Airlift Rescue

Airlift Rescue is a 1995 freeware remake of Choplifter, coded by David Fleming.

That’s almost all there is to say about it, really. If you don’t know Choplifter, it’s very easy. 64 people are being held hostage by someone non-USA. You have to rescue them with your helicopter. You shoot tanks, planes and, err, alienthings trying to kill you, you pick up the hostages and you drop them at the embassy. No score is being awarded for shooting enemies, only for rescuing the hostages.

Air Bucks

Trying to get a “Read more” thing on here to keep the front page a bit more readable. Notify me of problems.

Air Bucks is a 1992 air company management simulator, developed by Impressions and distributed by Sierra. Impressions is probably known best for the Caesar series of, well, ancient city management simulation. You know, the ones with all the fire. But we’re not here for Caesar – that’s for a later post.

Just in case you also had a fluid dynamics exam recently: remember planes that take off leave behind a starting vortex and flying planes shed trailing vortices both because of Helmholtz's theorems. More info on Wikipedia.

Airborne Rangers

Guest review by Crazy from the comic No Happy Endings. He actually made that blog just now so I could link to it but check it out as it’s good. Thanks for helping me out with the review while I’m preparing for a fluid dynamics exam I will never pass anyway! And this Amarth-person you might see referred in the text is just me. Pseudonyms, nicknames, confusion is lovely.

(To all those reading: Yes, i know i should be capitalizing my “i”-s but when i was first learning to write i was kind of unsure if i should be capitalizing it. Seemed like such an egotistical thing to do. Capitalize any moment you refer to yourself. And anyway, it’s stuck and it’s there and you can go suck on a caramel if you don’t like it. Seriously. It’ll mellow you out.)

2009-08-26 21:42:16  <Amarth> Don’t you want to play a fun DOS game instead and guest review it on LPO? 😛

Why, that’s a splendid idea! Of course, since i’m an irredeemably boring person, i decided to define “fun” as “the next one alphabetically”. And since i apparently don’t know the alphabet, I played “Airborne Ranger” instead.

Slowwww

Heya dear readers, just to let you know I’m drowning in work, stress and other nastiness. I’m currently dividing my time between Summer of Code evaluations, a project deadline in 12 hours (it’s 4 AM now – and oh yeah, I need to hand it in on paper 100 km from here) and a huge exam on Friday. After Friday I’ll try to get back to a decent rate of posting, let’s say best case value 1 game/day and worst case amortized 1 game/week.

In the meantime I suggest you find your entertainment somewhere else. How about the infamous Blue Ball Machine?

War of the Lance

Sorry for the radio silence, people. When you allow yourself a break, it’s hard to pick the work up again. But, back in business for now. Also, new banner, made by Anonymous1157. Thanks!

War of the Lance (labeled as “AD&D War of the Lance”) is a turn-based strategy game set in the AD&D universe of Dragonlance. I’m not familiar with the setting and I apologize to the fans for all the big mistakes I will make in this review. Feel free to correct me. The story goes kinda like this: evil country (Highlord) invades good countries (Whitestone). You are Whitestone, fight back. This being AD&D, there are some subtleties though. But that will require quite some space to explain. *clears throat*

Adventure Writer

For those following the list, I’ve skipped War of the Lance and Adventure for now because I need considerably more time to work through them. Because I don’t want to keep postponing them there might be a few days without posts in the following weeks, depending on how my days work out. We’ll see.

Adventure Writer is an interactive fiction authoring tool written by Graeme Yeandle and released in 1983. It is better known as The Quill. The version I have absolutely refuses to work. However, read on…

That's as far as it goes

Ack-Ack Attack!

Ack-Ack Attack! is a now freeware game by Kurt W. Dekker. This game takes the classic “Paratrooper” (or Sabotage) game and takes it to quite the extreme. For those that don’t know those games, gameplay is rather easy. You control an anti-air gun. Helicopters fly in, dropping paratroopers. If 4 paratroopers land on one side of you, they work together to blow up your gun emplacement and it’s game over. The objective is thus to shoot down both the helicopters and the paratroopers as fast as possible.

Simple title screen

Ace Of Aces

Ace of Aces is a combat flight simulator published by Accolade in 1986. That makes it the same age as me, but I believe I’ve aged a lot better, thank you very much. The game was released for many platforms, so even if you were not a dossie you might recognize it.

Abrams Battle Tank

The M1 Abrams is a US battle tank which, according to Wikipedia, was used in battle in the ’90 Gulf war and the ’03 Iraq war. The Abrams Battle Tank game is from 1988. Because no prior battles had been fought with the tank, public enemy number 1 at the time was picked: the Soviets. You’ll fight a series of fictional battles against a (quoting the manual) “large mediocre force” of Soviet tanks. I think I can see some Cold War propaganda seeping through in this game.

My steel barrel shooting hot loads in your face

ABC Wide World of Sports Boxing

I’m a little boxing game, short and stout

here is my face, please punch me on the snout.

When I get all roughed up hear me shout:

One, two, three, four… ten, knock-out!

Another boxing game, woe is me. ABC Wide World of Sport Boxing is part of a series of sport games associated with the American Broadcasting Company. According to MobyGames, most games in the series were released for Windows so I won’t review the series. Boxing was released in 1991.

Say hello to Dan Dierdorf!