F-29 Retaliator (1991)

Retaliator is a cool game that I used to play a lot of.  Actually it’s the only flight sim I’ve ever enjoyed.  Its gameplay involves cruising around on a small map (settings included ‘Pacific’ and ‘Middle East’) and destroying labelled targets and enemy aircraft in the area (splash one lizard, yo).  Its 3D engine is simple but remarkably smooth for its time.

What really makes the game fun is its head-to-head modem play.  The slower modem we typically used ran at 2400 baud, which meant choppy updates but otherwise a very playable experience.  The only problems came up when trying to fly in formation: a slight change in trajectory could cause your opponent to slam right into you.

Typical of the genre, Retaliator supports multiple views: the standard cockpit view, various views taken from outside the plane, and one looking “behind,” shown on the right.  Hm.  Is that you, or the copilot?  I’ve only ever seen one parachute come out of an airplane…

When you are shot, different parts of your plane stop working: radar, fuel lines, weapons. This is kind of cool—your sensors can get damaged and you can keep flying around.  But if you’re damaged badly enough, your engines will intermittently fail and your plane will start to nosedive. You can pull up, prolonging the inevitable, but eventually you must eject. Oh, and while your engines aren’t working, Retaliator plays the most horrible alarm out of the PC speaker.  Possibly one of the worst noises I’ve ever heard in my life.  Cool MIDI soundtrack, though.

Nerd Stories I

In junior high I had a (deserved) reputation as one of those brats who messed around with the school computers.  So when someone stole all of the mouse balls from the computer lab, I was a prime suspect.  The school principal came into the class to scold us…

Slicks ‘N’ Slide (1993)

Gunfire peppers the side of your car, shattering your windows. As you spin out of control, a green motorcycle buzzes past and takes the lead. Enraged, you slam your fist onto a red button, launching a heat-seeking missile after your attacker. The missile follows the motorcycle into a tunnel … then bits of green plastic spit out the other side.

It’s Slicks ‘N’ Slide by Timo Kauppinen!

Excelsior (1994)

You may not know this, but there exists a council — the Council of World Watchers — that plans history, then monitors all of the inhabited planets for incongruity. When things go wrong, demi-deities known as Fixers are sent to correct the timeline. But there’s a catch: in order to affect change on a world, a Fixer must assume the form of one of its inhabitants, however feeble…

In Excelsior, (1994, 11th Dimension Entertainment) you play a Fixer who’s been tasked with correcting history in the medieval world of Lysandia. If you’re curious, you can find Lysandia on plane 52, universe 13, subclass A; coordinates 152.21 by 546.4 by 1,321.43 by 72.2…

For auld time’s sake

Friday, Lonn came over to play some Gladiator, a game I’ve mentioned before. Way back when, we’d play side-by-side on the same keyboard, noses to the monitor. But for this re-enactment of our childhood, we plugged a wireless keyboard into the laptop, which we then plugged into the TV: this let us sit on the couch and play on separate keyboards (Lonn on the wireless, me with the laptop cooking in my lap). We played for hours!

Castle of the Winds (1989)

Castle of the Winds by SaadaSoft (i.e., Rick Saada) was my very first Roguelike. You control a legless farmer who just can’t seem to catch a break: First, your farm gets torched, and then your godparents are slain. To even the score, you venture into the nearby abandoned mine and systematically kill every creature in sight. But when you emerge, someone has gone and burned your village to the ground!

The Buckaroo Box

As a humongous nerd, I can cite machines and people as influences. This is the (brief) story of the Buckaroo Box.

Back in ‘95 or ‘96, I, a young nerd, posted a WTB for a cheap desktop in the local alt.forsale. Buckaroo replied. Mid-30s, lived in his parents’ garage, sweatpants-clad, hadn’t shaved in days; but when I went to meet Buckaroo (Dad prudently accompanying me) I saw a grown-up computer nerd and honestly thought that he was the coolest person I had ever met.

The Buckaroo Box was a gynormous 286 with a 10″ monochrome-orange monitor. This monitor “featured” an anti-glare mesh that reduced reflecting light (and readability). Most of the time, I’d use this setup to dial up a plaintext public access ISP called the Edmonton FreeNet at 9600 baud (this may explain my current preoccupation with mouseless interfaces).

Thanks to the Buckaroo Box, I am a nerd for life.

The Darkest Day

The Darkest Day was a game my friend Lonny and I were working on for fun a few years ago. It has nothing to do with the Baldur’s Gate mod of the same name. We planned for TDD to be your basic Roguelike, with a graphical tileset, turn-based combat, an inventory system, and a complex skill system based on experience. We’d created our own graphics, written our own MIDI music, and had a fairly reasonable AI system (for the genre), but the coolest part of the game was the story we’d planned…

Gladiator (1995)

Gladiator (or glad if you’re an affectionate fan) was released in 1995 by a group of shareware programmers called the Forgotten Sages (FSGames). You were tasked with hiring and training mercenaries, travelling across the realm, and accumulating wealth and power. glad is one of the few shareware titles I’ve actually registered.*