1987 is the year I finally got my own computer. It was a combined Christmas and birthday present, a Commodore 128 with a tape recorder, and nothing was the same after that. It's also the year the C64 peaked, at least for me. Looking back at the games that came out in 1987, I can't believe how many of my favourites are from this one year. The fact that I got a C128 instead of a NES, or even a C64, probably changed my life. It made me start programming earlier than I otherwise would have. I'm not sure how much it helped me in the end, but at least I learned the joy of experimenting with computers early on. It's easily one of the best Christmas presents I've ever had!

It's also the year the Amiga became a home computer, the year Nintendo's big games finally reached Swedish shops, and the year a new generation of games started in Japan with Final Fantasy, Metal Gear and Mega Man.

The Amiga 500

Commodore announced two new Amigas at CES in Las Vegas in January 1987: the Amiga 2000 for professionals and the Amiga 500 for the home. At the CeBIT fair in Hannover in March, they were the stars of Commodore's stand. Datormagazin's reporter counted 15 Amiga 500s and 20 Amiga 2000s on Commodore's stand, and there was a rumour going around the fair that the 500 would come with a C64 built in. It didn't.

The Amiga 500 had half a megabyte of memory, a built-in 3.5" disk drive, 4,096 colours and stereo sound, all in a keyboard case that looked like a big C64. In Sweden it cost 6,495 kronor. Datormagazin pointed out that this was only 200 kronor more than a C128D, and predicted that the C128 would be dead within six months at that price. A C64 cost 2,295 kronor at the time.

By the summer of 1987, Commodore Sweden had sold 4,000 Amiga 500s. That doesn't sound like much compared to the C64, of which there were around 120,000 in Swedish homes by then, along with 22,000 C128s. But the Amiga would take over, just not for me yet. I played my first Amiga games at a friend's house later, and I didn't get my own Amiga until the 90s.

Photo: Bill Bertram, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Datormagazin tested the Amiga 500 in issue 4-5 of 1987 and asked if it was the successor to the C64. Scan: Datormagazin, via DMZArkivet

In the arcades

1987 was a great arcade year. Konami's Contra came out in February, Irem's R-Type in July, and Capcom released the first Street Fighter in August. Nobody remembers the first one today, but without it there would be no Street Fighter II. Taito's Operation Wolf had a gun mounted on the cabinet, Sega's After Burner sat you in a moving cockpit, and Technōs Japan's Double Dragon let two players beat up street gangs together.

Konami's Combat School was also a 1987 arcade game, and I'll come back to it.

A new generation starts in Japan

In Japan, 1987 gave us the start of three series that are still going:

• Metal Gear by Hideo Kojima, for the MSX2 computer, July 13. A game where you were supposed to avoid the enemies instead of shooting them.
• Mega Man from Capcom, December 17.
• Final Fantasy from Square, December 18.

Metal Gear on the NES. The original came out on the MSX2, but the NES version, which reached Europe in 1989, was the one most of us saw.

On October 30, NEC released the PC Engine in Japan, the console that started the next generation. We'd see it as the TurboGrafx-16 in the US, and hardly at all in Sweden.

Photo: Evan-Amos, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link also came out in Japan this year. More about that one below.

Adventures and RPGs on American computers

On the American computers, 1987 was a big year for adventure games. Sierra released Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards in June, and in October Lucasfilm Games released Maniac Mansion, Ron Gilbert's adventure where you clicked on verbs instead of typing commands. The system was called SCUMM, and it was used for all of Lucasfilm's adventures in the years after, Monkey Island included. And it came out on the C64 first, together with the Apple II.

On December 15, FTL released Dungeon Master for the Atari ST, a real-time dungeon crawler in 3D that you controlled with the mouse. IBM launched the PS/2 in April with VGA graphics, which would matter a lot for PC games a few years later.

None of this reached me in 1987. It was disk only, often expensive, and it took time before these games came to Sweden.

The C64's best year

On the C64, 1987 was incredible. The Last Ninja, Wizball, Pirates!, California Games, IK+, Barbarian, The Great Giana Sisters, the C64 version of Out Run and many more all came out this year. Most of my favourites below are C64 games.

The best-selling game in the UK in 1987 was Out Run, with more than 350,000 copies across all formats by March 1988. The C64 version came out in December 1987. I couldn't find sales figures for Sweden, but someone who worked in a computer shop at the time has told me it was a big thing. I'd played the arcade machine before, and I bought the C64 version myself very early on. It came with the soundtrack from the arcade game on a separate cassette.

IK+ (International Karate +) from System 3, by Archer Maclean, is one of the classics of the year: three fighters on screen at the same time instead of two, a bonus round where you deflect bouncing balls with a shield, and a background with a fishing man and a periscope in the pond. Datormagazin called the graphics a masterpiece. I played it, but it never became one of my favourites.

Airborne Ranger from MicroProse came out in 1987 too. It felt like a more advanced and very promising action game, but I never got to play it enough. I played Skate or Die!, EA's first game made in-house, with music by Rob Hubbard, and Ocean's Platoon, but none of them became favourites.

What Datormagazin thought

Reading Datormagazin's reviews from 1987 today is fun, because they don't always agree with history. The two highest averages of the year were 4.8 out of 5, for Wizball and Star Paws. The Last Ninja got 4 and became a "Screen Star". Pirates!, which is in every list of the best games ever made, got 3.5.

Datormagazin also reported the British magazine Commodore Computing International's awards for 1987, where Pirates! was named simulation of the year and California Games sports game of the year.

Nintendo arrives in Swedish shops

The NES had been sold in Sweden since September 1986, but 1987 is the year it took off. Super Mario Bros. reached Europe in May 1987. The first NES game I ever played was Kung Fu, I think, or possibly Excitebike, rented and played at a friend's house. Super Mario Bros. was among the first ones too, but I think I played it for the first time when a friend and I rented a NES ourselves.

In the summer and autumn of 1987, I really wanted a NES.

Photo: Evan-Amos, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

For Christmas 1987 came the big ones: The Legend of Zelda on its gold cartridge and Punch-Out!!. By the end of 1987, just over 40,000 NES consoles had been sold in Sweden. But there was no NES under our tree. I got something else.

My Commodore 128

So, my C128 arrived on Christmas Eve 1987, with a tape recorder. The disk drive came a couple of years later.

Photo: Evan-Amos, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The C128 was really three computers in one. It had its own C128 mode with BASIC 7.0 and 128 kilobytes of memory, a CP/M mode almost nobody used, and a C64 mode that ran nearly every C64 program. When you switched it on, it started in C128 mode:

Notice the Microsoft line. Commodore's BASIC had always been Microsoft's BASIC, ever since Commodore bought a licence in 1977 for a one-off payment of about 25,000 dollars. Microsoft had asked for 3 dollars per computer, but Jack Tramiel refused with the famous line "I'm already married". Because of that deal, Microsoft's name never appeared on the PET, the VIC-20 or the C64. After Tramiel left Commodore in 1984, the company made a new deal with Microsoft, and the C128 was the first Commodore computer to show the name on the start screen.

To play games, you went to C64 mode. There were two ways to do it. You could type GO 64, and the computer would ask if you were sure:

Or you could hold down the Commodore key while you switched the computer on, and it would start straight in C64 mode. Then you pressed SHIFT and RUN/STOP, and the screen every C64 owner with a tape recorder knows by heart appeared:

Then you pressed play and waited. And waited... A game could take several minutes to load from tape, and many games had loading music and pictures to make the wait bearable. You also had to wait between levels, or events in sports games. I don't remember for how long, but loading the next level of a game like Last Ninja took at least five minutes if I remember correctly.

I played games in C64 mode like everybody else, but I spent a lot of time in C128 mode too, because that's where I programmed. BASIC 7.0 had commands for graphics and sound that the C64 never had, so you could actually make things happen without filling the screen with POKEs. There was even a built-in sprite editor, started with the command SPRDEF.

My first games came on Ocean's Live Ammo compilation, with Rambo, Top Gun, Green Beret, The Great Escape and Army Moves. I can't remember if I got it for Christmas or bought it a few days later. Top Gun felt very basic compared to ACE, but I played them all.

My favourites from 1987

As in the earlier posts, each game is listed under the year it first came out. I got my C128 at the very end of 1987, so I played almost all of these in 1988 or later, and the Amiga games much later. But they came out in 1987, so this is where they belong. 1987 was such a great year, especially on the C64, that I couldn't bring myself to cut the list down.

Pirates!

C64, 1987 (MicroProse)

You're a privateer in the Caribbean in the 1600s. You sail between ports, trade (or at least sell what you plunder), take letters of marque from the English, French, Spanish or Dutch, attack ships and cities, fence with enemy captains, look for your lost family and hunt for buried treasure. Your career lasts as long as your health holds, and when you retire, the game tells you what became of you. It was the first game with Sid Meier's name in the title. According to MicroProse's Bill Stealey, it was Robin Williams who suggested over dinner that they should promote Sid as the star.

Datormagazin reviewed it in issue 7 of 1987 and gave it 3.5 out of 5. The reviewer was impressed by the 88-page manual, a little book with everything from ship specifications to the latitude and longitude of every port. But he thought it lost its appeal after a few games, and he wrote that after the third game he'd decided not to buy it, because of the price: 199 kronor on tape and 249 on disk. "But it is still a very good game."

Playing it again now, I'd forgotten how things worked back then. Before you could start, a captain in a tavern asked you something only the manual could answer, like when the treasure fleet arrived in Puerto Bello in 1660. That was the copy protection. You could only save in a town, on a separate save disk you had to format first, and the game kept asking you to swap disks.

This was my wow game of 1987, though I didn't play it until a couple of years later. I got it on a disk borrowed from a friend's older brother, after I bought my first disk drive. I wasn't really into pirates as a theme, but the sailing, the trading and managing a fleet hooked me right away. It opened up a new world for me. I still remember the long loading times, even from disk.

Technically, the game is still very impressive for its time. How they even made it run on the C64 is a mystery to me, but much later I read, in Sid Meier's memoir if I remember correctly, that they used fonts, custom character sets, for some of the graphics to save space.

The Last Ninja

C64, 1987 (System 3)

The ninja Armakuni sets out to avenge his clan and take back the sacred scrolls from the evil shogun Kunitoki. It was an isometric action adventure, a mix of fighting and puzzles, with some of the best graphics ever seen on the C64 and music by Ben Daglish and Anthony Lees. It became one of the best-selling C64 games of all time, with more than two million copies across all formats.

Datormagazin called it "the summer's hottest game" in issue 6 of 1987 and made it a Screen Star, with an average of 4. In the same issue they printed a reader's map of the levels, because the editors had "stopped counting the calls" from readers asking how to get past different places in the game. The map continued in the next issue.

The reader's map of The Last Ninja in Datormagazin, issue 6 of 1987. Scan: Datormagazin, via DMZArkivet

When Datormagazin went through the sales of 650 games a year later, The Last Ninja had sold eight times more than any other karate game.

I remember playing this game a lot, and after a while I borrowed an old issue of Datormagazin to get hold of the map. The game isn't large by today's standards, but it was easy to get lost back then.

Wizball

C64, 1987 (Sensible Software / Ocean)

Screenshots: Lemon64

The evil Zark has drained all the colour from Wizworld, and the wizard Wiz has to bring it back, bouncing around in a green ball with his cat. You shoot enemies to release paint droplets, and the cat collects them so you can paint the grey levels in colour again. It was made by Jon Hare and Chris Yates at Sensible Software, who would later make Sensible Soccer. It was hard to control at first, but once you got the hang of it, nothing else played like it.

Datormagazin gave it 4.8 out of 5, "damn good fun, especially when the cat screams". Zzap!64 later named it the best C64 game ever. It didn't sell that well, though.

I actually don't remember ever completing this game, and I don't remember too much of it, except that it was lots of fun.

Star Paws

C64, 1987 (Software Projects)

Screenshots: Lemon64

Captain Rover Pawstrong, a space dog, has to catch all the tasty space griffins on a planet before he can go home. You chase them on foot or with vehicles and weapons dropped from space. Between the levels there were mini games. It was written by John Darnell, it was full of jokes, and the animation was great.

Datormagazin's Game Squad was "completely lyrical" about it in issue 7 of 1987, and it shared the highest average of the year, 4.8. The reviewer thought the animation deserved the highest possible grade. It cost only 89 kronor on tape.

This was one of my favourite C64 games. I'm not sure why, but it's a really fun game, with music that sticks (you can find it on Spotify). I think what makes it fun is the weapon and equipment loadout, plus the mini games. There are two of them, one where you puzzle together a ship and one where you try to hit a bird with a cannon. I may add more screenshots of this game later.

California Games

C64, 1987 (Epyx)

Epyx's sports series left the Olympics behind and went to the beach: half-pipe skateboarding, footbag, surfing, roller skating, BMX and flying disc. Up to eight players could take part. Datormagazin gave it 3.8 and wrote that it would be hard to find anything else that lasted as long for the same money.

I played this one a lot with friends. I especially liked the surfing and BMX events.

Combat School

Arcade, 1987 (Konami)

Screenshots: Lemon64

A boot camp in game form, with seven steps: an obstacle course, three firing ranges, an iron man race, arm wrestling and finally a fight against the instructor. If you didn't make the qualifying time, you were out. Most events were about waggling the joystick as fast as you possibly could. Ocean converted it to the C64 in 1987.

It was a game that broke joysticks. It involved a lot of joystick waggling and took some time to complete. I remember having trouble with the third event, the iron man race, for quite some time.

Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior

C64, 1987 (Palace Software)

Two barbarians with swords, a lot of moves, and the one everybody remembers: a spinning blow that cut off your opponent's head, after which a little goblin came in, kicked the head away and dragged off the body. It was designed by Steve Brown, and it went to number one on the British charts.

The box was even more famous than the game. Palace used photos of the glamour model Maria Whittaker in a bikini and Michael Van Wijk, later Wolf in the TV show Gladiators, instead of a painting. That caused more outrage in the UK than the violence did, and the publicity sold a lot of games. In Germany, it was put on the list of media harmful to young people because of the violence, which meant it couldn't be advertised or sold to minors.

Datormagazin's reviewer had "never seen anything so violent in my whole life" in issue 4-5 of 1987. A year later, when the Swedish MP Margareta Persson wanted computer games censored, Barbarian's advertising was one of the examples readers used in the debate.

For me, it was just a fun game. The beheading was cool at the time, obviously :)

The Great Giana Sisters

C64, 1987 (Time Warp / Rainbow Arts)

Screenshots: Lemon64

Giana from Milan falls asleep and gets stuck in a strange dream, and she has to find a giant diamond to wake up. If that sounds like Super Mario Bros., the first level looked like it too. Armin Gessert and Manfred Trenz made it, and Chris Hülsbeck did the music, which is still one of the best on the C64.

Nintendo thought it was a bit too much like Mario and sent Rainbow Arts a letter. There was no lawsuit, but the British distributor pulled the game from the shops in 1988, and even the developers have said they're not sure exactly why. The British box even had the slogan "The Brothers are History!", which probably didn't help. Of course, that only made it more popular, and people copied it like crazy.

In Sweden, Giana Sisters seems to have arrived late. Datormagazin wrote in the autumn of 1988 that the game had finally turned up in Swedish shops, "a super game before it was even released", and reviewed it in issue 11 of 1988.

My greatest memory of this is the music. Another game with great music, and a great platformer overall.

Tai-Pan

C64, 1987 (Ocean)

Screenshots: Lemon64

Based on James Clavell's novel, you play Dirk Struan, a trader in 1840s Hong Kong. You buy a ship, trade, smuggle, fight pirates and try to become the Tai-Pan, the most powerful trader of them all.

Datormagazin interviewed the programmer, 18-year-old Michael Gaunt, in early 1987, and called it a follow-up to Shōgun. That sounds odd, since Tai-Pan was written first, but it's right if you go by the story: it's the second book in Clavell's Asian Saga in chronological order. The Shōgun TV series was very popular in Sweden at the time, which is probably why they mentioned it.

The review in the summer of 1987 was harsh. The reviewer gave it 2.8 and wrote that a lot of people would be very disappointed, that "Tai-Pan was best when it didn't exist", and that you'd get more for your money with Pirates! or Pirates of the Barbary Coast.

I liked it anyway. I read the novel much later, and both Tai-Pan and Shōgun are still favourites of mine.

Ports of Call

Amiga, 1987 (Aegis)

Screenshots: Lemon Amiga

A shipping company simulation by Rolf-Dieter Klein and Martin Ulrich. You start with five million in capital, buy ships and carry freight between the big ports of the world. You have to keep your ships in shape, watch fuel prices and the weather, and you can steer your ship into port yourself, which was the part everyone remembers. Several players could compete at the same computer.

Datormagazin reviewed it in issue 3 of 1988 and thought it was very good value despite the price, 295 kronor. The reviewer noticed that the game took a long time, but that you only noticed when you stopped playing. Its only weakness was the thin manual.

I seem to be drawn to this type of game to this day, so it's no surprise I liked it a lot when I played it.

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

NES, 1987 (Nintendo)

A very different Zelda. The overworld was seen from above, but towns, caves and palaces were side-scrolling, and Link got experience points and levels. It's often called the odd one out in the series, and it was hard. It also has one of the most quoted lines in NES history:

His name really is Error. In the Japanese original there's also a character called Bagu, which is "bug".

It came out in Japan on January 14, 1987, on the Famicom Disk System, but it didn't reach Sweden until September 1988, almost two years later.

Like the first Zelda, it grew on me, and it became one of my favourite NES games of all time. The switch between the top-down overworld map and the side-scrolling towns and dungeons is still very interesting.

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!

NES, 1987 (Nintendo)

Little Mac, a small boxer from the Bronx, fights his way up through a line of larger-than-life opponents: Glass Joe, Von Kaiser, Piston Honda, King Hippo, Bald Bull and the rest, until he gets to fight Mike Tyson himself. Every opponent had his own tells, and the game was about learning them. Between the fights you went jogging with your trainer Doc Louis, and the referee was Mario. It came out in North America in October 1987 and in Europe on December 15, 1987, so it arrived in Sweden at the same time as Zelda.

I played it in early 1988. I still remember the password 777 807 3454, which takes you to the World Circuit and the second fight against Piston Honda. The code for the Tyson fight, 007 373 5963, I never knew back then. It was spread by word of mouth, and it didn't reach us. I only found it while doing research for this post.

Sources

• 1987 in video games (Wikipedia)
• Amiga 500 (Wikipedia)
• Commodore 128 (Wikipedia)
• The Last Ninja (Wikipedia)
• Wizball (Wikipedia)
• The Great Giana Sisters (Wikipedia)
• Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior (Wikipedia)
• Sid Meier's Pirates! (Wikipedia)
• Star Paws (Wikipedia)
• Combat School (Wikipedia)
• Ports of Call (Wikipedia)
• Pirates! on the C64 (C64-Wiki)
• Pirates!: The Treasure Fleet and The Silver Train (C64-Wiki)
• Sid Meier (Wikipedia)
• Sid Meier with Jennifer Lee Noonan, Sid Meier's Memoir! A Life in Computer Games (2020)
• Metal Gear (Wikipedia)
• Dungeon Master (Wikipedia)
• Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (Wikipedia)
• Out Run (Wikipedia)
• Commodore BASIC (Wikipedia)
• Screenshots from Lemon64 and Lemon Amiga, hardware photos from Wikimedia Commons
• NES Sverigelansering fyller 40! (Varvat)
• 1988: Konsolerna tar över (Spelbloggen)
• Datormagazin nr 3/1987 (Amiga 500 and C64 prices, s. 2; Tai-Pan interview, s. 3), nr 2/1987, s. 3 (CeBIT), nr 4-5/1987 (Wizball review, s. 7; Barbarian review, s. 18; Amiga 500 test, s. 43), nr 6/1987 (Last Ninja map, s. 22; review, s. 24-25), nr 7/1987 (Commodore Sweden sales, s. 3; Pirates! review, s. 18-19; Star Paws review, s. 25), nr 8/1987 (Tai-Pan review, s. 19; California Games review, s. 25), nr 10b/1987, s. 10 (IK+ review), nr 1/1988, s. 9 (CCI Oscars), nr 3/1988, s. 28 (Ports of Call review), nr 10/1988, s. 5 and nr 11/1988, s. 18 (Giana Sisters), nr 12/1988, s. 4 (sales survey), via DMZArkivet

1986 is the year the Nintendo games I grew up with were made. Almost all of them came out in Japan this year, and it took one or two years before they reached Sweden. It's also the year the NES arrived here, the year Sega took on Nintendo in the US, and the year Datormagazin, the magazine I later subscribed to, was born.

I turned ten just before Christmas 1986, and I still didn't have a computer. I didn't play a single one of the games in this post in 1986. They came to me later, on the NES at friends' houses and on my own C128 from Christmas 1987. But this is where they started.

Nintendo's big year in Japan

On February 21, 1986, Nintendo released the Famicom Disk System in Japan, a disk drive that plugged into the Famicom. The disks were cheaper than cartridges, held more data and could save your progress. The first big game for it came out the same day: The Legend of Zelda. Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to recreate the feeling of exploring the countryside as a child, and instead of a linear series of levels you got an open world, a map full of secrets and a sword. It sold 1.69 million copies on the Disk System in Japan alone.

On May 27, Dragon Quest came out for the Famicom. Yuji Horii was inspired by Western computer RPGs like Wizardry and Ultima, and Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball did the art. It made the RPG a mainstream genre in Japan and paved the way for Final Fantasy a year and a half later.

Then came one classic after another:

• Metroid, August 6, a science fiction adventure where you explore an alien planet, open new paths with new equipment, and, if you were fast enough, find out at the end that the hero in the space suit, Samus Aran, is a woman.
• Castlevania, September 26, where you whip your way through Dracula's castle.
• Kid Icarus, December 19, a mix of platforming, adventure and Greek mythology.

Metroid felt revolutionary when I first saw it, a big connected world instead of one level after another. I never spent much time with it myself, though.

For a Swedish or European NES player these dates are misleading. This is when the games were released in Japan. Here is when they reached Europe:

Zelda reached Swedish shops for Christmas 1987, almost two years after Japan. Kid Icarus is listed as released in Europe in February 1987, but I remember it arriving later than that in Sweden.

The NES comes to Sweden

On September 1, 1986, the NES was released in Sweden. It was imported by Bergsala, a company from Kungsbacka, and according to Varvat, Bergsala's founder Owe Bergsten convinced Nintendo that Sweden should be the first country in Europe to get the console. In the end, Norway, Denmark and Finland got it on the same day. The launch titles were Ice Climber, Mario Bros., Pinball, Popeye, Tennis and Excitebike.

Notice that Super Mario Bros. isn't on that list. The console came with Ice Climber, and Super Mario Bros. didn't reach Europe until May 1987. I have always remembered Ice Climber as the game that came with every NES in Sweden, and it turns out I remembered right.

It started slowly, but the NES became huge here. Just over 40,000 were sold by the end of 1987, according to Spelbloggen, and 420,000 in total in Sweden. For me, the NES was mostly something I played at friends' houses or rented. I didn't own one myself at the time, although we did get one at home a few years later.

Sega takes on Nintendo

Sega was no newcomer. Its first console, the SG-1000, came out in Japan in July 1983, on the same day as the Famicom, and its Mark III followed in October 1985. In September 1986 it came to the US as the Sega Master System, for $200. On paper it was more powerful than the NES, and games like Alex Kidd in Miracle World and Wonder Boy were good, but Nintendo had a head start and strict rules that kept third-party developers from releasing games on other consoles. In the US, the Master System never really had a chance.

In Europe it was a different story. The Master System came here in 1987, and by 1990 it was the best-selling console in Europe. But not in Sweden. Here it only sold about 4,000 units in 1988, according to Spelbloggen. Nintendo got here first and owned Sweden. A Swedish C64 mail order shop was selling Sega games like Alex Kidd, Wonder Boy and Zillion in autumn 1987, so they were available, but I don't remember anyone I knew who had a Master System.

Sega's biggest hit of 1986 was in the arcades. Out Run came out in September 1986. Yu Suzuki's racing game had a red Ferrari Testarossa, a blonde in the passenger seat, forked roads where you chose your own route, and music you picked on the car radio. The deluxe cabinet moved with the car. It became one of the best-selling arcade games of the 80s.

I actually played the Out Run arcade machine, before I played the C64 version that came out in December 1987.

Home computers

In April 1986, Amstrad bought Sinclair's computer business and the Sinclair brand for £5 million. The Spectrum lived on, now as an Amstrad product. My friend's Spectrum, where I played Bomb Jack, Harrier Attack and Bruce Lee, probably still ran into 1986.

On the C64, 1986 was another very strong year:

• Uridium by Andrew Braybrook (Hewson), released February 28, a fast shooter where you fly over giant enemy dreadnoughts. It was named arcade game of the year at the Golden Joystick Awards, where Gauntlet was game of the year.
• Leader Board from Access Software, the best-selling C64 game of 1986 in the UK.
• Gunship from MicroProse, which I'll come back to below.

By early 1987, Commodore had sold 7 million C64s and one million C128s, according to Datormagazin.

On the Amiga, Cinemaware released its first game, Defender of the Crown, on November 1, 1986. It looked like nothing else at the time, and it became the game people used to show what the Amiga could do.

Datormagazin is born

The first issue of Datormagazin came out in May 1986, and there were four issues that year. I subscribed a couple of years later, after I got my C128, and it was where I found most of my information about games. I recently browsed the archive at DMZArkivet, and it's fun to see what the magazine wrote at the time.

In autumn 1986, Epyx's CEO Gilbert Freeman visited Stockholm and held a press conference at the Grand Hôtel, where he announced the company's next C64 games: Movie Monster, Destroyer, Super Cycle and World Games, the next game in the series that started with Summer Games. I have no idea why an American company chose Stockholm to reveal its new games, but the press conference was also about the Swedish market for games on tape.

Why C64 games look different today

I've been trying to figure out why C64 games don't look the same in an emulator today as they did back then. My theory was that colours on a modern monitor are simply so much better than on a small CRT TV. It turns out there's more to it than that.

In an emulator, C64 games can look harsher or more washed out than you remember, and that's not only nostalgia. The C64 had 16 fixed colours, and it never sent exact colours to the screen. It sent an analogue signal that every TV decoded a little differently. On top of that, an ordinary PAL TV blurred the colour more than the brightness, mixed colour between neighbouring lines, and had scanlines and a soft glow. The graphics artists used this on purpose, and patterns of dots became smooth shading on a real TV.

The top image uses the Colodore palette, which is measured from a real C64. The bottom one is an approximation of what a PAL TV did to the picture. It's not a measurement of a real TV, but it's much closer to what I remember.

In the arcades

Besides Out Run, 1986 gave the arcades Bubble Bobble from Taito, which I'll come back to, and Arkanoid, also from Taito, which took Breakout and added power-ups. Ikari Warriors from SNK let two players fight their way through the jungle together (it also happened to be one of the first games I played on a C64), and Namco's Rolling Thunder was a spy game with a very cool style.

New companies

Cinemaware was founded in the US in January, Ubisoft in France in March and Bethesda Softworks in the US in June. In September, Square became a company of its own in Japan, after starting as a software division of an electricity company in 1983. Codemasters was founded in the UK in October, and FromSoftware in Japan in November. Apart from Cinemaware, whose Defender of the Crown is below, none of them made anything I played back then, but most would become big later. Activision also bought Infocom, the text adventure company, in June.

My favourites from 1986

As in the last post, I list each game under the year it first came out, not the year I played it.

Gunship

C64, 1986 (MicroProse)

Screenshots: Lemon64

You fly an AH-64A Apache attack helicopter on missions in Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East and Western Europe. Arnold Hendrick and Andy Hollis designed it, and it had the usual MicroProse depth: you chose your weapons, your pilot survived between missions and got promoted and decorated, and the realism settings let you choose how hard it was to fly. It had sold more than 500,000 copies by 1989. This was my introduction to combat flight sims. It was very advanced for its time, but still easy to get into.

The Swedish magazine Datormagazin reviewed it in issue 2 of 1987 and gave it 4 out of 5. The reviewer praised the 80-page manual but warned that it was only in English and "nothing for someone who doesn't master fairly advanced English". I think a lot of people improved their English by reading those MicroProse manuals.

The MicroProse manuals deserve a mention of their own, because they were crazy for the time. Gunship came with an 80-page operations manual, a keyboard overlay and a catalogue of MicroProse's other games. Only the first half of the manual was about playing the game. The second half, the "Apache Pilot's Manual", covered aerodynamics, weapons and tactics, how to recognise enemy vehicles and the regions you flew in, and ended with a glossary. It read more like a military handbook than a game manual. It was also part of the copy protection: before you got to fly, the game asked you to identify a vehicle from the pictures in the manual, so a copied disk wasn't much use without it. MicroProse kept doing this for many of their games, and I actually learned a few things from those manuals.

The keyboard overlay was a card you put on the keyboard that showed what each key did. A helicopter sim needed far more controls than a joystick with one button could give you, so the keyboard became part of the cockpit.

Fist II: The Legend Continues

C64, 1986 (Melbourne House)

Screenshots: Lemon64

The follow-up to The Way of the Exploding Fist. Instead of a tournament, you walk through a world of forests, temples and caves, fighting whoever you meet, looking for the hidden scrolls of the Exploding Fist on your way to defeat an evil warlord.

Datormagazin wasn't impressed. In issue 4 of 1986, the reviewer wrote that many would be disappointed, that it was too slow and that you could no longer play two players. It cost 129 kronor on tape and 179 on disk. Personally, I still loved it.

World Games

C64, 1986 (Epyx)

The fourth game in Epyx's series, after Summer Games, Summer Games II and Winter Games, took you around the world: weightlifting in the Soviet Union, slalom in France, log rolling in Canada, cliff diving in Mexico, caber toss in Scotland, bull riding in the US, barrel jumping in Germany and sumo wrestling in Japan.

This was my first Epyx game, and I bought it myself in early 1988.

Defender of the Crown

Amiga, 1986 (Cinemaware)

England after the death of the king, with Saxons and Normans fighting over the throne. You conquer territories on a map, raise armies, lay siege to castles with a catapult, joust at tournaments and rescue ladies in distress. Jim Sachs's graphics on the Amiga looked like paintings. The C64 version came in 1987 and couldn't match it, but it was still a very good-looking C64 game. If I remember correctly, it also fixed some of the Amiga version's problems, and that seems to be right. Cinemaware had shipped the Amiga original early because it needed the money, with several features cut, and most of the later versions turned out to be better games.

The Legend of Zelda

NES, 1986 (Nintendo)

Link, a sword, and an open world full of secret caves, dungeons and hidden paths. You could save your progress, which was a big deal in 1986. Outside Japan it came on a gold-coloured cartridge, which made it feel special before you even put it in the console.

It reached Sweden for Christmas 1987. It wasn't love at first sight for me, but the game grew on me, and in the end I loved both Zelda and Zelda II.

Kid Icarus

NES, 1986 (Nintendo)

You play Pit, an angel who has to fight his way up from the underworld to rescue the goddess Palutena. The levels mostly go upwards instead of sideways, and between them are dungeon-like fortresses with mazes. It's hard, especially at the start.

I have very fond memories of this game. I had a lot of fun with it when I borrowed a NES from a friend for a few weeks. That was also when I fell in love with The Legend of Zelda.

Pro Wrestling

NES, 1986 (Nintendo)

Six wrestlers, each with their own special moves, a referee in the ring, and even a cameraman and commentators at ringside, which no wrestling game had done before. It came out on the Famicom Disk System in Japan in October 1986, was number one in the US for about two months, and reached Europe in September 1987.

I played this one a lot, on a borrowed NES and at my friend's house. It's a lot of fun, and I still have the music in my head, along with a few other classic game soundtracks. I actually remember completing it with a friend, taking turns and playing every other match. I can't remember how we dealt with the last one.

Bubble Bobble

Arcade, 1986 (Taito)

Two small dragons, Bub and Bob, blow bubbles to trap enemies and then burst them. There are 100 levels, and the game was built for two players at the same time. You only get the real ending if two players finish the game together. Firebird released the C64 version in 1987.

This is my favourite of the longer arcade-style games. I completed it on the C64 together with a friend, and I still remember some of the tough levels. Datormagazin's reviewer in 1987 thought it was a "very monotonous platform game" that would have been fine in 1982. I couldn't disagree more.

Sources

• 1986 in video games (Wikipedia)
• Family Computer Disk System (Wikipedia)
• The Legend of Zelda (Wikipedia)
• Dragon Quest (Wikipedia)
• Metroid (Wikipedia)
• Castlevania (Wikipedia)
• Kid Icarus (Wikipedia)
• NES 30 år i Sverige! (Retrospelsmässan)
• NES Sverigelansering fyller 40! (Varvat)
• NES - min historia (Svampriket)
• 1988: Konsolerna tar över (Spelbloggen)
• Master System (Wikipedia)
• Out Run (Wikipedia)
• Sinclair Research (Wikipedia)
• Uridium (Wikipedia)
• Leader Board (Wikipedia)
• Golden Joystick Awards (Wikipedia)
• Defender of the Crown (Wikipedia)
• Defender of the Crown (The Digital Antiquarian)
• Colodore palette (colodore.com)
• Pro Wrestling, NES (Wikipedia)
• Bubble Bobble (Wikipedia)
• Arkanoid (Wikipedia)
• Ikari Warriors (Wikipedia)
• Rolling Thunder (Wikipedia)
• SG-1000 (Wikipedia)
• Cinemaware (Wikipedia)
• Ubisoft (Wikipedia)
• Square (Wikipedia)
• Codemasters (Wikipedia)
• Bethesda Softworks (Wikipedia)
• FromSoftware (Wikipedia)
• Infocom (Wikipedia)
• Gunship (Wikipedia)
• Gunship computer game (Smithsonian, National Museum of American History)
• Gunship C64 manual (Internet Archive)
• Fist II: The Legend Continues (Spectrum Computing)
• World Games (Wikipedia)
• Datormagazin nr 3/1986, s. 5 (Epyx in Stockholm), nr 4/1986, s. 45 (Fist II review), nr 2/1987, s. 12 (Gunship review), nr 3/1987, s. 5 (Golden Joystick, C64 sales), nr 9/1987, s. 16 (Bubble Bobble review) and nr 10b/1987, s. 32 (Sega ad), via DMZArkivet

From now on, one post per year. 1985 is a good place to start: the 8-bit home computers were at their peak, the next generation of machines arrived, and Nintendo quietly started fixing the American console market it had watched collapse two years earlier.

I was eight years old in 1985, and I didn't have a computer of my own yet. Almost everything in this post is something I played later, on a friend's computer, on my own machine from Christmas 1987 or on the NES. But these are the games that shaped the years I grew up in, so they belong here. At the end of this post, and every post from now on, I'll list my own favourites from the year.

The new machines

Commodore 128

Commodore showed the Commodore 128 at CES in Las Vegas in January 1985, and it sold for $299. It was really three computers in one: a C128 mode with the new BASIC 7.0 and an 80-column display, a CP/M mode using a built-in Z80 processor, and a C64 mode that was almost 100 percent compatible. Around 2.5 million were sold.

In practice, most people used it as a C64. Very few games were ever written for the C128's own mode. I know, because this is the computer I got for Christmas 1987. I played C64 games on it like everyone else, but its better BASIC is also where I started programming. More about that when we get to 1987.

Atari ST

After leaving Commodore, Jack Tramiel had bought Atari's consumer division in 1984. His answer was the Atari 520ST, announced in January 1985 and widely available from July. It had a mouse, a graphical desktop and 512 KB of memory, and cost $799.99 with a monochrome monitor. The slogan was "Power Without the Price". It also had built-in MIDI ports, which made it a favourite among musicians for many years.

Amiga 1000

And then there was the Amiga. Commodore unveiled the Amiga 1000 on July 23, 1985, at a gala at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York, with Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry among the guests. It had custom chips for graphics and sound and a multitasking operating system, and it was far ahead of anything else in its price range. That price was $1,295, plus about $300 for the monitor, so it wasn't exactly a machine for kids yet. The Amiga's big years as a games machine came later, and so did my own Amiga memories.

Nintendo's comeback

On September 13, 1985, Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. for the Famicom in Japan. It sold 1.2 million copies in its first month and around 3 million within four months. It helped make the side-scrolling platform game the genre of the decade, and the original NES version went on to sell more than 40 million copies.

A month later, on October 18, 1985, Nintendo tested the Nintendo Entertainment System in New York. After the crash of 1983, American retailers didn't want anything to do with video game consoles, so Nintendo called it an entertainment system, shipped it with a robot accessory called R.O.B. and was strict about which games were allowed on it. Launch titles included Duck Hunt, Excitebike and Gyromite.

Sweden got the NES on September 1, 1986, and Super Mario Bros. reached Europe on May 15, 1987. So my NES memories come a bit later, but the games are from here. The first NES games I played were, if I remember right, Kung Fu, Nintendo's own conversion of Irem's arcade game Kung-Fu Master, and Excitebike, with Super Mario Bros. soon after. Kung Fu came out in Japan in June 1985 and in the US on launch day in October, but didn't reach Europe until 1987.

Duck Hunt I only played much later. Technically, though, it has a clear link to the shooting games on my grandfather's Pong box. The Zapper has no idea where the ducks are. When you pull the trigger, the screen goes black for one frame and the targets are drawn as white boxes on the next, and a light sensor in the gun simply checks whether it's pointing at something bright.

The C64 at its best

1985 was a great year for the Commodore 64, and a lot of the games I played on it later came out this year.

The year started with a game from late 1984. Activision's Ghostbusters, designed by David Crane and written in just six weeks to catch the film while it was still in cinemas, topped the UK charts from January to March 1985 and ended up the UK's fourth best-selling game of the year.

The Way of the Exploding Fist, released by Melbourne House in June 1985, was the best-selling computer game of the year in the UK and sold 500,000 copies across Europe. Its fighting was based on real karate competition rules, and it won Game of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards.

Commando came out in the arcades in May 1985, and Elite Systems released the C64 version in November. The game is good, but the C64 version is remembered above all for its music. Rob Hubbard wrote it in under 12 hours, working through the night, and by the time everyone arrived at eight in the morning he had loaded the tune on every C64 in the building. It was one of the best-selling games in the UK that Christmas.

Screenshot: Lemon64

Ocean's Rambo: First Blood Part II played a lot like Commando, and it even replaced Commando at number one on the charts. Its C64 music was written by Martin Galway, the other big name in C64 music at the time.

Epyx followed up 1984's Summer Games with Winter Games in October 1985. Up to eight players could each pick a country and compete in events like ski jumping, bobsled, figure skating and biathlon. It became Epyx's best-selling Commodore game.

And MicroProse, which I wrote about in part 2, released Silent Service, Sid Meier's World War II submarine simulator. It sold around 400,000 copies and won the Charles S. Roberts Award for "Best Adventure Game for Home Computer of 1985".

From the UK came ACE, short for Air Combat Emulator, from Cascade Games. It was a modern jet fighter game where you defended England's south coast, flying over a map and taking on enemy aircraft, ground targets and ships. It had weather settings, weapon loadouts and nine difficulty levels, and sold over half a million copies on 8-bit computers. I played it later, and I remember flying around the map picking out targets and missions.

One 1985 game I never got to play was U.S.A.A.F. - United States Army Air Force from SSI, designed by Gary Grigsby. It was a serious strategy game about the American daylight bombing of Germany during World War II. I remember reading a review of it and really wanting it, but it was far too expensive for me. Going through the old Datormagazin issues, I found that review again. It was in issue 10 of 1988, three years after the American release, and Hans Ekholm gave it 4.4 out of 5 and called it a must for anyone interested in the air war. Datormagazin had already written in 1987 that many of SSI's games from 1984 and 1985 had only just reached Sweden, U.S.A.A.F. among them. In a Swedish mail order ad from autumn 1987 it cost 229 kronor and came on disk only, while I was still on tape. Elsewhere it got good reviews, and Computer Gaming World called it "unsurpassed" for studying how German industry collapsed under the bombing. It sold poorly, though. A reviewer joked in 1993 that its fans were limited to himself and the designer.

A few more C64 games from 1985 deserve a mention. Paradroid by Andrew Braybrook got 97 percent in Zzap!64 and has been voted the best C64 game ever by Retro Gamer's readers. Little Computer People from Activision put a small person in a house inside your computer. There was nothing to win. You just looked after him, and it's often called a forerunner of The Sims.

Screenshot: Lemon64

RPGs grow up

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar came out for the Apple II on September 16, 1985, with the C64 version in December. It was a very different kind of RPG. There was no big villain to defeat. Instead, the goal was to become an example to others by living by eight virtues, like honesty, compassion and humility, and the game kept track of how you behaved. Even your character creation was a series of moral questions from a fortune teller. It sold 400,000 copies by 1989.

Screenshot: Lemon64

In December 1985, Interplay and Electronic Arts released The Bard's Tale for the Apple II and C64. It was a party-based dungeon crawler in the Wizardry tradition, and it became one of the best-selling computer RPGs of the 80s, with 407,000 confirmed copies sold.

Screenshot: Lemon64

In the arcades

The arcades had a strong year too: Paperboy from Atari Games with its handlebar controller, Gradius and Green Beret from Konami, Ghosts 'n Goblins from Capcom and Sega's Hang-On and Space Harrier. In October, Atari Games released Gauntlet, a dungeon crawler for four players at the same time, which topped the arcade charts into 1986.

I never played any of these in an arcade. I played them later on home computers: Green Beret, Gauntlet and Nemesis (the European name for Gradius) on the C64, Paperboy at home, and Ghosts 'n Goblins, probably on my friend's Spectrum. I hated Ghosts 'n Goblins for some reason. I still can't really say why.

New companies

Westwood Studios was founded in Las Vegas in 1985 by Brett Sperry and Louis Castle. It would matter a lot later, with Dune II and Command & Conquer. Codemasters, Square and Cinemaware are often mentioned together with it, but they all date from 1986, so they're in the next post.

My favourites from 1985

These are my favourite games from 1985. A note on how I sort them, since it applies to every post from now on: I list each game under the year it first came out, not the year it reached Sweden or the year I first played it. Many of these games reached me years later, on a different machine than the original, but this is where they belong. When it matters, I'll mention which version I played.

Silent Service

C64, 1985 (MicroProse)

Screenshots: Lemon64

You command an American submarine in the Pacific during World War II, hunting Japanese convoys and trying to survive the destroyers that come after you. You switch between the bridge, the periscope, the charts and the damage report, and between the tense parts you speed up time. You can only have four torpedoes in the water at once, so every attack has to be planned.

I played this game on the C64 sometime in early 1988. Someone I knew who was a bit older than me owned a few MicroProse games, and this was one of them. I started buying MicroProse games really early, but not this one. It was the first submarine sim I played, even if it was a very arcade-style sim. Still, it's a submarine game, and I've played many since.

ACE

C64, 1985 (Cascade Games)

Screenshots: Lemon64

A modern jet fighter game where you defend England's south coast. You fly around a map picking your targets, from enemy fighters to ground targets and ships, with weather settings and weapon loadouts that made it feel like more than an arcade game.

I played this one quite late, after Gunship, but it was still one of the early flight sims I played. There was a Top Gun game on the C64, but it was very basic compared to this.

Winter Games

C64, 1985 (Epyx)

Pick a country and compete in the winter games. The events were short and easy to learn, and with up to eight players it was a perfect game to play with friends.

The first Epyx game I played was World Games, which I bought in 1988, but I played this a lot as well. It's a fun game, and I actually managed to complete the bobsled track several times without looking at the screen. It has the same quirks as other Epyx sports games: it doesn't include a lot of countries (no Sweden, for example), and the Soviet national anthem is replaced by "The Internationale".

Rambo: First Blood Part II

C64, 1985 (Ocean)

Screenshots: Lemon64

A top-down action game where you start with a knife and grenades, pick up better weapons like a bow and a rocket launcher, find the prison camp, rescue the prisoners and get out. Martin Galway's music is worth a listen on its own.

I bought this a few days after I got my first computer in 1987. It was part of Ocean's compilation Live Ammo, together with games like Top Gun, Green Beret and Army Moves. It's not one of the greatest games, but it was fun at the time, and for a 1985 game it's good. I like it better than Commando, for example.

Spy vs. Spy II: The Island Caper

C64, 1985 (First Star Software)

Screenshots: Lemon64

The black spy and the white spy from Mad magazine are back, this time on an island, fighting over the same goal on a split screen and setting traps for each other along the way. Unlike the first game, you no longer start with a set of traps but have to collect the materials to build them. Zzap!64 gave it 92 percent. I loved all three Spy vs. Spy games, but this is the one I remember best.

I played this game quite a lot, both on my own and with friends. A short but fun game. Most of my all-time favourites came later, but I still had fun playing this several years after it was first released.

Super Mario Bros.

NES, 1985 (Nintendo)

This game is legendary and doesn't need an introduction. It's a great example of an early platformer done well. Everyone played this.

This was one of the first NES games I played. I think the first time was when a friend and I rented a NES ourselves.

Paperboy

Arcade, 1985 (Atari Games)

Screenshots: Lemon64

Deliver newspapers to the subscribers on your street without crashing, and get bonus points for breaking the windows of the people who don't subscribe. Elite Systems brought it to home computers from 1986.

Another game I played off and on to pass time. I still remember it, so it must have been great at the time.

Sources

• 1985 in video games (Wikipedia)
• Kung-Fu Master (Wikipedia)
• NES Zapper (Wikipedia)
• Commodore 128 (Wikipedia)
• Atari ST (Wikipedia)
• Amiga 1000 (Wikipedia)
• Super Mario Bros. (Wikipedia)
• Nintendo Entertainment System (Wikipedia)
• Video game crash of 1983 (Wikipedia)
• The Way of the Exploding Fist (Wikipedia)
• Commando (Wikipedia)
• Rambo: First Blood Part II, video game (Wikipedia)
• Winter Games (Wikipedia)
• Summer Games (Wikipedia)
• Silent Service (Wikipedia)
• ACE, video game (Wikipedia)
• U.S.A.A.F. - United States Army Air Force (Wikipedia)
• Paradroid (Wikipedia)
• Little Computer People (Wikipedia)
• Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (Wikipedia)
• The Bard's Tale (Wikipedia)
• Ghostbusters, 1984 video game (Wikipedia)
• Green Beret / Rush'n Attack (Wikipedia)
• Spy vs. Spy, 1984 video game (Wikipedia)
• Spy vs. Spy II: The Island Caper (Wikipedia)
• Datormagazin nr 3/1987, s. 19 ("Frontrapport"), nr 9/1987, s. 23 (Datalätt ad) and nr 10/1988, s. 16 (U.S.A.A.F. review by Hans Ekholm), via DMZArkivet
• Live Ammo (MobyGames)
• Westwood Studios (Wikipedia)
• Paperboy (Wikipedia)
• Gauntlet (Wikipedia)

In part 1 we went from oscilloscopes to Pac-Man. This time we cover the first half of the 80s, the years when computers moved into ordinary homes, whole genres were born, and a 17-year-old could write a hit game in his bedroom. It's also where my own memories start. I turned four just before Christmas 1980, so for me these years are a mix of things I remember and things I only understood much later.

From 1985 onward I'll go year by year. But first, the years that set everything up.

My first games

My first gaming memories are from my grandfather's home. Under his TV there was a flat box with a round switch that picked between six games. I remember two-player Pong, squash, and the shooting games where you aimed a light gun at a square on the screen. As I wrote in part 1, that box was almost certainly built around the AY-3-8500 "Pong on a chip". By the early 80s it was already old technology, but to a small kid it was magic.

I remember people playing it at a family gathering, and I played it myself at some point too. I obviously don't know exactly when they got it.

I had played arcade games here and there before, but my first real arcade memories are from a hotel in Cyprus, around 1984 or 1985. They had a Space Invaders machine, and I played it a lot. By then the game was already six or seven years old, but that didn't matter one bit.

Donkey Kong and the handheld boom

In July 1981, Nintendo released Donkey Kong in the arcades. It was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, and its hero was a carpenter called Jumpman. Nintendo of America later renamed him Mario, reportedly after the landlord of their office. Donkey Kong is often credited with pioneering the platform game before anyone called it that, and it used short animated scenes to tell a complete little story, which was new at the time. It was also a huge hit: around $280 million in US arcade cabinet sales by 1982.

Arcade games were also shrinking into your pocket. Nintendo's Game & Watch line got its two-screen Multi Screen series in 1982, and on June 3, 1982, the Multi Screen Donkey Kong came out. It was the first piece of video game hardware with the cross-shaped directional pad, the D-pad that Nintendo has used on almost every system since. Game & Watch sold 43.4 million units in total, and Sweden was a surprisingly big part of that. Nintendo's Swedish distributor Bergsala, run by Owe Bergsten, had sold close to 1.7 million of them by 1983, in a country of only 8.3 million people. That early success is also a big part of why Nintendo became so strong in the Nordic countries later on.

I still have my orange Donkey Kong Game & Watch. It's scratched and worn after years of use, but it's still here. I don't remember exactly when I bought it. The big brother of a friend had one, and I must have tried it at some point and wanted one of my own. I do remember where, though. I think I paid 219 kronor for it at a local watch shop that still exists today.

I played it a lot, especially on car trips. It made those long drives go much quicker back then.

Not everything was LCD. Tomy's Puckman from 1981 used a glowing VFD screen, the same kind of bright blue-green display you'd find on a clock radio. It was sold as Puckman in Japan, Munchman in the UK and Pac Man in North America, and Tomy reportedly sold at least 700,000 of them. I got mine around 1984. It was a round, yellow thing that looked like a flying saucer, and at some point it disappeared. I really wish I still had it.

Computers for the masses

Commodore's VIC-20 came out in Japan in 1980, as the VIC-1001, and in the rest of the world in 1981. It became the first computer of any kind to sell one million units. It launched in Sweden in November 1981 for 2,499 kronor. Commodore's boss Jack Tramiel had a simple idea: computers should be for the masses, not the classes.

The machine that really proved him right was the Commodore 64. It was released in August 1982 for $595, and within two months Commodore had cut the price by $200. By June 1983 it was down to $300, and some stores sold it for $199. It had 64 KB of memory and the SID sound chip, a real three-channel synthesizer that made C64 music sound like nothing else at the time. Estimates of total sales range from 12.5 to 17 million, and Guinness lists it as the best-selling desktop computer model of all time. In Sweden it quickly took around 40 percent of the market in its first years, according to Internetmuseum, and plenty of later Swedish game developers started out on Commodore machines. Minecraft's creator Markus "Notch" Persson, for one, learned on his father's Commodore 128, just like I did on mine.

In the UK, Sinclair launched the ZX Spectrum on April 23, 1982. It cost £125 for the 16 KB model and £175 for 48 KB. It had rubber keys and a famous limitation called colour clash, where every 8 by 8 pixel block could only use two colours, so moving sprites often changed colour as they passed over things. None of that mattered. It sold over 5 million units and became the machine that built the British games industry.

The Spectrum was also the first home computer I got to use. A friend of mine had a 48K, and we played on it at his place in the mid 80s, hooked up to a tiny TV of maybe six to eight inches. That was small even back then. The games I remember are Harrier Attack, Bruce Lee and Bomb Jack.

The birth of the computer RPG

In part 1, I left Richard Garriott with a hit game in a Ziploc bag and his old nickname, Lord British, on the box. In June 1981, California Pacific released Ultima, often called the first open-world computer RPG. You explored a top-down world, went down into first-person dungeons and, for some reason, ended up flying a spaceship. Ultima II followed on August 24, 1982, published by Sierra, and it started the series' tradition of a cloth map in the box. After a fight with Sierra over royalties, Garriott started his own company. Origin Systems was founded on March 3, 1983, by Richard, his brother Robert, their father Owen and programmer Chuck Bueche, working out of the family garage. Their first release was Ultima III: Exodus the same year.

Just a few months after the first Ultima, in September 1981, Sir-Tech released Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord for the Apple II. You built a party of up to six adventurers and took them down ten levels of first-person dungeon. If that sounds like Oubliette from part 1, you're paying attention. Wizardry sold 24,000 copies by June 1982 and around 200,000 within three years, more than the first Ultima. Along with Ultima, it inspired Japanese series like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy.

Two series, launched the same year, that between them shaped almost every RPG that followed.

Words and pictures

Remember Zork from part 1? The MIT students behind it had founded Infocom in 1979. Zork I was first released in 1980 through Personal Software, and after that Infocom published its own games. Their secret weapon was the Z-machine, a virtual machine that let them release the same game on more than 20 different computers. Their boxes came with "feelies": maps, props and odd little extras that doubled as copy protection. Through these years they released games like Deadline (1982), Planetfall (1983) and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984). By 1986 the Zork trilogy alone had sold 680,000 copies.

Meanwhile, Roberta Williams at Sierra wanted pictures that moved. In May 1984, King's Quest was released for IBM's new PCjr. IBM put $700,000 into the project, making it the most expensive game Sierra had ever made. Instead of reading descriptions or looking at still pictures, you walked your character around an animated, graphical world. Adventure games would never be the same. It's also credited with saving Sierra after the 1983 crash.

The crash I never noticed

In the US, 1983 was a disaster. Too many consoles, too many bad games and far too much stock led to what we now call the video game crash. Home video game revenue fell by about 97 percent, to around $100 million by 1985. Atari famously buried around 728,000 unsold cartridges, including E.T. and Pac-Man, in a landfill in New Mexico. When part of the site was dug up in 2014, the burial was confirmed, and the former Atari manager who had been in charge of it put the number at 728,000.

Home computers played a part too. When a Commodore 64 cost about the same as a console, a lot of people asked themselves why they should buy something that only played games.

In Europe, the story was completely different. In the early 80s, home computers dominated here, and the American consoles never had the same grip on the market. In some countries, like the UK, consoles didn't really take off until the early 90s. In the UK, the number of companies selling games on cassette went from 95 to more than 450 during 1983. The Nordic countries were different again. When the NES arrived in 1986, it became huge here, but that's a story for the year-by-year posts. So while the American console market collapsed, we were busy loading games from tape. As a kid in Sweden, I had no idea anything had crashed at all.

Bedroom coders

This is the part of the story I love the most.

Matthew Smith was 17 when he wrote Manic Miner for the ZX Spectrum in 1983. It took him eight weeks. It had twenty caverns, pixel-perfect jumps and in-game music, which was rare at the time: "In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Edvard Grieg. Its sequel, Jet Set Willy, came out in 1984. By one estimate, somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 young people in the UK were making games at home in those years. Most of them never got anywhere, but some went on to build studios.

Two brothers, Chris and Tim Stamper, ran a small company called Ultimate Play the Game. In November 1984 they released Knight Lore, which used a technique they called Filmation to draw isometric 3D rooms where objects could pass in front of and behind each other. Edge magazine later called it "the single greatest advance in the history of video games". The Stampers later founded Rare, but that's a story for much later.

In the US, the business side was growing up too. Trip Hawkins, who had worked at Apple, founded Electronic Arts on May 27, 1982. EA called its developers "artists", gave them photo credits in magazine ads and sold games in square boxes that looked like record sleeves. Its first games in 1983 included M.U.L.E. and Pinball Construction Set.

Another company started the same year with a much better origin story. Sid Meier and Bill Stealey were playing the arcade game Red Baron in Las Vegas, and Meier kept winning. He explained that he had worked out how the game's code behaved and claimed he could write a better game for a home computer in a week. Stealey said he'd sell it if he did. It took two months, not one week, but the result was MicroProse, founded in 1982. Its first games were flight combat games for Atari's 8-bit computers, like Hellcat Ace in 1982, and then F-15 Strike Eagle, which went on to sell more than a million copies. Sid Meier would go on to become one of the biggest names in computer gaming, but his best-known games come later in this series.

Elite

If one game sums up what these years made possible, it's Elite.

It was written by David Braben and Ian Bell, who met as students at Jesus College, Cambridge, and it was released for the BBC Micro on September 20, 1984. You started with a small ship and a few credits and could do whatever you wanted: trade, mine asteroids, hunt bounties or become a pirate, all while working your way up to the combat rating "Elite". It was one of the first home computer games with wireframe 3D graphics that hid the lines you shouldn't see, and it had eight galaxies with 256 planets each. None of those planets were stored in the game. They were all generated from a single seed number run through a fixed algorithm, which is how Braben and Bell fit a whole universe into a home computer of the time.

The BBC Micro version alone sold 107,898 copies, and estimates for all versions together range from 600,000 to around a million. Almost every open-world space game since, all the way up to Elite Dangerous, owes something to it.

Meanwhile, in Japan and Moscow

On July 15, 1983, in the middle of the American crash, Nintendo released the Family Computer, or Famicom, in Japan for 14,800 yen. Its launch games were ports of Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye. In Japan the crash barely registered, and the Famicom became a huge success. The rest of the world would get it a few years later under a different name.

And in Moscow, a researcher named Alexey Pajitnov wrote a little puzzle game on an Elektronika 60 computer at a computing centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Most sources date it to June 1984, though some say 1985. It spread on floppy disks around Moscow and later around the world. It was called Tetris.

Meanwhile, in Swedish schools

The Swedish ABC 80 from part 1 had become a common computer in Swedish schools, but by 1980 it was already seen as becoming obsolete. The answer was the Compis, a Swedish educational computer introduced in 1984, built around an Intel 80186. It was controversial from the start, and once the world moved to IBM PC compatibles, it was left behind. It was officially discontinued in 1988, but many schools kept using them well into the 90s. I used one myself around 1989 or 1990, in an introduction to computers at school. It was very limited, and even then it already felt old.

Where we are in 1984

By the end of 1984, the home computer had won in Europe, the computer RPG and the graphical adventure had been born, and kids in bedrooms were writing games that sold in the hundreds of thousands. In the US, the console business was in ruins, and in Japan, Nintendo was quietly getting ready to fix it.

From here I'll go year by year. 1985 is a big one: the Amiga and the Atari ST arrive, the C64 is at its peak, and Nintendo gets ready to bring the Famicom to the West as the NES. The NES reached Sweden on September 1, 1986, and I got to play it before I had a computer of my own. That came at Christmas 1987: a Commodore 128, the machine where I also wrote my first code. We'll get there.

Sources

• Donkey Kong, 1981 video game (Wikipedia)
• Game & Watch (Wikipedia)
• Donkey Kong, Game & Watch (Super Mario Wiki)
• One bullish Swede and some little white lies helped carve Nintendo's place in the West (Nintendo Wire)
• Så tog Owe från Kungsbacka Nintendo till Sverige (Kungsbacka-Posten)
• Pac-Man, Tomy LSI Game (Pac-Man Wiki)
• VIC-20 (Wikipedia)
• Historien om VIC-20 (Svenska Commodoreklubben)
• Commodore 64 (Wikipedia)
• Commodore 64 gör svenskarna till ett datorspelande folk (Internetmuseum)
• Markus Persson (Wikipedia)
• ZX Spectrum (Wikipedia)
• Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness (Wikipedia)
• Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress (Wikipedia)
• Origin Systems (Wikipedia)
• Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Wikipedia)
• Infocom (Wikipedia)
• King's Quest I (Wikipedia)
• Video game crash of 1983 (Wikipedia)
• Atari video game burial (Wikipedia)
• Manic Miner (Wikipedia)
• Matthew Smith, games programmer (Wikipedia)
• Knight Lore (Wikipedia)
• Electronic Arts (Wikipedia)
• MicroProse (Wikipedia)
• F-15 Strike Eagle (Wikipedia)
• Elite, video game (Wikipedia)
• Nintendo Entertainment System (Wikipedia)
• Tetris (Wikipedia)
• Compis (Wikipedia)

Dune: Awakening is a survival MMO from Funcom (the studio behind Conan Exiles). It takes place on Arrakis, in an alternative version of the Dune universe where Paul was never born, because Jessica actually followed the Bene Gesserit's directions (and had a daughter instead of a son).

Disclaimer: Most of my time with Dune: Awakening was before update 1.5, released in September 2026. That update changed a lot (see the Update 1.5 section below), and some of my criticisms, especially about the Deep Desert and the end game, may not apply in the same way anymore. I'll update this review once I've had time to play the new version.

Graphics & Setting

Even though the game takes place on a desert planet, they've managed to make it look interesting. There's a lot of sand (obviously), but the landmarks and rock formations really make the world stand on its own.

Audio

The audio is nice. You can hear things moving around out in the desert, especially the sandworms. The music adds some nice ambience in places, but nothing that really stands out.

Getting Started

You're dropped into the desert with nothing and introduced to the game's storyline, which you can continue at your own pace. The early parts of the game are a nice introduction to its concepts, but after a very short introduction you're free to explore the world.

As in most survival games, you build your own base and craft your own items. Since this is an open world, you share it with other players. The total number of players was quite low when I last played, so depending on the server you play on, you might not run into many others (more on player interactions later).

Hagga Basin

The PvE area where you start the game, Hagga Basin, is where this game really shines. It's a large area with a lot of interesting locations and things to do. You can pick up quests at trading posts, continue the main storyline, or simply explore the desert while trying not to get eaten by sandworms or killed by other hazards.

You'll quickly learn the importance of water. That becomes much less of a problem later on, when you can mass produce it. This makes the game a lot harder early on, before you have plenty of water and vehicles to cross large distances quickly and without risk. I wish the game was better balanced in this way.

Having said that, the game is probably at its best before you build your first ornithopter. Until then you have to think about where and when to cross open desert, and how to avoid storms and sandworms. Hagga Basin is great, and this area alone makes the game worth playing. It's where you'll spend your first 50 to 100 hours, depending on how you play. Some people never leave it.

The Deep Desert

After you leave Hagga Basin is where things start to fall apart. First you have the Deep Desert. The early part of it is a regular PvE area, a little like Hagga Basin, but the dungeons are randomly placed and there's less content overall. You won't find some of the things that make Hagga Basin interesting, such as the nightly Sardaukar patrols.

The rest of the Deep Desert is opt-in PvP. It's a vast desert with small islands where you'll find "dungeons" and crashed ships. The Deep Desert is wiped every week, so if you build a base there you'll have to rebuild it each week (which is fine). I just find Hagga Basin much more interesting.

The advantage of playing in the Deep Desert is the amount of spice and higher tier resources you'll find there. You obviously need to collect spice in a Dune game, and there's not much of it in Hagga Basin, so you're pretty much forced into the Deep Desert if you want to progress towards the end game. It quickly becomes very repetitive.

I wish the developers had focused on adding more Hagga Basin style areas, but I understand that's a lot of work. To attract more players, they decided to take the game in a different direction.

The Landsraad & Testing Stations

That brings us to the Landsraad system. There are 25 or so Landsraad houses you can choose to do missions for. Before, each house had certain missions each week. With the revamp this spring, they also added repeatable dungeons (Imperial Testing Stations) to the overland map. Before that, the overland map was just how you traveled between areas: Hagga Basin, the Deep Desert and the two faction cities.

These dungeons come with a new leveling system, where they scale up based on the level you choose to play them at. The scaling feels insane to me, with damage multipliers in the hundreds to thousands of per cent. The new boss fights are interesting the first few times, but I couldn't care less about the system overall. Some people probably like it (to each their own), but I basically stopped playing after trying them a few times.

They also added new gear enhancements, I guess to balance for the new scaling. That makes me wonder what will happen if they add a new open world PvE area like Hagga Basin. Will we be expected to grind out these dungeons just to be able to play it? There's a new open world area called the Polar Cap on the way, but I'm not sure how it will work. I assume you'll have to craft entirely new gear for it, but how they'll balance that for all the different types of players (everything from people who stay in Hagga Basin, to people who did a little of the Deep Desert, to people who grinded out the new testing stations) is beyond me. Maybe they'll solve it, but it will be difficult to satisfy everyone.

Dying & Losing Things

The game has also made you lose less when you die. Before, when you got eaten by a sandworm, you lost everything. Now you still lose everything you carry, but your vehicle can be recovered at a durability cost. They've also made some nice additions that let you back up your base if you're taking a break.

Story

The main story is fine as far as I've played it, but it seems to deteriorate a bit after chapter one. There are also faction storylines that unlock certain cosmetic upgrades. I did the Atreides one, and it was good for this type of game.

Update 1.5

Update 1.5 was released on September 17, 2026, together with the console launch. I haven't played enough of it to say how well it works, but according to Funcom, these are the biggest changes:

• Single-player mode: the whole game can now be played solo, with difficulty presets or custom settings. The Landsraad simulates other guilds, and the Coriolis storm no longer wipes the Deep Desert in single-player.
• Optional PvP: everything in the game can now be played in PvE. The Deep Desert has separate PvE and PvP versions on every official world, with the PvP version giving 2.5 times the mining and harvesting yield. Hagga Basin is fully PvE (shipwrecks included).
• Less spice needed: spice is no longer part of the build cost of several endgame crafting stations, to make the end game reachable for solo players.
• Story: the final chapter of Book One is out, so the whole story can now be played from start to finish. Story missions also give new cosmetic rewards, retroactively.
• Losing less: you can store up to three snapshots of your base and rebuild them later, even on another world. Destroyed vehicles can be recovered for up to 30 days, for a Solari fee and a durability penalty. Base upkeep taxes are gone, and the durability penalty on death was lowered.
• Custom rules: in single-player and on self-hosted servers you can adjust things like sandstorms, sandworms, PvP zones, harvesting and XP rates, base decay and what you drop on death. PC players can also host their own server for free.
• Combat: more forgiving parrying, clearer enemy attacks and better enemy AI.
• Coming later: the Polar Cap, a new survival area with its own storyline, is planned as a free update later this year. Cross-play between PC and consoles is also planned.

On paper, this should address a lot of my complaints, especially the clash between PvP and PvE, but I have a feeling it may still leave a lot of players unhappy. Whether it fixes the end game is another question, since the testing stations and their scaling are still there. I'll update this section once I've played more.

Conclusion

Can I recommend Dune: Awakening? Yes, if you know what you're getting yourself into. Hagga Basin is great, and you'll probably have a great time playing that part of the game. If you want a good end game though, I would say no, not in its current state. It suffers from the same problem most MMOs do.

If this was just a PvE or co-op survival game, it would be even better. I feel the developers are trying to satisfy everyone, and that creates clashes between PvP and PvE. They've been trying to resolve this with update 1.5, but it remains to be seen if it works. If you're a Dune fan or like survival games and mostly want to explore and build, this game is for you. If you're looking for a long-term end game, I'd wait and see.

Video games, along with books, have always been a huge part of my life. In each post I'll add my own personal notes, like my favourites from the year or thoughts on a particular console. I don't have many memories from before 1980, so there won't be much of that in this post. I'll also try to add a little about what the gaming scene looked like in Sweden, when I can find it. I know when the C64 and the NES became popular among my friends and when certain games caught on, which, it turns out, was sometimes long after they were released.

Games have come a long way since those early days. The first games I played were a white square bouncing between two lines, and today we walk around in huge worlds with orchestral soundtracks. The way we find our games has changed just as much. I borrowed disks and tapes from friends, and found out what was new through magazines and word of mouth. The internet changed that. Now you can find information about a game the moment it's out, and you can buy everything digitally, which is huge and something I think should have come much earlier than it did.

My own taste has partly changed along the way, but looking back, I was drawn to the same kinds of games early on: simulations, strategy and RPGs. The problem was that those games were rare and hard to get hold of. They often came on disk only, reached Sweden late and cost more than the usual games, and as a kid you didn't have much money. So I played what I could get, and read about the rest in magazines. I'm a computer gamer at heart. The NES was the last console I played a lot, and after that it was only the odd Mega Drive or PS1 game. These days the games I prefer usually come from studios that dare to do their own thing, whether small indie developers or the odd big one like Larian or Paradox.

So why write this series? Partly for nostalgia, and partly because I think this history is worth telling properly. But mostly because I want to go back in time myself.

My first computer was a C128 that I got for Christmas 1987. Before that I had a chess computer, a Game & Watch and a Pac-Man handheld, but more on that later...

Before anyone called them games

The first computer games weren't really meant to be games. They were demonstrations, experiments, ways to show off what these enormous and very expensive machines could do.

In 1952, A.S. Douglas wrote a version of tic-tac-toe called OXO on the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge. You played against the machine and the board was shown on a small screen. It's a milestone, but hardly anyone played it. The EDSAC was one machine in one lab.

In 1958, physicist William Higinbotham built Tennis for Two at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US. The lab had an annual open house for the public, and he wanted something more fun to show visitors than the usual displays. He used an analogue computer and an oscilloscope, and the result was a side view of a tennis court where two players could hit a ball over the net with homemade controllers. People lined up to play it. After two years of exhibitions it was taken apart and more or less forgotten.

What strikes me about these early games is that nobody saw them as the start of something. They were more a way to show what a computer could do.

Spacewar! (1962): the first game that spread

This is where I think the real story starts.

In 1962, a group of students and hackers at MIT, with Steve Russell doing most of the programming, wrote Spacewar! on a PDP-1 computer. Two players each controlled a spaceship, dogfighting around a star whose gravity pulled them in. There was thrust, fuel, torpedoes, and physics. It's a real game. I may actually write my own version of it one of these days and add it here.

What made Spacewar! different wasn't just that it was fun. It was that it spread. The code was shared freely, copied to other universities that had the same kind of computer, and modified by people who wanted to add their own ideas. That pattern of sharing, hacking and improving each other's work would define computer gaming for the next twenty years.

Games on big machines (the 1970s)

Through the 70s, computers were still something you found at universities, research labs and large companies. But the people who had access to them kept writing games, and some of them were far more advanced than you might expect.

PLATO

PLATO was an educational computer system based at the University of Illinois, with terminals spread across many sites. It was built for teaching, but its users quickly figured out it was perfect for games. And since everyone was connected to the same system, those games could be multiplayer.

In 1975 came dnd, one of the first computer role-playing games, inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. In 1977 came Oubliette, a first-person dungeon crawler with a town and shops above and a dungeon below. If that sounds like Wizardry, that's not a coincidence: Oubliette is widely considered a big influence on it. Then in 1979 came Avatar, a group dungeon game written by high school students, which became the most played game on the whole system.

So networked multiplayer games were already around in the mid 70s, decades before most of us had heard of the internet.

Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork

Around 1976, programmer and caver Will Crowther wrote Colossal Cave Adventure on a PDP-10. It was a text game where you explored a cave by typing commands like GO NORTH and TAKE LAMP. The cave was based on a real one, part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky, which Crowther had explored himself. In 1977, Don Woods expanded it with fantasy elements, puzzles and a scoring system, and the game spread across the ARPANET, the network that would later become the internet.

When Adventure reached MIT in 1977, a group of students played it and then decided they could do better. The result was Zork. Its creators later founded Infocom, which became the name in text adventures during the 80s.

Adventure also inspired Scott Adams, who released Adventureland in 1978, one of the first adventure games you could buy for a home computer. And it got Roberta Williams hooked, which led to Mystery House in 1980, often called the first graphical adventure game, and to the company that became Sierra.

MUD

In 1978, Roy Trubshaw, a student at the University of Essex in England, started writing a multiplayer adventure game. He called it MUD, short for Multi-User Dungeon, as a tribute to Dungeon, the name of the version of Zork that ran on DEC-10 computers like the one at Essex. Richard Bartle, another Essex student, joined in and took over development in 1980. Several people could explore the same world at the same time, talk to each other, and compete. Most online worlds since, from text MUDs to World of Warcraft, can trace their family tree back here.

Rogue

Around 1980, two students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, wrote Rogue on the university's Unix system, and Ken Arnold joined in later. You went down through the levels of a dungeon to find the Amulet of Yendor and bring it back up. Everything was drawn with letters and symbols: you were an @, a B was a bat, and the walls were lines of dashes. The game was turn-based, so you could take as long as you liked over each move.

Two things made it special. Every dungeon was generated randomly, so no two games were the same. And when you died, you were dead. There was no going back to an earlier save, you had to start over from the top. Rogue spread across the universities just like Spacewar! had, and later got commercial versions for home computers, published by Epyx.

It gave its name to a whole genre. Games built on random dungeons and permanent death are still called roguelikes, and today they're one of the most popular kinds of games around, from Diablo, which started out as a turn-based roguelike, to modern hits like The Binding of Isaac, Slay the Spire and Hades.

Meanwhile, out in the real world

While all of this was happening on university computers, ordinary people met video games in a completely different way.

In 1972, two things happened. Magnavox released the Odyssey, the first home video game console, designed by Ralph Baer. It even had a light gun accessory for a shooting game. And Atari released Pong in the arcades. Pong was simple, but it was a huge hit, and it proved that people would pay to play games.

Then, in 1976, the company General Instrument released a chip called the AY-3-8500, often called "Pong on a chip". It contained six games: tennis (basically Pong), football, squash, a practice mode, and two shooting games for use with a light gun. Suddenly anyone could build a cheap home Pong console, and hundreds of companies did. Millions of these chips were sold, and they ended up in boxes under TVs all over Europe, sold under dozens of brand names. My grandfather owned one of these, and it was my first exposure to gaming, even though I wasn't born yet when the chip came out.

Computers come home (1977 to 1980)

1977 was the year the personal computer arrived for real. Three machines launched that year: the Apple II, the Commodore PET and the Tandy TRS-80. For the first time, ordinary people could walk into a shop, buy a complete computer, take it home, plug it in and start using it. And of course, people started writing games for them.

The games were often sold in the simplest way possible: a cassette or floppy disk, a photocopied manual, all in a plastic bag hanging on a hook in a computer store.

In 1979, Atari released the Atari 400 and 800, home computers built by a company that knew games. They had graphics and sound far beyond most competitors, and games like Star Raiders showed what they could do.

And here in Sweden, we had our own machine. The Luxor ABC 80 was launched in August 1978. It was designed by the Swedish company Dataindustrier AB and built by Luxor in Motala, a company better known for making TVs and radios. Early models even used a modified Luxor TV as the monitor. It was built around a Z80 processor and had a fast BASIC, and it was mainly sold in Sweden. It's a small footnote in the global story, but I think it's a pretty cool one. I actually remember reading a reader question in a magazine in 1987 or 1988 about which computer to buy, where they recommended an ABC computer over the C64 as the more future-proof choice...

Akalabeth and the birth of a legend

A teenager in Texas named Richard Garriott was obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons and Tolkien. He had been writing D&D-inspired games on his school's computer for years, and when he got an Apple II, he rewrote his 28th attempt into a game with graphics. He called it Akalabeth.

He was working at a ComputerLand store at the time, and his boss suggested he sell it in the shop. So Garriott spent around $200 on Ziploc bags and photocopied manuals, with cover art drawn by his mother. He sold only about a dozen copies in the store. But one of them found its way to a publisher, California Pacific, which released the game properly in 1980. According to Garriott, it sold around 30,000 copies, and he got $5 for each one.

The publisher also suggested he put his old school nickname, "Lord British", on the box as the author. And his next game was called Ultima. But that's a story for a later post.

The arcades explode (1978 to 1980)

At the end of the decade, the arcades went from popular to enormous.

In 1978, Taito released Space Invaders, and suddenly everyone wanted to shoot aliens. Then in 1980, Namco released Pac-Man, the biggest arcade game of the year in Japan and a character that almost everyone on the planet would recognise within a few years. The same year, Nintendo launched Game & Watch, designed by Gunpei Yokoi. They were small handhelds with one game each and a built-in clock, and the first one, Ball, came out in April 1980.

None of these were computer games. But they were the doorway into gaming for millions of people, and they shaped what people expected from games on every platform, computers included.

Where we are in 1980

By 1980, everything that would shape the next decade was in place: home computers, the first real game companies, role-playing games, adventure games, online worlds on university networks, and arcades full of people. A whole generation was about to discover that the TV could be played, not just watched.

That generation includes me. In the next part, I'll look at the early 80s: the Commodore 64, the ZX Spectrum, the Famicom, Ultima and Wizardry, the handheld boom, and the years when bedroom coders started turning into game studios. It's also where my own memories start, so things will get a bit more personal.

Sources

• Tennis for Two (Wikipedia)
• History of video games timeline (Wikibooks)
• Dnd, 1975 video game (Wikipedia)
• Oubliette (Wikipedia)
• Avatar, 1979 video game (Wikipedia)
• Colossal Cave Adventure (Wikipedia)
• Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave, Dennis G. Jerz (Digital Humanities Quarterly)
• MUD1 (Wikipedia)
• Rogue (Wikipedia)
• Roguelike (Wikipedia)
• Multi-user dungeon (Wikipedia)
• Magnavox Odyssey (Wikipedia)
• AY-3-8500 (Wikipedia)
• Binary Dinosaurs: Pong consoles
• Star Raiders (Wikipedia)
• ABC 80 (Wikipedia)
• The History of Luxor ABC Microcomputers
• Akalabeth: World of Doom (Wikipedia)
• Richard Garriott: Gaming (RichardGarriott.com)
• Game & Watch (Wikipedia)
• 1980 in video games (Wikipedia)

Telling you more than that would be a spoiler. You learn a lot about the premise in the first few minutes of playing, but I'll leave it there so the story stays fresh for you.

Graphics & Art Style

The graphics in this game are hard to describe. They're realistic, but with a layer of paint on top, done in a very particular style. As I understand it, the look is inspired by an art style from the same era. This makes the world feel really strange at times, and sometimes it's like walking through an art gallery.

It is a very beautiful game, though, and the art style adds a lot to the atmosphere.

Audio

Everything about this game's audio is great. The voice acting is really good for the most part, and the music is some of the best I've heard in a game. I even listen to it outside the game. It has won awards for its music, and for good reason.

Combat

Like many turn-based RPGs, you explore the world in real time, but combat is turn-based. What makes it different is that combat has a lot of QTEs (quick time events). You have to react in time to parry or dodge, and you can make your skills more effective by hitting your timings.

I usually don't like QTEs, but here they work well. If they're not for you, you can turn some of them off. Some fights also have several phases, with cinematics in between.

Exploration & Structure

Outside of combat, you travel around an open world map with entrances to cities and "dungeons". The story itself is fairly linear and divided into three acts. Still, you can do a lot of things in whatever order you like, and you can go back to places later if you missed something. Only certain story beats have to be done in a set order.

Character Building

The skill system is interesting. Each character has their own skill tree, and skills synergize both with each other and with skills on other characters. On top of that, weapons can strengthen certain types of skills or boost your character's attributes. You can also raise those attributes yourself as you level up.

You can unlock even more enhancements through something called "Lumina", which you get by collecting and using special items in the game. There are a lot of them. This allows for some really interesting builds for specific fights, or for insanely powerful combinations if you really dig into it.

Story & Characters

Even though there aren't many game-changing choices, I got really invested in the story. It's a very dark story, with some lighthearted moments thrown in to lift the mood now and then.

The dialogue is great, and there are a lot of memorable characters. The way they interact with each other, and their individual stories, are fantastic. I rarely get this invested in characters in a game.

It's also one of the most emotionally powerful games I've played. There were moments in the story where I was close to tears, and that rarely happens to me while playing games.

The Expeditions & the World

As the title suggests, you are not the first expedition. Many expeditions came before you and failed. Throughout the game you pick up hints about what happened to them, and some of those hints actually help you along the way. This adds a lot to the story, but I wish there was even more about each expedition.

The characters and enemies you meet are like nothing you've seen before. These are not your typical fantasy creatures, and you can clearly see the art inspiration in them. I won't spoil anything, but you'll see some of them in the screenshots.

Overall, the game feels a bit like a Japanese RPG, a genre I haven't played much of, with some Dark Souls elements thrown in.

Conclusion

I highly recommend Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to anyone who likes a good story, and to anyone who likes RPGs. A few great RPGs have come out over the past few years, but this one is special. It's beautiful, it's clever, and it hits hard emotionally. It's a rare gem that really stands out from the crowd.

This is one of the most ambitious games I've ever played. It's trying to do a lot of things. Every region has GDP and a lot of the geopolitics are simulated. Also, a lot, if not most of the solar system is simulated. This is hard sci-fi with a lot of space physics simulated from my understanding. You could argue that this is several games baked into one. First of all you have the game on earth, where factions are struggling to gain control over nations, once you get into space, you have to manage space stations and fight space battles against aliens and possibly other factions.

Gameplay Overview

In Terra Invicta you don't control nations directly. You start out as one of 8 factions with completely different goals. One faction wants to ally with the aliens, another wants to exterminate them, a third one just wants to leave earth and so on. You have to influence nations to get some control of them and benefit from their resources. Eventually you'll get into space and start building space stations (stations such as the ISS already exist btw). More stable, or large nations are more difficult to gain control over, so you have to make short and long term decisions on what nations you want. You could take control of smaller, or less stable nations to quickly get access to their resources or maybe try to build them up, or you could try to gain control of ones that already have a space program. Since you eventually want to get to space, and the game uses some real world physics, you'll also have to consider what regions are suitable for space programs (near the equator is better overall). You'll quickly realize how much this game tries to simulate. Every nation on earth has one or more control points with GDP and other information based on current real world data. It doesn't stop there, once you look at the solar system, you'll realize that the game doesn't only have the planets, but also larger asteroids and moons to colonize, or build orbital stations around.

With eight factions that all play differently, combined with a tech tree that deliberately locks certain projects to specific playthroughs, there's a lot of replayability here. I haven't tried all the factions yet. In fact, I've only played two of them.

Agents & Organizations

You interact with nations, assets and other factions by using agents. The agent system is quite complex with different agent classes, traits and stats to determine what skills they can use. Agents are used for everything from taking control of nations to assassinating or detaining agents from other factions. You start the game with two agents but can recruit more as the game progresses.

The agent system, like a lot in this game, is quite deep and complex. For example an agent can give you bonuses to influence in countries where education is below a certain threshold, or only give benefits in certain countries, so you really have to think about how and where you use your agents.

The game also has organizations which you can use depending on what nations and agents you control. A lot of these are real world organizations such as intelligence agencies, military organizations, companies and criminal organizations (SAS and MI5 if you control the UK for example). Organizations will give you all sorts of bonuses and sometimes drawbacks in different areas.

Research

The research system is a great part of this game. There is public research which will benefit everyone. You have some influence over what public projects get picked. Once a public project is completed you'll get access to private engineering projects which only your faction will benefit from. This means you'll have to be careful what public projects you support to achieve your goals. The tech tree is the largest I've ever seen in a game, but you can't, and you don't need to research everything. Some projects only have a certain chance to unlock for your faction in a playthrough, so you'll not always have access to all the projects you want. Having said that, there is always alternatives, and there's a lot of technologies you don't need. The game has lots of rocket engines for example, but you'll only need one, or a few of them. There are also a lot of earth related techs to unify nations, or how to deal with the aliens.

Earth Phase: Geopolitics & Threats

You'll get your first alien contact right at the start of the game, but for the most part the aliens don't have a huge effect on the game early on. The aliens are not your only threat however, especially not early on. Humanity is far from united in this game. Each faction has their own goal, and nations on earth can and will fight each other. This can include an all out nuclear war, which I haven't seen in my own game yet.

Space

I haven't got far enough into the post-release game to give a full account of this section. I'll update the review when I have.

Once you get into space and start establishing colonies (this will take a while), you'll eventually start building a space fleet. The game has a ship designer and real time space battles. It seems very comprehensive. Real world physics are also simulated, which means that transfer windows between celestial bodies matter. It'll sure matter when it comes to how long it'll take you to travel around the solar system.

Terra Invicta is a mix of turn based and real time. You make weekly, biweekly or monthly decisions where the game pauses, but you progress time in real time. Space battles are real time, but can be paused as well. You can either have cinematic battles where you don't have to consider fuel usage, or you can use real world physics, in which case you have to consider fuel usage during battles to avoid having your fleets end up on an escape trajectory where you end up on a course that prevents you from going back home.

UI & Learning Curve

Some will argue that the UI and learning curve are the weakest parts of this game, and I must admit, it's very overwhelming at first. The game has so much information and so many things affecting each other, it can be difficult to find the things you're looking for. I still don't want to call it bad, even though recent Paradox titles have better UI. Same with the learning curve, you won't see your mistakes right away, it will take years before you realize you're in a death spiral, but you can also turn things around. Just don't expect to start the game and know everything right away. There is a tutorial now, but it will only point you in the right direction early on. Since information is interconnected and scattered all over the place, the UI could really benefit from a nested tooltip system.

Conclusion

I haven't played this game enough to draw a final conclusion, but I think it's safe to say it's a good game. If you want an extremely complex and ambitious game that tries to do a lot of things, you should like this. Whether or not it succeeds is up to you to decide, but I think it does a really good job, especially considering the size of the development team. If you like grand strategy games, hard sci-fi and some 4x elements, this game could be for you.

I should've written this two years ago, but it's one of those games that you play for a while, take a break from, and then come back to. Darkest Dungeon looks like a very simple game on the surface, but it's actually fairly deep and complex. It's a very classic rogue-like in a sense, but still feels modern.

Graphics

Darkest Dungeon is a 2D game with quite simple graphics. Still, it works very well for this game. The style is beautiful and even if the animations are simple, some camera tricks make it work very well.

Audio

The audio is fantastic. Especially the narrator giving one-liners throughout the game as well as some longer speeches. The game also has nice music.

User Interface

The interface is simple but most things are quite clear, except for some tooltips for skills.

Gameplay

You start out with two characters on your way to a hamlet, fighting two battles to get there. In your hamlet, you can recruit more characters, upgrade buildings and buy/sell trinkets. Each turn in the hamlet represents a week, and you have to complete one dungeon each week. You usually have multiple dungeons to pick from, and it's important to make the right choices with the characters you have.

During a dungeon crawl, characters will be stressed or die. Stress is a very important part of the game and can ruin a run if you're not careful. Characters can also receive positive and negative quirks. Both stress and quirks can be managed at the hamlet, but it will cost you. All combat is turn based, giving you a chance to make good tactical decisions if you know your character skills and enemies well.

Summary

This is a great game, and I recommend it to everyone who likes RPGs, rogue-likes and tactical games. Even if you're not sure if you like it, pick it up on a sale and try it out!

The developer behind this has made a similar style game called planet base that I haven’t played unfortunately.

This game takes place in the early history of mankind (Or should I call it early modern history since we are talking about modern humans?). You start out as a hunter gatherer tribe in the Paleolithic era (Old stone age) and need to survive and develop your tribe into an iron age settlement. I would say the game spans a few thousand, up to maybe 10.000 years depending on how you look at it.

Graphics

The visuals are nice, with a lot of attention to detail. There’s also a sort of action camera to get a close up of any thing in the game, instead of the usual top-down view. It has no practical use but it’s a nice touch.

Audio

Well, the game has good ambient music, audio cues and other sounds expected from such a game. Animal sounds and human grunts (or whatever it is) is also well done.

User interface

The user interface is nice and clear but I would like some more hotkeys and panels. Adding specific villages to a hot key would be nice for example. They have added more panels through patches, so I hope this may be added in the future.

Gameplay

This feels like a quite casual city builder at first, but if you play on higher difficulty or in hard core mode you have a lot of pressure to keep developing your settlement to avoid getting wiped out by raiders that will occasionally attack and try to destroy your nice little village. WHen you are not under attack, it’s all about assigning important tasks and placing buildings. It’s the usual city building stuff plus hunting. Just be careful what you try to kill, because animals will defend themselves and kill your villages. Your villages may also get killed while gathering resources or fetching food, bu roaming aggressive animals (I hate those wolves).

Conclusion

So far, I love this game. If you are interested in a survival style city building game. This is for you. This reminds me of banished, but has more features and resources plus a quite big tech tree, that seem to be growing with every patch. Buy it when you have the chance!

Graphics

The graphics are definitely nice in this game, even though everything is icy. It has some nice effects and I really love some of the buildings. The game has some cutscenes, but these are nothing special.

Audio

The sound effects are nice, and I love some of the voiceover lines. The music is fantastic. You can listen to it on Spotify if you like that kind of music. It works really well for the mood of this game.

User interface

The user interface works fine for the most part, even though I sometimes find myself trying to find specific buildings when things get cluttered later on.

Gameplay

Usually in this type of game, I go for sandbox mode if available. Here however I went straight for the first scenario. I think there is a sand box mode available now, but I haven’t tried it. The whole point of this game is that things get worse over time. You start with a limited set of buildings and very few people, and this game is played over days instead of years, so things happen quite quickly here. You can assign new laws and research new tech to unlock new buildings. Laws will affect the two major stats in this game. Hope and discontent. You’ll have to make quite a few decisions that makes you feel terrible in this game, and you usually seem to end up with some kind of extremist community. On my first attempt I was banished for bad leadership. You grow your population through immigration. The first scenario is basically survival, but on the second one you have to try to keep seeds alive, starting with just a few scientists. Each scenario also has an extra hard survival mode that you can try if you don’t feel challanged enough. The resource management part of this game is nice, and doesn’t feel to easy. During the course of the game you also get a lot of time limited quests from your population, such as heat all homes or treat all sick people. You usually have several options when these quests pop up. If you don’t feel you can do everything they want, you can gain some hope by at least doing something.

Conclusion

If you like the less releaxed type of city building/management games, this is definitely worth picking up. I loved the setthing and how things really got worse over time. In some games it’s the oposite; things start difficult and becomes easy once you get everything sorted out. I highly recommend this game.

Graphics

The graphics range from great to fantastic. The enviroments are very detailed and has high graphical quality. It probably requires a decent PC for the best experience. I like the graphics in this game, not only for it’s quality, but for the great attention to detail.

Audio

Sound effects are great, and voice overs are for the most part ok.

User interface

The user interface can feel a bit clunky at times. For example the inventory system. Replacing gear, something I do quite often, can be a bit tedius.

Gameplay

This is a first person RPG. If you’ve played games like SKyrim, you’ll feel quite at home, except that the combat system is very different (much better IMHO). You start out as a Blacksmiths’  son, without much combat experience, and it’ll take some time before you learn to fight properly. ALso fighting with different weapons feel quite different. The addition of notrition, the need to sleep and repairs is also nice.  Ranged combat is even more difficult than melee before you get used to it. I also usually go to an archery range whenever I switch to a new bow to try a few shots.

Conclusion

Well, if you haven’t noticed already, I’m totally in love with this game. This might turn out to be my favorite RPG of all time. If you want a historical RPG, or just something fresh. Get this game right now!

But now, A year later, after playing EU4 I decided to give this a serious look. Now, 50 or so hours later, I really love this game. Now I’m not sure what made this game seem so overwhelming, even though there are some concepts I still not grasp 100%. I guess the main reason is that you approach things differently. Instead of playing a nation, like in other similar games, you play a dynasty. or rather a member of a dynasty. You try to spread your dynasty while at the same time trying to keep enough land to ensure that your heir will be powerful enough to survive against other claiments. This can be tricky at times, since other dynasties, as well as other members of your own dynasty will try to take what they consdier to be theirs. I use the term “land” ligltly here, cause the game is more about titles. You can hold a Kindom without actually holding any land in it (even though you run a huge risk of getting into trouble with revolting powerful vasals).

Each characters has traits that you have to take into account when arranging merriages and deviding land. Traits can be gained and lost throughout a characters lifetime. This brings an interesting RPG element into the game.

The game takes place in medieval europe for the most part, so you don’t have access to the whole world like you do in EU4, however, the most recent expansion adds india to the map. In the original game, you can start in 1066 and play all the christian feodal leaders. Expansions have added the option to play muslim and pagan leaders as well as the option to start in the 9th century. No matter what  start you pick, the game will end in 1453, since this is considered to be the end of the medieval era (The fall of constantinople).

Something that may put people off, is that the game has a lot of DLCs. I’ve picked up most of them by now, but if you are looking to pick this game up, I would start wit hthe original game, and if you like it, pick up the DLCs on sale.

Graphics

THe game uses the same engine as EU4 I think, so if you’ve seen that, you know what to expect. There are a limited number of character faces in the game, but several small DLCs will add more distinct faces for different cultures.

Audio

The sound effects are nothing special, but the music is good for the most part. There are also a lot of music DLCs to add flavour to different cultures.

User interface

As mentioned, the game can be very overwhelming berfore you get used to it. Some things can be pretty difficult to find, unless you know where it is (financial overview comes to mind). It will take you a few hours of clicking around to learn where everything can be found. Some areas could probably have been made more intuitive, but at the same time, once you get used to it, it works quite well.

Gameplay

You start out as a member of a dynasty with one or more “landed titles” and your goal is to make you and your dynasty gain more power, and survive the test of time. A lot of decisions you make will be long term, for example, you marry one of your children, so his or her children will inherit a title. Events will occur throughout a characters lifetime, changing their traits, opinions of other characters and so on, usually involving active decision making.

You’ll also get involved on plots to clain or revoke toties as well as getting rid of certain people. Managing your vasals is another important area that sometimes requires some creativity. You want to keep people happy without making them to powerful. To sum it up, the game is basically a dynasty simulator.

Conclusion

If you can get through the steep learning process, this game is awasome. I would higly recomment this game to anyone who likes strategy games. It also won’t hurt if you are a fan of intrigues such as those found in series like The sage of ice and fire :). Presonally, I really like this game right now, and there isn’t many similar games out there.  For beginners I would recommend picking up just the original game, playing through one game and then picking up all the expansions and DLCs.

Having an affair with your daughter in law can have some inconvenient results

Well, the wrong person inherited all the titles I wanted. This is what happened to the unlucky 1 year old who inherited all my titles.

I’m writing this after having spent about 50 hours with this game. That’s how long I feel it takes to really get a grasp of the game. I still don’t know everything there is to know about the game, but I feel comfortable playing and know what to do in most situations.

Graphics

Graphically, this game looks quite good for a strategy game, even though graphics are not that important in this genre. The most important thing is that the map is easy to read.

Audio

The sound effect are ok, but the music is really great. THis is a good thing since you’ll have to listen to it for hundreds of hours

User interface

Despite the complexity of the game, the UI is quite easy to get used to. It’s quite intuitive, even though I sometimes spend time looking for something that I know can be found somewhere (A lot of statistical

Gameplay

This is a grand strategy game, so expect to spend a lot of time looking at a map. Well, the concept is easy. You pick a nation, and control it from 1444 (or whenever you like to start) until 1821. Theis is a very interesting time period in most of the world, and the experiance may differ depending on what country you decide to play. For example, as England, you’ll start out in the hundred year war, but later on probably end up cononizing, trading and exploring the rest of the world, pretty much staying away from the european continent. ON the other hand, if you picka country such as Poland, you’ll end up in a lot of the big european conflicts. The game isn’t scripted per say, but some historical events will trigger under certain conditions, such events can turn out to be both good and bad. There are also a lot of other events that will trigger under certain conditions, such as big revolts, trade events and formation of new nations. The game has no real goal, even though there is a score system. it’s more of a simulation then anything else. The game has the usual features of other strategy games such as research, but things are structured in a slightly different way. When you first start out, it feels like you have very little control over your country’s progress, but as you dig deeper, you realized that there’s a lot of things to manage. I would recommend starting as a decent sized country without to many enemies. I started out as spain, and I feel that was a good idea. Your wars early on won’t be that complex and you can experiance some colonizing right off the bat.

Conclusion

Right now, I love the game. It’s the best strategy game I’ve played for years. If you want a game that’s relatively easy to learn, but has a lot of depth, I would pick this up right away. Just be aware that each game will take 50 hours plus, especially before you get used to the game.

The plot is similar to the previous games. You end up alone in a sparsely populated area somewhere in the world, in this case in an fictional archipelago. This time around you won’t have to worry about the malarea like in FC2, so you can focus more on exploring and improving your equipment. The game has a basic crafting system that allows you to get better equipment by hunting wild animals and gathering plants.

Graphics

The graphics are really, really good for the most part, with a lot of stunning views, good looking characters, vehicles and animals.

Audio

Great sound effects, not much in terms of music, even thoug hthere is music to add to the feel of the game.

User interface

One of the few problems I find with this game is the user interface. The whole things feels a bit “consoly”. THe inventory system is easy to use, but I feel that some things requires to many clicks.

Gameplay

You start out alone on an island, but the game has more to offer then most first person shooters. A lot of exploration, tons of side missions, a good story so far, and just lots of things to do in general. You gain experiance by killing pirates, hunting, taking over outposts and completing missions. COmpleting missions also unlocks certain weaons. The crafting system could be a bit more flexible. Right now, the way it works is that certain items requires certain hides and sometimes things just get stupid. The game has a lot of stealth elements along with the usual shooting stuff. You can also find a lot of vehicles throuighout the game, and I like the way they handle.

Conclusion

If you want a good first person shooter with some of the best character interaction I’ve seen in a game like this, you should pick this one up. I wish the main character wasn’t as good at shooting, and they should have made more out of the survival elements in this game. The unexperianced main character is surprisingly good at using firearms that he has probably never seen before. Despite the problems, it’s still a good game and worth playing.

The only game I’ve played in this series is AC2, so I can only compare these 2 games.

My impressions of AC2 was, that it could have been a great game, but I felt the port was terrible. I found it really difficult to get a hang of the controls without using  a controller.

AC3 on the other hand, is much better in this respect. The game seem to follow pretty much the same concept, but the controls feels much more straightforward, and during the tutorial, you are actually told what keys to use instead of having to recognize different symbols, and try to remember what key on your keyboard corresponds to each symbol.

The game, for the most part takes place in 18th century Americas. I’m currently a few hours into the game and it is still very linear, however I expect the game to open up a bit more down the line.

Graphics

I must say, this game looks awasome for the most part. Most of the enviremental graphics, as well as  the characeters looks, and moves nicely. This is pretty much expected from a tripple A title. It’s not just the quality of the graphics. Most of the places I’ve seen so far has a lot of detail that adds to the imersion of the game.

Audio

The sound effects and voice acting is generally good so far. There are games with better voice acting, but this is defenitely good enough.

User interface

Well, I can only compare this to AC2, and as mentioned earlier I think the UI is hugely improved. FOr example. Early on in AC2 I got stuck on a roof (or tower) with an objective to press 2 or 3 keys simultanously, however, since I didn’t have a printout of the control options and couldn’t access it during the scripted sequence, I was pretty much stuck. I guess you get used to the controls, but that pissed me off quite a lot. AC3 on the other hand, teaches you the controls early on in a straightforward way. Stuff like “Press F to aim” is much better then just being presented with symbols from a console controller that you don’t own. This has helped me to get into this game pretty much without frustration I was kind of disapointed that a  game with such great potential as AC2 has was missing such a basic thing. The character movement usually feels pretty fluid and intuitive.

Gameplay

If you’ve played earlier instances of Assassins creed, you pretty much know what to expect. Early on, the game is very scripted without much freedom, but as mentioned I expect this to change.  Expect to spend a lot of time leaping from roof to roof and climbing stuff. Evne though the game has a main story, there are also side missions along the way. I’ve been trying to avoid reading up on the plot, but it seems like the main character (or the one you play when doing the time travelling thing) will take part in the american revolution and war of independence. SO far, I’ve nly seen parts of Boston, but I expect to be able to go to other key historical places of the time, we’ll see. So far I haven’t had to make a single decision on my own in the game whitch is a bit dissappointing. The dialogues and scripted events have been very straightforward. Maybe this will change later on as well? The combat, so far has been very easy. I’ve been shot at with pistols, and attacked with swords and (I think) bayonettes but nothing I couldn’t handle. The combat system overall feels quite simplistic. The blend of history and science fiction in this series has always felt a bit weird to me, but it works for the most part. Sometimes some features feel a little out of place while trying to get imersed into the historical setting.

Conclusion

If you enjoyed the earlier games of the series and wnat more of the same, I expect you’ll get a lot oout of this game. If you expect complete freedom to explore and do whatever you want, or have a lot of choices to make right from the start. Chances are you’ll give up the game fairly quicly, if you don’t find the story compelling enough to continue playing just to see where it’ll take you. After my earlier experiances wit hthe series, I didn’t expect that much out of this game, but so far, I find my self enjoying it enough to want to continue playing. It seems like they’ve done a uch better job with the PC version this time around. It doesn’t hur that I really like 18th century setting either. If you don’t have this yet, and have any interest at all in the series, this is the game I would pick up. Especially if you can do it during a sale.

Metro last light takes place in  russia (I think), in a dystopic future where people spend most of their time below ground. As the name suggests, a lot of the game takes place in the metro. The Metro universe is based on a series of novels by the Russian author Dimitry Glukhovsky (not sure I spelled that correctly 🙂 ) but I don’t think it follows the story of these novels.

I didn’t play the original MEtro 2033 (a prequal to this game), but even though there are references to events in that game, Last light is definitely playable without having played the previous game. Something I wouldn’t say about a series like Mass effect for instance. The game is a single player FPS with focus on stealth. It’s probably possible to shoot everything, but that doesn’t seem to be the best approach to the game.

Graphics

The graphics on the PC are outstanding for the most part, with a lot of emphasis on detail. I’m not sure how the game will look and perform on lower end system, but on my new 4th gen I7 with GTX 770 it runs really well. I like the amound of detail they’ve put into some items as well as the envireoment.

Audio

I find nothing to complain about wihen it comes to the sound effects, but the English voice acting is a completely different story. I’ve heard the Russian voice acting is much better, but so far I’ve been using the English version and it ranges from average to terrible. The developer’s are Ukrainian and I feel that they didn’t put that much effort into the English voices.

User interface

Not much to say here, it’s an FPS, but you have less information on screen then in most other FPSes these days. Something that adds to the imersion of the game and I don’t mind this at all.

Gameplay

As mentioned this is an FPS, but it’s not Doom, half-life or CoD. On the other hand it’s not an FPS RPG like  Fallout 3 or Fallout NW either. Stealth is pretty much a necessity, especially on higher difficulties. There is also a ranger mode available that’s soposed to force you to be even more stealthy. In the world of Metro, you buy and sell stuff with military grade ammo. This can also be used in the weapons you find in the game, but for the most part you’ll use “dirty” rounds.  You’ll spend most of your time in the metro since you have to wear gas masks when going outside. The gas mask has replacable filters that last about 5 minutes. If you are easily scared, you might have some problem with this game since you’ll spend a lot of time in dark places and the amound of detail put into the game really adds to the overall dystopic feel of the game. So far the game is super linear, but hopefully you’ll be given some more freedom later on. If the linearity is a problem, I think you may want to look at some reviews before purchasing the game, since this is a first impressions article. In terms of gameplay I don’t really know where to place this game. It has a little bit of Deus Ex HR, but since it’s post apocalyptic Fallout 3 also comes to mind.

Conclusion

If you don’t mind the linearity, this game is really really good. For some reason, half-life comes into my head while playing this game. I like the world and a lot of the small details they put into this game. I’m not a huge fan of the genre, even though I’ve played a bunch of FPSs. This game fels different in some way and I expect to play more of it. The graphics and overall imersion in this game makes it more apealing to me then most other FPSs Add the stealth elements to that and you have a game that stands out from the rest of the genre.

I want to start by saying that I haven’t played a 2D platformer in like 20 years. I bought this more out of nostalgia then anything. The original Giana sisters came out back in the late 80s and had some controversy surounding it, since it was basically a Mario clone. It was however, still a good game, with an awasome soundtrack. The original game has been ported to several platforms, including IOS.

Now, almost 25 years later, the sequal has been released. As I said earlier, I didn’t expect much from this game, except from a great soundtrack and some nostalgia, however, this game is actually realy good.

You play as two different characters (sisters?, incarnations of the same sister? whatever) and you can and must switch between them to bypass obsticles throughout the game.

Graphics

The graphics in this game is very impressive for an indi game, and without knowing much about PC platformers, I think this is the best graphics I’ve ever seen in a platformer.
It’s usually quite easy to distinguish between stuff in the foreground that will hurt you, and things that are just parts of the background.

Audio

The sound effects are nothing special, but the music is freaking awasome. One nice touch to the game is that the music changes as you “twist ” between worlds, while still staying synchronized.

User interface

I play this game with mouse and keyboard, and even though it’s probably easier to play with a controller, it’s still very very playable with just a keyboard. You’ll learn what keys to use when fairly quicly and then you play pretty muc hwithout thinking about that you don’t have a controller.

Gameplay

I’ve pretty much covered everything already. This is basically a 2D or 2.5D platformer. I haven’t ran into that many difficult puzzles, but there’s a lot of places where you have to figure  stuff out quickly if you don’t wanna die. If you play in standard mode, you have infinite number of lives but it will heart you rating if you die to much, or don’t collect enough coin in a level. That brings me to the starring system. You get stars for completing a level, and certain levels require a set amound of stars from previous levels. This can be annoying if you have to go back and replay stuff you didn’t like, but it brings some challange to the game. You can also play the game in Score attack, Time attack, Hard core and Uber hard core mode. The Uber hard core mode gives you only one life.

Conclusion

Since I’m not a fan of platformers, I wouldn’t pick this up at full price, and if you are you probably already own this game. If you can pick it up on a sale however, it’s definitely worth it if you have the slightest intrest in this genre.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution takes place in a not to distant future where human augmentation through inplants is possible, but not available to everyone. There is an ongoing struggle between the people who are pro augmentations and those who think modifying humans in this way are morally wrong. This theme is an important part of the game, and brings up the classic question of how far sciance could and should go.

The main character: Adam Jensen, is (even though, it’s not by his own will) an augmented human being. He gets his augmentations so early on that I don’t consider it a spoiler. He gets involved in a big conspiracy involving very powerful augmentations.

The game consists of several “City hubs” with a main plot and a lot of side missions. The hubs are fairly large and (at least for me) fairly easy to get lost in. It’s not a true open world game but while withink a hub, you can move around freely before moving on to the next one. The missions are fairly good and usually have several solutions and sometimes leads to other side quests.

Graphics

Overall, the graphics are really good. Their are more important things in a game like this, but it doesn’t hurt that most of the game looks really good. There are some exceptions however. Some of the scripted cutscenes and “Take downs” (more on this later) looks weird. As I’ve already stated though, this doesn’t take away much from the overall experience.

Audio

The sound effects and music of this game is great. Most of the areas in the game has music in the background that adds to the overall atmosphere and feel of an area without being repetitive. Many places also have people talking to each other. You can overhear some interesting conversations, some of which can give you hints to quests or just add to the overall feel. This gets me into voice acting. The voice acting in this game range from quite bad to really good. For some reason, I really like the voice of the main character. As in most open world games, some of the general chatter can be repetitive, but I really haven’t found as much of this here as in other games.

User interface

There isn’t much to say here. The UI does what it’s soposed to and it does it well. Inventory management is quite easy and it’s always easy to find what you’re looking for.

Gameplay

The game is played from a first person perspective for the most part, with the exception of some, for the most part unnecessary cutscenes. This brings up the concept of the Take down system mentioned above. You can incapacitate people by using a non lethal take down (basically walking up to someone and pressing a key). This will take care of enemies without having to kill them, and can be a good solution to many situations. I think you can actually play through the entire game without actually killing someone with a few exceptions. This brings me to the most annoying part of the game: Boss fights. From what I’ve heard, the boss fights in this game were outsource to a different company and the original developer wasn’t to happy with them, however they are there and I have to talk about them. The first one almost made me stop playing the game, cause I got there with weapons that made it really difficult and these fights only take away from the overall experience of the game. They are few and far between however, so, for the most part, those shouldn’t bother anyone to much. This game, however isn’t only about killing stuff. The main story and the multi layer quests is better then you’ll find in most games. This game calls itself an RPG, and RPG  for most people today means statistics, leveling and character development (even though this can be debated and I don’t agree with it). You gain experience by doing all sorts of things; Talking to people, completing quests, hacking computers and taking out enemies). For the most part, you gain more experience by using non lethal solutions to problem, something that can push your gameplay in a way that I don’t like. While playing, I usually don’t care and I just take the solution I feel is the most righteous thing to do or whatever suits me best. In terms of leveling, you gain praxis points that can be used to buy augmentations. Augmentations are basically the skill system of this game. When it comes to weapons, I don’t feel that any weapon is more powerful then another in most cases. Everything has it’s advantages and disadvantages, with the exceptions of the silly boss fights. Same goes for the augmentations, even though I’ve found a few that would be really difficult for me to do without. There’s quite a few weapons to choose from, but I usually use what’s at hand, and what I can find ammo for, since your inventory space is quite limited, even with inventory enhancing augs. I’ll usually find myself switching weapons several times during a long mission depending on what my enemies are using. This will depend on your accuracy and the difficulty level you play on off course. Even though I have been talking a lot about combat and such here, I want to emphasize that the most important part of this game is the storytelling and character interaction.

Conclusion

In 2011 we saw quite a few great games, and this is no exception. If you like a game with some action, that also has a good story, this game is a must. I really don’t have much to complain about in this game, despite what I’ve said above. I highly recommend this game, and if you want quests to be more challanging, I recommend turning off the quest tracker waypoints in the options.

Company of heroes is a Real Time Strategy game set during world war two. Before I picked this game up, I thought it was pretty much like Men of war, but after playing the tutorials and a few missions, it feels more like a  standard RTS with base building elements and resource management. Don’t get me wrong, the campaing missions I’ve played so far plays pretty much like Men of war, but the game feels more like a standard RTS then a WWII battle simulator or whatever you want to call it.

I’m always a bit sceptical to games trying to be somewhat authentic, while at the same time time incorporating base building and resource “gathering”., however this still seem to be a fun game and I’ll keep playing it.

The campaign is set on the western front in 1944 (like most other WWII games). It seem to focus on the operations in Normandy. It would be nice if it had some different campaign, I mean, WWII is more then just just the invasion of France, but the existing campaign seem to be well done.

Game play

I haven’t played enough to say much about game play yet, but it’s the usual RTS stuff. You start with some units, establish a base and build more troops. You can also upgrade tropps and gain special abilities and spend command points to get artiliry strikes and stuff, so the game seem to have pretty good strategic depth.

Graphics

For a game from 2006, the graphics are really nice. They also mix in cut scenses during the campaign to enhance the experiance. THose cuts seem to be  well done thus far.

Audio

Sound effects are good, and the game has a really nice soundtrack.

Conclusion

If you like RTS game, this game is definitely worth a try, especially considering the price 6 years after the release.