The Oregon Trail — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 18)

So for fun I sometimes sit around and tweak the list of games I’d like to include in this feature. Games get moved up and down all the time, but the overarching principle I use is this: What games should a person experience before they die? And more presently for myself, which games would I want to write about before I die?

It’s morbid, but then, so are many games.

Which leads us to one of the most brutal lessons many people of a certain age ever experienced via the educational game The Oregon Trail: that life is constantly trying to kill you.

It’s not what I’d call a subtle lesson either.

It cracks me up to this day that educators saw fit to knock this lesson into kids’ heads for something like a generation of kids (maybe more?).

“Hey kids? Want to learn about the world? Well here’s this ‘history game’ [wink, wink] that’ll show you how much life sucks sucked. Have a good time getting adjusted!”

The thing is, this game was wildly addictive anyway.

Yeah, it was borderline impossible to avoid snakebites and/or cholera. But the point of the thing was to try to win anyway, and when someone in the class was finally able to confirm that, yes, it was possible to make it all the way to the end without sustaining complete disaster, well that was just the perfect brew of crack cocaine the rest of us needed to continue to come back to it.

Plus it was a video game. In class. As opposed to math worksheets or some other mundane task like collecting rocks.

OF COURSE everyone loved this game.

The Oregon Trail at a glance:

Genre: Educational
Released: 1985
Platform: Apple
No. 9 on Time’s 50 Best Video Games of All Time
Continue reading The Oregon Trail — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 18)

WhoDatJedi podcast: Han shot first! Until he didn’t!

Han shot first!

That saying gives me the shivers, as it denotes fan entitlement. But there’s no denying that many of George Lucas’ changes to “A New Hope” he debuted with “The Special Edition” in 1997 continue to create frustration for a great many fans.

On this episode we dove into why, whether any of the changes are good, and how this problem came into being in the first place.

Continue reading WhoDatJedi podcast: Han shot first! Until he didn’t!

Tetris — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 17)

Tetris is an essential play for everyone.

This is stipulated here, and pretty much everywhere else too: Tetris is a game everyone must play.

That’s not surprising, or at least it shouldn’t be to anyone currently breathing air. This puzzle game — in which different shapes fall out of the sky and one must arrange them so that you can fill in a line to clear out more room for still more falling blocks — is widely considered the best puzzle game in existence, if not the best video game … period.

Again, so stipulated.

What’s kind of fun about Tetris is that its roots account for some of its pervasiveness. This game has been ported an astounding 65 times and been purchased an even more astounding 202 million times. This fact, that there are dozens of versions of this game and it really doesn’t matter which version you play (unless it’s the Genesis version; that version sucks), is unique in this industry.

Also unique is its backstory, which involved a Russian programmer, the U.S.S.R. government, several gaming companies, and — for some reason — Hungary.

It’s one of the most popular games of all time. And yet, would it have been so popular if its licensing rights hadn’t become so bizarrely entangled?

Possibly not.

It got ported and ported and ported again, because no one knew enough about who owned the thing to be scared enough not to pirate the thing.

And thusly, Tetris spread like a disease.

Tetris at a glance:

Genre: Puzzle
Released: 1987
Platform: PC (and everything else)
EGM’s No. 1 game of all time
Continue reading Tetris — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 17)