However, in retrospect… Since I started The Oath, I reviewed a grand total of 6 games. Six. I have to say that, yes, I cut my video game spending by a huge amount, but that was not the intended effect. So I’m going to experiment a bit more, see if there are ways to get my review output up, but I’m not going to commit to a system of a long duration again.

I still want to review these games before I die, though. That sounds like an achievable goal, for now.

The Amazing Spider-man is a 1990 platform/puzzle game, published by Paragon Software. In the game you obviously play Spiderman, platforming around, but there is a curious twist. Or rather, there are many curious twists, but this is the main one. For some reason, Spiderman became all pacifist and refuses to directly harm any enemy you encounter. The only thing you can do with enemies is evade them. And that’s why the game is fundamentally a puzzle game.

Title screen. Also main menu, probably because the artist didn't feel like drawing certain aspects of Spiderman's anatomy

Now, evading enemies is not exactly hard. SpiderGandhi can walk on walls and ceilings and can shoot webs to climb and swing around on. The webs can also be used to trigger buttons, which makes for some interesting possibilities and cool level design.

In case you don't have the money for a chandelier, the Spiderman(tm) makes a nice alternative for your foyer.

In yet another curious twist to make the game more puzzlelike, SpiderGhandi will only walk at about the same speed my Vista computer boots, which is to say horrendously slow. I’m not entirely sure why this is. Does SpiderGhandiSnail feel that whenever his girlfriend is captured by Mysterio makes the perfect time to leisurely enjoy the various enemies and traps he encounters? That sounds wrong. My old adage “what would Spiderman do?” is crumbling before my very eyes.

Spider sense tingling... No, that's just the heating.

The game is hard. It is also traumatic. The two might be related, but there is certainly a curious twist that is also partially responsible for the traumaticity (that is totally an existing word, spell-checker!) of this game. You see, there is no health-bar in this game. The concept of the health-bar is translated to a visual representation of Spiderman himself. Which, when taking damage, slowly turns into a skeleton. Starting from the feet. It makes no sense, it is weird and awful, and it probably caused at least 5 kids to have nightmares. At least.

Seriously.

The Amazing Spider-man: a maze of curious twisty passages designed to make you feel like crap for loving Spiderman. But if you forget for a while what Spiderman is about (leaping from huge buildings, using the momentum of the spiderweb-swing to kick right through a villain, leaving said villain’s intestines scattered all over Spidermancity – note how I don’t have the foggiest idea but I like Batman and Wolverine), if you forget all that and can appreciate SpiderGhandiSnailSkeletor, then this is not too bad a game. 6/10

The first thing you’ll notice is that the game is very beginner-friendly. The controls are shown, the goals and tools you have are explained, and there are two difficulty settings. The only thing they don’t tell you is that you need to have numlock disabled if you want to use the regular arrow keys in the menus. Strange, but it might be a DOSBox quirk.

Look! Ancient empires!

The game starts out with a map of four ancient empires. Each location leads to a series of maps, from each of which you must recover six pieces of an artifact related to that culture. Of course, the pieces are typically only reachable after you pass some obstacles. These obstacles come in different forms. There are evil creatures ranging from snakes and beetles to alien-like explosive-spewing things. Each creature has his own behavior which you must avoid to pass the obstacle.

The alien-like explosive-spewing THING in the top-left! What IS it? What ancient empire held such horrible secrets? This so-called educational game does not tell us.

Another obstacle are the logic puzzles. These are in general rather tame (okay, the game is probably not made for computer science majors) and range from pressing the correct combination of buttons to make all doors open, over rotating prisms to make your light beam hit the switch, to time your path past various switches so you can push them in the correct order. Each empire comes with a different core mechanic and associated puzzles, which is kind of cool.

In Greece you are required to fall through the bottom to hit the gongs in the order listed at the bottom right. Meanwhile also avoid the fireball-shooting scorpion. The whatnow? Still not quite sure on the educational worthiness of this game.

In order to fulfill your quest, you have been given three items. In pure educational game tradition, these are absolutely completely real and feasible items. There are the rocket-boosted boots that make you jump higher, the miner’s helmet with light beam that goes as fast as you walk, and the personal energy field to keep the creatures away from you. It’s probably technology developed in the ancient empires but lost to human civilization over the years.

Hmm... What ancient Babylonian reindeer fits on the question mark?

All kidding aside, while there are some details that aren’t quite perfect, this game seems an interesting logical/platforming challenge to a six-year old. And it doesn’t really matter if six-year olds believe in alien-like explosive-spewing things. Serves them well to quietly cry in their bed when daddy doesn’t want to check for alien-like explosive-spewing things in the cupboard. Bloody six-year olds. 6/10.

The female version of Alter Ego is very much like the male version. The two versions differ only in text, with about three-quarters of the events unchanged or only changed slightly. That leaves a bunch of new content though, ready to be discovered… But because I don’t want to spoil everything, this might be a somewhat short review.

Let's find out!

Since the Internet provides ample proof of the fact that girls are evil, and since I already did an evil male version, let’s see the good female version! Childhood passes quickly without remarkable events. Well, almost…

A little mistake...

I'm so impressed in a girly way.

I have a relationship with one Jim from the age of 16 to 26, but on the big wedding day he decides to stay at home. Psah, men. I start focusing on my natural sciences high school education more. This of course comes with the much-required parties!

The decisions a girl faces...

A few more relations that break because of various reasons (the pig cheating on me, me posing for a semi-nude calendar, …) Dammit men, I want babies! I try desperately to woo the men, I make lots of money, I am smart and cute and creative and *everything* but nothing works. Despite being engaged three times, I never get wed and thus the game prevents me from having children. All men are bastards. It shows this game is written by a man. Hell, I even die while shopping at the age of 69. 69 for God’s sake. Sexist pig.

Still, not a bad way to go I guess

I guess it would be wrong for me not to award this game the same score as the male version: 9/10.

The city opens with a short cutscene about a UFO-like object attacking a modern city. It’s strange because there’s no further reference to this anywhere in the game – the rest of the game is set in a kind of medieval city. But hey, limited hardware won’t let us have much space for story, so pictures of a flying saucer attacking some buildings has to be enough, right? Let your fantasy do the job! Or maybe the manual explains a bit more, I haven’t seen it.

Invader's blood marches through my veins like giant radioactive rubber pants!

Past the opening sequence lies a menu with character creation option. Character creation is like a slot machine: there’s a bunch of numbers scrolling past, you hit a key at some point and the numbers on the screen are the stats of your new character! Faster than D&D, that’s for sure.

Hmm, the spaceship has nuked us back to medieval times? Would that be the story?

I have all this explanation about the parts before the game, because the game itself isn’t really much. You wander around in the city. You can enter some shops and inns and all that to get items or rest. You have random encounters which sometimes try to kill you and often succeed in it. And that’s it. There doesn’t seem to be a further goal except surviving and building a good character for the next installment of the series. I suppose you could make a map of the city. The game doesn’t really give much motivation to play along – no story, no conclusion, and it’s hard. Maybe it would be called a sandbox these days.

Which, you guessed it, killed me.

There is some fascinating tech behind the game though. The viewpoint is raytraced textured 3D (think Wolfenstein 3D, 7 years early, on way more limited hardware), there are a load of stats that are tracked and the city area is kinda large. But tech demos are not games. If you are fascinated with numbers, stats, and pointlessly mapping an area (there are maps on the internet), then you might have fun with this. It’s not my cup of tea. 3/10.

The game start off with a bit of set up. First, you enter your name and you have the opportunity to set up character by answering a few psychology profiling questions, or by letting the computer generate a character for you. Obviously, since I want to create a maximal evil character here, I take the questions.

Durrr

The next option is to select the phase of life at which you want to start the game. I start at “birth & infancy”, because it immediately starts off with the best question ever:

Alter Ego: making choices even before you are born

After that, the structure of the game is very simple. You see a network of events. There is no clear reason why these events are in a network, but it makes the presentation less dry. Each event is marked with a symbol, to signify roughly in what area of life it is situated: social, emotional, health, …

Main screen, with the "road of life"

Select one, and you’ll get a little text box explaining what is going on. You can then respond to the action by selecting both a mood and an action. Some combinations are obviously not possible (be unconcerned and cry), but sometimes the moods are interesting twists on the actions (do you curiously or aggressively approach a stranger?) and the combination of choices you make affect the outcome of the event. Most of the time it’s clear what is going on and what the “good” or “bad” outcome is, though the game is surprising some of the time. Sometimes, you are prevented from doing certain things because your character doesn’t have the necessary skills or a matching personality type. When you have finished an encounter, there might be changes in your personality: you might get smarter or less sociable, or an accident might leave you horribly disfigured.

Oops.

The character is tracked through a whole lot of numbers and percentages, showing for example your skills in the familial, intellectual or physical areas of life, or how gentle or trustworthy you are. The game also keeps track of your money and any possessions you might have bought or gathered along your life.

Still trying to get the calmness up to achieve magnificent bastard status

All this might sounds a bit boring, but the joy is in the descriptions of the event and how they play out. The game is often very funny and will sometimes try to mess with you. As a child, you might be noticing things you can’t label, so the game gives you vague descriptions (like a “hairy person with a cold nose” for a dog) and tries to let you figure out what is going on. Usually, if you figure it out, you might even be rewarded with increased intelligence.

What's going on here? Tip: they're not actually fighting!

It might even randomly start questioning you on trivia you will probably not know the answer to. Act like your character would and look it up if you want to score intelligence points! On another note, the game might also do things you don’t really expect it to do but that might have interesting conclusions.

Well. Shit.

Other situations are just plain funny. One situation had me read a piece of really bad poetry to a girl. At least at one point I could get out of a situation by declaring that it was “too ridiculous”, after which the game said that it was sorry they weren’t all gems of insight and wisdom. I once had the game trying to convince me a toad monster, hiding under the beds of children, is something really scary. It kept asking me whether I was scared already at each more gruesome description it gave. In the end, it went “Oooh, you’re so brave. BOO! Did I scare you now?” and if you answer “No” it’ll respond with “Did so, too.” And at one time a chain letter showed up, asking me to send the letter to ten people. Doing it would give me fortune, not complying would give me misfortune. The letter tried to convince me with the example of a non-complier’s dog being struck with a rare and dangerous disease. I obviously didn’t pass on the letter, but a week later my goldfish died of constipation. Awesome.

If anyone knows how to contact Helga, let me know

As for my little evil character… He couldn’t get a job during adolescence because he “lacked required qualifications”. I wonder what experience is needed to work at a fast-food restaurant. The same problem persisted during adultness. I couldn’t even get a job in sales, despite my confidence of 95% and trustworthiness of 2%! I couldn’t get to college to study because I lacked the money (no idea where it went). I couldn’t get money because I didn’t have a job, and the bank wouldn’t loan me any because I was not trustworthy. And it’s apparently not possible to lead a life of crime. Well. This sucks. But I guess I can just finish this game with $5 in my pocket… Then a random event goes “You have just won $250 in a fishing tournament”.

Eh. Okay. But then the following event happens:

Beats an iCompany giving me an iProfit I guess.

Yay!

That was random. Not that the money lasts for a long time. But it’s not over. I then meet a girl who on the first date wants to get married. I say I’m not ready for that (while thinking “shut up psycho bitch”) but then this shows up:

Psycho bitch has an unexpected side

I’m like WHOAH okay I’ll take you. And then

Psycho bitch keeps being a bitch. Probably psychotic too.

Awww. I eventually die at the age of 60 of a stroke caused by bad health, never having worked a day in my life and never having been in a steady relationship. I was 97% happy when I died and I had $5 in my possession.

All in all, I’m not sure how much of this game is “real” and how much is make-believe in a sort of ELIZA effect. It definitely looks like many of the situations and choices you find yourself in are not really realistic. As an example, the game makes you meet and fall in love with many, many girls, even when you are dating someone. It’s also jarring when the game sometimes doesn’t take into account your past or your personality scores, like having your mother call you to tell your father is depressed, while you were practically kicked out of the house earlier, never having had a pleasant experience at home. Still, the game mostly works great. Massively entertaining, not in the least because of the humor. 9/10

Games with moustache selection options are the best games (also see: Fallout 3)

Also interesting to know: there is an online version of Alter Ego which you can play for free: www.playalterego.com. Enjoy! Share your stories in the comments!

Apart from computer knowledge, we will need:

• a copy of teledisk.exe. I don’t know about the copyright status on this, but try not to break the law.
• Bochs, a free x86 emulation tool (in case you have no idea what that means… this is one hardcore tool).
• a copy of DOS. Of this I do know the copyright status, Microsoft is still pretty much alive so again, don’t break the law here. FreeDOS or something similar might work, I haven’t tried it.
• A way to manipulate FAT disk images
  • I used mtools, a free toolset to manipulate FAT disk images, on my Linux computer. If you are on a decent Linux distro, this is probably in you package manager or even already installed.
  • on Windows you’ll have less luck with mtools. Ben Lunt has compiled versions but these did not work on my Windows 7 64-bit machine. I couldn’t get them to compile either (missing headers) but I didn’t try very hard. Let me know if you tried mtools on Windows and how you did it.
  • I have also heard ImDisk is an alternative to mtools, allowing you to use images as real disks. You might give that a whirl if you don’t feel like command-lining today.

As a little aside, if you couldn’t gather these, there might be another course of action if you want to read and experiment a lot. Will Kranz has a page documenting the Teledisk file format and there is some code and binaries available. I didn’t want to figure it all out though, but it might be an interesting project to do more research on this. If you manage to get a useful program out of this that works on recent versions of Windows or Linux, let me know and I’ll add you a million times to this page, because that’s what you deserve.

Anyway. Our course of attack will be pretty straightforward: we will get DOS running on Bochs, then load up Teledisk, copy the Teledisk image to a Bochs image, then either play in Bochs or get the files from the image and into DOSBox or your favorite other way to play those games. Allons-y!

First things first, download and install Bochs. If you are on Linux, see your package manager. If you are on Windows, I guess you are able to do this yourself. Make sure to associate .bxrc files with Bochs, it’ll make your life easier.

I suggest you create a new folder where you will do all work in from now on. You’ll create a number of files and you want them together. I’ll name this folder ovovivipary because it’s a cool word. I hope you have a better naming system on your computer though.

We will start with adding a Bochs configuration file to ovovivipary, name it bochsrc.bxrc. This will allow you to quickly boot the virtual machine by just double-clicking this file. Mucho awesomeness. A fully-documented sample configuration file comes with Bochs, but if you want to you can simply take over mine, below. We’ll need to edit this file a few times so keep your favorite text editor (I suggest Notepad++ on Windows, though notepad should do) around.

megs: 32
romimage: file=$BXSHARE/BIOS-bochs-latest
vgaromimage: file=$BXSHARE/VGABIOS-lgpl-latest
vga: extension=vbe
log: bochsout.txt
mouse: enabled=0
cpu: ips=15000000
vga_update_interval: 150000

Next step is to create a hard disk for our virtual machine we’ll be running. We’ll use the bximage tool for this that comes with Bochs. Just run it and answer its questions. If you don’t know what kind of image to choose, go with flat file. 10 MB should be enough, but you can go for a bigger HD if you want to. I’ll name it c.img like proposed, that will be useful to keep it right in our head. Windows Vista/7 users take care: if you execute bximage from the start menu, it’ll try to dump the created image in the “Program Files” folder, where it probably has no writing permissions. Copy the program to ovovivipary and run it there, or go find the image in the depths of AppData\VirtualStore and copy that to ovovivipary, your call. BTW, if the file name of the image is blue in Windows Explorer, this is because the file is compressed: open the file properties, and check “size on disk”. Since the file exists of only nulls (byte value 0), Windows decides it can just store the attributes of the file, but doesn’t need all those zeros. Smart eh? You need not worry about this, the file can be used like any other file.

After c.img was generated, bximage printed a line starting with ata0-master: to add to your configuration file. So do that now. It’ll make Bochs recognize the hard drive which is always useful.

Disk image creation with bximage

Now that we have a virgin hard disk for our virtual system, let’s install DOS on it! We will need to boot our virtual machine from the DOS install floppy disks to do this. Good thing I had images of those around… Copy the images to ovovivipary and add the following lines to your bochsrc.bxrc:

floppya: 1_44=dosdisk1.img, status=inserted
boot: a

Where dosdisk1.img is the name of the first disk. Now we are ready to run our virtual machine! Exciting, isn’t it? Just double-click the bochsrc.bxrc file and off we go. What should happen is that the machine boots from the floppy image, the DOS install program asks you to format your hard drive and then starts installing DOS on it. If it asks you to change disks, you can click the little disk marked A: in the top left corner, then load the second image, and let the installer continue.

Installing DOS, sorry for the German

At the end of the installation, the installer asks you to remove all disks from your computer and it’ll then reboot and restart. Well, this will not work because we still have only the floppy registered as our only boot device. So since the installation is finished now anyway, kill the simulation (Bochs might appear to hang but just close it), edit the configuration file to say boot: c instead of boot: a, and then restart the virtual machine.

Achievement unlocked: Got DOS?

You should have DOS running now. If you got this far, pat yourself on the back and grab a fresh drink. It’s time to get to serious business.

We have DOS inside our virtual machine, and we have the Teledisk files outside the virtual machine. We need to get them inside the machine. As said before, I used mtools on a Linux box for this, but there are probably a dozen other ways of which probably a dozen are actually better. Please leave a comment if you can offer a better way!

Okay, so what we’re going to do here is that we will totally bypass DOS and that virtual machine business, and sneak some data on the HD image without it ever going to stop us. Sounds totally cyberpunkish and it’s totally awesome to do too. Let’s start by gathering all files we need together in one folder – for me that meant copying a bit of stuff between machines. The files we’ll need are the disk image c.img, the Teledisk executable teledisk.exe and the Teledisk game images, which I’ll assume is just one file game.td0. We’ll then inject the files on the disk image with the following commands:

mcopy -i c.img ./game.td0 ::
mcopy -i c.img ./teledisk.exe ::

The “::” means the following. mtools uses the DOS convention of naming a path by <drive>:<path>, for example C:\DOS means the \DOS path on the C drive. To name an image file as the drive, mtools uses a colon as identifier. So “::” means the root of the disk image specified by the -i switch.

Using mtools to copy data to the disk image

Get your specially constructed c.img back to ovovivipary and restart the virtual machine. Check if your files are there with the dir command. You can do some tidying if you want the files in their own directory, like me. I’ll put them in a folder called meiosis. By the way, I totally don’t like biology, biology students are all treehuggers without a life. At least I, as a computer science student, have a blog, a virtual machine and a life!

Everything ready in Bochs!

We can now almost run teledisk.exe and get our game unpacked! We first need something to unpack the game to. A floppy disk image! So go create one with the bximage tool. Now, there’s one catch here. Since the Teledisk images are images of a floppy on a pretty low level, we will need to get the exact right type of floppy, up to the number of sectors, tracks and all that hardware stuff. Fortunately, there are only a few categories possible as presented to you by the sizes in the bximage tool. Unfortunately, due to the compression used in the Teledisk image file, it’s not always possible to know what size of floppy you will need. Teledisk will tell you, but only once you have actually started writing. How very inconvenient. Still, not much you can do about it. Try to guess the correct size from the size of the Teledisk image file and create a new image. I’d suggest naming it a.img, and remember to add the line bximage tells you to add to the configuration file. You’ll also have to remove the line you added to make it load the DOS install disks, but I think you can figure that out.

If you have a candidate image ready in ovovivipary and set up in the bocshrc.bxrc file, we can start the virtual machine again. cd to meiosis and start teledisk.exe!

Title screen. Usually I put this at the top of my post...

After some fancy introduction, choose “Copy File to Disk”. Teledisk will ask you which disk you want to copy to, so select A: since that’s where you mounted your disk image. Then either type game.td0 or hit return to select the file from a list. Teledisk will read the file and might show a window with the comments stored in the file. After that, it’ll start writing the files to the disk! Yay!

Yes! Do your magic, Teledisk!

If there is a mismatch between the required disk size and the provided image, Bochs will complain heavily because Teledisk requested a non-existent sector or whatever. Take this as a cue you need to adjust the disk image. At this point, Teledisk will show you want kind of disk you need. If your knowledge of ancient data carriers isn’t complete, you might need to google a bit to find out what exact size conforms to what Teledisk message.

Sometimes, Teledisk might make a mistake, giving you errors as if a wrong type of image was used, but in the middle of writing. This might signify data corruption, or it might be totally harmless, I have no idea. You can try to continue the simulation in the Bochs window, after which Teledisk also figures out something went wrong so you can just continue there, too. Keep in mind that the end result you get from it might not be what you wanted though.

Okay, so right now you have a plain disk image of the game! You can now try to get the files back out of the image with mtools or similar, but this might not work for all games. The point of disk images is that there might be data on the disk that is not in the file system. Some games are really hardcore like that. But in that case, you can take a look at the IMGMOUNT command of DOSBox (although I don’t know whether it’ll be sufficient) or you can try playing the game in Bochs. You might need to dig around some more in the bochsrc.bxrc file in that case to make sure you emulate hardware the game will support.

Whatever you want to do next, it should be no big deal compared to the skills you just displayed in rescuing your data. Enjoy your game!

Title screen. The journal or whatever in the background has absolutely no relation to the game.

As is usual in these types of adventure games, the plot is laughably thin and nonsensical. Our protagonist P.J. Barrett goes to pick up his TV from the repair shop. However his TV is accidentally switched with the one from another customer, a warrior or barbarian that might have run straight from a D&D game. Nothing to do about it, and P.J. has to hurry because his special ladyfriend will be over tonight! So he goes back home, changes in his pajamas, and when the ladyfriend is in the bathroom to also change into something “more comfortable”, he settles in front of the TV. He turns the TV on, and then…

Don't you hate it when that happens?

He gets sucked through the TV into an alternate dimension, where he promptly gets a speech from a mysterious character named JonQuah, reprimanding him for not being the great warrior they had asked for. But hey, they’ll have to do with what is given to them, so you get the task of retrieving the Jewel of Light which was stolen by Helmar, the evil twin brother of JonQuah. So, only armed with his pajamas and a bowl of popcorn, our great hero P.J. (get it? P.J.? Pajamas?) sets out to save an alien universe!

The obvious first thing I want to try is to see whether the game is a nice game or a cruel game. So I take two steps to the top of the screen, and immediately fall down a crater and die. I guess that qualifies for cruel…

Obligatory death in 5 seconds

So okay. Stay away from the edges, don’t do stupid things, or at least save the game before doing them. In fact you better do a lot of stupid things, because in many cases the logic of the game is strange, to say the least. When seen in the universe, the actions our hero has to do kind of make sense. But the universe is so alien and strange that you’ll have a hard time figuring it all out. As an example (spoilers until the next picture), somewhere near the start you are supposed to capture a bird in a forest. No-one gives you any directions to the forest except for the general remark that “it will be a long journey”. From the start of the game, however, you can only reach about 5 screens by walking. Where is this elusive forest? Well, it’s apparently *down*. You see, you are on some sort of floating island, and you have to grab a flying creature that occasionally passes through the screen, which will safely bring you down. Now this creature looks completely unimportant and no-one even mentions it. It’s not something I would have ever found out. The whole game is like this, filled with all kinds of details, but about 90% of it are red herrings. Good luck finding the 10% signal in this colorful, living noise.

Obligatory funny responses to insignificant actions

Combine the alien logic with the usual guess-the-word problems which might stump you even if you are getting closer to the correct path, and there is a lot of room for frustration in this game. And frustration there was. At least for the first half hour. I discovered a few things and got up to about 10 points. However, there was apparently no way to go from there. So after that frustrating half hour, I took the easy path and just downloaded a walkthrough. Ah, Internet. I have no idea what I would do without you. I’d definitely not be the savior of an alien dimension though.

Obligatory dangerous path you have to pass at least twice

However, the strange feeling of the place is also its strongest point, in my opinion. There is a great variation in the places you will visit and there are many, many weird creatures that you will interact with, albeit with various levels of success. That is the main reason I would recommend this game. See the sights, meet the natives! But don’t forget to bring a guide, or you will become hopelessly lost. It wouldn’t work as an adventure game now, and I am not sure it really worked as an adventure game back then, but it works great as a view in the mind of a team of artists on LSD. Or, well, that’s my theory anyway. 7/10.

Obligatory bird doing a hip hop dance as a form of divination. Wait, what?

One year later, I’ve played 30 games out of the 893. That is 3.36% of the games. Perhaps more interesting, this means I need 29.77 years to complete the whole set. 30 years. By that time, I’ll be in the middle of my midlife crisis. Ouch.

So. Unless I want to be a slightly balding and unsatisfied-by-his-marriage semi-old man when I finish this, I need to go faster! I would like to make all sorts of promise like “in a month, I’ll have a lot less of other things to do”. But, while true, I don’t think that will have much of an effect really.

I will try a totally new system and I will base it on someone else’s system. Because systems you steal from someone else are the best ones after all. I have been following Carl Muckenhoupt’s blog for a while. Carl, aka baf, aka System Shock Programmer, aka Baf’s guide to the IF archive maintainer, aka a Hero. Anyway. He has a system he calls The Oath. It basically comes down to: I will complete all games I have, I will blog about my experiences and I will only buy new games in a ratio that decreases the stack of unplayed games.

So. An oath for myself. I don’t care about completion, I care about experiences. I don’t need to blog within 24 hours of playing a game. Also, calculating taxes is for people with too much time on their hand.

Starting on 1 August 2010, I will keep myself to the following policy for at least the next 12 months:

I will play all games on The List until I have a good experience of each. When I feel like I know what a game is about, and I think there is no significant enjoyment or experience left to be found in it, I will write a blog post about it. For each blog post I write, I will grant myself one (1) point. For each game or enhancement (in the form of expansion, DLC, or whatever) to a game I acquire, be it in retail, on distribution platforms like Steam or GOG, directly from the creator of the game, or any other way, I will subtract one point for every ten euro of the total cost of the game, rounded up. I will not purchase a game if it would give me a negative point total.

This oath purposefully excludes free (as in beer or speech) games and purposefully includes the whole piracy thing which I am not a part of anyway! Wew!

Now, I have a Starcraft 2 to earn! And some credit to build before I lose out on all kinds of promotions! Wish me luck.

Title screen

What’s it all about? You are a hero of sorts, on a quest from Zeus (of all people beings) to rescue his daughter Athena, apparently by destroying a whole load of evil demons, zombies, and other completely weird creatures. You can kill these nasties by either kicking or punching them. That’s the way of thinking I like…

I have been charged with a sacred quest!

Now of course, as the title suggests, there’s more to the game than this. Well, slightly more. Some of the enemies (blue bull-like things for some reason) drop powerups. Catch those powerups and you will grow stronger. Catch three of them and you will become a beast! This gives you some super strong attacks and prepares you to kill the bastard known as End Of Level Boss.

Transfoooorm! It's morphin' time! Roll out! Etc.

And once you killed the boss, onwards to the next level. You know the deal. Leaves me to say that this game is hard. The first level is okay after a few tries. But by the time you reach the second level, you’ll probably already have given up all hope for this game. Well, I did anyway. Eventually getting into the second level, I quickly died because I had my lives leeched by the first levelboss. Practice makes perfect, but practice takes time. I’ll leave it to the completionists…

Level boss 1, and me as werewolf to the left.

It’s apparently also playable with two players. As usual, I don’t have any friends to play this with. And if I had friends, I wouldn’t want to lose them by forcing them to play this game with me.

You've got to give the graphics team credit for creating some freaky monsters. Look at that malicious smile!

All in all, I can barely recommend this game. Sega has thrown out a version for XBLA which got rather bad reviews, but of course, this game might be pure nostalgia for some players. Me, I don’t see the appeal. The artwork is nice (though a bit more colors would be welcome to the modern gamer) but that’s about it. 4/10