This is another post in my series about the odd games that I have decided not to complete, although I will at least try them out for up to an hour or two.
Pac-Man Championship Edition 2
Developer: Bandai Namco Studios | Released: 2016 | Genre: Arcade, Maze
A significant update of the original arcade game with glowy graphics, techno music and additional rules. I was never a fan of the original. Too simple yet also too hard for me. I liked e.g. Mr. Do a lot better.
New rules? I could bomb jump (sort of like teleport) and picking up a fruit as it emerged seemed to change the maze layout on the fly – sometimes even with a snazzy Tempest zoom. There was one red ghost in the short time I played the game. It didn’t kill me until I had touched it a few times first, pissing it off. It could also collect a train of placeholder ghosts. And there was even a boss level.
Wasteland
Developer: Interplay Entertainment | Released: 1988 | Genre: RPG, Top-down
I tried this classic top-down RPG from 1988 a few years ago. Back then it was a just crude version with the original font and portraits. This time I tried the Steam version in DOSBox, and it had been spiffed up with a smoothed out font, high definition portraits, and a constant music soundtrack in the background.
The music was pretty good – very atmospheric and quite varied too.
I just accepted the preset party of four and went into a world that wasn’t much prettier than ASCII graphics. Found a town with a few buildings. Left and found another place. A farmer wanted me to kill the vermin in the fields next to a big satellite dish. Sounds easy, I thought, and jumped right in. Turns out the turn-based text fights against mostly prairie dogs took quite some patience and even almost decimated my party. At one point I tried to run, but even that required a lot of turn-based action.
Then I tried exiting the field, but instead I stumbled into a gray cave with a treasure at the end. Now I had to fight bunnies. Where the graphics actually showed the prairie dogs in the field, the cave didn’t show the enemies there at all. It was all surprise when moving. That felt a bit unfair.
I never played Wasteland back in the day and thus have no nostalgia for it. But I have a feeling I wouldn’t have had much patience back then either. There is too much text in drawn out fights and too much having to imagine everything in my head. But I do understand and respect its foundation for the later Fallout games, most of which I completed and adored.
Unturned
Developer: Nelson Sexton | Released: 2014 | Genre: FPS, Zombie
Didn’t really like this one. Perhaps the real fun is to be found in multiplayer?
It was a survival zombie FPS with minimalistic graphics. A tutorial revealed that there were also cars (which could even be refueled) and harvesting of plants and chopping down trees for crafting. Fishing too.
The single player game dropped me somewhere random in a big mountainous area with roads and houses scattered around with quite some distance between them. What I didn’t like was that I had nothing to defend myself with. No weapons. Not even harsh language. Green-skinned zombies were always waiting around those houses, and sneaking was hard. They easily discovered me and killed me in seconds.