davidn | Entries tagged with stumbling through

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw1d9eMOKfY

Finally reaching the end of my almost realtime coverage of Epic Megagames' releases in 1993! This video covers three games from a group of developers in Poland that were later packaged together as the Epic Puzzle Pack. These are Robbo and Heartlight, which are puzzle games, and Electro Man, which isn't.

During the video, I release the first game-related thing I've done in a very long time - a rudimentary editor for Heartlight, which is downloadable here.

Watch on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNdp6CGhQRU

I'm honestly not sure how I'm keeping up this schedule while taking care of a rapidly developing toddler, but here is another Epic video! I'm still covering 1993, during which Epic somehow managed to release about five years' worth of games. This video covers their brief experiment with publishing games for Windows 3.1!

Featured here are Castle of the Winds by Rick Saada and Dare to Dream by a developer you may have heard of called Cliff Bleszinski. It also shows Xargon, which was Allen Pilgrim's second game that took a lot from Kiloblaster and Jill of the Jungle.

Watch on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LnAcW_ya-k

Somehow I finished this one a week early compared to my usual three-week timeline!

Continuing coverage of Epic's improbably gigantic year in 1993 - I'm now two videos into it and have covered about half the games they released during that year. Once again, the genres that Epic published are all over the place, and the games covered are:

The justifiably famous Epic Pinball
The completely obscure Epic Baseball
Top-down shooter Zone 66 by Renaissance
One of the very few shareware CRPGs, Ancients by Farr-Ware

Watch on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jf485ixLO4

1993 was a ridiculously large year for Epic where they released about twelve games. This video covers Solar Winds and Silverball by James Schmalz (now of Digital Extremes) and Ken's Labyrinth by Ken Silverman. It also includes footage of a quasi-official followup, Ken's Labyrinth II!

Watch on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_sDBGjEWM4

Continuing my look through the back catalogue of the great Epic Megagames, covering their history from ZZT to Unreal Tournament! This episode is about the first four graphical games that Epic released in 1992 - it’s called Ventures in VGA even though one of them isn’t.

Features Jill of the Jungle, Kiloblaster, Brix and Overkill.

I'm opening up a new video series that's a lot like my old video series - the Stumbling Through name had meant to be for blind playthroughs of games, but I'd drifted into using the same title for more documentary-type videos as well. So from now on, the videos where I talk in-depth about games, compare ports, and so on will be under the new name, Stumbling Tours!

Watch on YouTube

This one came into being because I was trying to look up a playthrough video for Le Fetiche Maya, a Silmarils DOS game from 1989 that I could never work out at all. Finding there wasn't one, I decided to make one myself, with the aid of a guide from Abandonia.

The aim of the game, as much as you're given one at all, is to venture into the ruins of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, etc. and recover a strange fetish (probably one of

kjorteo's). Along the way, I found the writers of the game had done more research than I'd anticipated, but honestly it didn't help the game make any more sense.

Watch on YouTube

It's been a long, long time since I just showed a game off - but I want to give some attention to a ZDoom game that's been criminally overlooked!

This is an amazing conversion of The Crystal Maze into first-person form by Stephen Clark, "The Ultimate DooMer". It's incredible to see the set transformed into Doom geometry, and there are 32 games of varying scope and complexity - some of which seem to also have taken inspiration from Knightmare. This is my chance to prove that I can do better than the protozoa we watched being led around by Richard O'Brien weekly.

If you want to try it yourself, get:
- A copy of Doom II from GoG or Steam or something
- GZDoom from here: http://zdoom.org
- The mod from here: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/a-c/cr-maze

Then look up a guide on how to set it up, I'm not explaining everything!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG8chy-kRRg

1995 was the year that Apogee started becoming 3D Realms, with a new focus on the games in 3D environments that were beginning to become more prevalent in the era of the Pentium. This video has Terminal Velocity, Realms of Chaos, Xenophage, Death Rally, Stargunner… and their most famous game of all time, Duke Nukem 3D.

Somehow, all of these were new to me!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9CS1SdMx8s

As endorsed by Joe Siegler ;)

1994 was Apogee's most prolific year, so this is a 40-minute special! Find a hug partner before starting. It features many more diverse games than previous years and only one side-scrolling platfomer: Raptor, Hocus Pocus, Mystic Towers, Wacky Wheels, Planet Strike, Boppin and Rise of the Triad.

I'm probably taking a bit of a break after this one to do some other things that have been needing my attention, but there are still many more games to come!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1QF58FTpKU

Let's bowl! After Superbowl XLIX I decided to make an attempt to understand the baffling and incomprehensible game that Americans call football. In this educational video, Kjorteo teaches me the rules and strategies through Tecmo Super Bowl, and it seems to be about getting from line to line, like a much more violent Backgammon. In the end I did quite well, but lost.

I forgot to ask why it was called the Super Bowl.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wykPn7IquRU

Continuing my journey through the 3D Realms/Apogee back catalogue, 1993 was the year when things transitioned from EGA to VGA, and a number of new and interesting ideas were tried out across their releases. Because of this, at last I've got a reasonable length of video out of a week's work.

Wow, do I really care about this journal so little now that I haven't posted a single one of the video series I've been doing over the last few weeks? Here are the first three parts - they're basically my attempt to substitute for my obsolete dream of becoming a games programme presenter on television.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X60j-TWn414&hd=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMOSgepPNDY&hd=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQsIhIoIur0&hd=1

To complete the journey through Action 52, it's the crown jewel of the collection, in which the boggle-eyed Action Gamemaster gets sucked through the television screen to contribute nothing further to the story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osPkprtp7Qo&hd=1

Drifting along on their blinding cloud of unjustified confidence, the makers of the collection planned for a line of action figures, a cartoon series and so on. They did release their planned "Disney quality" animated television advert, but it wasn't.

Usually I hate the arm-reaches-through-screen virus thing in a story because it's so bloody stupid, but let's face it, if there were a game so ineptly made that it would actually do that by accident, this would be it.

It's finally over. I'll talk about some decent games next time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbfnCWJZq78&hd=1

It's Part 4, and I swear they're getting worse. Actually, this has some... 'interesting' games among the general dribble - they are at least not just space shoot-em-ups and plain platformers, and at least one is set in another dimension. Unfortunately they are still equally dreadful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCNnC6LkCvg&hd=1

A slightly-longer special wherein I play 14 games instead of 11, mostly in order to speed the whole process along a bit and get it over with. I crack up a record number of times during these videos, just due to not believing what I'm seeing in front of me.

The press release/video store advert can be found here!

SPAAAACE DREAAAAAMS na na na na na na SPAAAACE DREAAAAMS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVWLL3Eet7U&hd=1

I start providing my own entertainment in this exploration through games 12 to 22, because the game certainly doesn't provide much.

kjorteo put me up to this - after encouraging Zoey to suffer through it (but with the effort thwarted by her judiciously breaking the emulator), here is the first of a five-part venture through the titles (I hesitate to call them 'games') barely contained within the infamous Action 52 cartridge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syISlA54rO8&hd=1

My initial assessment is that it isn't very good.

Two videos in the same weekend? Madness! Blasphemy! Lawsuit! But this one was far easier than the huge Prince project - here, Quadralien and I play Doom Knightmare-style, as in the 80s programme where someone was put into a virtual dungeon and had to be guided to avoid falling down chasms, being cut up by giant circular saws or burned alive. Great times. In practical terms, this means that there's one of us with the keyboard, having to be guided by the other who has the screen. Can we play successfully like this? Not really.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ29d2FMGkI&hd=1

An out of place Youtube comment inspired this enlightening journey through (a very brief slice of) the history of games based on Christian mythology, starring some men with mighty beards and some others with mighty dodgy acting skills. They include:

Exodus: Journey to the Promised Land (Sonsoft, PC)
Exodus: Journey to the Promised Land (Wisdom Tree)
Left Behind 4 (Left Behind (Left Behind (Left Behind Games)))
King of Kings: The Early Years (Wisdom Tree)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e04zzisktF0&hd=1

I said recently that I honestly have no idea whether these videos will turn out as interesting looks at games or comical groanathons of torture until I finish recording them... but to be honest, I had a pretty good idea of how this one was going to turn out from the start.

Today, I want to present an experimental short film in which nothing at all happens for 40 minutes. Not really, it's...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al7-W9gd1h8&hd=1

A boring video about a boring RPG, and if you enjoy it then you are a boring person! Actually I could sort of see that this game had some decent ideas, with the dungeons versus the free-roaming overworld and the potential of having to swap between characters to solve puzzles, but the whole thing feels so clunky as to undermine it.