Pac-Man 2 - Hot Dogs & Cats Living Together

Written by Michael

Junior: I was late submitting my game review to TAG and now I’m sad

Welcome back, fellow chompers!  Let’s play some more of this game based on the two major food groups for teenagers in the 1980s, pizza and gumballs.

When last we left, we had just gotten a flower for Lucy, Pac-Junior's rather pale-faced girlfriend.  Now, it seems that Junior is sad.

Universe - Stranger in a Strange Land

Written by MenhirMike

Having landed on the asteroid and being given some sort of goal to get us going ("try and find a way out of this place"). Let's explore!

The interface is controlled with the left mouse button to walk somewhere and interact with stuff, while the right mouse button brings up a button bar at the bottom. There are icons for "Pick Up", "Options", "Use", "Look", "Talk", "Attack", and "Inventory". The "Options" item opens another menu with additional commands: "Insert", "Push/Pull", "Eat/Drink", "Wear", "Throw", "Combine", "Open/Close", "Jump", and "Info". The "Info" item opens a third menu with "Disk I/O", "Copyright Info", and "Scene Info".

Elegance or Nuisance? Time will tell.

This feels like an attempt to declutter the interface: Important stuff like Pick Up, Use, Look is directly there, while secondary commands are just a click away. But we’re also in the weird transitional phase in adventure gaming between a large amount of verbs and future games with essentially just Use and Look. It will be interesting to see how much the verbs under "Options" get used, because if you have a bunch of verbs you really need to use them in the game design. This has the potential to be also very clunky if most of the game requires an extra click to go through Options all the time.

Goblins Quest 3 – From heaven to hell

By Ilmari

I began the game in an empty flying ship, bombarded with stones, starting to slowly sink to the ground. The obvious goal was to get out of there alive.

Even if there’s a parachute lying around?

Pac-Man 2 - Riding the Midnight Train

Written by Michael

The white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only.

Welcome back!  I’m going to admit to being a little less-than-eager to write this post.  See, the game is a lot more arcade and a lot less adventure than we originally hoped.  

But I’m a trooper.  I’ll get through this.

I don’t have the reflexes (or the patience) for arcade games like I did 30 years ago.  But I suppose that’s many of the people in this room right now, because those of us who still prefer adventures often prefer using our brain over our brawn.  It’s why, when the comments exploded on our coverage of Fate of Atlantis, the majority of us seem to prefer the “team” and “wits” paths over the “fists” choice.

Still, this is a fun game, and a lot less “arcade” than some other titles.  

Game 164: Universe (1994) - Introduction

Written by MenhirMike

British game developer Core Design is one of the more beloved Amiga developers, thanks to classics like Rick Dangerous, Chuck Rock, Banshee, or Bubba 'n' Stix. Of course, the one game that overshadows all of their other games combined is Tomb Raider, which also helped Sony’s PlayStation dominate the market even more than it already did (despite first releasing on Sega's ill-fated Saturn console).

But we're here to look at their adventure game output, and they are certainly not beloved for that. In fact, there are only two games to list: 1992's Curse of Enchantia (which was reviewed here by Alfred n’ the Fettuc and scored a whole 22 points) and today's topic, 1994's Universe. I almost thought that they had a saving grace because they also made Hook - but that's actually an action game on Genesis and not the adventure game, which was made by Ocean Software.