Author: ericiseasytosay

I saw a random post somewhere on Mastodon that mentioned the 1985 DOS game Striker and the included screen shot pulled something deep in the childhood nostalgia region of my brain. I hadn’t thought of it in decades but I remembered playing it as a kid and had to track it down.

Dang that CGA cyan/magenta colour palette gets me every single time.

The game itself is actually pretty fun, especially considering it’s from 1985. You fly your helicopter through a horizontal landscape, either shooting or bombing tanks, rockets, or alien ships. The more you maneuver your chopper, the faster your fuel reserves deplete, but destroying ground-based fuel tanks replenish a small amount in your tank.

The end of each level has a small challenge; center your helicopter on a landing pad to pick up spies and then the next level you do the same to drop them off. Another is to pick up cargo, etc.

The game isn’t overly challenging and it felt really good to play it again. According to the readme included, it was created by a Derek Williams. Derek, if you’re still out there, know that childhood me and adult me had a lot of fun with this.

Every now and then I have the urge to dip my toes into tabletop RPGs. Unfortunately, nobody else in my circle of friends has ever expressed any interest in it (or, like me, they keep it well hidden). So, instead of a traditional D & D game, I usually make my way through a Fighting Fantasy book while my wife puzzles. It makes for a cozy evening in.

I’ve made a Fighting Fantasy scoring spreadsheet that I use whenever I play and maybe some others will find it useful. I’ll include the pdf output for easy printing and the Excel Libreoffice Calc file in case anyone wants to make it their own. It uses the Dalelands Uncial font which should be pretty easy to track down, if you want it.

I did not go back to Planetfall after I got myself into a walking dead/softlock scenario. So I guess that makes it like every other interactive fiction game I’ve ever played.

It was fine and good and I was actually getting intrigued with the story but the pointless hunger/sleep/can-only-ride-the-train-during-daytime-hours game mechanic that led to the softlock just completely drained my interest level. The extensively detailed Trizbort map means that I could get back to where I was in probably less than 30 minutes, so maybe I’ll go back to it someday? I feel like listening to the DOS Game Club episode on this one will probably push me to finishing it.

Maybe.

I’ve been playing Infocom‘s Planetfall lately, as it’s the game of the month for the DOS Game Club. I’ve only ever given interactive fiction cursory glances over the years; the first time as a kid on my uncle’s Olivetti business computer, to most recently (before Planetfall) when I made a valiant effort to port King’s Quest I to a text adventure during COVID.

Usually when I attempt these, I begin with the best intentions. I used to make hand-drawn maps with plenty of space to annotate any oddities in each area (for Planetfall I’ve been using the wonderful Trizbort in a Windows virtual machine), I kept notes in a separate $gamename.txt file, and I’d play in fullscreen to remove any distractions. Even with all this, I’d rarely put in more than an hour or so before losing interest. I don’t know why – some of the IF I’ve attempted have been really great, and I like to think I’m decent at converting words on screen to pictures in my head. I suppose it’s likely just the problem of too much choice – Steam and GOG libraries with way too many other, more stimulating, options.

Planetfall, though, has got its hooks into me and I’m pretty confident that this will be the first one that I actually finish. With the exception of one (so far), the puzzles have been pretty straightforward and seem to rely more on thorough world exploration to find items than they do on stretching item usage plausibility.

There’s a food/sleep and day/night mechanic that doesn’t really add much to the game besides opening yourself up to walking dead situations but that’s been my only real complaint. I’m hoping to get a couple hours this weekend to put towards this and, who knows, maybe even complete it.