First off, I want to apologize to readers of this space for being remiss in my posting duties. December is a hectic month, what with the holidays just around the corner, and finding time to play good, classic video games is getting harder.
So with that in mind, I’ve decided to start a new topic or category, Video games I want to play forever. It’s very literal. It will feature video games that I love and those that I want to keep playing until my computer conks out, or until my body crumples from exhaustion.
Without further ado, I present to you …read more

Not that Starship Troopers: Terran Ascendancy isn’t mentioned in a lot of video game-related websites and blogs. It’s just darn disappointing reading about it on Wikipedia. Why? Go check out the entry:
Starship Troopers: Terran Ascendancy is a real-time tactics video game developed by Blue Tongue Entertainment and published by Microprose on October 28, 2000. The game is based on both the 1997 movie Starship Troopers and the book Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.
It’s so short! Am I the only video game player who played the game?
The graphics and sound aren’t shabby as this video shows:

The gameplay is great, that I …read more

If the little stick guy from Lode Runner only had a face to go with the way he/she/it moved across levels and mowed down bad guys, his/her/its mug would probably be plastered on every video game magazine available at least once a year.
What? You’ve never heard of Lode Runner? Well, that’s kinda impossible, but for those who aren’t kidding when they say that they’ve never even seen stick man running around brick platforms, climbing stairs and collecting mounds of what seems to be gold dust, here’s a little backgrounder for you:
Lode Runner is a 1983 platform game, first published by …read more

I’m currently watching a video on the history of video games by YouTube user applemctom, and my wife, Joyce, keeps asking me why I know majority of the games featured in the video. I guess my video games addiction is finally showing, eh? To test my mettle, I tried to list down in order all the games shown in the two-minute footage. Unfortunately, I didn’t get them all. Before I show my list (rather, before you take a look at it), watch the video and try listing down in order all the games that you see. Let’s compare notes later.

Well, …read more

What do you do if you only have a 386 PC on your desk and need to sate this craving for world domination? Why, play Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator, of course. And this is exactly what I did back in 1994, when I had been stuck for hours on end manning the editorial offices of the college paper.
Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator, or simply Conflict, is a turn-based government simulation game designed by David Eastman and published by Virgin Interactive in 1990. Although available for DOS, Atari ST, and Amiga, I played it only on DOS on (yes, you …read more

I’ve been asking this question since the early 2000s, and I don’t know for the life of me why I didn’t bother looking the answer up with Google, or any other search engine for that matter. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to ruin the mystery. It turns out, however, that the disappearance of Strategic Simulations Inc. is not a mystery after all.
Like all things in the corporate world, Strategic Simulations Inc., or SSI, was acquired by a bigger video games development firm. Join me in a virtual tour of the history of SSI, which is, for me, one of …read more

Okay, I’m stumped. Not that I mind, really. Not much anyway. It’s a little annoying knowing that you can’t beat a video game that you’ve played before. I’ll get over it, though.
Before I begin another mind-numbing round of Dungeon Keeper, which is, to me, one of the best games ever produced by Bullfrog Productions, I’m going back to the basics of the game in hope of retrieving as much useful information that will help me through my relearning phase. No, it’s not cheating. Let’s call it a reconnaissance.
Well, Dungeon Keeper’s interface is pretty much like that of real-time strategy games. …read more

By trying to keep up, I mean my futile attempts to keep up to the game as memories of playing it more than a decade ago flood my video game-addled head.
After a few hours (yeah, right) of playing Dungeon Keeper again, I still can’t make heads or tails of how the game works, despite having played it hundreds of times in the past … way baaack in the past.
So my knees finally buckle (or my eyes finally give way to Morpheus’ sand) and I sleep on it. While dreaming of Dungeon Keeper, I get this idea of doing a little …read more

Well, at least that’s how I see my role in this video game where you get to slap the butts of goblin slaves and other monsters to keep them in line and do your bidding.
Dungeon Keeper is a PC-based strategy game released by Bullfrog Productions in 1997. Gosh, has it really been a decade? Going back to the topic, the game puts you into the role of (what else!) a dungeon keeper instead of a knight in shining armor or a muscle-bound warrior in search of good booty. Yes, pretty cool, huh?
Your goal as Dungeon Keeper is to 1) build …read more

Ahhh, Starcraft … playing it again, even against the AI, brings back fond memories of weeks of multiplayer mayhem with close friends at our small network gaming cafe. Starcraft was perhaps the second most played network game at our little nook, the first being (what else?!) Counter-Strike.
Going back to my memories of Starcraft, I recall the time when the game was just a week old (at our cafe). Being the owners of the cafe, of course we had first dibs. We needed to “test” the game before letting the kiddies play it (yeah, right).
Back then, there were no zergling, zealot …read more