After the success of Wing Commander II, the franchise received its first spin-off game. Wing Commander: Privateer or simply Privateer. It can be looked at as Origin Systems take on open-ended gameplay, and their take on the legendary Elite (1984). Released in the Fall of 1993, Privateer had an interesting […]
Theme Park – One of the best theme park strategy games gets a DarkwyndPT review!
Now, we’re just upping the ante, aren’t we? Still, it’s impossible to make a Bullfrog retrospective without mentioning another critical and commercial successful title, which is perhaps their most colourful game that also begun its own influential series. I’m talking about Theme Park. Theme Park is a managerial strategy game […]
Populous – A brilliant Strategy game reviewed by DarkwyndPT
Well, it isn’t too hard to figure out which Bullfrog game I’ll start reviewing for this retrospective. And it’s only fair that I start with Bullfrog’s first and possibly biggest success ever: Populous. Populous is a managerial/strategy game developed by Bullfrog and published by Electronic Arts. It was originally released […]
SimCity – DarkwyndPT takes a look at multiple versions of Sim City in this BIG review!
And again we’re going to take a look at not just a true classic game, but also a highly influential title that helped define an entire genre, spawned several clones and influenced several other titles. I’m talking about the one and only SimCity. SimCity is a simulation/managerial game developed by […]
DAAD Adventure Writer – Text based adventure game creator, fully recovered after 30 years!
A great piece of news has just hit our inbox, as we’ve recently been contacted by Stefan Vogt, the same creator behind the recently updated brilliant science fiction game Hibernated 1: This Place is Death. That he has recently announced the DAAD Adventure Writer has been fully recovered, extended and released […]
Doing Windows, Part 9: Windows Comes Home
This series of articles so far has been a story of business-oriented personal computing. Corporate America had been running for decades on IBM before the IBM PC appeared, so it was only natural that the standard IBM introduced would be embraced as the way to get serious, businesslike things done […]
Doing Windows, Part 8: The Outsiders
Microsoft Windows 3.0’s conquest of the personal-computer marketplace was bad news for a huge swath of the industry. On the software side, companies like Lotus and WordPerfect, only recently so influential that it was difficult to imagine a world that didn’t include them, would never regain the clout they had […]
Doing Windows, Part 6: Look and Feel
From left, Dan Fylstra of VisiCorp, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Gary Kildall of Digital Research in 1984. As usual, Gates looks rumpled, high-strung, and vaguely tortured, while Kildall looks polished, relaxed, and self-assured. (Which of these men would you rather chat with at a party?) Pictures like these perhaps […]
Doing Windows, Part 5: A Second Try
The beginning of serious work on the operating system that would come to be known as OS/2 left Microsoft’s team of Windows developers on decidedly uncertain ground. As OS/2 ramped up, Windows ramped down in proportion, until by the middle of 1986 Tandy Trower had just a few programmers remaining […]
Doing Windows, Part 4: The Rapprochement
We’ve seen how the pundits had already started speculating like crazy long before the actual release of IBM’s TopView, imagining it to be the key to some Machiavellian master plan for seizing complete control of the personal-computer market. But said pundits were giving IBM a bit more credit than perhaps […]
Doing Windows, Part 3: A Pair of Strike-Outs
Come August of 1984, Microsoft Windows had missed its originally announced release date by four months and was still nowhere near ready to go. That month, IBM released the PC/AT, a new model of their personal computer based around the more powerful Intel 80286 processor. Amidst the hoopla over that […]
Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents
Has any successful piece of software ever deserved its success less than the benighted, unloved exercise in minimalism that was MS-DOS? The program that started its life as a stopgap under the name of “The Quick and Dirty Operating System” at a tiny, long-forgotten hardware maker called Seattle Computer Products […]