It’s been a while since I’ve played. It turns out that I did get the pearl brooch in the dungeon and was able to dispel one barrier in the Tower of Magi – revealing a Haste spellbook – but the other says it’s still too powerful, so I guess I don’t have level 3? I remember finding it in the far SW corner of the map, past Fort Remote.

I might try to get the Demonslayer repaired anyway, since I can’t make any other progress today.

Also, holy shit at the beginning of The Last Door. I also have I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream elsewhere on my computer and I’m sure that one has some fucked-up stuff in it. But directing the whole action, that was really something. Awesomely, it’s an effective tutorial to the basic game mechanics.

I played five minutes and decided to call it quits because I had been playing computer games for a solid 90 minutes and I decidrd I had had enough, at least for one morning. I didn’t bother saving but I’ll return to it.

There’s an INCREDIBLE platformer called Alwa’s Awakening that I soent the bulk of my time playing. Basically it’s a modern game fit for modern sensibilities, but in the style of an NES Capcom platformer – Mega Man, Little Nemo, Mickey Mousecapade, others. Creative use of special abilities. I think technically it’s a Metroidvania (eventually you’ll have to return to the beginning because there’s an exit you can’t get to) and I have close to zero experience with that genre (really only familiar with the first Castlevania and I’ve played just enough Metroid to get a taste) but it’s a good game. There’s another Alwa game on GOG (you really should use GOG over Steam) that I just bought because it was 85% off.

Other games I kicked the tires on:

Fantasy General (a hex-tile turn-based strategy game. It gets 4.4/5 from a generally tough GOG crowd: four stars is really good That gives me some comfort because I’ll have to soend an hour going back and forth to a PDF of the manual and the game to figure out what the hell I’m doing. If I can learn how to play it looks like a great game. It’s from SSI, which started as a wargaming company, didn’t it? This is the spiritual successor.)

1942 (a game with air, land, and sea battles in the Pacific theater, DOA with jankly input issues that make the game unplayable. I’ll look for a solution as the game looks good A DOS game having nothing to do with the 1942 arcade game, which actually I think I’ll play tonight on MAME. Thanks, Babble!)

Hocus Pocus (an Apogee platformer, a real blast from the 1994 past. I’m reasonably sure I’ve played this since we were buying a lot of shareware games at Staples at the time and would have come across it. It’s uncomfortably fast and jerky unless you slow it down, sprites are too large, and it seems that you have to manually scroll the screen uo and down unless I’m just having a problem with my screen resolution (menus are fine). As it is it’s unplayable, but the charming menus with BBS numbers for 2400 baud and up modems to call into are heartwarming traces of early-to-mid-’90s computer/internet culture as you’ll find, like similar menus in Doom etc.)