Monthly Archives: October 2019

Creep Clash Fighting category

Title screen from Creep Clash

The monsters of Necrovania are squabbling for power. Who among them will be crowned the new Great Lord of Necrovania, the “ghastliest ghoul,” to lead the undead into the land of the living on Halloween night? Will it be Pumpkin Pyre, the living jack-o’-lantern? Or perhaps Demon Spawn, the floating horned creature with his chest splayed open to the horror of all who see him? These monsters could’ve come out of a cute direct-to-video knockoff of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Alas, they’re stuck in this awful fighting game. » Read more about Creep Clash

5 comments , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fact, fiction, and fear in Ghosts and Weird Adventure categoryEducational categoryMultimedia category

Screenshot from Ghosts

Ghosts and Weird: Truth is Stranger than Fiction aren’t exactly educational games. They’re more like those sketchy shows on the History Channel.

There’s plenty to learn in Ghosts and Weird, though not anything you’d hear from a more reputable source. Both these games, created by largely the same team led by producer-director Philip Nash, tell stories about alleged encounters with the paranormal – ghosts, ghouls, hauntings, psychic premonitions, alien visitations, and everything else spooky that somebody ever claimed happened to them. They take folklore, and they blow it out into a larger-than-life 3D world, like a gallery of supernatural curiosities.

This type of immersive encyclopedia was common for a short time in the mid-90s, when publishers were discovering new ways to present information on CD-ROMs, like the virtual museums in Eyewitness Virtual Reality. With The X-Files and the 1995 alien autopsy hoax frothing the public’s interest the supernatural, that made it great subject for a CD-ROM. But in the spirit of a dodgy cable TV documentary about aliens, these two games act like they’re serious informative programs. Is it still just spooky, or is it misinformation?

And can you believe Christopher Lee is here?! » Read more about Fact, fiction, and fear in Ghosts and Weird

3 comments , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Guest appearance on the Bad Game Hall of Fame Podcast Blog category

Here’s a quick plug! This week, I stopped by the Bad Game Hall of Fame Podcast to talk about my favorite bad game, Gooch Grundy’s X-Decathlon. It’s a wild misfire attempt at a comedy-sports game that’s even funnier because it tries so hard to be funny.

Bad Game Hall of Fame is a blog that revisits games with bad reputations and gives them another shot, with a closer look at their history and the reasons they’re disliked. It’s part of Game & Love, a network of queer game bloggers, streamers, and video creators. There’s lovely folks over there!

It was fun talking with Cass about Gooch Grundy! The Bad Game Hall of Fame’s mission has a lot in common with The Obscuritory, so it was great to help celebrate the fun side of bad games with them.

Leave a comment ,

Extreme Rock Climbing Sports category

Title screen from Extreme Rock Climbing

Niche sports should get to be games too! The extreme sports game boom in the late 90s and early 2000s turned skateboarding into its own genre, and that opened the door, however briefly and unsuccessfully, for more games based on smaller solo sports, like Wakeboarding Unleashed featuring Shaun Murray. And why not? They’re athletic challenges that emphasize personal growth and achievement, which is a perfect fit for a style of game where you practice something over and over until you finally nail it in record time.

What sport is better suited for that than rock climbing? It’s a literal representation of that struggle to improve yourself and surmount an obstacle, in this case a giant wall or a cliff. Given the popularity of the sport, it’s surprising that more games haven’t explored rock climbing outside of a few motion-controlled sports titles like Kinect Sports Rivals and Wii Fit U or something intentionally silly like the slapstick control scheme in GIRP. At the moment the extreme sports genre exploded in 1999, there was at least one climbing game. Alongside other games in the Extreme series like Extreme Rodeo, Head Games Publishing released the small and surprisingly clever Extreme Rock Climbing.

But how do you translate the physical challenge and dexterity of rock climbing into a computer game? To find out, we need some help from a delicious, energy-boosting PowerBar®. » Read more about Extreme Rock Climbing

2 comments , , , , , , , , , , , , ,