The Commodore 64 version of Forbidden Forest is superior to the Atari 8-bit version. I probably thought it was the best computer game in the world when I first played it. I saw it on my best friend’s Commodore 64, on a black and white television – warezed version only, of course. I had the experience of seeing a lot of 5.25″ Commodore 64 disks with many games on them, their titles written across the label. I treasured these disks and immediately started making my own when we got an IBM.
The first job in creating every video game is to pick a name not previously used by another game. Those are the rules, I think less of games that don’t show some respect and putting a colon in the title doesn’t get my ass off you. APB is a beautiful arcade game that is a mix of a racer and action game with some mild RPG elements. The initial arcade version offered a unique cabinet and controls and BENCH, they let you sit on a bench to play it. The multiplayer online game called APB: All Points Bulletin has the stupidest name for a game in game history and it should be disliked and shunned, while recognizing the very hard work the creators put toward it. I can see how APB as the title of something was alluring, but you have to be strong, especially since APB the arcade game was so great.
APB – the one by Atari – was ported to the Atari Lynx. It is a bold effort for a home conversion that comes up a little short. More on that later. APB had a lot going on for a game you put a quarter in to play, but it’s bright and smooth and playable:
Aztec cracks me up, Raiders of the Lost Ark premiered on June 12, 1981, and the Apple II copy of Aztec that I have displays “1982” on the title screen. It may be impossible to know how development went, so I’ll imagine the creator of Aztec rushing home after watching Indiana Jones STEP ASIDE THROWIN ELBOWS WE MUST PROTECT THE BRIEFCASE to get this game made, as the title screen very clearly invokes the iconic scene of Indy attempting to obtain a Golden Idol. Maybe it was really easy to make a graphic like the one below for Apple II computers; there is no way it was easy to make a graphic like that for Apple II computers.
I was in a single-season fantasy baseball league filled with text adventure creators like Jon Blask, Lenny Pitts and Neil deMause in 2005, and from that I was invited to play an online baseball video game that a few fellas were playing. It was through a game called Diamond Mind Baseball, and I have been playing it regularly since 2006. I am in three leagues of 10, 10 and 24 people and it is probably the computer game I have played the most in my life.
I am trying to create joy with this game blog post project; almost all of the games that I have played I have enjoyed, I liked revisiting them and I wanted to help people remember the good times. That was my intent when I started Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne last week. That was the GOAL. That didn’t happen. The opening, at least, isn’t good. It’s not offensively terrible, but this is what I’ve got this week. I went in thinking that this post would be like any other. I had nothing but fond memories of Max Payne 2.
Max Payne 2’s Wikipedia entry states, “The game received highly positive reviews from critics and, like its predecessor, has been cited as one of the greatest video games ever made.” There are videos out there stating that it is a masterpiece. Reader, this is absolutely not one of the greatest games ever made.
What I enjoyed about the original is that it blended film noir with a Finnish perspective. The Fins gave the world the greatest sniper of all-time; I was genuinely interested in what they had to say and depict regarding shooting people in the face with machine guns. Seeing cultures interpret art forms of different cultures is interesting and it can be fun. If a group of trust fundos prancing around like assholes, dressed as Chief Knock-a-homa is on one side of things in terms of maybe what not to do, an interpretation of bleakness, rage and depression by people with long nights, who neighbor a nation of some of the worst humans in history is on the other.
So I was pumped for the sequel.
I still have the box Max Payne 2 came in, it somehow made it through the places I’ve moved for 20+ years. Before Steam took off, I’d get a couple of new PC games in their boxes each month, at least. I wish I could have kept them all. You can see that they changed the actor for Max – it’s a little thing, but I think making him look more generic, instead of using Sam Lake again takes a little bit away from the game. Max is wearing a very stock and standard set of clothes. His very loud vest from the first game was a better choice. (I was going to leave it at that, but in retrospect, changing his clothes bothers me a lot. Here is a picture of his flower vest from the first game. To me, that looks like something a happily married guy would have. It’s sad that he’s still wearing it after his family got killed. I own one vest – a simple grey one, sadly – and I own it because I wore it at my wedding. My wife got me it. I’m probably making all of this up and there was no intentional decisioning here, but having Max wear a stock, white button down shirt with a couple of buttons open doesn’t make me think anything new about his character and his journey for the sequel, it makes me think that someone didn’t know about or didn’t want to recreate the vest from the first one.)
We start out in a hospital. The Havok physics engine ruined a few games in this time period, Deus Ex: Invisible War was another. When Max wakes up and gets out of his bed, he’s knocking everything over by brushing it, and it doesn’t seem like the game takes place on Earth. The gravity of the game’s narration is betrayed by the gravity of the world the game takes place on. The ultimate film noir setting: Io. Just kidding about the narration – there’s just nothing there that will stick with you. Here are some quotes.
“Your only chance is to turn around and face it. It’s like looking down at the grave of your love.”
“Or kissing the mouth of a gun, a bullet trembling in its dark nest, ready to blow your head off.”
“I was hurt. My crime, what I had done, was like a hungry pit behind me.”
Isn’t noir supposed to be snappy? The quotes up above are from the first few minutes of the game. Dark nest? Hungry pit? Let me contrast that with one of the greatest noir lines ever from a syndicated cartoon over to the left. Bill Watterson is a genius, nobody expects all media to live up to what he could do. There wouldn’t be anything written in the last 20 years if he were the standard. But the narration and cut scenes needed work, editing and something about them to make them clever enough to bother with.
There’s other stuff. Some of it is good! The game has a working mirror, which games in 2025 often don’t have. The graphics are on the right side of the mind-boggling effects of the time. I liked the early pistols akimbo, I liked the opening bit where you follow a janitor that will obviously betray you, and then he betrays you, and then you shoot him. But there’s enough jank that it constantly competes for your time and attention — when you change an option in the settings menu, the game interprets your click to confirm as pulling the trigger for your gun. Exiting the menus shoots. That’s a bug, and an easy one to find and fix.
Max is haunted by his dead wife and daughter, but the central premise of this game is that a femme fatal is very present. What I am about to say is on me, maybe I haven’t read and seen enough noir – is it weird that our tragic character now loves someone else? I feel it is weird. I feel we have a character driven by sadness and grief and regret and ope, here’s a hot chick to run through levels as. The game shows her on a hospital bed and then does a flashback to where we play and I am not completely sure if she’s DEAD dead, or if she is just suffering because she might be on one of those bed sore-preventing hospital beds which are unbearable uncomfortable, and a thousand times worse than getting a bed sore. (Which, all of this – don’t get me wrong, make a Mona Sax game, someone. I’m in.)
I think the thing that ultimately bothers me about Max Payne 2 is that, yeah, we all probably did think it was a lot better 22 years ago. I know this is a 5.5/10 game. I know that now. It’s not offensively poor. Obviously, we changed and not the game. I didn’t care about anything I wrote here in 2003 when it was new. I played a great deal of Max Payne 2 and my memory indicates that I made it halfway through the game when it was new. Max Payne 3 came out later, now produced by Rockstar, and Rockstar introduced middleware through Steam which requires access to an email address I no longer have, so I can’t try it out. Middleware logins beckoned with their slavering maws, A HUNGRY PIT BEHIND ME. I do remember the third game getting even further away from the character. It could have been anyone as our protagonist. Max Payne 4 will simply have us play as Duke Nukem.
I don’t really resent Max Payne 2, I think what I resent is no longer having the endless free time and the lack of responsibility to be able to play something that isn’t that good and get far in it. Each game these days is a strategic choice. If regret is a central theme to these games, I guess you have to give them credit for producing that emotion, even if it is in a roundabout way.
I saw an interview with Nick Cannon where he related an anecdote about who he had a crush on when he was growing up. He stated that his was his current wife, and then it was quickly revealed to the unsuspecting viewer that he just went out and got famous and married Mariah Carey. I don’t have a similar story, I only mentioned it because for many years there was an Elevator Action in the basement of the arcade at Oskar’s Blues Bar in Lyons, Colorado and I looked forward to playing it every time I went. I was fascinated by the game as a child and it was really special to see the game on location as an adult. You never seem to really have enough time to play an arcade game on location, so I thought about it a lot. Eventually, the game was taken off-route and posted for sale on craigslist. Where I struck. It is mine! Unlike the aforementioned marriage, Elevator Action and I are still together. It is a ridiculous game to own as a stand-up arcade cabinet. It’s very simple – a 4-way joystick and two buttons to jump and shoot your gun – and for any arcade enthusiast starting to run out of space, it would be an easy one to get rid of because of how easily it can be reproduced on other systems. But there is a sense of wonder in Elevator Action, where it seems to be more than the sum of its parts.
I’ve recently made time to seriously play Baldur’s Gate III – it is as good as everyone says. It was fine from the outset. The first big tactical fight that I had was fun! However, after about 20 hours it has cemented itself as one of the best games I’ve ever played.
I am going to let go of the slow pacing for AAA games, especially CRPGs. It should have been this good immediately, not taken twice as long as the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy to really hit its stride. But that is just games now. You have to power through. But I did that, and now I can grab the rewards. One of the fundamental gaming memories I have is coming home from high school one particular day and playing Ultima 6 until I went to bed. To some degree, I have been chasing that feeling for over 30 years. I’ve let myself lose track of time with BG3 and the combat and characterization is why.
I loved the combat in Baldur’s Gate 2 due to the variety of “verbs”, or actions or abilities available for your six characters, depending on their class. Having a cleric and a wizard-type character is a must; you’d miss out on a lot without the two of them, and that goes for BG3 as well.
It seems like everyone I’ve had in my party has some kind of magic ability. I am playing as a monk, so there are some special powers. I enjoy being able to push enemies away. I would enjoy that in real life, too. My monk is practical. But I’ve been able to add a rogue, cleric, wizard, druid and warlock. (The green elf character I do not care for. Some research indicates that she is a fighter. I have not put her in my active party yet.) And they can all do so much. It creates joy, and one of the bits of gameplay I like for BG3 is thinking about how to tackle obstacles. More than any game I can remember, when it comes to choosing what spells a wizard might learn for the next day, I am just as open to hurting people with combat skills as I am getting around with things like the “Knock” spell to open locks.
You are able to move characters in and out fairly easily. There is a 4 character maximum for your active party, but the only cost of exchanging is clicking around on the UI. This reminds me of another Ultima game, this time Exodus: Ultima III, in so much as you can do some swapping. It was kind of useless in Exodus, but not everyone is good at everything in BG3.
Everyone is very far away from each other in camp, I should say. The UX could be a little streamlined for that. (The UI, though, is very good – if BG3 is giving you more options than any other RPG, and I think it is, the most magical thing about it is that I can find what I want to do.)
The camp thing is kind of weird, isn’t it? It isn’t a different dimension as far as I can tell, because the scenery of it always matches where you are. But I guess the other people that you see in camp are just behind you, but not actively going to help you in a battle. Maybe it was explained. Nobody gets attacked in their home at night. A land with actual castles does not require Castle Doctrine. It’s VIDEO GAME LOGIC.
The characters that come along with you are enjoyable. I have been a game player that enjoyed making his own characters so I could pick the classes I wanted to fight with. For this one, I just rolled with who showed up and I am glad I did. I hope I am articulating it right. Let me try again. In BG2, you could enter a mode where you made each character. They did not have personalities. I would avoid the companions because I wanted to make sure I got the exact subclasses that interested me. I did not do that for BG3, I’m running nothing but built-in companions, and I like the game this way.
Shadowheart – the companion cleric – is very passionate about her decisions and her belief in herself. She is an elf, but she seems very young-adult to me. I… I used to be that way, so passionate and quick to brood; being around death has a way of mellowing out a person, if only because you realize how little things truly matter.
Astarion (also an elf!) is a malignant narcissist. I keep those people out of my life. For most of the game, I kept him out of my party. I give a fight two tries before thinking hard about party line-up, so I added him at one point. And he’s a great character. I am not falling for any of the BS he is selling, but I can’t think of many characters in gaming in general that are of the repugnant, would-be charming type. And he’s an asshole. I’ve created many text adventures with assholes because sometimes that goes along with being funny. Astarion has a unique voice in computer games. I remember liking a thing in Shadows Over Riva where it was beneficial to keep a character in your party that was only good in towns and Astarion is worth it because he’s just not like anyone else in the medium.
RealNC on my forum stated that his understanding of BG3 is that “the developers and designers thought of everything.” Do you know how freeing that is? I have been playing so many 1980s RPGs where the developers thought of nothing and you had to go read the manual to get the game’s story. This is a total change on what I have been playing lately. It looks incredible and the battles have tactics that I enjoy, but Baldur’s Gate III may be the best designed game I’ve played in forever.
Baldur’s Gate III was played on Steam, with Windows 10. I have an OLED monitor and the deep blacks look great with it.
I got a call from my brother on Monday, July 8th, 2024. I was eating lunch, so I declined the call. I would call him back in like 10 minutes. He texted “call me” though, right after, so I did. It was always something bad when that has happened. He told me that he came home from work and found our mother dead on the couch.
My mother was an angel. I was very fortunate to grow up with a strong foundation of a loving set of parents, and it was through her actions toward my brother and me that made me who I am. She was the emotional center of our family. She made sure the four of us always got along.
She had me when she was 30. My parents had been married for 10 years at that point. She told me I was a quiet little guy that was okay playing with toys by myself and two and a half years later she had my little brother. That, plus two dogs and two cats along the way, that was our family. We grew up in a little suburb of Rochester called Hilton in western New York.
My mother grew up in the 1940s in Portville, New York – the closest “big” city was Olean. Her parents/ my grandparents lived there. She would drive the two hours to get there during our summer breaks from school. My brother Michael and I would read copies of Baseball and Football Digest during the road trips to Portville, memorizing stats. We played with our G.I. Joes and Transformers in our grandparents’ big (to us) house. Mom, Dad, Mike and I would be together for all major holidays, of course, always making sure to drive south for Thanksgiving where my aunt and uncle would hold a Christmas for all of us, but during Thanksgiving, because the roads would usually be too bad to drive that far in December. That was our routine for a number of years.
She put in the work to make me a good person. When I was very little, I remember stealing a piece of candy or a small toy from the drug store. When she found out, she drove us right back there and made me apologize and return it. (The cashier was our neighbor and her best friend, which made the experience even more memorable to me.) I can safely say that I have not stolen a physical item from a store in the 45 years since. Stealing is wrong. I think about what a pain in the ass it must have been to get us back to the car and drive back there, but it was important. I’d hope I have the same resolve if the situation ever happens with any of my nephews.
She signed Mike and I up for “Computer Camp” for a couple of summers, where I got to play with and use an Apple // and Mike got to play with an Atari 400 which encouraged a lifelong love of computers, to the extent that there is an Apple // to my left, and an Atari 8-bit one room away. I don’t know how many hours a day we were at this “camp” – we didn’t sleep there or anything – but she found out about it and took us there and picked us up. Being around computers was life-changing for me. I got exposure to it because my mother found out about the classes, felt her kids would enjoy it and made it happen.
As we became older, she took a job at the nearby retirement home. Her first day was when we were home for summer break from school. She gave us the number of where she was going to be working her first day and gave us explicit instructions not to call her unless it was an absolute emergency. A few hours into her first day at work, she is horrified to be told that she got a call from her kids at home. Worried, she went to take the call from me.
“Robb? What is going on, are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you calling? Is everything all right?”
“Yes…. Mom… we miss you….”
(Sorry, Mom.)
I have been at a loss all these months to describe my mother and what she meant to us. That is the thing I learned, what do you even say when your mother dies? It’s so incomprehensibly stupid that one parent could die, much less two. She came out with my Dad to Colorado pretty much every other year since I moved away. She got to see me build a career and get married and create a good life.
I keep coming back to the day my father died. He passed away in 2021. We checked him into the hospital as his heart was failing, as we later learned. Mom was getting the calls in the middle of that night from the hospital, it was a terrible night. We thought Dad was just going to be in the hospital again for an overnight evaluation, I didn’t know it would be the last time we ever saw him. I remember her coming to her first realization that her husband of 5 decades was probably not going to make it out of this one. I was so dumb and stupid, failing to understand that he was effectively on life support and of course they would wait for us to get there before they let him go. My mother got herself ready and put some makeup on before we left for the hospital that day and at the time I was like come ONNNN he won’t last forever, of course I understand now. I would have put on a full face, too, to delay the inevitable. I know that now. She had lived through her parents, her brother, her sister-in-law, her husband and so many friends at her age passing, of course she knew more than I did. Death changes a person. I’m sorry I was so impatient, Mom.
After Dad died, she had the house we grew up in to herself for about six months. My brother sold his house to move in with her — including his little dog Griffey, who had already elected himself chief protector of my mother before making it official with him living there. I called her once a week at minimum after there was a routine. I got her GrubHub delivered on Wednesdays from Colorado and we would talk about everything and anything.
In April of 2024, I was able to have one of the most special experiences of my life: my wife arranged a trip with my dog and nephew to Rochester, where my little nephew, who I see twice a week, got to meet my mother. My nephew was two at the time and my favorite little dude in the world, and he loves singing happy birthday to people. There was an eclipse that week (the day was overcast, so it sucked) and my mother’s birthday (ruled) and I will forever treasure being able to see my little guy with my mom. I am really glad we did not wait and we just did that.
And just like that, three months later, one random day in July, she was gone. She had just gotten a good bill of health from her doctor the week before and one of our neighbors said that they saw her working on her garden that morning. As far as we can tell, she finished gardening, went inside, and passed away on her couch inside the house she made into our home.
In the last five years, I’ve lost every family member of mine growing up, save for my brother. I wrote my mother’s obituary when she died and I guess I am supposed to take solace to some degree that my parents passed before their kids did, not everyone gets that. It has taken me months to be able to write this, to be able to even be able to process this. How can she be gone. The despair has somewhat caused me to lose 40 pounds which, don’t get me wrong, I have needed to lose, but also now as an orphan, I needed to slim down if I were to ever have a prayer of getting adopted, as nobody picks out the fat kids. There is no longer a concept of receiving unconditional love in my life any longer. What I think has taken me these months to understand is that with my mother, my lovely angel of a mother, passing that my role with the world and reality has changed. It is no longer I who receives love unconditionally, but it is my job to now provide it to the world.
I’m trying, Mom, I promise. I love you. I miss you every single day.
Linda Sue Haskins
1943 – 2024
My beautiful, wonderful mother.
Protector is, in my opinion, the greatest game ever created for the Vectrex. It is a clever, stunning imagining of Defender for a system that maybe had a reputation of poor arcade ports and what my father used to call “flickery shit.” I was considering the other games that you could make an argument for as “best of” for the Vectrex, and one of the first games I thought of was Mine Storm.
When I first started this project, my desire was to have a different platform featured every week. The PCjr! The arcade version of Elevator Action! Wirewalker on the PlayDate! Space Ace on the New Wave Toys replica! I have been meaning to connect my Amiga 1200 up for the entire year, and only recently was able to do so.
I have (had) an 1084S monitor that I used as the sort of catch-all CRT around here that could take composite video. I bought it from someone on an #arcade IRC channel. It worked well enough for a couple of years, but both the composite input for video and specific video cable that the Amiga uses gives me the same result: “wiggling” the connectors will mean I maybe get everything from the red, blue and green guns, but usually not. I bought a Sony PVM monitor at one of the 1UP bar arcade locations last year and while it is just a 9″ monitor, I have the thing close enough to my face that I can make do. Taking the Amiga out of storage, the keyboard ribbon cable had somehow become disconnected. When I fixed that, I heard something rattling around inside and it would not boot. I re-opened it and… there was a screw against the motherboard causing a short. GOD, storage, right? I now have it booting correctly from an AmigaKit fake hard drive flash solution. There are games on it from years ago. One such game…
Adventure Construction Set! Ahead of its time in many, many ways, let’s feature the very first part that excites me even now. I’ve been working on my text adventure CRPG Cyberganked for 13 years, so when ACS tells you in its pretty cool demo mode that it can “finish the game for you,” oh how I dream. (Just kidding, kind of. Although this game is almost 40 years old, it is a sort of artificial intelligence that would finish it, right? In general, if a human didn’t make it then I, a human, don’t want to read/experience/play it. When I had ACS for DOS in the 1980s, I do remember just letting ACS complete at least two games I had worked on. I guess the “surprise” was the point of it. I guess the other thing is that Stuart Smith, the developer, didn’t shamelessly steal from thousands of other content creators in order to let ACS finish games, and then cry like a bitch when faced with a reality where maybe they can’t do that. I guess that is the difference. That and ACS not boiling off the Earth’s fresh water supply. Reader, we identified the differences.)
The DOS version, released in 1987, used CGA graphics – the blue, brown, white and black mode. The subdued brown and blue gave it a less garish look than the stereotypical cyan and purple, but the Amiga version kicks the hell from it. According to Mobygames, the Amiga version came out the year before the DOS version and it looks beautiful. It’s stunning. It is the ideal version of the game and game creation system. It is a great example of what nice PC video cards had to overcome to simply look as good as what the Amiga could do out of the box. Okay, one step back —
What is Adventure Construction Set? It’s a fully-featured framework for making your own Ultima III style adventures. You have access to a graphics editor, a map and quest system and the ability to put hotspots and non-player characters around your game. You have access to creating weapons and magic spells. ACS supports three different “themes” due to tilesets: secret agent, fantasy and science-fiction.
You get two complete adventure games (Rivers of Light and Galactic Agent) and the ability to make your own. From the forum posts and blogs I’ve read this week about ACS, the construction was very much where the bulk of players enjoyed their time.
The adventure present on my copy of ACS for the Amiga seems to have a kind of tutorial thing for it. It isn’t strictly in one genre, but it shows off a lot of the great activities for an ACS game – you have melee and missile weapons (a sword and a pistol) alongside a lamp that can have an action associated with it (rubbing the lamp) that brings the character of the genie around. Any other NPC on the same screen as you gets to move just like you do. If they are friendly, they will just run around doing their thing, and of course those that are marked as foes will try to attack you. ACS has a sort of real time+ thing going on: if you just sit idle, the timer bar will decrease, so that the other creatures and players can take their turn. If you are moving quickly, you burn up the same time.
One of the things I am trying to do with this project is identify games that still hold up and ACS holds up as both a development system, and for the games themselves. They are going to get a little samey inevitably, but if you pace yourself at one of these every 10 years and throw in a new computer system to play it on, I think you’re good. One of my favorite bits from the Angry Video Game Nerd was when he exclaimed, “LOOK AT THIS CHAOS!” during his Silver Surfer review. ACS isn’t a twitch game, but on the screenshot to the left, we have our player character in yellow, three information kiosks (the “H” tile), a hospital (the red cross) a pistol, a wandering genie and what isn’t there is a bad guy that was shooting at me, who I killed with a sword. If Ultima III was a little more methodical, ACS is playing with your action figures in computer game store. It hasn’t lost a step.
