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.

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.