Wednesday, August 03, 2011

Stuff (No Longer) In My Drawers Day

This is Part II of my efforts to photograph a bunch of old crap in my crawlspace so I can throw it all out without guilt. Part I was a couple weeks ago.


In the olden days, you couldn't throw out your manuals, because there was probably a ridiculous set of symbols or questions hidden inside to prevent people from making copies of the games. As you can see, we had a marked preference for Sierra games in our house.
I played this game for three months over dial-up when it first came out and was bored out of my mind. After all that time, I had made it to a level 18 BARD, and spent the entire time "kiting wisps", which meant allowing a specific monster to chase you around the map while singing a song that slowly killed it over the course of 10 minutes. Bards were too weak to fight anything directly, and I hated joining other people's parties.


At some point in the 90s, Sierra On-Line bought Dynamix, a company which had a bunch of off-the-wall games NOT afflicted with sequelitis.
I loved the Quest for Glory series, and even owned the first one with its original name, Hero's Quest (before possible litigation from the makers of the HERO QUEST board game). These games fell out of my favour around Quest for Glory IV, which had a large number of impassable bugs. In fact, every Sierra game I bought in that year had these bugs, which is why I never bought another Sierra game afterwards.


The Game-Maker software purported to let you create your own tile-based games and then offered to distribute them for you at a higher-than-nominal fee. I was hugely disappointed with it, because I wanted to make Ultima, and it was really meant for platformer games.
Jones in the Fast Lane was one of the games I replayed a ton as a kid -- you set goals for education, money, happiness, and job, and then tried to be the first person to reach those goals. There is now a Flash version available, complete with the original cheesy music.


Codename: Iceman was a different sort of Sierra game -- it was overly difficult, and required some knowledge of latitudes and longitudes, as well as a basic understanding of sonar. This was the game that taught me CPR, because you had to type it in from the manual early in the game. SHAKE AND SHOUT. CALL FOR HELP. ESTABLISH AIRWAY.
I was probably the only person to own SimAnt -- the most useless Sim game apart from SimEarth. You dig a big ant colony while avoiding spiders and lawnmowers, then you get bored and flood it with a thunderstorm.

Mug-Shot Industry Will Dig Up Your Past, Charge You to Bury It Again
2 men suing woman they saved
Extra sugar is not a legal option at Dunkin' Donuts

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