Website Recommendation: Abandonia

Today's post isn't writing related, but relates to one of my other interests--gaming.
I'm a huge fan of really old video games, ones that came out in the days before 3D graphics. Why, you ask, would I want to play 2-D VGA adventure games, or *gasp* text adventures? The answer's simple--They had to make the games great, they had to make the games fun so that people would play them once and want to play them again and again and again, not just to look at shiny graphics, but because the game is so great and just SO challenging.

I would LOVE to hear about people's favorite old-school games! Feel free to comment and say your faves. Maybe you'll find kindred spirits or maybe you'll just be providing great recommendations for other gaming enthusiasts. Either way, it couldn't hurt, right?

The downside is that the games a decade or two back were sometimes a little TOO challenging. Consider Ghouls and Ghosts for the NES. You start with a guy in armor. If he gets hit once he loses his armor. If he gets hit again without finding more armor, he dies. He has not many lives, maybe 2 or 3, and if you die there are NO continues!!! If you spent hours getting to the last level and you die, too bad! You're starting right back at the beginning, bub! Modern gamers would have a fit if there were a game like that released today! I suppose it's a side-effect of short attention spans, if you have to restart the game after an hour, then people would be more likely to just find another game.

I always sought out fun old games, bought a Space Quest collection, a King's Quest collection, found a "Lost Treasures of Infocom" text adventure collection which had Zork 1-8, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and at least a dozen others. It was amazing! Granted, I was terrible at it, and I never finished a single one of those games, but it was darn fun to explore, and the manuals were like little novels!

Anyway, I do have a point with all this. If you love old games like I do, and are sad that you can't find them, then you should check out Abandonia.com
They have old, old games available for download, and some of them are just plain amazing. Some of the games listed on there are not available for download, but they claim to have near 1000 downloadable games. The ones that aren't downloadable are to avoid legal trouble, which is understandable enough.

I think this site is great. After all, not many people would be willing to pay money for these nowadays right? Sites like this keep the intellectual property readily available to anyone who is interested in it, and offers suggestions for how to run it with modern software on top of it.


A few that you might want to try:

Elder Scrolls: Arena
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/195/Elder+Scrolls%2C+The+-+Arena.html
For those of you who played Morrowind or Oblivion, this is the original original. I tried it for a while, and it was moderately fun, but I just plain wasn't very good at it.

Freddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/202/Freddy+Pharkas+-+Frontier+Pharmacist.html
A rather funny adventure of a pharmacist in the wild west. The manual for this one alone is worth a download, an 1800s pharmacy manual. It's somewhat educational, but not boringly so. You do NEED the manual to do some of the pharmacy puzzles as a sort of copy protection.

Laura Bow 2: The Dagger of Amon-Ra
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/186/Laura+Bow+2+-+The+Dagger+of+Amon-Ra.html
This is a great mystery Whodunit sort of game. The protagonist is a female reporter in male-dominated 1920s. She just got hired on the job. She keeps a notebook of all the people she meets and the various topics. In each conversation you add a little bit more to the notebook, so when you talk to someone else you can use the notebook as a questioning mechanism to learn more and more. The story starts out pretty tame, but before too long bodies start piling up and you'll need to be very smart to sort it all out! I made it through act 1 with no help, but I confess that in Act 2 (I think? This was years ago), I had major trouble with a task that was supposed to be pretty easy according to every walkthrough I've ever read--All you're supposed to do is eavesdrop at a party, but I could NOT do it. The game offered a mechanism to skip ahead to the next act, but then I missed the major plot elements and once I cheat once I lose the resistance to cheat again so the challenge sort of goes away. Anyway, it's a great game (at least the parts that I finished).

The Mysteries of Memory

Wow, I've had a lot of posts in the last week and on random topics. Well, here's another one--the mysteries of memory. In particular I was wondering how the brain chooses what to remember and what to forget. I'm a mediaphile, always hunting the next great movie/tv show/book/short story/etc, and I am constantly amazed at how much totally useless information I have stored up there. Is all that information using up my storage space? Is that why I forget where I put my car keys, or totally blank on test questions in my classes?

Does anyone else find they have huge amounts of totally useless things stored in their brains? For instance:

1. Video games walkthroughs. I haven't played Super Mario Bros. 3 on NES for 10 years. The last time I played through it, it had been at least 5 years before that, and I knew EXACTLY where everything was in the game. Where the warp whistles are, exactly how to get hammer brothers suits, where the invisible note blocks are. And my muscle reflex is still completely intact for that game, I barely skip a beat.
I could also probably list at least 20 special moves for various characters in the Mortal Kombat series, though I haven't played those for 10+ years also.

2. Random associations. When I was in junior high and high school, I liked to play through video games on one TV while I had the little black and white TV showing TV shows in the background. In this one, one media becomes melded together with the other in my mind. There's a particular level in The Illusion of Gaia (on SNES) where you're fighting your way through the jungle. When I was playing through that, I was watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where they meet a genderless alien race. There's one member of the race that is intrigued by human femininity and so she tries to be more womanlike. Riker grows a love interest for her and has some very awkward conversations about sex. Then at the end, the race discovers her deviance and brainwashes her back to "normal" behavior. I haven't seen that episode since then, but I remember all those details.

3. Faces on movies/tv shows. My wife and I make a game of it when we're channel surfing or going out to movies, if we can figure out where else we've seen an actor without going to IMDB. We've been doing that so long that it's rare to watch something where there isn't some association. I should start playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, that game always sounded fun when I heard it on radio shows and stuff.