Throughout 2000 years of human history, ever since mankind understood how art can be packaged and sold, a single struggle has resisted, immortal, rearing its ugly head time and time again: the artist against the system. It’s a timeless tale, used in books and screenplays: the desperate toil of a striving artist to make his…
In the history of Italian videogame development, point’n’click adventure games are, perhaps, the quintessential genre. Yes, even more than soccer games, go figure! While Sierra Entertainment adventures struggled to find a market in Italy, mainly because they were rarely translated and fairly difficult to approach for a non-English speaker, Lucasarts adventures have always been huge.…
Futuristic sports have been a moderately successful gaming genre during the whole of the 80s and early 90s, with the Bitmap Brothers’ Speedball II being probably the last great title. Even though there have been some exceptions, even in the last years, it is safe to say that both public and developers have mostly moved…
Back in 2001 – as Dr. Frank N. Furter would put it – it wasn’t easy to have a good time. There were few alternatives, for a PC gamer, to full price titles bought on store shelves: the good free indie titles were still far on the horizon and Macromedia Flash wasn’t yet ready for…
Skitchin’ was to Road Rash what Beavis & Butthead were to The Simpsons. Where Road Rash was direct and kind of rude, Skitchin was rad, awesome and not afraid to flip the bird. Grab your skates, steal a ride on a car bumper and we’re off! Skitchin, for once on this blog rich with weird…
It is fascinating how the history of video games tends to be skewed towards the USA. Still today it is easy to come across articles – written by Italians of all people – that keep on mentioning the “console wars” in the 90s or the “great video game crash of 1983”. And yet, all of…
The point’n’click fans are a pretty weird bunch: always hungry for more games but rarely interested in going beyond their platform of choice to find some more. I used to be one of them so I can relate to that frame of mind. Among many classic home computers, the Commodore 64 is far from being…
Nobody in the 90s cared about the history of videogames: they just played them really. Back then, though, the medium was still in its teenage years; it would be like expecting 15th century painters to organize an exhibition about Renaissance art. By now videogames are approaching their middle age, consequently we’re seeing more and more…
In the 80s, before complex D&D based RPGs reached a bigger audience, teenagers who didn’t have friends to play with, found companionship in gamebooks. The very first book in the Fighting Fantasy series was The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, originally written by RPG veterans Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson. It is the gamebook most people…
Arcade conversions on Commodore 64 were definitely one major source of revenues for many publishers. But, naturally, most coin-ops from the mid 80s were way beyond the beloved breadbin’s limited hardware. Plenty of times, the public was horribly letdown by subpar or unplayable conversions, like Super Hang On or E-SWAT. Buggy Boy is, luckily, a…
