more about SoulTrap

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Rhapsody! A King Kong Battle Strategy category

Title screen from Rhapsody! A King Kong Battle

It’s not clear what spurred the existence of multiple tactical games in the early 90s about gorillas duking it out in the big city. The best known is Gorillas, a game that came bundled with the QBasic programming tool for the MS-DOS operating system, where two gorillas lob exploding bananas at each other from opposite ends of a city.

Then there’s the inexplicably but poetically named Rhapsody! A King Kong Battle. Who knows what that title means – maybe it’s trying to invoke the sweeping Americana of Rhapsody in Blue to go with the city? – but despite the musical name, it might be one of the most robotic games with a gorilla.

Screenshot from Rhapsody! A King Kong Battle

A mild sense of vertigo hanging over this poorly planned city

In a way, they’re fairly similar. Both games are about trial and error. In Gorillas, you take turns typing the angle and strength of your throw, like a game with artillery cannons, adjusting your aim until someone gets blown up by a fatal banana. In Rhapsody, instead of flinging anything, the gorillas are running around a city. You give the gorillas instructions about how many pixels to move – north 300, east 150, south 100 – and if they stop or hit a building, they go back to their starting place. The goal is to see who can reach the other one first. Like in Gorillas, the tension keeps rising as the apes get closer to their targets. It isn’t shown, but presumably, it ends with one gorilla beating the shit out of the other gorilla.

The kicker is that the gorillas take their directions in the form of a single long string of characters – N300E150S100. This is not gorilla-like at all. It’s more like programming a robot. Or transmitting encrypted orders to a submarine running silent through Soviet waters. You can imagine an old mainframe spitting out ticker tape with gorilla code.

Typing out directions in this syntax is simple enough, but it’s an outstandingly arcane way to play a computer game. It could just as well be a game for a computer terminal from the 70s. Rhapsody runs on Windows 3.1, a more robust operating system than MS-DOS with built-in support for mouse input and window interfaces, but it’s even less intuitive than Gorillas is.

Games for Windows 3.1 can feel like they’re learning to take advantage of the capabilities of the platform. Rhapsody! A King Kong Battle looks like it’s using the features of Windows 3.1, too, while actually doing nearly the opposite, stubbornly running on gorilla code.

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TaskMaker Macintosh categoryRPG category

Title screen from TaskMaker

There’s a trick TaskMaker loves to pull where one tile in a wall looks slightly different than the others. It’s called a “passwall,” and if you spot one, you can walk through it into a hidden passage or shortcut. TaskMaker doesn’t treat them like secrets. They’re part of the tutorial, and sometimes they’re the only way to advance through the game.

Secrets like this are the language of David Cook’s eccentric role-playing game TaskMaker. » Read more about TaskMaker

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