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Monday, July 19, 2004

Viva Karateka!

Somewhat by coincidence, a couple friends simultaneously dropped me a note today to share the fake Peasant's Quest video game trailer available on Homestarrunner.com. A spoof on King's Quest and 80s video games, the trailer's very funny and definitely worth checking out. By the way, thanks Eric for the easter egg tip at the end of the trailer: "Once you're done click on the upper right hand corner of the black screen for an easter egg."

Peasant's Quest reminded me of the hours of fun I had with my first computer, an Apple IIe. Thanks to emulators, I quickly found a bunch of my old favorite games available for download. Actually playing any of these games would be a massive waste of time and I'm not going to be sucked in. However I did try Karateka. Woo! Karateka! I loved that game! I never beat it, but I got to the final bad guy a hundred times. He was like Mike Tyson -- unless you knew the exact moves (which I didn't) there was no way of rescuing the girl.

The Apple Emulator website also has Conan, Captain Goodnight, Castle Wolfenstein (no hacked Smurfenstein though), Lode Runner, and Prince of Persia. I loved all these, especially once we got a double disk drive so I wasn't constantly flipping over and inserting new floppy disks to continue each game. Instead I could enjoy the sublime back and forth hum of the drives as they served up the next level of 8-bit challenges.

What I'm most excited about, though, is Swashbuckler. I absolutely loved this game but the version I had was... *ahem*... pirated and it wasn't a clean copy. Near the end of the 2nd level, the game would always freeze and I'd have to reboot. But it was sooo worth the frustration. I loved my pirated pirate game. AAAAARRRRRR.