This is the fifth and final part in a series I’m writing on games that I played so long ago that I’d almost forgotten them.

Back in the day before we were all on the internet, I used to log onto bulletin board systems with a dial-up modem to play door games. I played Usurper, I played Barren Realms Elite, and a number of others that I can’t remember. But the door game that my friends and I always enjoyed most was Falcon’s Eye.

You’d begin the game by naming your country and deciding your race. The list of races you could select from was extensive. There were a few dozen. You could be anything from humans, orcs, or elves to wolves, pixies, or ghouls. Each race had certain advantages and disadvantages. You’d build up your economy, hire workers, construct improvements, and develop magic spells. Then you’d invade other player-made countries and defend your own. It was all on a turn basis, of course. Each real-life 24-hour period was one game year, and you had 12 months (12 turns) to play each day. If you went a day without logging on, you’d fall behind the other countries, so the game became addictive. Tactics got fierce: you could plan raids with friends, and then all log in at 11:45 to play one year, and then at 12:01 to play a second. This way you could each attack a certain country twice, and totally pound the other player.

You can probably still log on and play Falcon’s Eye over telnet if you look hard enough.

I’ve never played any of the original Monkey Island games, but I’ve heard people rave about them. Now, it looks like TellTale games, makers of the new Sam & Max and Strong Bad adventure games have a new episodic game series on the boards: Tales of Monkey Island.

The series is debuting July 7th for the PC, and TellTale is putting together incentives to get you to preorder, including a DVD and one free other TellTale game.

Check out the site for details and view the trailer over at TellTale Games.

You may not have heard of Onlive, but it’s currently a big deal. What is Onlive? Cloud gaming. Services like Steam (of which I’m a big fan) already allow you to purchase games online and download them. Now imagine taking a low-end PC and running Crysis with no problem. That’s Onlive. The processing is done on their end. The image quality is controlled by your connection speed, much like when streaming movies from Netflix. 

Onlive is being seen as potential big competition for the big game consoles like XBox 360 and Playstation 3, but my guess is that it won’t be available until near the time of the XBox 720 and Playstation 4.

My first thought about Onlive is that I’d much rather own my games and be able to play them offline. Sure, I love Steam, but with Steam I’ve purchased and downloaded the games – the content is sitting on my machine and if my internet connection goes down, I can still play Far Cry 2 or Beyond Good and Evil.

But then I started thinking about things. Everyone’s primary concern here seems to be cost. What if they set this up as a service like Netflix, where you pay a flat rate for all services? Netflix remains profitable while charging under $20/month and providing the latest movies in Blu-Ray format. Buying all those discs and shipping them can’t be cheap. Could Onlive manage to be profitable while offering the same type of subscription model for games? If so, the comparison between traditional gameplay and Onlive might be analogous to buying television shows on DVD versus subscribing to cable.

Haven’t you always wanted to ride a shopping cart down a hill and see how far you can jump it? Oh. Me neither.

Shopping Cart Hero allows you to indulge that fantasy, and as you earn money you can buy better wheels, rockets, and a harem. 

Play Shopping Cart Hero

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

Most people who own a PC or console and like RPGs have played The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It’s a fantastic game. And although I’ll admit that by the end I was a bit burned out on the game, it’s largely because I’d played it for over 200 hours.

Although it came out far prior to Fallout 3, which ran on the same engine, I honestly believe that Oblivion was far better than Fallout 3. You can also make the argument that the whole leveling system in Oblivion was overly complex and that you could easily screw your character over by leveling incorrectly – I’ve written about the complexities of the leveling system in Oblivion more than once – but there are mods out there that can alter or “fix” these issues if you find them to be issues. My favorite of these is Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul, but the number of mods out there for Oblivion is absolutely huge, which is one reason I believe the PC version to be so much better than the console version.

I’m not entirely sure that I’ll ever go back and play as massive a game as Oblivion a second third time, but that doesn’t change my opinion that the game is most definitely a keeper.

It seems fewer and further between than when I was younger, but every so often while I’m playing a game, there’s a particular moment or event that’s just so damned satisfying. For you, it might be getting some great loot from a raid, blasting off three guys’ heads with a single shotgun blast, or getting revenge kills against that damn sniper with your spy.

We took a little survey here in Lungfishopolis, asking people about their most satisfying moments while playing video games.

The first moment that comes to mind for me is completing Ultima V. This was the first huge epic game that I’d ever finished. I’d played Ultima 3 and 4, but never finished either. This was before online walkthroughs, and getting through one of these games was difficult. It was also probably more time consuming than a game like Oblivion. When I finished Ultima V, I wrote the date on my calendar and celebrated it for a few years afterwards.

Staying home sick in 6th grade to beat Super Mario Bros. 2. I really was sick, but used my time home alone to beat this freakshow of a Mario game instead of getting better. After I completed the game I left the final screen up on the TV as proof for my brother when he got home from school, and then I went to bed.  I think I was even sicker the next day from not resting, but it was well worth it.

Actually finishing Resident Evil 2’s “3rd survivor” minigame. Once. You probably haven’t heard of “The 3rd Survivor”. It was a game that you unlocked after completing Resident Evil 2. You could make it from start to finish in about five minutes, but actually surviving for as long as a 60 seconds was incredibly hard. The game put you in tiny rooms packed with zombies, gave you very little ammo, and put you up against some of the game’s most difficult enemies and bosses. Thankfully, in true survival horror style, you usually didn’t need to kill any of them – you could just dodge them, which was still incredibly difficult. But after the hundredth run-through, I got pretty good at it.

Beating my friends at Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo as a handicapped colorblind player.  Anyone that has played Super Puzzle Fighter knows that you want to group up large quantities of same colored gems and then blow them up with a Crash Gem, only to dump those gems onto your opponent’s side of the screen.  This is how you crush your enemy, and color is the primary element of the game.  Well, being colorblind I couldn’t exactly kick ass by only being able to see the blue gems.  But I was never one to make excuses, so I picked up the controller and proceeded to defeat three of my evil color-sighted friends in a row.  You may call it luck but I prefer to think it was something bigger that allowed me to win. The Force perhaps?  Telepathy?  Mutant predisposition to puzzle fighting games?  I’ll never know for sure, but it was sweet while it lasted.

Finishing missions in Tenchu:Stealth Assassins without ever being seen once. You were allowed kill enemies as long as they never saw you. If the game were made today, there’d be achievements for it.

Finally beating Metal Gear Solid after putting it down for almost a year.  I was really into this game for about a month straight and had finally gotten to the end.  For some reason, I just couldn’t get past the Metal Gear REX battle and in frustration I shelved the game for at least 10 months.  Well, when Metal Gear 2 was set to come out on PS2 I figured I had to beat the first game before I even thought of buying the second.  I popped it in, got over whatever mental block impeded my progress the first time around and finished the game in an evening.  I felt stupid for putting it off for so long but it was a great feeling to have finally completed the game.

Starcraft. Popping up a dozen burrowed zerglings around a group of terran marines and absolutely destoying them was always very satisfying.

NFL2K1: Defeating some random person in my first ever online console game.  NFL2K1 was the first sports game I ever played that included online matches.  The Dreamcast was way ahead of its time, and being able to dial up their server and play against my brother in Fort Collins, or someone across the country was pretty amazing to me at the time.  After dialing up my first online match and playing SomeDude001, I defeated him pretty handily and was hooked on this new fangled way of playing my games.  It was a rush to be able to trash talk with the keyboard and see your name on the leaderboards.  Sure, it only lasted about 30 minutes before I was crushed in my next game, but damn it was cool back in 2000.

Armored Core: Perfecting my flying circle strafe. This involved flying in circles around someone and firing at them continuously from mid-air. This is not nearly as easy as it may sound. I found this to be the absolute most effective technique for taking out enemies. And if it worked well on computer opponents, it worked even better on real people. When I played my friends, using this technique nearly always led to a win.

No doubt about it, my single most satisfying game moment was when I took down a dragon by myself in Baldur’s Gate 2.  Ok, so technically, he was only half dragon, but still.

So, in the Throne of Bhaal expansion, you ran around finding the other children of Bhaal and invariably fighting them.  One of them was this half dragon dude who would start the fight as human, then call up some followers and eventually turn into a dragon and beat you senseless.  I tried and tried to take this thing out, and nothing worked so I had to start taking a different approach.

I was a hella high level Swashbuckler at the time with plenty of points in dual wielding, to the point where I had no penalty for my off-hand, I mean, I had a penalty, but it just meant that when I hit you with my off hand it would just hurt a smidge less than when I hit you with my dominant hand.  I also had plenty of points in Whirlwind, but most importantly, I had taken the feat that let me use any magic item.  With this it didn’t matter if it was a scroll or a staff or a wand.  If it was magic, I could use it.

So I checked through my party’s inventory and found exactly what I was looking for, a staff my magic user was using that kept her invisible as long as she was holding it and not attacking and a Time Stop scroll.  My magic user had already learned Time Stop, so this was just a spare.  I moved my party way, way back from where the fight was going to go down and then I set every single trap I could on the stairs leading up to the guy.

I equipped the staff so that I would be invisible, appoached the guy and popped Time Stop.  Then, with one magic sword that did extra damage against dragons in one hand and one that lowered my enemy’s armor class with every hit in the other, I popped Whirlwind after Whirlwind on this guy.  Then, two things happened, two things that always spelled my doom when I was taking him on in a more straight up fight, but also, two things that had to happen for this to be successful.

First, when he got to half of his hit points, he turned into a full on dragon.  Second, his first move as a dragon was to flap his wings and use his buffett attack to blow me across the area and down the stairs.  Once I landed, I equipped the staff so that I was invisible again, and thereby untargetable by our scaly friend.  He came after me, pounding down the stairs, right into all of the traps that I had set.  They went off, he went down and it was all over.  What had taken me hours of failure when doing a straight up fight took about five minutes of subterfuge and alternate thinking.  So remember folks, rogues do it creatively.

This is the fourth part in a series I’m writing on games that I played so long ago that I’d almost forgotten them.

I was twelve years old when they released the best vehicular combat game ever. Autoduel came out for the Commodore 64 back in 1985, and in many ways this game has never been surpassed. Obviously, the graphics were for crap by today’s standards, and they couldn’t include things like turrets given the simplistic controllers available at the time, but the game was a faithful interpretation of the Steve Jackson Games Car Wars rules, and it rocked.

In the post-apocolyptic future, areas between towns are dangerous – ruled by gangs with motorcycles and jeeps that have machine guns and missiles mounted on them. Men can be paid good money to deliver goods from town to town, although it’s very dangerous.

You started out in a small town with few options. The character you’d created had only three skills: gunnery, driving, and repair. You could enter a rookie arena fight using a free loaner vehicle or else take a bus to another town where you’d have equally little in terms of options. By entering a rookie fight in the arena, (amateur night) you could both gain cash and notoriety. Once you get enough cash, you can buy your own vehicle. Personally, I always took a bus to Atlantic City and gambled until I had enough cash. Quicker and easier. Got to love how gambling in old video games would put the odds in your favor.

Creating your own car is where the game really shone. You couldn’t create a motorcycle, but you could pick a compact, mid-size, sedan, luxury vehicle, or van. I think there were actually 3-4 more body types, but I can’t remember everything. In addition, you could install a number of different power plants, (electric engines) different levels of armor on every side of your car including the undercarriage, and a number of different tire types including standard, puncture-proof, and solid tires.

And then there were the weapons. Machine guns, recoilless rifles, rockets, flamethrowers, smokescreens and oil slicks, spikedroppers and mines, and the beautiful beautiful laser that never runs out of damn bullets. Although you had more space for weaponry on the luxury and van, I always liked building a sedan with a side-mounted recoilless rifle and driving circles around opponents. That and dropping mines – the AI was for crap, so enemy cars could/would rarely avoid those mines, and they rarely had the undercarriage armor required to withstand a hit.

So I’d drive up and down the eastern seaboard on courier missions, fighting other cars and generally getting killed because I couldn’t afford a clone. (which was essentially a save game) Yeah – the game was ruthlessly difficult. But it was damned good.

If you’re easily frustrated, don’t try “You Probably Won’t Make It”. They’re not kidding – the game is head-smashingly hard, and you may end up getting mad like this guy. I got to level three before I gave up.

If you’re feeling masochistic today, you can download the game here. Just remember, you probably won’t make it.

Although I no longer play Team Fortress 2, I follow Valve’s updates to the game with a passing interest. The most recent of these is a spy/sniper update, and the hilarity of the update makes the previous comedy of the sandvich look like nothing. In the Meet the Spy video, we got porn featuring your enemy’s mother. Now, there’s Jarate. That’s like karate, but using a jar. Full of urine. Check it out.

Just a quick note to say “Hey, look!”

It’s Thursday night, and I’m sitting down and relaxing at the end of a long (rainy) day here in Colorado, and I say to myself, “Hey, self. Why don’t I get some more header graphics up for Lungfishopolis?”

As you’ve probably noticed, the image of a videogame in the header here changes randomly every time the page is refreshed. The intent is that you’ll see a game and say, “Hey! I think I know that game!”

Anyway, I convinced my wife to sit with me in front of our TV and snap about a gazillion pictures of me sitting in front of different game screenshots. She’s such a good sport. And she had fun telling me to open my mouth or stick my tongue out to make it look like I was eating the key in Adventure or licking Jade’s butt.

Anyway, check out the new header graphics. There are like twice as many as there were earlier today.