showing 30 games
| name arrow_downward | publisher(developer) | year | tags | description | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accolade Comics: Steve Keen, Private Spy | Accolade | 1987 | 5.25disk firearms gamebook jumping multisequence specialagentprotagonist swimming walking | This is a choose-your-own-adventure comic book but some choices lead to action platforming sequences that fit the story. | labelimageminimize |
| Altair Russian Roulette | author | 2002 | 5.25disk basic firearms handguns naturalistic sourcecode sourcecodeavailable | labelminimizeminimize | |
| Atomic Wasteland 2098 | Magicsoft | ? | 2090s 21stcentury 3rdmillennium 5.25disk castle city dragons energyweapons firearms future group merfolk mutants psychics robots subterranean suicide teleporting totalconversion uvl-confusable waterscooter | "Spam! I need spam!" - Dragon | labelminimizeminimize |
| ATTACK OF THE PETSCII ROBOTS | 8-Bit Productions | 2021 | 5.25disk actionadventure assemblylang binarycolor color-4bit display-280x192 display-560x192 download finiteammo firearms handguns robots timelimit | labelminimizeminimize | |
| Black Hole Adventure | Softside | 1981 | commercial firearms handguns interactivefiction license-proprietary movie multipleendings nosaves robots unlicensed uvl-confusable wordinput | This is an unofficial adaptation of Disney's The Black Hole released on that film's 2 year anniversary. Disney's official computer game for the movie was [url=/game-217208]Space Probe: Math[/url] released on that film's 4 year anniversary. Guess which was more popular? Softside did not get sued. Instead of 6 crew (as in the movie), the Palomino apparently only has the captain of the Palomino leaving to investigate Deep-Space One. The population of Deep-Space One does not differ from movie but the player's interaction with them is drastically altered to fit a suitable text-adventure plot. There are a multitude of "game over" options. The player can work toward escaping or two other plot resolutions. | labelminimizeminimize |
| Castle Smurfenstein | Dead Smurf Software | 1983 | 5.25disk canada castle firearms grenades parody search stealth stealthgame | This game is sometimes claimed to be 'the first mod'. Most games before this one were mods, but the industry worked a bit differently then. 'Mods' were expected and even encouraged. Perhaps they mean it is the first non-commercial mod of a proprietary closed-source game done in violation of copyright? Notably, the makers of this mod did not remove the copy-protection. So, theoretically, an original copy of Castle Wolfenstein was required to play it. Regardless, the creators of Castle Smurfenstein themselves have talked about Dino Smurf, their mod of [url=/game-173770]Dino Eggs[/url] which happens to be a prequel of Castle Smurfenstein. | labelminimizeminimize |
| Castle Wolfenstein | Muse Software | 1981 | 5.25disk castle firearms gameplayinn germany grenades namelessprotagonist nazis search stealth stealthgame uvl-fantitle wolfenstein worldwar2 | First game to fuse successfully strategy, home-arcade, fantasy. Escape from Nazi stronghold with secret plans. Room layout changes with each new game. Enemy speaks (in German).***Never published as [i]Wolfenstein 2D[/i], this was fan-invented title to differentiate from the later FPS, [i]Wolfenstein 3D[/i].***First game in the Wolfenstein series. [Zerothis] | labelimagesubject |
| Commando | Data East (Quicksilver Software) | 1987 | 5.25disk firearms grenades instantdeath lives militantprotagonist runandgun score uvl-confusable | labelimageminimize | |
| Duke Nukem1 | author | 2020 | 5.25disk display-40x40 download firearms flatterrain harmfultouch inventory maleprotagonist runandgun score titularcharacter | labelminimizeminimize | |
| Freedom! | MECC | 1992 | 1830s 19thcentury 1life 5.25disk astronavigation censored circadiancycle delaware difficulty dogs earlymodernperiod earth edu-history escape femaleprotagonist firearms genderchoice hunger hunted inventory kentucky maleprotagonist maryland multipleendings northamerica northcarolina past river seriousgame similliteracy simulateddisorientation slavery tennessee unarmedfighting usa virginia | 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] | labelimagesubject |
| Guerrilla War | Data East (Quicksilver Software) | 1987 | bossbattles cheguevara fidelcastro firearms flamethrowers grenades helicopters lives powerups runandgun score socialistprotagonist tanks unrestrictedviolence | labelminimizeminimize | |
| Heavy Barrel | Data East (Quicksilver Software) | 1989 | 5.25disk aimdirlimit bossbattles firearms grenades hires lives runandgun walking | labelimageminimize | |
| King's Cave | General Masters Corporation | 1983 | 5.25disk firearms interactivefiction subterranean wasteland wordinput | labelminimizeminimize | |
| Law of the West | Accolade | 1985 | 5.25disk commercial consequences dialog-progressive dialog-sentences dialog-tree earth firearms handguns joystick lawenforcerprotagonist license-proprietary maleprotagonist naturalistic negotiatedresolutions northamerica outlaws score serious town walking western | labelimageminimize | |
| Lewis and Clark Stayed Home | MECC (Bouchard Creations) | 1991 | 1800s 19thcentury 2ndmillennium 5.25disk cooking difficulty earth firearms horses hunger hunting indigenousresidents menus natives naturalistic northamerica past timelimit trading | labelminimizeminimize | |
| Noble Quest | DDC | 1991 | 17thcentury 2ndmillennium atlantic earth firearms fishing naturalistic ocean past river slavery | labelminimizeminimize | |
| Noble Quest | DDC | 1991 | 17thcentury 2ndmillennium atlantic earth firearms fishing naturalistic ocean past river slavery | labelminimizeminimize | |
| Pilgrim Quest | DDC | 1991 | atlantic earth firearms fishing ocean past river | There are hidden graphics and animations in this game but Steve A. Baker forgot "keys" to activate them. The prequel, NobleQuest, was designed after this game [Zerothis] | labelminimizesubject |
| Platoon | Data East (Quicksilver Software) | 1987 | display-560x192 firearms forest grenades hires jungle militantprotagonist movie runandgun score tropic vietnam vietnamwar walking | labelimageminimize | |
| POW: Prisoners of War | Data East | 1989 | beltscroller bossbattles consoleclassix firearms grenades lives militantprotagonist score throwingknives thrownweapons unarmedfighting | labelminimizeminimize | |
| Robocop | Data East (Quicksilver Software) | 1988 | 2040s 21stcentury 3rdmillennium bossbattles city-detroit-mi cybernetics cyberpunk cyborgprotagonist cyborgs display-560x192 earth firearms future handguns hires lawenforcerprotagonist megacorps movie naturalistic northamerica robocop robots runandgun transhumanism walking | labelimageminimize | |
| Russian Roulette | Creative Computing | 1979 | 101basic basic firearms handguns naturalistic sourcecodeavailable typein | labelminimizeminimize | |
| Shootout | Apple Computer | 1978 | 5.25disk apple2 cassette coversystem finiteammo firearms gunslingers handguns nplayers paddles score western | labelminimizeminimize | |
| South Pacific Quest | author | 1987 | 5.25disk apple2 appledos3.3 bootloader display-280x192 download firearms handguns joystick license-publicdomain lives platformer score | This game never made it to a commercial publishing but later showed up on a BBS from where it became widely pirated until author Peter Ward declared it to be Public Domain. | labelminimizeminimize |
| Techno Cop | U.S. Gold (James & Paul Software;Gray Matter) | 1988 | carcombat display-560x192 firearms future hires joystick keyboard lawenforcerprotagonist score timelimit vehicularcombat | labelimageminimize | |
| The House of Usher | Crystalware | 1980 | 5.25disk escape finiteammo firearms limitedsupplies realtimelimit | labelminimizeminimize | |
| The Last Gladiator | Electronic Arts | 1983 | 5.25disk boomerangs chiroptera club commercial display-280x192 firearms gladiatorial javelins joystick license-proprietary meleeweapons spiders vampires | labelimageminimize | |
| Wild West Math Level 4 | Micrograms | 1990 | dogs firearms gunslingers handguns | labelminimizeminimize | |
| Wild West Math Level 5 | Micrograms | 1990 | dogs firearms gunslingers handguns | labelminimizeminimize | |
| 혹성大탈출 | Topia | 1989 | aristocratprotagonist bossbattles dragons enemyhealthdisplay firearms gold indoors meleeweapons outdoors overworld shopping swords xp-none | labelminimizeminimize |
