Review Archives (All Reviews)

You are currently looking through all reviews for Apple II games. Below, you will find reviews written by all eligible authors and sorted according to date of submission, with the newest content displaying first. As many as 20 results will display per page. If you would like to try a search with different parameters, specify them below and submit a new search.

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	A Mind Forever Voyaging review (APP2) Reviewed on September 11, 2009 I don't believe A Mind Forever Voyaging is more profound than the emotionally apolitical Trinity or even the wildly clever Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it's another successful text-adventure experiment from Infocom. It features you as PRISM aka Perry Simm, a computer built to simulate human experience in the future. It is another example of an Infocom game doing what a book would like to do but cannot, and here it creates an interactive dystopia with social comment...
	Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It review (APP2) Reviewed on September 05, 2009 Graphics would probably have ruined Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It--it's a pure text adventure which relies on puns and figures of speech. Though it's text-focused, it feels more like a fun quiz than a real text adventure. The plot is, nominally, about rescuing a city named Punster from out-of-control words. Still, I would bet Nord was really an excuse to serve up clever word play that didn't quite fit in other games. If that's true, it was a good one.
	Wasteland review (APP2) Reviewed on August 28, 2009 Vegas is a wild place, so I've heard. If the top-down classic RPG Wasteland is to be believed, not even nuclear war can keep it down. The surrounding towns that survived the blast have panicked, but Vegas's gang bosses still have the upper hand on the invading robots--just--and may even have information on destroying them for good. That's Wasteland: a game which skewers not only fears of nuclear war but also stale RPG conventions----and you, if you try to cheat.
	Ballyhoo review (APP2) Reviewed on August 15, 2009 Infocom's text adventure Ballyhoo turns a circus into a deadly kidnapping mystery, never sacrificing reality for dramatic tension. Chelsea Munrab, the daughter of circus owner Thomas Munrab, has been kidnapped. As a straggler from the show's crowd, you hear a conversation between Munrab and the detective in your town. Munrab blames the locals and suggests the detective do the same.
	Rocky's Boots review (APP2) Reviewed on July 25, 2009 Rocky's Boots, like Warren Robinett's more famous Atari 2600 hit Adventure, features you as a cursor running through rooms of many wall textures and colors. It's an educational game, though, not an adventure. You build logic machines to sort shapes with positive and negative values. Or you don't have to. Even the tutorials and sandboxes can keep you wrapped up for a while. Though the end puzzles get maddeningly difficult for the targeted age group, Rocky's Boots provides han...
	Olympic Decathlon review (APP2) Reviewed on July 19, 2009 Everyone knows about the free card games you get with Windows, but they are nothing compared to Microsoft's wonderful early Eighties game, Decathlon. It simulated all ten events of its namesake, and you could practice or play through them all; Decathlon telescoped a grueling two-day affair into an intense thirty minutes. Even friends with the latest consoles enjoyed getting better and almost beating me, and I had fun mostly winning. We took breaks between events, just like real ath...
	Jawbreaker II review (APP2) Reviewed on July 12, 2009 Jawbreaker 2 left me wondering: how small can a maze game be before it's not really a maze game any more? It lowers the bar further than I thought possible, as you run a clacking pair of teeth through five rows of dots with roving trap-doors between them. For all the cheery graphics, there isn't much to do, and yet it's more sophisticated than Jawbreaker, that silly clone of Gobbler, with enemies who actually get faster and smarter. Still, it's one of those games you can't b...
	Number Munchers review (APP2) Reviewed on July 06, 2009 Number Munchers (NM) had six cut-scenes; Pac-Man had only three, and they weren't nearly as funny. It's more exciting than some lousy flash cards or even chalkboard problem solving races, and it has high score lists, with names, for each sub-game. And it's more ambitious than its better-known peers, the Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego series. The latter, after several plays through, become veiled, randomized multiple-choice exams a notch above vocabulary baseball and other didacti...
	Kukulcan review (APP2) Reviewed on June 14, 2009 Kukulcan (1984) is an educational graphic adventure game set in 1519. The player takes the role of an Aztec scribe summoned by Montezuma to seek knowledge of the Feathered Serpent, in hopes that this knowledge may stave off the arrival of evils portended by recent omens. The Aztecs were right to have been worried around this time; the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez was soon to invade Tenochtitlan (the future site of Mexico City), arrest Montezuma and bring an end to the Aztec Empire. Thus ...
	Trinity review (APP2) Reviewed on June 12, 2009 Infocom's text adventures were usually better at being funny than serious. For example, Zork I and II were better games than Zork III. But Trinity, based on your efforts to prevent the first atom bomb from exploding, works, and staggeringly well. It places you, as a tourist, in Kensington Gardens, with the first missile of World War III about to land. You find a deformed lady, take an interesting transport to the shore, and enter a white door you'll see again later, to wind up in a place ...
	Snake Byte review (APP2) Reviewed on June 12, 2009 Snake Byte was a simple, high-resolution graphical update to White Lightning, one of the first games made for the Apple, in BASIC and low resolution graphics. I knew it first as Hustler, from the TRS-80 at our school, and then after the librarians got more diligent deleting games, Snake Byte and its wonderful graphics left me captivated. It's a fairly simple game: you're a snake, chasing apples on a board around barriers. The more you eat, the longer the snake goes. C...
	The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy review (APP2) Reviewed on June 12, 2009 The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (HHGG,) based loosely on the Douglas Adams book of the same name, was the best text adventure from Infocom and likely will continue to be the best for all time. The puzzles were funny and clever. So were the ways to die, the side characters, the ways to lose points, and the hint book. It's free many places online, and some of them even offer graphics enhancements. But unlike some cheesy $30 three-level action game, it was worth the money back when it came ou...
	Amnesia review (APP2) Reviewed on June 11, 2009 If you create a public scene or break any laws (such as sleeping in public or leaving the early-game hotel room naked), odds are you'll wind up arrested. Humorously, you get to play through your final days in a jail cell, choosing what your final meal is, what denomination of priest speaks to you before death and whether you die by lethal injection or firing squad — just one more of the many things I loved about the writing in this game.
	Hard Hat Mack review (APP2) Reviewed on May 22, 2009 Donkey Kong inspired a number of three-level looping spinoffs in the eighties, and one of the most successful ideas was Hard Hat Mack (HHM,) a cute little platformer about a construction worker with various tasks to perform. He starts off drilling cement blocks in place on the first level, gathers lunch boxes, and apparently in the afternoon he has crates to drop into some crazy machine. He's obstructed by Osha or the Vandal. Each looks different but move in exactly the same predet...
	Sammy Lightfoot review (APP2) Reviewed on May 20, 2009 Sammy Lightfoot(SL) is a step down from the better-remembered Hard Hat Mack in fun, playability and fairness, but it's still the sort of interesting old-school title worth a brief spin. Sammy's this tubby orange-haired fellow who makes squip noises when he walks and boingy noises when he jumps. His hair even spins around when he dies! The game's object is just to reach the platform at the top, navigating obstacles in three scenarios. Then you start all over again with a different, ...
	Aztec review (APP2) Reviewed on April 28, 2009 Aztec, the classic Apple II platform adventure game of tomb plundering excitement and bizarre glitchiness, was released in 1982. 'Nothing like it before. Nothing else like it now!' screamed the hectic looking ads in Creative Computing magazine. They were probably right. 1982 was the year after the arrival of Raiders Of The Lost Ark in cinemas, and was the same year in which the original Pitfall came out for the Atari 2600. Pitfall Harry presents as a colourful stick figure of girth...
	Beyond Zork review (APP2) Reviewed on April 15, 2009 Being an RPG and Zork fan, I was thrilled to learn of Infocom’s plans to combine the two in Beyond Zork (BZ.) You get levels and player stats instead of the usual points for a text adventure, but even crazier, there’s no elvish sword or brass lantern-and most of the game’s completely above ground! Finding your ultimate goal, the Coconut of Quendor, is exhausting, and even with a cluebook, BZ provides many dead ends despite a few too many puzzles that are little more than manual-based copy-protec...
	Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz review (APP2) Reviewed on April 15, 2009 The Zork series spawned an impressive group of knock-off products which, although never destined to make a killing, made Infocom notorious. The packaging itself was always worth savings, with its jokes and going so far beyond the expected instruction cards(later it would provide a useful stab at copy protection.) The 'New Zork Times,' which later under threat of lawsuit was forced to change its name. And gamebooks that helped me score the most points I'd ever gotten in an Infocom text adventu...
	Zork III: The Dungeon Master review (APP2) Reviewed on April 15, 2009 Sadly, Zork lost its humor and spontaneity somewhere between II and III. The final game, in which you must seek to take over the Dungeon Master's mantle, was a disappointment for me even discounting that the packaging wasn't as cheery as before. Most of its jokes are homages to the first two games, and there are two frighteningly hard puzzles required to win. And the worst part is that, unlike the previous installments, the score is not terribly complex. In Zork I and II you got points for f...
	Zork: The Great Underground Empire review (APP2) Reviewed on April 15, 2009 One of the first computer game series ever starts in front of a white house. You need to discover twenty treasures and find the passage to the sequel, Zork II. There's not a ton of plot, but you'll have to deal with two odd mazes, a lantern that dims as the game goes on(once it goes out, you may be stuck by grues--who engendered the word gruesome, of course--that roam in the darkness,) two opponents, a nasty river and even some undead spirits. There's enough of an assortment of items, from th...

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