Longtime contributor and verbose commentator. Loves Roleplaying Games, Adventures and Puzzle Games. Gets strangely nostalgic when he enters a DOS prompt, hears a Gameboy *ding* or sees horrible colour palettes. Always good for a second opinion on everything.
Played together with his little brother cute Nintendo games and gambled undercover Wolfenstein and Larry on the PC. But real nostalgic feelings only come up with the C64 and 8-bit consorts. Passion for everything that is cyberspaced, fun and fast.
Website founder. Likes adventure and strategy games. Enjoys perfection, but cannot help finding the fly in the ointment. Has a weak spot for the obscure and loves the beauty of imperfection.
Elwood... Elwood? Who is this Elwood? Ah well well, that's me then I guess. Teacher, musician, wannabephilosopher and former fanatic collector of ancient gaming rarities. My personal gaming history goes back to the times of C64 and Amiga - a time in which schoolboys could sit down and program gaming classics without huge marketing strategies and budgets of millions of dollars. Back then the idea counted for more than the looks, but let's stop the ranting.
Today we'll talk about Sunny Shine - On the Funny Side of Life (which, despite its English title, is in German). This game has been mentioned on the Spieleveteranen Podcast as one of the games which Boris Schneider-Johne produced during his time at Rainbow Arts. He said (translated by me): "It's not worth searching the Internet for this game and to start up an emulator. I can't stress this enough!" Of course, as fanatical fans of promotional games, we can't do him that favour...
What's New?
2024-05-18
Spoiler: the encounter with the Bone Demon is indeed a memorable one. It is, however, the only demon in a book called Demons of the Deep. What a fraud! Balancing it out, there are a couple of other quite spectacular encounters with non-demonic creatures to be found. Even if not particularly consistent in its theme, individual scenes will certainly stick to my mind.
Here is our attempt to be totally up-to-date. Galastrad has been out for only few days. To be on top of recent development, we even shifted our regular schedule. Good thing that you're subscribed to our RSS feed, so you've caught this unusual Tuesday addition!
Galleons of Glory: The Secret Voyage of Magellan. Never heard of it? As a total addict of any "new world exploration" type game, I had to fill this knowledge gap, obviously. This one was easy to get into, unlike certain… ahem… other games which may or may not appear in this place at a later point.
Which year has this been released? Any guesses? No, no, no. The correct answer is: 1989. Double Dunk is a very late entry to the Atari 2600 library. How much care would you assume has been put considering the small remaining market? Surprise, it's quite a decent one. Not up to the technical standards of the time, but with good ideas and well playable.
Sentient Software, probably a typical American garage company – or a start-up, as we would call it today – was founded solely for the purpose of publishing the text adventures produced by owner Michael Berlyn himself. Reportedly already addicted to science fiction literature as a teenager, the game he first published, Oo-Topos, was naturally also from this genre.
Into the mine, out of the mine. Descent 2 repeated the original game's formula with very few changes. I remember being quite annoyed by it at the time. Time passes, I got older and more forgiving. The game not being all that expensive anymore may help as well. You should play it!
You're about to embark on an epic journey through several kingdoms. On a mission of no less than to save the whole world. But, you know, as the main evil henchman says at the end, himself and the hero are not that different. Yes, it's a huge bag of trite clichés. Though presented in a self-aware, ironic way. At its core, Xeonjia: Ice Adventures a humble, entertaining game.
Appointment with F.E.A.R. took me a longer time than usual. With more sections than your normal book and no less than four mutually exclusive paths inside, plus a mechanic which makes parts of the solution impossible to brute-force, it is no wonder in retrospect. The surprising thing about it: I felt entertained the whole time!
Soon, this land will be mine! In today's indie gaming world, there are so many things to discover. The issue being to find them. Or, from a developer perspective, to receive any attention. Having discovered this humble little game called There is Only Power through semi-random browsing on itch, and having enjoyed it, here is a recommendation for you.
Yup, it's Sonic! But, of course, it would be too easy to take the one everyone knows. Let's be honest, nothing to add to the public opinion about that one. Though the semi-recent release of a C64 port motivated me to take a look. Hoping to raise some awareness of this amazing work.
...that everything you see here has been coded from the ground up? We're not using any generic Content Managament System - those things never fit any specific purpose anyway. The same goes for our forum which has even been released under a Free Software licence in its current incarnation.
So what is this site? To put it in the most simple way imaginable: It's a site about digital games. Not about the latest gaming news, but about the games themselves, and - as you've already surmised from the site's name - specializing in what's usually considered 'classic' these days. Of course, definitions of 'classic' differ widely. However, if you browse around a little, you'll find us covering pretty much everything (with varying intensity) from the earliest home systems (late 1970s) to the end of the last millenium.
