My name is John and you found my website! I make Flash games and do other things. I have this website as a sort of homestead for myself and my work. Thanks for visiting :).
If you ever played recent favourite Armadillo Run you’ll probably like this one. On Old Games That Don’t Suck Thursday, it’s The Incredible Machine.
In my searching I have failed to find a better video, but the gist of the game is this: with a given number of machines and parts, can you achieve the objective? There are simple goals in this game, such as shooting a basket or getting an item from point A to point B; but the work area is so flexible and the parts so interworkable that its not always as easy as it looks.
Among the items given to you are bowling balls, baskets, ropes, wires, and other fun toys. Arranging them in such a way as for them to create a Rube Goldberg style apparatus will help you achieve your goal and move onto more complex machines. Like some of my games, its a simple push of a play button to see if you won or not. If the machine doesn’t work, you go back and fix what you did wrong.
Yeah, its not some huge shooter with epic graphics and plenty of baddies to kill. Its really casual gaming way before it was even thought of as such. The game is addictive like Peggle and is really worth a visit.
This game was available for DOS and can still be found online. Check it out! If you have trouble finding that, also check out Armadillo Run, an equally fun and much more recent and workable game.
To be perfectly honest, I am not sure if the screenshot below is Munchers or Super Munchers. Either way, this week’s game I love to look back at is Super Munchers, this week’s Old Game That Doesn’t Suck!
Super Munchers is edutainment at its finest. You are an adorable muncher, a frog-like armless creature that runs around gobbling up items that match the topic. Once you munch up all the matching answers with the topic you move onto the next level!
Oh ho, it’s not that simple though! For there are WRONG answers which somehow DESTROY your muncher, goodness gracious we know why we dies from a wrong answer! And on top of that there are ENEMIES who walk across the screen. Each enemy behaves differently, like the purple blobish Grimace like character walks only forward and is incapable of walking side-to-side. Future creatures become smarter, to the point where they almost follow you.
Anyway, the game is fun. Matching games are always fun, and when you toss in baddies and addictive gameplay (complete with full storyline and love interest!) its a fun distraction.
This is an old, old dos game of old Apple II/ Classic Mac OS game so good luck finding a live, working copy. However there is always Dos Box emulation for getting your old systems up and running again.
There are a boatload of ‘tycoon’ games and I am fairly certain every possible industry has been turned into one. In this episode of Old Games That Don’t Suck Thursday, it’s one of the earliest, arguably the first. It’s Dinopark Tycoon.
Like any other simulation game, you start out with a loan and a plot of land to build on. After buying some dinos you can start to attract visitors to come to your dinosaur themepark, which in-turn give you more money and time to pay off your loans. Keep making more money and sooner or later you can buy better dinos and a better park.
The fact that this sort of game existed was awesome enough, but the fact that it was an “educational” game found in schools was beyond me. Yes, business management is educational and there’s something to be gained but I typically remember educational games being a whole lot less fun. Of course, I think back to Oregon Trail and gather the same thoughts.
If you have ever played Rollercoaster Tycoon or any similar business game you’ll be in for a treat revisiting this older one. The concepts and gameplay involved are very, very similar but oh-so-old and lovely. Plus there are dinosaurs. Dinosaurs!
Simulators have been a genre I have steered clear from, and I am not sure why. Maybe I need to make a sim game… they seem to be the games that I loved the most…
This week on Old Games That Don’t Suck Thursday, it’s SimTower. And man it’s a funky game.
So imagine a vertical game of Sim City. Instead of allocating services like roads you supplement elevators. Instead of zoning you build offices and condos and instead of parks you build movie theatres. This is SimTower.
I love SimTower for one reason: Elevators. Elevators were the coolest concept in the entire game. You build different size elevators to take you to different levels and areas. Your high traffic areas require more elevators or elevator shafts, your slower building areas require less. If you can’t balance your elevators you can see your patrons getting angry while they wait, which will eventually drive down the happiness of the building. The trick here is building larger elevators to supplement the main floors, and sending smaller elevators away from the main floors so it forces people to take a couple elevators. Then you can program your elevators just to go upwards or downwards to influence the direction and pattern of the elevator cars. That alone deserves it’s own game.
And one day, I want to revisit elevatoring. I Love Traffic channels some of the energy of sorting and prioritizing but I really want to make an elevator game one day.
So anyway, yes, SimTower. It’s a great game if you play it solely for elevator organization. The game itself cannot beat a good SimCity 2000 but for an older Win95/Mac game it does the job.
I’m revisiting Windows 3.1 for today’s OGTDST (Old Games That Don’t Suck Thursday).
Rodent’s Revenge ranks among the frequented games people used to play on their older computers, along side classic titles such as SkiFree (yes, you remember now!).
The point of the game is simple. Move your little mouse around the playing field. If you move into a block it will be pushed along with the other blocks in that row. Cats will constantly try to get to you but can’t move through a adjacent blocks. The objective is to trap a cat around all sides so that its completely surrounded by blocks.
Its really not that simple in strategy though. Each time you move a block you are clearing pathways for cats to get to you. In order for cats to get where you want to get them you have to draw them towards you. And as levels progress, so do the number of cats. More cats make it really difficult to operate the field without breaking some sort of wall.
I loved this game and for some reason I cannot decide whether its because I could only play it at school or because it was a really good game. Its sort of like why people really, really like typing games; school seems to make a lot of games seem much better than they actually are. I’m sort of split here. I loved to play it then and recently porting it to Windows I liked it now, but not as much as back then. It doesn’t suck though, I promise you. It’s simple give-and-take game and it’s a great little distraction.
