The Space Bar is the kind of adventure game that makes me forgive a lot of sins and then immediately demand better behavior from everybody involved. It is a 1997 Windows PC graphical adventure, released on three CDs, and it has the kind of brainy, overstuffed structure that now feels almost indecently confident: a murder […]
The Space Bar (PC, 1997) – Review Read Post »
I have a weakness for games that begin as a bad idea in the best possible sense: a couple of university students in Germany, a hobby project, a persistent world, and the audacity to think a graphical online role-playing game could exist without first asking permission from the genre gods. Tibia, in its original 1997
Tibia (PC, 1997) – Review Read Post »
Tom Clancy’s Politika is the sort of game that makes me suspect the late 1990s were being governed by an escaped committee of risk analysts, Cold War novelists, and people who believed every box on a store shelf should contain at least one map of a collapsing nation. This is the 1997 PC adaptation of
Virtua Cop 2 on PC is one of those late-90s port jobs that looks, on paper, like a compromise and, in motion, like a small act of stubbornness. Sega took a 1995 Model 2 arcade light gun shooter, shaved off the gun, shoved in a mouse, and still wound up with a game that understands
Virtua Cop 2 (PC, 1997) – Review Read Post »
Picture it: February 1993. Doom shareware disks are spreading faster than a chain letter, Jurassic Park’s CGI raptors are about to rewrite Hollywood’s DNA, and my mall arcade is a riot of neon and “BOOM-SHAKA-LAKA!” echoing from freshly minted NBA Jam cabinets. Into that audiovisual mosh pit tiptoes Shadow President, a DOS box so drab it might have been printed on
Shadow President (PC) – Review – The Oval-Office Spreadsheet that Let Me Invade Canada Read Post »