Abandonia Treasures #17...Bad Blood.

Here's another cool one from Origin (you remember the creators of Ultima, Auto Duel... ).  This is a later era game (1990), and it's not bad.  It's Post Apocalyptic (I'm sold), after the bomb, you had me at Post Apocalyptic, and to add wonder to marvel, you get to play the mutants.  Yup, you get to pick a mutant to play, and you're like a cool good mutant to boot.  You have to stop an impending conflict between humans and mutants, and there's a sophisticated story line and everything.  It's top down, and that's very cool, and I like that the controls are easy and right in front of your face.  It all plays out on an old TV that is the main screen, a bottle lets you know your health status.  It's a creative interface for sure and I like the graphics quite a bit.  Seems like "Bad Blood" would be a good starter RPG, because it's not as complicated at say Ultima, but not as simple as console types like Zelda.  Check it out, see what you think.

Bad Blood at Abandonia

Game-a-day #27...The Untouchables.

Okay ya mugs, drop the heatrolas and reach for the sky!  That's my attempt at some good old fashioned thirties gangster talk. You know like James Cagney.  "The Untouchables" is a game set in the world of prohibition, bootleggers, G-men, and Tommy guns.  I always liked the 30's gangster genre, it's underused in the video/computer game world in my opinion.  Why don't they make a GTA bootlegger version?  Economic depression, booze, old cars... Anyhow, back to the C64 game,  it's a side scroll shoot-em-up.  It's Fun, has pretty good graphics.  The game play is smooth and fast paced.  It was published back in 89 a couple years after the blockbuster film of the same name that stared Kevin Costner and had the baseball bat scene, Sean Connery too.  If you like the movie, and you like side scroll shooting games, try this one out, it's a real peach, a hot tomato....see.

The Untouchables on Gamebase64

Abandonia Treasures #16...Inspector Gadget.

Did you watch Inspector Gadget?  I did... I know it was a goofy cartoon, but you know as a kid I liked it.  Wasn't my favorite, but it was funny, and I think it must have been the inspiration for the modern day laptop/netbook.  That's right, the Penny's computer book.  When I got my first laptop in 1994, I remember one of my first thoughts was, "This is like a real life computer book".  As kids we all wanted a computer book like Penny had, it was awesome, a portable computer the size of a book.  The computer book actually looked like a real book and opened like one... Maybe they should bake a netbook like that, I would buy it.  Okay, so the game here brought to us by our good friends at Abandonia, is pretty good.  It's like getting to play the cartoon, and as it's an early 90's game (1992), the graphics are good and the interface is smooth. It's a point and click type game, so to me it's awesome (I love a good point and click).  It's way easy to get started, and it is very much like the cartoon.  This game was made about six years after the series had ended, but Gadget enjoyed syndication well into the 90's so it's easy to see why they made the game at that time.  In the 90's they ended up making a lot of cartoons into games because the graphics were good enough by then.  If you like Inspector Gadget don't hesitate to get this game, it's fun and funny and will bring back memories, so go on.... Go Go Gadget Download at Abandonia.

Inspector Gadget at Abandonia

Arcade Compare #2...Star Wars.

Star Wars... It was HOT in the 80's, it's hot today, but when I was a kid, I think I would have done anything to be able to participate in the destruction on the Death Star.  Lucky for me the video game industry was aware of my desire, and realized it was the desire of about every kid who's eyes had fallen on the original Lucas classic.  In 1983 Atari created the Star Wars arcade game.  No trip to my local arcade was complete without a stab at the Empire in color vector graphics.I remember getting good enough to destroy the Death Star the first time (not too hard), I mean, I might as well have fallen into the movie I was so excited.  I thought I was Luke.  It's not hard to see why I bought this game for my C64.  I had the Atari 2600 version that did NOT have vector graphics, but the Commodore version did.  The C64 version of the classic is great, it's just about as good as arcade ports get for the Commodore.  The graphics are as close as they can be to the original, game play is very very close.  I'll go out on a limb and say this may be the best arcade port to C64 I know about.  Today, you can just fire up Mame and play the arcade version, and no matter how good the C64 version is, it's not the arcade version.  But it's fun to be able to play both and remember the days when the arcade was king, my shoes had Velcro, and I had to wait a week for new episodes of my favorite shows to air on TV.

Game-a-day #28...A Rock Star ate my Hamster.

Did you ever play the lemonade stand game?  It's a game where you run a lemonade stand and you buy lemons, sugar, ice and cups and see how much money you can make given weather conditions. "A Rock Star Ate My Hamster" is like an advanced version of that lemonade game.  You are a music producer and your goal is to create a star or stars.  I thought this game looked stupid at first, but after I played it for a while I got to liking it quite a bit.  It's humorous, and a little addicting. There's no action in this game, it's totally decision making strategy  based play, but it's kinda cool, and the graphics are classic.  Music fans will appreciate the silly parodies of rock and pop icons, and you strategy people will enjoy trying to get a gold record.  It's also a cool history lesson for you kids who don't know about the days when itunes didn't exist, and you actually bought albums.  It's fun and funny, try it out, you'll probably like it.

A Rock Star Ate My Hamster on Gamebase64

Abandonia Treasures #15...Legend Of Kyrandia.

Well, now that I've opened the flood gates to the games of the 90's it only seems fair to start featuring some of them in the Abandonia Treasures entry.  As and era I always thought of the 90's, especially the early part of the decade as a dark time in computer game history, kind of like the "Dark Ages".  But I was wrong, and it's Abandonia that set me straight.  When you look at all the games on their site, so many are so good and so from the early 90's.  I don't know what I was thinking, well I do know why I was thinking, but I was thinking all wrong.  See I had a Mac in the 90's and yeah it was sweet and had like 4MB of ram and a giant 117MB hard drive, COLOR screen, and 25Mhz of processing power.  For a laptop it was SUPER... but for games, not so much.  If you read the last entry Game-a-day today, you know that from 1991-1993 I was all wrapped up in being a rebellious young person, then after that... A Mac.  So, yeah I missed out on an entire world of games that they made for the PC until 1996 when I graduated from computer trade school and built my very own Pentium (well Cyrix) system with a 100Mhz CPU.  That's like five years of no good games, but... I did have one game that I remember was quite good for my Mac laptop, and it was "Legend Of Kyrandia".  Sweet, funny, great graphics, this game is a winner.  It plays utilizing one of my favorite systems of all time, the point-and-click method.  You collect stuff, you solve sweet puzzles, it's a win.  Now, I never played this game to completion, no sir.  But I did spend many hours playing it and marveling at the graphics that I was sure could get no better.  Okay, so graphics got better and I didn't think they would, I'm not a prophet, I'm just a man, and a man aint' nothin' but a man.  If you know who said that (not me), then you win an American folk lore prize.

Legend of Kyrandia on Abandonia

Game-a-day #29 ...Escape From The Planet Of The Robot Monsters.

I'm gonna call today 90's day, because for the first time in Game-a-day history (a little less than two months) I'm pulling a 90's game off the shelf to talk about.  Yeah! the 90's were kinda cool, they started Grunge, Techno, Liquid Television, Reality TV, wild art coffee houses... I went to one in the early 90's called Van Gogh's Ear, it was right on the Venice Boardwalk, a famous strip of beach in Los Angeles, and the times I had there were very 90's alternative good.  But I digress into my early adulthood, and I'm not talking about games like I should. Okay, so I didn't actually get to play a lot of computer games from 90-93, because I was busy being a late teen who just liked girls, experimenting with controlled substances, and learning about tobacco and beer.  My C64 sat on a shelf for this three year period and at the end of it all it was outdated to the point of going into a closet.  There was one exception during this period.  I was hanging out with a girl I had a crush on who happened to have a C64 of her own, and was still trying to finish "Alice in Wonderland" on it, so we played that game a little together.  Man, memory lane kinda gets you off subject.  Anyway, needless to say I missed some of the most advanced titles the C64 had to offer and "Escape From The Planed Of The Robot Monsters" is one of them.  It's a rescue game kind of like "Alien Syndrome".  It's got Isometric graphics (awesome), multi-level ladder access, a bunch of robots, hostages to rescue, a weapon, and it even plays with the pace of a good arcade game.  The graphics are in the as good as the C64 can do and still have moving objects category.  The C64 enjoyed a long life for a personal computer, games being produced well into the 90's are good proof of that.  So while I was following the Grateful Dead, and hitchhiking through Northern California, some awesome game companies were making sweet games that I never got to pay, but get to now through the miracle of hackers and emulation.

Escape from the planet of the Robot Monsters on Gamebase64