2004-10-26 - 1:11 p.m.

Contrary to rumor, I am not dead, but am instead very busy (which is like being dead except you don't get to lie down). But in the little free time I have had for the past month, I stumbled across MobyGames, an online video game museum of sorts (that is, it is a video game museum of sorts that is online and not a museum of online video games) and memories of my first computer (Apple IIc!) rushed back. So here, in no order, is a by-no-means-comprehensive list of games I played quite a lot as a child:

• Choplifter: You control a helicopter that has to fly into enemy territory to save hostages and avoid being shot down by tanks. Bomb the tanks with what appear to be honeydew melons and try to avoid landing on the hostages (which is hilarious tragic). This game is where I learned the word "sortie".

• Cannonball Blitz: Control a little guy running up a bunch of ramps and dodging cannonballs kicked by a 50' tall soldier. My brother and I only ever got to the second of three levels, but boy, did we play Cannonball Blitz a lot.

• King's Quest 4: The Perils of Rosella: I played this game for about a year straight and could never find the stupid bridle. Then, several years later, I came across the solution in a hint book at EB and had to go home and drag the IIc out of the attic to finally play through the rest of the game.

• Think Quick!: Highly underrated educational game that taught logical skills and contained random Dune references. You could also make your own levels and puzzles, which I absolutely loved.

• Ace Detective: I think this was put out by the same people who did the popular Carmen Sandiego series. It was a text-based game (with additional cruddy graphics) where you had to discover the MOTIVE, the OPPORTUNITY and the MEANS for a crime. Also had the feature to write your own modules, which I took great advantage of. And looking back at the stories I wrote, I was a pretty odd kid.

• Conan: Oh MAN, did I ever rock Conan. To this day, I could still write a comprehensive FAQ with hand-drawn maps for each level as well as my strategies for levels 4, 5 and 6 AND the locations of BOTH 1-ups. Level 7 required a color monitor, so I had to hook up the CPU to our television (the IIc monitor being green-and-black), which was a highly involved process in which I pulled the video cable out of the back of the monitor and plugged it into the back of the TV. Ah, technology.

• Oregon Trail: YOU SHOT 998 POUNDS OF FOOD BUT CAN ONLY CARRY BACK 100 POUNDS TO YOUR WAGON.

• Green Globs/some circus-themed Boolean logic game: As my father is a math teacher, he sometimes brought home mathematical educational software. Green Globs was a graphing game that I wasn't so good at, as I only knew simple linear equations at age 11 and it was really your parabolas that gave you the most points. The Boolean game was great fun though, even if it does leave me enraged that very few search engines have implemented the "XOR" term.

• Various text adventures: The only one I ever beat was this fine game called Planet of the Robots. The one that drove me the most up the wall was one that started on an airplane and then there was a desert and an airport and some guy's house and I always got stuck in the desert cave and aaaaaaaaaaah. If you know the name of this game and also how to get out of the stupid cave, please write to me. I'm fairly sure it was shareware, and was written by some guy who used to hang out on the "applesiders bulletin board" back in the early 80s.

   

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