Does anyone remember a Windows game called Yoda Stories? I had such fond memories of it that I tried to find the game or an emulator version multiple times. No luck. It was an elegant game from a more civilized time where resolution, shading, texture and frame rate did not define how good a game was.
There was also Indiana Jones Desktop Adventures which used the same engine. Both were rather harshly reviewed at the time for being "pointless" - presumably the reviewers didn't like the random generation - while "rogue" (and Nethack, etc) existed, the idea of a "roguelike" hadn't quite gelled as a concept in pop culture yet.
I remember it fondly. My family had a lower-end 486 and it couldn't run a lot of games but it ran Yoda Stories great! Loved that game as a kid. LucasArts really was a gem (loved Grim Fandango, Dark Forces, Jedi Knight, Full Throttle, etc.).
I loved Jedi Knight. There still isn’t anything quite like logging into the Zone and having light saber battles where the saber model is replaced with a full size star destroyer :)
Note: I had very good luck with DosBox on a pile of games from that era and older lately. (Edutainment mainly). I didn't try this one though. Now I want to...
I bought a copy of Afterlife from one of the Scholastic catalogues when I was in primary school after already having had a blast with Sim City 2000.
I absolutely loved the graphics and the theme and everything, but as it turns out, I had absolutely no idea how to play it and never got far enough into it to really appreciate its gameplay.
I should probably give it another go as an adult who has a bit more patience for reading through instructions than I did as a kid.
1. Find a map with the maximum amount of buildable space
2. Start the game with the maximum speed to above 5000 years
3. Build Hell first and only
4. Pause, build the portal already thinking in upgraded form.
5. Build long straight roads, columns spaced 4 from each other, avoid crossing
6. Check the sins demand
7. Usually, the green is the most demanded
8. Don’t touch anything about the planet
9. This is key: using green as example, build 2x2 spaced so the neighbor is diagonal, never adjacent.
10. Build your first wave of buildings, and essentials (dystopias, the trams, etc. I assume you know those things)
11. Open the portal, make a lot of money
12. Upgrade the portal, make more money
13. Max capacity reached, starting to lose souls and money, you adjust the building’s efficiency to white for every building manually until you are rich
14. Buildings start to reach its top version and capacity, lock them
15. Activate the bats , y to their guano are excellent to upgrade the buildings. Also keep other disasters away during a grace period
16. Then keep growing, adjusting buildings efficiency, more portals, more buildings
17. You only need half the Hell, to achieve hell’s Omnibulges
18. Then star heaven
19. Follow heaven best practices and you reach to Love Domes very easily and rich af
20. I would only train later in the game. Build the best training school, make it only accept top 10%, left side, watch and leave 20% no lower because it can cause excess oof demons or angels, unless you want to see the a special ending
21. Endings can be quite fun to achieve (then you want to mess up with the planet)
I'd recommend this. As kids my brother and I could never complete a game on the BBC Micro called Imogen[0]. It was amazing for the time in that your character could transform into three modes (wizard / cat / monkey) and on one screen a fourth mode, and the transformation looked smooth even back then. However - we never completed it. As an adult I found it again and while I completed it fairly easily, it was a nice memory.
I played it summer of 2005, the same year I binged Douglas Adams' complete non-HHG works (including 'Last Chance to See' on CD-ROM and the interactive fiction game, 'Bureaucracy').
Afterlife is wonderfully fun and satisfying to experience to completion for the first time, and what it might lack in replayability it more than makes up for with humor and design.
I still play once a year. But now I can reach full omnibulges and love domes in less than an hour. But I remember spending months to survive until I discovered the cheat code (btw if you use too much, it triggers something that I can’t remember, it can mess up the game as a punishment).
The I figured out to let the planet evolve and grow it’s population because then, your afterlife has high demand thus more money, that detail solves the hardest part of the game!
The other insight which came much much later, the better capacity per area is given by the top 2x2 and 4x4 multi color. 3x3 top buildings are badass looking but they offer smaller max capacity for souls, we are aiming in reaching 1 billion souls using the least amount of area so you always have free space to build as demand explode.
What I like about sim city 2K is that it is like an arcade sim game. It is super easy to get up and running without too much prior knowledge. You can build a successful city without reading through the manual.
I also like that there's no ending. Maybe this makes it "easy", but it promotes setting specific goals for yourself and exploration rather than going through certain expected motions to meet a preset goal. But there are the scenarios for people who like a preset challenge.
These are my favorite kinds of blogs. Irrelevant knowledge formed from notes; even if I’m interested in game development or retro games it has little use for me to peruse, but it’s fun to play the observer and read into people’s human digest or solutions to abstract issues. I wish there were more blogs like this. Thanks for sharing.
Side note, Lucasarts' games rewired my kid brain to expect humor and (good) voice acting in games. It's really guided (and limited) what games I'm able to enjoy
Wow, this is wild. I'd never even heard of this game.
Based on the linked article, this seems exactly like the kind of game that would have had an AMAZING sequel.
You know the type of game I mean. The first game breaks all types of new ground with a bunch of innovative ideas and is fun, but also has a lot of jank and rough edges because they were trying so many new things at once. And then the sequel is where it all really comes together. The ideas that didn't work are fixed or discarded, everything else gets polish, and a few new ideas are introduced.
I love this game. The whole design, the voice acting, humour and frustratingly hard game play as you get further into the game. If you like other Lucasarts games, highly recommend just playing through the tutorial at the very least.
Because of my poor English, I thought this post was about life at LucasArts after the sale. I was disappointed. I never had time to play LucasArts games: Leisure Suit Larry, Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals and similar games took up all my time.
It's not your English proficiency. I didn't know this game existed, so before clicking, I expected it was about LucasArt's legacy on the games industry, or what former people there are doing now.
I've got good enough English as a native speaker and I thought the same thing, don't worry. That said, still an interesting article about a game I managed to never hear of before, despite being immersed in exactly those sorts of games at the time.
> Lucasfilm, at one time had a gaming subsidiary called Lucasarts
I am given to understand that this was always the setup; the gaming subsidiary was always called LucasArts.
But the games suggest something different. Early games are branded "Lucasfilm". The first Monkey Island game to have LucasArts branding is the third in the series.
As far as I remember, they were called LucasArts, except their first title (Labyrinth, 1986) was published and distributed by Activision. Everything else, from Maniac Mansion (1987) to Escape from Monkey Island (2000), was published by LucasArts.
/edit I stand corrected... I just checked the intro on the c64 version of Maniac Mansion, and it does indeed state Lucasfilm Games, not LucasArts. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM8ot8bJS3Q)
I've just remembered whichever version of Sim City I played as a kid used to have the option (and encourage?) to take on debt. I found the interest a killer.
I don't envy politicians having to run a country, knowing that 10% + of all government spending is just going towards interest payments for past spending.
As with all debt, you hope that it was used to buy assets that are earning more than the interest cost, and not just on a consumable.
Thinking about it, I wonder if this doesn't capture the whole picture. It is the percentage of spending, but doesn't capture whether that total spending denominator is itself more or less than the government is earning. Suppose one year, a government spent twice as much as it earned. Even if the interest payments stayed the same, wouldn't the "interest payments as a share of expenditure" halve that year?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJT4sdifLXM
Note: I had very good luck with DosBox on a pile of games from that era and older lately. (Edutainment mainly). I didn't try this one though. Now I want to...
I absolutely loved the graphics and the theme and everything, but as it turns out, I had absolutely no idea how to play it and never got far enough into it to really appreciate its gameplay.
I should probably give it another go as an adult who has a bit more patience for reading through instructions than I did as a kid.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imogen_(video_game)
Afterlife is wonderfully fun and satisfying to experience to completion for the first time, and what it might lack in replayability it more than makes up for with humor and design.
The I figured out to let the planet evolve and grow it’s population because then, your afterlife has high demand thus more money, that detail solves the hardest part of the game!
The other insight which came much much later, the better capacity per area is given by the top 2x2 and 4x4 multi color. 3x3 top buildings are badass looking but they offer smaller max capacity for souls, we are aiming in reaching 1 billion souls using the least amount of area so you always have free space to build as demand explode.
I also like that there's no ending. Maybe this makes it "easy", but it promotes setting specific goals for yourself and exploration rather than going through certain expected motions to meet a preset goal. But there are the scenarios for people who like a preset challenge.
Side note, Lucasarts' games rewired my kid brain to expect humor and (good) voice acting in games. It's really guided (and limited) what games I'm able to enjoy
Based on the linked article, this seems exactly like the kind of game that would have had an AMAZING sequel.
You know the type of game I mean. The first game breaks all types of new ground with a bunch of innovative ideas and is fun, but also has a lot of jank and rough edges because they were trying so many new things at once. And then the sequel is where it all really comes together. The ideas that didn't work are fixed or discarded, everything else gets polish, and a few new ideas are introduced.
Too bad it never got one...
I am surprised to hear that people felt this game was hard! Maybe it was because I was younger when I played it but I thought it was a lot of fun.
I do recall trying to get a "legit" copy of this game several times over the years and it's availability has been either nonexistant or barely there.
It's odd that it became so obscure considering it was released by a major, even if then declining, game company.
I am given to understand that this was always the setup; the gaming subsidiary was always called LucasArts.
But the games suggest something different. Early games are branded "Lucasfilm". The first Monkey Island game to have LucasArts branding is the third in the series.
/edit I stand corrected... I just checked the intro on the c64 version of Maniac Mansion, and it does indeed state Lucasfilm Games, not LucasArts. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM8ot8bJS3Q)
(/me goes to check YT videos)
Yes I'm right, see https://youtu.be/6lTz2nkPNXA?t=32
But the 2 advisers were so funny!
I don't envy politicians having to run a country, knowing that 10% + of all government spending is just going towards interest payments for past spending.
As with all debt, you hope that it was used to buy assets that are earning more than the interest cost, and not just on a consumable.
There are high numbers here that must be difficult: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-government-expen...
Thinking about it, I wonder if this doesn't capture the whole picture. It is the percentage of spending, but doesn't capture whether that total spending denominator is itself more or less than the government is earning. Suppose one year, a government spent twice as much as it earned. Even if the interest payments stayed the same, wouldn't the "interest payments as a share of expenditure" halve that year?