One of the best things about being a “millennial” is not having to care about anything that existed longer than five seconds ago. Hence the reason why I don’t know who Paul McCartney is and why I have no idea what I ate for breakfast yesterday. Also, if Nicki Minaj doesn’t tweet in the next thirty seconds I will assume she is dead. I’m perfectly “within the demographic”.
So when I found out that the Internet Archive had uploaded over 2,400 free “MS-DOS Games” to its collection, I said holy shit, look at the cute retro style of these things. It’s just like Minecraft if they made it even more retro and also 2D. It’s as if the creators of these “classic” games copied the style of 2011 indie hit Terraria, but like, made some of them adventures and some of them shooters.
Recently, the Guardian asked me to take a look through the collection and pick out my favourites. I cannot wait to give these games seven out of ten while shrugging apathetically. Let’s dig in.
This text parser game seems like a lo-fi ripoff of Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, a 3D hemo erotic gay orc dating simulator, possibly made by social justice warriors.
Although the software library claims this Lord of the Rings text game was made in 1987, it is clear to me that someone like Braid’s Jonathan Blow probably made it last year to maximise on retro aesthetic cred, perhaps using Twine, an open-source text game engine that it is now fashionable to hate.
Among Shadows of Mordor’s innovations is its impatience with the player. When you don’t input something, the game quite frankly gets on with it without you. This really appeals to the attention deficit part of me while also highlighting what’s wrong with games these days: the controller sits there waiting for your input to slice an orc’s bollocks off when it could just bloody well get on with it itself.
This text adventure also doesn’t patronise the player with any “3D graphics”. Instead, it occasionally displays what looks like a Powerpoint slide of the “artist’s impressions” and the rest of the time you use the “graphics engine of the mind” to fill in Tolkien’s dullard hilltops full of short people.
Rating: I give this short attention span game at least ten selfies out of five Drake/Nicki Minaj fanfics. For you old people that is “quite good”.
PC Gamer called this crap, “certainly the worst [game] starring an overlord who Jabba the Hutt makes a point of forwarding his Weightwatchers pamphlets to when he’s finished laughing”.
Even ignoring the fat-based jokes, Tongue of the Fatman is a 1989 fighting game that is so poorly balanced and unresponsive that it is practically unplayable. You can bet on yourself to earn money and then upgrade yourself if you win, though winning seems unlikely.
However, as a millennial, what appeals to me is the amount of stuff in it. There are about a million exotic and pointless items to purchase to bosh your opponent over the head with, including needle claws, force fields and some sort of electro-balls. It’s exciting. We millennials never get to purchase things because some bankers took all the money.
This game concerns the protagonist, ‘Gewt Ningrich’, running about killing nice things like polar bears (with an uzi), seals (with a club), Greenpeace protesters (with a battleship-mounted gun), and the internet (with some sort of… forcefield?). It says 1997 on it, but that can’t be right because the target of this biting satire is a clueless conservative who hates seals and the internet, and those guys are still around.
In any case this game is very edgy because it is well known that gamers today do not want politics to appear anywhere in their games, so kudos to the developers for actually making a game that seems to try to make both rich old people and entitled young people feel alienated at the same time.
Since I began doing what an arsehole like me might call “travel games journalism”, people keep saying “Where In The World Is Cara Sandiego” to me as if it is a joke a millennial might get. I can finally state that no, I had never heard of Carmen Sandiego before you made the joke, because frankly I only give a shit about selfie sticks and weed.
In actuality, the 1985 detective game Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, a popular franchise created to teach geography to kids, is quite good. It’s a game of deduction and elimination, and is quite a bit more informative than infamous stabbings-through-history simulator Assassin’s Creed, which usually features only one exotic country at a time: this game boasts many countries. Also, you don’t have to do any stabbing to get to the next plot point, suiting my millennial impatience.
Controversially, Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego stars a woman criminal traditionally depicted in a rather fetching wide-brimmed hat. Recent video games have shown an aversion to giving large narrative roles to women characters, and also a large aversion to giving protagonists such fetching hats. For these reasons, Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego was probably a very polarising game back in 1985 and its hero was presumably the Rhianna of the era.
In any case, good work Carmen. Nice hat.
The last in my browser treasure trove is Floor 13, a Richard Branson-funded and sublimely understated turn-based spy game. We cannot really be sure it was not made by current indie darling Lucas Pope, designer of last year’s Papers, Please, but we’ll take the Internet Archive’s word it was made in 1992 by PSI Software Designers.
I suspect it may be more modern than it wants us to notice because in true millennial game designer fashion, it is extremely strident about how the Government Is Evil And Is Running The Media, whilst also entertaining goofy ideas about how probably everything is also run by the Illuminati and/or Total Dicks Who Harsh Everyone’s Buzz.
The idea is that you manipulate democracy so that you can stay in power, checking polls every turn to see how you’re doing. You can do this in a multitude of ways, through surveillance, searches, disinformation, intimidation and infiltration, all of which are little check boxes on a form that remind you how cold and uncomfortable the actual act of giving orders is.
The best thing about this game is that it neatly simulates the detached bureaucracy a totalitarian government would have to put in place to actually control things, making you increasingly aware that this might be why governments recruit such boring rich people.
Happily it does also make you aware that real life Britain would not be so perfectly controllable due to the belligerence of our arsehole citizens. For example, someone would definitely spray-paint a penis on your surveillance van and at least some of your establishment thugs would rather take a tea break or put a bet on a horse than go round and rough up a hoodie.
Actually, it’s quite good for a spreadsheet game.
Rating: I score it two Branson beards out of bangers and mash. You know, because it’s British.
You should check out the amazing yet slightly janky Internet Archive of MS-DOS Games for yourself before evil corporations who hate young people realise they can make actual money selling these products. Keep it dense, yeah? Peace and gaming.
