Computer Games

I'm not really a folk who has a lot of regrets, but I certainly have a lot of things I didn't do in my youth that I wanted to. The other day, I was recalling Ebenezer's, a comic book store I frequented as a kid. It had a lot of then-new, now-very-old classic computer games in boxes (like the King's Quest series, gosh bless Roberta & Ken Williams) and also had a lot of gaming mags in plastic wrap. There was a very nice shopkeep named Darcy who let my brother and I rent NES carts for a Loonie (that's a Canadian dollar) a night. This was an era of technological discovery for me, and while that hasn't changed, there were a lot of pieces of interactive entertainment that passed me by. At the time, I was on an Amiga 500 and transitioning into a Macintosh Quadra 660AV (yeah, the one with the AT&T DSP and… OMG voice recognition), which is the time when I discovered Cyan's Myst. And what a glory-filled experience that was. I purchased The Best HyperCard Stack Of All Time™ from Future Shop with scholarship winnings acquired via piano competitions.

"I'll do my best impersonation of a new games journalist as I accompany you in this most humble boat!"

Further along the way, I heard about Cosmic Osmo and The Manhole, two more of Cyan's offerings. I read about the latter's color Masterpiece Edition while perusing the magazines in high school (placing this story around 1995); this was even more of a time of wonder when I loaded up on issues of CD-ROM Today which was Phenomenal (yes, with a "capital P"!) for the quality & quantity of goodies they packed onto the bundled CD. But before I diverge from my mainline of thought too much, I never got to play The Manhole in its coloriffic entirety — until yesterday.

Sometimes, but all-too-rarely, I have quiet moments where I sit in my chair, clasp my hands, and think about what I missed out on. Getting thoughts together, I wiki'ed this article and went, "Holy moly, it's on GameTap?"

GameTap, y'see, was a service I had tried a year previously, when it wasn't all that compelling but had a slick interface (the zip-zap sounds that play when you scroll through titles is amazingly fun). Reading the subscription prices (and this in no way constitutes an endorsement), I read that the first month was US$0.99 (99 cents!), so I signed up and headed on in.

And not just for The Manhole — many other "long-lost friends" returned to greet me as I scrolled past the selections. Overjoyed, I love how despite the fact this is a commercial service, it also functions as a museum of gaming history. I don't consider myself a hardcore gamer, but I do have a lot of faves I'll talk endlessly about, Deus Ex being one of them — and yes, it and its sequel, Invisible War, are on the menu. Apparently, even if you don't signup for their paid plan, they have an ad-supported free service of sorts which currently offers 70 games. A lot of these titles are big, established names too, not dinky ripoffs or lame-O "1,000 in 1" garbage.

But back to The Manhole: I ran into some errors trying to download and then play it (it spit out a "mount failed" message), but I persisted. And then, after all these years, The Manhole launched in its glorious, dithered self! Sadly, it also force-resized the resolution of my 1600×1200 monitor to 640×480, which looked brutally large-pixel, but after I made some adjustments, I began to play. Seeing as this came after Myst, I noted that some of the music selections wandering hallways and caverns and whatnot sounded awfully Myst-y, and smiled. Kind of like a goofier, children-oriented parallel twin of that seminal classic.

Alas, my long-winded adventures were not to be, because: (1) I couldn't spot a save button and (2) kept crashing on my route to bigger and better things. I don't know what buggered up the system's arse, but perhaps my computer being "too new" to run this classic had to do with it. Yes, I sighed heavily, but then continued to look at other games (like Altered Beast which encouraged me to "rise from my grave" and the new Sam & Max adventures… gotta love that hyperkinetic rabbity-thing!) and dip into them.

I had a lot of memories come back to me, forming new ones in the process. What I especially appreciate about GameTap is — despite the periodic errors and besides the really-well-done presentation in both the in-app interface and the website (they didn't just license the games for their collection and dump 'em on a meaningless platter) — that access to classic and not-yet-classic gaming is so easy. Installation for each title almost lives up to a "click 'n' play" ideal; the original manuals are scanned for many games, including the ones that have copy protection and ask you to type X word on Y page; and altho I wish some Windows titles likely to crash ran under emulation like the DOS ones instead of as-is (like The Manhole), it's overall a very cheerful package.

I don't know if GameTap can keep things going at this price — some, like Greg Costikyan, are skeptical of how sustainable the model is — and I certainly don't want to make any game developers sad BECAUSE I LIKE PLAYING GAMES, but for what it's worth today… I'm really enjoying GameTap and hope to delve into it further if/when I get spare time to reminisce about the days when my hair transitioned from rice bowl to wavy swirls.

Until next time, here's s'more piccies from my Manhole-ian adventures. And you there, by all means, share your retro-tech memories in these comments! I may reminisce with you, particularly if the Commodore 64 turning 25 (GameTap, incidentally, has a special feature on this) holds a lot of meaning to you.

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