…continued from Part One
Part 2: The Horrors of DOS P.C.
Shortly before Microsoft Windows managed to overthrow the world with it’s convenient easy to use design, my parents found themselves shopping for what they thought would be the end game of home computer technology. Without the use of internet back then, how could anyone begin to even comprehend, let alone research the wave of technology that was going to sweep over the world within the next 5+ years? This was a different world entirely, computer salesman were worse than car salesman selling nearly obsolete machines the equivalent of vehicular lemons for thousands of dollars, then adding additional charges to take classes on how to use the damn things. Well thankfully ignorance is bliss, and even with the hard to use series of text menu ‘s, constant errors, and eye damaging neon colour schemes; It still somehow managed to be detrimental in providing me some insanely memorable gaming moments! The harder the fight, the more satisfying the victory?!………Wait a minute did anyone ever successfully beat anything on these cryptic ancient beasts?
1. PGA Tour
Easily one of the greatest games on our computer, released in 1990 PGA Tour seemed like a graphical achievement at the time. All the courses looked like they were built out of vibrant cardboard from the early technology of three dimensional game design. This game played a huge role in making me fall in love with the sport of golf at a very early age. Whether chasing the ball around the fairway on a bad day or following it straight to the green, nothing can compare to the relaxation and challenge of a good round of golf. Also in the game whenever my brother, my friends, or myself got bored we would try to pickoff spectators by firing the ball full force at their crotches…….good times.
2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
What kid didn’t love TMNT in the early 90’s? Well I was no exception! Finding anything involving the green, pizza eating, foot soldier stomping, cheesy early 90’s dialogue spewing foursome was like striking gold. To this day I still remember how hyper and excited I was when I got to pick one game off the shelf for my birthday while in the same swindlers hideout who scammed my parents a few weeks earlier. Every other game on the shelf might as well had blank covers or not have existed at all. I sat in anticipation waiting for my parents to install the game, a long drawn out process on multiple paper thin floppy discs. Envelope after envelope, disc after disc, this game was soon going to complete my existence on this planet, the reason I was born was coming into fruition, and the world would just never be the same. The funny thing is, I don’t think I even complained once, I just sat in all my glory playing the first couple levels repeatedly. This was easily however the most frustrating game I had played since E.T. the Extraterrestrial. Never has a game missed the target audience of 4-10 year olds, to my knowledge quite like this managed to. The game was too difficult and had so many glitches on NES most adults couldn’t even get through it let alone the little ninjas the franchise was aiming for. Not only that, but I was playing the much worse P.C. version on a bunk computer that could barely run the bastard. Imagine a side-scroller with so much lag that a jump takes a full ten seconds to land. Also adding the fact that your backgrounds and your characters were neon coloured. Thanks for killing my eyes developers, really apreiated that. It was bad enough on NES, but on our 8088 it was straight broken.
3. Prince Of Persia
While the original Commander Keen and Duke Nuk’em series were side-scrolling favorites of mine, their was a much more adult oriented game of a pure genius design that had my brother, and mine’s attention like no other. Prince of Persia was the first game I had ever seen that the character’s deaths were animated with vivid bright crimson pouring from the wounds. I’ll never forget the effect the game had on me the first time I saw that little man fall through a loose tile leaving a mangled, unrecognizable, heap of gore on the cement below. Followed by that eerie music letting you know your done son! This was the early 90’s, and I was a sheltered child in a some what strictly religious home. The sight of the blood (whether from getting impaled on spikes, crushed from the impact of a high fall, or being cut in half by serrated doorways slamming shut) disturbed, shocked, and frightened me. After playing most nights I would have intense nightmares of not only falling, but being impaled in a spiked pit also, this eventually lead to a recurring nightmare of being kidnapped after eves dropping on two men in a restaurant who at the end of said dream would throw me off a bridge.
It was an intensely difficult game that constantly had you on the edge of your seat. Neither my brother nor myself ever successfully rescued the damsel in distress, but I’ll always remember looking up to my older brother as he made it further than I had ever thought possible! The last thing I remember was walking through a mirror where your evil reflection appeared and the two of us speculating if he was trying to beat us to the end or not? If anybody knows where it went from there hit me up, it had such an impact on me I still find myself thinking about it 18 years later.
After many years of playing the most random crap on a computer that was nearly obsolete within the first year, my brother and I decided to join the ranks of the few. We sold everything we could sell on a garage sale in hopes of upgrading to the most impressive machine we had ever molested with our eyes…
