Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio. Try and grow a city-state by strategically distributing resources. Poor distribution results in death by famine, disease or invasion. Good distribution keep state growing and eventually become king to win the game. I played it on a Commodore PET.
There was a local band where I am 20+ years ago called Naucet. With songs such as “This is Not a Convenient Time to be Stabbed”. I have absolutely no idea what happened to the band, where they went, what they did. I can find no reference to them anywhere online whatsoever. I have a musician friend who was friends with them(maybe just one of them, I forget at this point) and has copies of their music on an old hard drive somewhere in a closet. Been a number of years since I’ve seen/heard from said friend, so I can only assume whether or not he still has that old hard drive. If he does, then for all I know, that might be the only place in existence that you can find that music.
I love stuff like that. I’ve got demo tapes and 7" records from local punk bands from the 90s. Some were kids from my school or kids I used to skateboard with.
A lot of it is just rubbish, but it means something to me. I’ll put a few songs on every couple of years, laugh at the hand-drawn artwork, reminisce, and sing along.
Pretty sure there’s very few, if any, other copies of some of that stuff around anymore.
Moraff’s Escapade for early Windows, or more specifically, the glitch levels in it.
If you spam the “next level” cheat button (which if I remember correctly is F8) enough times you’ll go past the levels that were intentionally designed and start exploring the game’s RAM.
Interesting!! I’ll have to check that one out. I was a big fan of Moraff’s World and i played a lot of Steve Moraff’s other shareware games back in the day. Never heard of that one though!
Two additions from the 3do era, PO’ed and Killing Time.
PO’ed was an fps with over engineered level designs and humanoid butt cheeks with legs and teeth that fired green projectiles. The 3do version had terrible controls and the game came out shortly before the console was abandoned. It was later released to ps1 to no fanfare, but had updated controls.
Killing Time was a cross between Doom and 7th Guest. It has fmv sprites to advance the story and is generally pretty advanced for its time. After Panasonic abandoned the 3do, Killing Time was ported to pc. It’s currently on sale at GOG. I might buy it lol
Video games: Weird Dreams and Spectre VR both for PC back in the early 90s iirc
Music: one artist i really enjoy that unfortunately died from covid in 2020 though he was only in his 20s… His name was Cesar Alexandre and i got to know and love much of his work as Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza. In fact, my first thought when i heard the opening track from their EP Daily Night Euphoria was that it would have been a great soundtrack for Spectre VR…
there is this film from the late 80s called miracle mile about a guy who answers an incoming call at a payphone outside a diner in los angeles, and its a panicked military officer who dialed the wrong phone number who says he just launched americas nukes and that a nuclear retaliation will hit american soil in about an hour. a lot of the film is spent without being fully convinced of the authenticity of the phone call and the film has a slightly dreamlike pacing which makes it feel pretty tense, and theres a scene that stuck with me where the main character has a nosebleed in the diner after the phone call. i feel like even as far as cult films go this one is a little under the radar and, even though its not a life altering film, probably deserves a little more credit than it gets.
A 3D, first person pacman clone that I played on a 286 MS DOS laptop in the nineties. I don’t remember its name and I’ve never seen it since.
A programming game from the early 2000s called something like Fleet Commander. (But none of the many games named something like Fleet Commander that I can currently find online are it.) This game had a VB-inspired, event driven programming language. You used it to command fighters, bombers and fleet command ships. Each ship had its own AI script it would execute.
Sorry, I missed one more critical detail there… This game was in space! Played on a 2D, wraparound surface, with a top-down perspective, but it was definitely in space.
The fighters were fast and cheap but weak and could only shoot lasers.
The bombers were slower but tougher and could fire missiles. (Missiles could also be scripted, come to think of it. And if you made them stop, they turned into mines)
The fleet ships could manufacture other ships. You only have a single fleet ship at the start, but as time goes on, you can build more. …if you haven’t spent all your resources on building fighters and bombers.
I don’t think it’s totally forgotten, but an old nes game no one talks about called Bump n jump. You play a buggy in a top down style racer; think spy hunter. You’re meant to race to the end of levels, crashing into (or avoiding) other vehicles for points. You can jump over bridges and gaps as well, and each level ends with a huge leap of faith ocean jump.
I feel like it was largely forgotten in gaming history, but I loved it when I was a child I put many hours into it.
I’d never met anyone but my mom who’d played Solomon’s Key prior to Nintendo straight up adding it to the NSO.
The other game I never hear about was the ID4: Independence Day floppies that came in cereal boxes or something. Don’t really remember the games that well but I do remember trying to collect them all.
Also, I once basically got gaslighted into thinking that Falling Down was just a fever dream of mine until one day I’d heard the name in a Tech N9ne song and it all clicked again.
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