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showing 11 games

name	publisher(developer)	year	description
Hold-up	Infogrames	?	Steal some valuables and leave the county. Should be simple.
Survival Adventure	United Software of America	1979	Imagine being dropped into a mountainous area and searching for diamonds. Your are running short of food and water, and must find more in order to survive and continue your search for the treasure. All this must be accomplished in Survival within a prescribed time limit. The game features displayed elapsed time, changing from day to night and also recording weather changes. There are nine levels of difficulty with the higher levels presenting more hazards, including some formidable predatory creatures. The adventure is text only.
The Count	Adventure International	1981
The Hobbit	Melbourne House;Addison-Wesley Publishing Company (Beam Software)	1983	[b]Once you begin, you may never want it to end[/b] Now, the book by which all other fantasy adventures must be measured has come to life as the ultimate computer program. Now you can enter into one of the most incredible fantasy adventures the world has ever known. As Bilbo, the reluctant hobbit, you suddenly find yourself on a wonderful, frightening, magical journey. You, Gandalf the wizard, and Thorin the dwarf are off to slay the evil dragon and return the treasure he is hoarding. Along the way you will meet trolls and goblins, wizards and elves, Gollum, Bard, and other creatures of Middle-earth. What’s more, through your computer, you will actually be able to talk to these creatures, make friends (and enemies!), share meals, and collect treasure. You will visit many incredible places; some familiar, some new and strange, but all exciting. For those who do not know of hobbits and their world, J. R. R. Tolkein’s book [b]The Hobbit[/b] is included in this package. It will introduce you to the marvelous, magical adventures of Bilbo and guide you throughout your journey in Middle-earth. And you can visit Wilderland again and again, and each time your adventure will be new and exciting.
The Great American Cross-Country Road Race	Activision (Synergistic Software)	1985
Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny	Origin	1987	[media=youtube]bO6Jappcl30[/media]* [49]* [52]***Comes on four 5.25" disks (8 sides). Can optionally use one or two Mockingboard cards to produce up to 8 channels of stereo sound. Use of sound hardware requires 128K RAM. Otherwise the game has a minimum requirement of 64K RAM. Game box and materials claim "Apple II" compatibility but as it requires 64K RAM this seems to rule out the original Apple II with it's 48K limit. An Apple II plus could be upgraded to meet the RAM requirement and seems a reasonable minimum system. However, there are Slot 0 cards that will upgrade an original Apple II allowing for compatibility of games that must access more RAM and/or ROM functions that were not otherwise possible in the original Apple II. These option would cost many thousands of dollars. Since the game was designed for the possibility of 2 Mockingboards, perhaps Origin intended this extravagance for original Apple II owners. But this option would be obscure since some such cards for the original Apple II were created long before the IIe and IIc existed while ones created after where intended for (compatible with) the II plus or IIe. Such cards were in fact intended for adding Integer BASIC, Pascal, or other languages with the RAM and ROM upgrades merely being a requirement for these rather than being intended to be used by finished software. Compatible sound hardware includes: Mockingboard A Mockingboard C Mockingboard Sound I Mockingboard Sound II Mockingboard Sound/Speech I Phasor Passport MIDI The title screen includes and ACTIVATE MUSIC option and all hardware options can be configured there. The user must specify what hardware is present and which slots contain which hardware. The user is warned not to create a configuration with more than 12 voices. Phasor support is discussed further in the game's manual. A single Phasor can supply the same features as 2 Mockingboards plus additional voices for a total of 12 (But the game only uses 8). Passport MIDI provides different sound and music than Mockingboard(s). Mockingboards and Passport MIDI can be used simultaneously and the different sounds are complimentary; that is, 1 or even 2 Mockingboards + MIDI (8 voices + MIDI) are intended configurations by the developers. The player must manually configure the 14 instrument selections. While this could be considered a bit tedious by modern standards, it has the advantages being universally compatible with virtually any MIDI device and allowing the player to select instruments other than suggested by developers such as electric guitar and violin. Trivia: Officially, this was the last Ultima for which Richard Garriott contributed a major portion of code. He would act in design and management roles on all published original Ultima games after this one. He actually coded the [game=#41000]PC version of Akalabeth[/game] in assembly in 1998 (for the Ultima Collection package). But, this was not an original Ultima game as it was based on the [game=#38011]Apple 2 version of Akalabeth[/game]. This would also be the last Ultima game published for the Apple and designed for the Apple then ported or converted to other systems. All following Ultimas began as IBM-PC products and did not have Apple versions. However, Ultima V was not planned to be the last Apple II Ultima but was planned at one time to be the last 8-bit Apple II Ultima. See the descriptions of the [game=#40988]Apple II[/game] and [game=#166776]the Apple IIgs[/game] versions. [Zerothis]
Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World	New World Computing	1988
Kraken: A Deep Sea Quest	Jacaranda Software	1989
Windwalker	Origin Systems	1989
Freedom!	MECC	1992	Players are presented a randomly generated protagonist; a slave during the 1830s. You have no choice in circumstances, skills, equipment, or name provided to you. A back-story is generated and your family members from it might be nearby to offer help or perhaps betray you for a variety of reasons. Two choices are provided, Male or Female and which zone in the southeastern United States the plantation you are held at. The zone represents difficulty level for the game. Some people will act differently to a male or female. The goal is to escape to freedom in the northern states. You might be blessed with literacy, swimming or a variety of other practical skills, or none. Money might come in handy (or not), if you can even get some. Nourishment, stamina, health, and injury level will be important factors to notice. Also the position of the sun during the day and the starts during the night will help, if You know how to use them. Or perhaps which side of the tree the moss is growing on. You will need to keep oriented somehow. If only you could obtain a compass. You will need sleep, food, and rest. If injured, you must tend to yourself somehow. You can also wait, knock on doors to ask for help, run, hide, fight, go around areas, people, houses, rivers and obstacles or go through them (not advised to go through a river if you cant swim). There's three ways to bring the game to an intended conclusion. Make it to freedom, get captured, or get killed. MECC had released many versions of the The Oregon Trail. They followed the very successful Apple II version of it with The Africa Trail, The Amazon Trail, and the Yukon Trail. It took a while, but someone at MECC finally noticed a disturbing pattern. This series of games were about colonialism and white people. The game engine for these games was promptly used for something a bit different. As MECC put it, Freedom was about providing "inclusive instructional materials," and their goal to "portray the experiences and perspectives of people from various cultures." Granted, MECC had an large non-white customer base; a fact that most certainly had not been ignored at the time of the game's release. Well, no good deed goes unpunished, as they say. Something very important to note is that regardless of MECC's profit-seeking and catering to an audience, the roots of this game were in place and the game designed long before anyone in the marketing department knew about it. It was motivated by history, not demographics. It was Kamau Kambui's [url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/can-slavery-reenactments-set-us-free]Slavery Reenactments[/url] in the early 1980s in Minnesota that inspired the game. MECC began by enlisting Kamau Kambui as a consultant for a game to play out his simulations on a computer. Kamau Kambui pushed the idea of having characters speak in historical dialect, which often made the characters difficult to understand. But there was a problem, historical dialect of slaves, is not what history has recorded for us. Instead, those who wrote history were, in one way or another, selective when they recorded the dialect of the day. But the problem goes deeper that recording the history of 'outsiders'. Authors who were slaves were quite conscious of their image and many did not write as they spoke or even as they once spoke. They were careful to use standard English even though they probably spoke or had spoken a local dialect of an outside culture or of their own culture. But there was another option, and that was to write, or even speak, as they were expected to, in an effort to gain acceptance in one way or another. A phenomenon that Frederick Douglass called "Negro Masking". Outside observers, for both historical and entertainment purposes, were clearly biased to the second option. But, both options share a problem, the actual dialects used were not recorded. Kamau Kambui and MECC decided to go with the dialects as improperly recorded by history. And, well, the problems didn't end there. For any given Apple II hardware (though not IIgs), a developer can only count on 6 distinct colors to work with. 15 colors on luxurious models, but that's not what schools tended to have. Depicting human skin tones cannot be done accurately even with 15 available colors. Kamau Kambui wanted the slaves in the game to look distinctly 'African'. The best the Apple could do ended up looking more like a minstrel show (blackface depictions). But, there's more. Some very well intentioned people a MECC created teacher's materials, same as with all their games, to offer helpful suggestions to classroom instructors. While most of MECC's descriptions of the game carefully adhere to 'political correctness' (almost ridiculously so), the teacher's materials did not contain carefully crafted words. The language was blunt, clumsy, naive and managed to offend many who saw it. Finally, MECC crafted the entire product for use in an classroom with children under instructor guidance (clearly, they understood the game could be misinterpreted). The reality of the vast majority of educational software in schools was that it was used as an unassigned activity and often with minimum to no supervision. Group participation and instructor guidance for individual titles rarely happened. It wasn't long before parents who never played the game heard of it. A few quick glances at the screen was enough for many parents to condemn this "Nintendoized" slavery. Those wanting a more in-depth study of the game didn't seem to play it at all, they instead asked for the game's instructor materials. Which of course described activities invoking "white children" and "black children" etc... MECC attended one meeting with one parent group and an NAACP representative and promptly retreated from the situation. MECC stated all copies of Freedom were recommend to be returned or destroyed and it was no longer offered to sell. The Oregon Trail, The Africa Trail, The Amazon Trail, and the Yukon Trail continued to sell well and let children play as colonizing white people. [Zerothis]
Nox Archaist	6502 Workshop	2020

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