Our Video Game History

May 22, 2008 on 3:01 pm | In Insanity, video games | No Comments

Remember the 80’s? And the 90’s? Of course you do. You were playing your Nintendos and Super Nintendos and Sega Genesises and Atari Jaguars and Sega Saturns and Turbo Graphix 16s and enjoying the advances in technology that made happiness possible.

Unless you had parents who didn’t believe in console systems. Like mine.

No, we poor unfortunate souls had to make do with PC games, the Ringo of entertainment. Most of the games had an educational component, or, alternately, had really awesome graphics which wouldn’t work on your slow 1990’s PC. It was a fun era, if you liked spending your time waiting to play a game about numbers. Ideally most of my generation just played outside instead.

Now, in 2008, someone has collected many of the DOS-based game covers here, so you can browse through and look at the awful games that you were luckily able to avoid or maybe unlucky enough to own. There are about a billion of these, so I’m only going to grab a few stand-outs from the first few pages for this post. Let’s see what the kids were playing/forced to play back in the day!

“Your next battle will take place…ON A CLIFF!!!!!”
From what I’ve read, there’s nothing 3-D about this game at all, other than some shading that’s a step up from an 8-bit Nintendo but kind of on-par with Super Nintendo. It’s just a boxing game, plain and simple, yet the cover implies that you’ll be in the woods, or something. THAT would be an awesome game. You’re a boxer, maybe a little down on his luck, and you have to get to the big bout in a faraway land. But you’ve got no bus fare, so you’re hoofing it through the forest, in your boxing gear. While you’re walking around, you have to fight things while keeping your gloves on. It’s not much better, but it would tie in real nice with the cover of the game, right?

James Bond played by British actor Timothy Dalton. Bond girls played by skanky models we found hanging around the photo studio. Hopefully he’s out for revenge on the skanks.

Let’s ignore the Indiana Jones game, and “Mad TV” which has nothing to do with the comedy show, and focus on the showpiece here, LOOM. LOOM absolutely has to be a first-person 3-D weaving adventure. You could not get away with calling your game LOOM and have it be anything else. Why would you want to play anything else? Why would any game that wasn’t weaving call itself LOOM? I wouldn’t want to play an action/adventure game called LOOM, I’d be afraid to tell my friends about it. LOOM! LOOM! Type it a few times and the meaning goes away. LOOM! LOOM! LOOOOOOOM!

“3 more colors inside, in addition to the 4 on the box!”
Big Brother is watching you load a floppy disk.

Addicted to chess? How does that work? Your game better come with bare-chested queens and knights that rock out on red guitars, or I’m calling shenanigans.

C’mon, that’s the best cover you can do? That was your marketing department’s #1 choice? Even the “7 Colors” guy was better than this, and he was just a face. Raspberry color? A hideous out-of-the-box font? A pixilated legless wizard zapping a ball on a black background? Sorry for ruining your lunch break by asking you to design a game cover, a**hole.

“Oh crap, Casper, someone’s fired a laser at your house, the one that’s floating in space with no driveway or yard or anything. Yeah, you should totally check that out.”

There is no way to get excited about this game. Even the guy on the box isn’t excited. “It’s a Great Game…but if you have something else to do, that’s cool too. I’m still your friend.” If you get excited about video cricket, then toss that box of condoms out, because you ain’t using them before the expiration date. This game boasts two big selling points: 1) the Sheffield Shield, and 2) it’s the Allan Border Tribute edition. The Sheffield Shield is like the Super Bowl of Australian cricket, so congrats, you got the licensing to use the name. And Allan Border is not dead yet, making the Tribute edition kinda unnecessary. We don’t called “Madden ‘08″ the “John Madden Tribute ‘08″ for a reason, that reason being that he’s not dead yet. Silly game. Silly Australian game.

By “ancient,” they mean “only after 1915.”

Maybe in other, poorer countries, a slot machine actually spits out the food that is depicted. If that’s the case, I do not want to play this game.

Too easy.