This is the vault for gaming design, titles released in the past that are still relevant today for design or plot choices.
No one was paying attention to the end of the decade that fateful 31st of December 1999. Hey, we had more important things on our hands. It was the end of the millennium! Perhaps, people were busy sending heaps of sms to their friends and family and trying to remember to turn off your pc…
The dead end in adventure games is indeed something that is hard to explain, if one hasn’t experienced it first hand before. Saving and reloading is one of those abilities one would wish to actually use in real life. All problems would fade away: forgetting to pay the rent, dying in a car accident while…
Realms of the Haunting. Forged in the Gremlin Interactive studio, protected by a clunky interface, at the center of chaos lies a potentially interesting adventure game. The focus for all realms of existence is the balancing force between good and evil, Dosbox and Windows. A focal point for all energies, and the one element that…
On the blog, I have mentioned how, in the nineties, several novelists got involved in the development of videogames, but that was not all. Several popular musician got in the business at well, at first just for the dreaded “multimedia product” of the mid 90s, when everyone was jumping at the possibility of making a…
The first game I’ve ever reviewed in my life, way back in 1996 when I was 12, was actually 4D Sports Boxing. Or at least I thought that’s what it was called, even though supposedly the official name is just “4D Boxing”. I was downright ecstatic about it, ranting “mamma mia it’s so good!” over…
Bad Mojo is one game that is easily remembered, since it is indeed one of the few titles around where the player commands a cockroach: roaming around in kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms, avoid being squashed and, at the same time, trying to save someone from suicide. Sounds weird enough? Well, the game had a full…
It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad Tv world. The basic plotline of a videogame, how would you describe it? Going back to the medium’s roots, could be just… not dying. A rather straightforward objective, which we can all cater to, but not really a story. More often than not your quest was about saving the…
Ever since the eighties, and continuining in the nineties, it was normal for many novelists to be directly involved in the process of developing a story for videogames. And not just simply hired to mentor the then-real writers, but to help along the process of converting their original books in gaming form. Indeed, this is…
It is a well known fact that, originally, Electronic Arts was not the evil colossus that would become, later, in the 00s, but a very different kind of company that attracted all kinds of talented designers, managing to release some of the more interesting titles of the 80s. Still, even after the departure of Trip…
Johnny Castaway is not a game. It’s a roguelike-like-like(unlike) screensaver with procedurally generated events during a day and night cycle. Indeed, Johnny is a screensaver, developed by Dynamix and distributed by Sierra in 1992, probably one of the best examples of a software designed like a game. Screensavers used to be pretty…