Hazily Remembered Games With Only the Vaguest Notion of What They Were

Okay, ill throw two out there, some of my earliest gaming experiences from when I was in primary school, so around the 1992 mark, both were black and white games on a Macintosh or Mac Classic. Both were RPG-esque, one had a horror theme and you would explore haunted forests and such navigating I believe by typed commands ala Adventure! but it had a display of what location you were in, I vaguely recall a werewolf or werewolves and you could easily die from a wrong decision. The second had the same kind of interface/interactivity but it was a different setting I'd hesitantly call fantasy, certainly not traditional fantasy, but someones made up world, and I recall as a player you could get certain items and trade them for others one of them being water. I also remember you could encounter some kind of creature with gigantic feet that would make stomping noises.

Yes, all of the above is very random, but I'd like to find those games and some means of replaying them...

chixor7 wrote:

Gapper was fun because the speed of the game was directly tied to the clock speed of the CPU, so it became completely unplayable as computers got upgraded.

Reminds me that the first Tetris I put significant time into was an ASCII version on an old 8088 IBM PC. When I finally got a 386 it was simply unplayable.

A friend mentioned a game from the 90s that involved playing a cockroach and solving a murder mystery. Anyone know what this one is?

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

A friend mentioned a game from the 90s that involved playing a cockroach and solving a murder mystery. Anyone know what this one is?

Sounds like Bad Mojo - I never played it, but I remember the ads:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/25...

Yeah, sounds very much like Bad Mojo. I didn't play it, but I did watch... BadMojo play it.

That HAS to be it! Thanks guys!

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Yeah, sounds very much like Bad Mojo. I didn't play it, but I did watch... BadMojo play it.

I have the newly remastered version in Steam. It's a good game.

Good enough to change your username over, or?

>:)

Running Man wrote:

I don't know where to look for this, because it wasn't really a game. Due to persistent requests, my parents got me an Apple IIe "game" for Christmas one year, and it was set in the future on a space station. I had thought the game's introduction was extremely long, until it dawned on me that I wasn't playing an actual game, this was a story that unfolded by reading the log entries of various crew members who had vanished. The guy at the software store told my parents it was educational and fun, so they ignored my hints for an Ultima game and got me that instead.

Setting aside my bitterness, I plodded on with it. You could go to different areas on the space station and read log entries. Then an alarm would go off at another section, so you'd travel there and read some more. There were basic graphics representing the station's various rooms. Eventually the fate of the space station was revealed, but I didn't bother to finish it.

Anybody have a clue what this was?

That sounds a little similar to this "interactive novel": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal...

Though this game took place on Earth.

Starcross was an Infocom text adventure, but it was an actual game and didn't have graphics AFAIK. Stationfall was another abandoned space station game.

Reminds me that the first Tetris I put significant time into was an ASCII version on an old 8088 IBM PC. When I finally got a 386 it was simply unplayable.

Nyet!

Quintin_Stone wrote:

That sounds a little similar to this "interactive novel": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal...

Though this game took place on Earth.

By Jove I think you've got it. Portal was the cruel joke played on me as a kid, and it's probably the unconscious justification for 400+ games sitting on the Steam pile.

I was a big Infocom fan, so I'd heard of Planetfall and Stationfall. Planetfall rocked.

All this talk of old games has got me thinking of all those weird PC games I played back in the day. In addition to the ones I mentioned previously that I actually remember pretty well, I recall playing 2 other games on my grandma's computer (probably early 90s era - either DOS or 3.1).

In the first one, you play as two firefighters with a trampoline, and you have to catch people (babies?) as they fall out of the burning tower. Basically the only controls were sliding your dudes back and forth. Sounds kind of grim now, but I remember it being pretty fun.

The other one I didn't really like, and I think was newer, but it was a bass fishing tournament. You had limited time or fuel I believe, and had to drive your boat around and find the best places to fish. I remember it pretty much all being top down, but there might have also been a fish finder so you could see where fish were? I remember catching a lot of pike....

Bouncing Babies? It didn't look exactly how I remembered it.

Yes! That's the one! Same here, I thought the building was in the center of the screen rather than off to the side, but that's definitely the game I was thinking of.

I used to play a game where you piloted a space ship from top-down. But the only thing I can remember about it is that you could build colonies on planets and there was a ship called a Flower Power which was a large freighter.

Yoyoson wrote:

Here's one I've been trying to return to. When I was a kid my dad took me to a "computer store" where I obtained a 5.25" floppy chock full of DOS shareware. It was a compilation of dozens of games, but the one that I remember was some kind of ASCII or curses based adventure in which you control a smiley face (think of the ALT codes).

Example of the smiley face is in the upper left corner of this image:
IMAGE(http://i.stack.imgur.com/by2Pb.png)

The specific puzzle room I remember was a giant with narrow hallways (one character wide) with about 80-100 square columns, and the columns were 3-5 characters on a side (They were all either 3x3 or 4x4 or 5x5 but the exact dimension I can't remember). Each hallway was completely filled with some random ASCII garbage such as you can see in the first row of the image above.

The puzzle was that your avatar was placed at one point in the room and you had to walk up to the end of a hallway and push on the nearest piece of garbage. This would in turn push all the garbage up or over to the right. Some of the pieces of garbage could only move horizontally, some only vertically, and some both ways. Some were immovable. So you had to line up the bidirectional pieces on the intersections in order to allow movement in an intersecting column or row.

It was called "The return of _______" of "The revenge of _______" where, right now I'd fill in the blank with "XYZZY!" but I don't know now that that makes any sense, because googling on that isn't helping me at all.

It may have been referred to as a maze, since you probably had to make your way from one corner of the room to the opposite one.

Yoyoson wrote:

Alright, after a bunch of searching I've determined that the title was probably something along the lines of "Return to ZZT" or something like that. But I recall now that ZZT gave you a level editor, and then, the specific puzzle room I'm trying to conjure up was probably a user created level bundled along with many others. The chances of finding it just dipped considerably. Ugh.

I found it!

In fact, here's a screen shot of that exact puzzle. Not sure why I couldn't find this earlier.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/be...

Wow, my recollection and retelling was not very close at all.

This is a bit of a weird one from the early/mid 80s

I grew up in Montreal and there was a channel on our local cable network (videotron maybe?) that allowed you to call up and play video games using the touchpad on your phone. I specifically remember a golf game and one that was similar to defender. I tried to find information on this a couple of times to no avail. The channel was not dedicated to this service so after a couple of hours it would revert back to regular programming. The cool thing was that only one person could play at a time and everyone else had to watch - it was the original eSport!

Please tell me there is someone out there that remembers this.

lactose wrote:

This is a bit of a weird one from the early/mid 80s

I grew up in Montreal and there was a channel on our local cable network (videotron maybe?) that allowed you to call up and play video games using the touchpad on your phone. I specifically remember a golf game and one that was similar to defender. I tried to find information on this a couple of times to no avail. The channel was not dedicated to this service so after a couple of hours it would revert back to regular programming. The cool thing was that only one person could play at a time and everyone else had to watch - it was the original eSport!

Please tell me there is someone out there that remembers this.

Sounds like TV Powww

In NYC we had something similar, called "TVPixxx" where kids could sign up to get called to play a live video game, saying "Pix" to fire a rocket or something like that. High scores would win prizes like T-Shirts, movie tickets, or savings bonds.

This was a adventure game on the C-64 back in the mid-eighties. There was a parrot and one of the puzzles was a music tone puzzle that I never got past because I'm bascially tone deaf

Alz, I remember PIX. I was living in NJ so we saw a lot of NY programming.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Alz, I remember PIX. I was living in NJ so we saw a lot of NY programming.

It's funny, but Al Roker from the Today show was with WPIX (channel 11) and was the guy who hosted the PIX segments.

PIX looks similar to what I remember but with way higher production values. From what I recall the games were a little more basic. Thanks though

Holy crap, I think it was! Thank you!

Thank you so much for bringing Aztec up in this thread. I had totally forgotten it and those screenshots just brought me back to it.

This one has been bothering me as I've fired up Total War again. It was some precursor to the Total War series from the mid 80's. It was set in Japan. You started out trying to gain control of your "province", then as you got that the game would change to try to take control of a section, then would change again to take over all of Japan. It has the battles with formations of troops and had some town building as well. The part that I remember the most and was different, was being able to have ninja missions, where you would try to sneak through a rivals house and steal their family sword which would bring disgrace to them so you could gain more influence and take over their lands. I believe there were other ninja missions you could undertake, but that one I remember the most distinctly. I believe it was a low color game, I remember lots of green/cyan.

Edit: Also, PC.

Rybowl wrote:

This one has been bothering me as I've fired up Total War again. It was some precursor to the Total War series from the mid 80's. It was set in Japan. You started out trying to gain control of your "province", then as you got that the game would change to try to take control of a section, then would change again to take over all of Japan. It has the battles with formations of troops and had some town building as well. The part that I remember the most and was different, was being able to have ninja missions, where you would try to sneak through a rivals house and steal their family sword which would bring disgrace to them so you could gain more influence and take over their lands. I believe there were other ninja missions you could undertake, but that one I remember the most distinctly. I believe it was a low color game, I remember lots of green/cyan.

Edit: Also, PC.

This sounds like it could be one of the old KOEI strategy games. They made a whole bunch that took place in ancient asian geographies. These all came out on PC platforms, but also showed up on consoles like the NES and SNES. I don't specifically remember a "Ninja" minigame in any of them, but take a look and see if anything shakes your memory:

- Nobunaga's Ambition
- Romance of the Three Kingdoms
- Genghis Khan
- Bandit Kings of Ancient China
- Inindo, Way of the Ninja

fangblackbone wrote:

Sword of the Samuraii? http://store.steampowered.com/app/32...

This would be my guess as well.

(infiltration gameplay about 6 minutes into this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adqm...)

I grew up with each of those as my brother was a big history buff and thus strategy game fan. I can tell you none of those describe the town-building mechanic he is thinking of.

Always nice to be reminded of Inindo, though, even if it was really, really rough. Also: Super Nintendo, so about ten years too late.

I love this thread.

OK, here are two I've been trying to think of lately.

the first game is a DOS 2D action platformer, and I think starts with an X, like Xenophobe or Xenophage or something. I only played the demo back in the day, but would like to see what the whole game is like. The demo started in a forest, and you just went around collecting items and shooting things. there was also part of an underwater level in the demo.

The other game I can't remember I saw at a friends place. it was all in Japanese, but I wonder if there's an English version. It started out as a 2D space shooter like R-Type, but the bosses at the end of each level were played on the ground as a 2D fighting game. As I remember, it had some pretty good music too.