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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	Miner 2049er review (APP2) Reviewed on April 07, 2012 I figured once I became a big college student or even an adult, I'd be able to breeze through a game like this with my life smarts. That'd I'd be stronger and quicker and more mature and--well, I did realize stuff. Like how grossly unfair early video games were.
	Dragon Wars review (APP2) Reviewed on February 06, 2012 Bard's Tale IV never came--in name, anyway. It took a couple times through Dragon Wars (DW) for me to see I'd found something as good.
	Eternal Dagger review (APP2) Reviewed on January 21, 2012 The too-short Wizard's Crown series from Strategic Simulations, Inc. had a simple solution: quick combat where the computer ran everything and flashed text of your party's health every second. It left time for the actual story and exploration.
	Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny review (APP2) Reviewed on November 15, 2010 Sequels usually promise a bigger world, more spells, more detailed combat, and so forth, but when it comes to the previous game's narrative faults, they don't say much. Ultima V (U5) isn't just shinier; it makes a complaint about its predecessor the focus of the plot. Many people thought U4 micromanaged how the player gained and kept virtue. So the villain in U5 is a quasi-theocratic dictator, Blackthorn, who has deposed Lord British since U4 with the help of nebulous spirits called the S...
	Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar review (APP2) Reviewed on November 14, 2010 Before Ultima IV (U4,) people took being the good guy on faith. Maybe you'd get your butt kicked if you robbed a shopkeeper or attacked a townsman, but generally it was you against skeletons and goblins and the like. It was great fun, but Ultima III took things too far. The best strategy was to kill druids in one town until you were strong enough to kill guards in another town with a huge treasure vault. Then you could go kill a computer. Technically, the game was a strong achievement, and it so...
	Superstar Ice Hockey review (APP2) Reviewed on November 04, 2010 For a month or two, Superstar Ice Hockey (SIH) pushed my buttons perfectly. I could win regularly--two seasons in an afternoon--but it'd never be too obvious I had it in the bag. Game time was a relative concept that went quicker when fewer players were in the puck's third of the rink. With three goals max per game and four-game seasons, playoff possibilities were on a knife-edge until the final game. In real life, my team would have been the most negative, boring, dislikable bunch you co...
	GBA Basketball Two on Two review (APP2) Reviewed on November 02, 2010 Shortly after my friend Aric pasted me in GBA Basketball Two-on-Two on his Apple IIgs--retribution for all the RPGs I'd solved--I found the IIe version cheap at Babbage's. I felt frugal--it probably didn't have all the extras, like the crowd that disappeared as it became doubtful I would avoid getting doubled up. But it had two-on-two play, which had to be a step up from the wonderful One on One, and the back-of-box blurbs seemed comparable, if the in-game pictures didn't. Jealousy...
	Championship Baseball review (APP2) Reviewed on November 01, 2010 "Adjust tint til blue field is green." That's the opening screen of Championship Baseball (CB,) with "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" blaring. I never bothered. Blue grass is just one of the things that aren't true to life in CB but are probably more fun. With only so much disk space, only the most exciting bits of baseball survive. You draft your own team complete with abilities that don't matter except for batting. You get to name everyone: eight fielders, three starting pitchers, two utility me...
	Neuromancer review (APP2) Reviewed on October 03, 2010 It's too late to write a game about how wonderful the Internet might be. Few actually tried beforehand, but at least Interplay's Neuromancer did it right. Set in decaying, crime-ridden Chiba City in Japan, Neuromancer is part RPG, part adventure game and full of odd characters equally likely to give you information or insult you. It's got public terminals where you can read BBS email or even enter Cyberspace, a weird gridlike world where you can crack databases with the right softw...
	Robot Odyssey review (APP2) Reviewed on October 02, 2010 People made good money off long multiple choice tests disguised as educational software back in the Apple II's heyday. It took a while for kids to get over playing a computer to realize it was just a quiz. Some games went beyond. Oregon Trail taught the dangers of fording a twelve-foot river and the wisdom of resting if you have dysentery. Number Munchers helped speed up your mental arithmetic. I found Type Attack, a Space Invaders clone that taught the QWERTY keyboard, more useful than e...
	The Lurking Horror review (APP2) Reviewed on September 27, 2010 Infocom released more than thirty Interactive Fiction titles in their time, setting the standard for sophisticated text adventure game parsers in the process, but only one of these games declared itself as belonging to the horror genre. That one was 1987's The Lurking Horror (TLH). In this adventure you assume the role of a student at the fictional GUE Tech whose essay on the topic of 'Modern analogues of Xenophon's Anabasis' is due tomorrow. The game begins with you sweating away at your essay ...
	Ultima review (APP2) Reviewed on March 15, 2010 Origin did the right thing releasing an improved version of Ultima I. The original, with less entertaining graphics and horrid controls, is tougher to find on the net. It's best to enjoy the chubby townsmen bouncing around bushes bigger than they are and ignore the silly plot: build a time machine to knock off the wizard Mondain before he can craft a powerful evil gem. Then, U1 is straightforward kill-the-big-wizard fun.
	Lady Tut review (APP2) Reviewed on January 23, 2010 I believe Lady Tut is the first game I ever solved, and it was worth it. Three-level deals that wiped me out with a roided-up version of the first level after one loop don't count. Neither do games that repeat at the highest difficulty. LT is a series of nine mazes with exotic monsters and turnstile doors that flip ninety degrees so you can alter the maze. Pick up one key and open a lock to the next level--or, later, go get another key way on the other side of the maze, to open the SECOND...
	Snack Attack review (APP2) Reviewed on January 23, 2010 Too many dot-maze games risked little in aping Pac-Man. Snack Attack commendably bent dots-in-maze conventions to bizarre and individual effect. Its three-level loop featured garish orange walls, gumdrops worth one (green) or two (red) points, a wind-up noise to start things, and a stupidly smiling pumpkin that appeared at random intervals in the center. The screen top flashed WRONG at those who dared breach the EDL; axis of moving. So wonderfully childish, and my first concern troll, too...
	Type Attack review (APP2) Reviewed on January 23, 2010 Space Invaders was the first game I got tired of on my 2600. Even zapping the lowest enemies got easy. I learned the 112 different games were just a few options. Type Attack replaces zapping aliens with letters, then words, as they invade. A curtain comes down if too many escape. I learned to touch type quickly to break the high score list.
	Wrath of Denethenor review (APP2) Reviewed on December 29, 2009 Wrath of Denethenor seems to be Sierra's attempt to do Ultima II right the second time. Dying's tougher, and instead of time periods, your lone character moves from one world to the next. Unforunately, the formula's apparent: talk to king, beat up monsters, get better armor and weapons, steal a boat in plain view, and move to the next world. The outside's too black-and-white, and the inside's too orange. The keyboard controls are bizarre alphabet soup even by 80s standards, and sim...
	Might & Magic II review (APP2) Reviewed on December 05, 2009 Might and Magic II overcompensates wildly for its predecessor's insane difficulty, and the poetry even scans and rhymes. With more organized and rewarding side quests, you won't notice how stupid the two new character classes are. The formula remains intact: FPRPG, five towns, several castles with quests, dungeons that may or may not be relevant, and all manner of weird nooks that give items or raise attributes--temporarily or permanently. While it's not appreciably bigger than the original, MM2...
	The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate review (APP2) Reviewed on November 22, 2009 I'm fortunate enough to have enjoyed Bard's Tale III (BT3) twice and in different ways. As a teen fanboy, I reaped the benefits of destroying far too many Dream Mages in BT2.
	Wizard's Crown review (APP2) Reviewed on November 21, 2009 Well before sports websites existed, I loved live box-scores. The top-down RPG Wizard's Crown used a feature called Quick Combat. Easy fights required no work. Tough battles could see-saw with each combatant knocked unconscious. I'd cheer as the chief enemy went down or groan as he killed my last three players. Sometimes my super fighter with the Frost Greatsword held off the last four enemies. Or I'd gain an important magic item and forget how morale loss affected my party, making for a ...
	Bureaucracy review (APP2) Reviewed on September 18, 2009 Douglas Adams's name is not featured prominently in the packaging for Infocom's text adventure, Bureaucracy. He got distracted from it by the Dirk Gently books, and eventually the game got written by committee. The result was a game that showed the downside of corporate muddling the wrong way--an extended whine where puzzles rely too heavily on the defeatist "whatever can go wrong, will" maxim. It features the sort of jokes you laugh at if they are buffers for more sophisticated jo...

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