Category: Retro Gaming

Rollercoaster Tycoon is a PC game from way back in the year 2000. It’s been immensely popular and well remembered over the years. It was actually so popular that it eventually started being distributed as a freebie with boxes of cereal! It was a different time back then.

What I’m trying to say is; Rollercoaster Tycoon is probably my favourite game ever made.

Crash Twinsanity was released in 2004 by Traveller’s Tales. It was the first Crash Bandicoot game to step away from the linear, level-based gameplay of the previous games in the series.

Theme Park World (aka Sim Theme Park) was released in 1999 as the sequel to Bullfrog’s Theme Park. It was the 4th game in Bullfrog’s series of games about construction and management. The game brings the original Theme Park up to date, and it does an amazing job of it! It’s presented in 3d and a lot of the financial management stuff that I didn’t like about the original game is gone, with the focus moved much more towards construction.

Theme Park is a Theme Park management/business sim from way back in 1994 made by Bullfrog Productions. It was very popular at the time and a lot of people have good memories of it, myself included. It has had a few ports, including Playstation and Nintendo DS, versions but this post will be about the original DOS version.

Psychonauts is a 3d platformer originally released in 2005. You play as Razsputin, a boy who runs away from the circus to join a summer camp for children gifted with psychic abilities. In the game, you get to enter and explore various people’s minds in order to train Raz’s psychic abilities. Later on in the game, you will help characters overcome their traumatic memories and fears.

Commander Keen 3: Keen Must Die! is the third and final installment in the Invasion of the Vorticons series. In this game, Keen has a snow day, so he has chance to head over to Vorticon VI and “face the horrors of suburban life”. Suburban horrors aside, he must battle his way through the Vorticon army to finally meet the mysterious Grand Intellect. In the previous game, we found out that the Grand Intellect is controlling the Vorticons using mind belts and they aren’t evil killing machines after all. The game once again includes a story section with some nice details about Vorticon life; they live similar to us humans, but with anti gravity cars and teleporters and whatnot. It also talks about the Vorticons favourite game; a game similar to Jacks, except they play it with giant balls and giant Jacks. We’ll see that this game of Jacks plays a part in the actual gameplay.

In this episode of Commander Keen, Keen boards the looming Vorticon Mothership, which is getting ready to blow up the Earth! The Earth does not actually explode, as the title indicates. Regardless of whether the Earth explodes or not, Commander Keen Episode II: The Earth Explodes is a pretty cool name for a game. Keen actually has a tough decision to make here – if the Earth explodes, then he doesn’t have to go to school in the morning. He does the right thing though and decides that he should save the Earth. In this game, Keen explores the Vortican Mothership and has to destroy all the Tantalus Rays, whatever they are.

Commander Keen was a 1990 DOS platformer developed by id software. Id are a little bit more famous for making Doom than Commander Keen, but in the early 90s, Commander Keen was a pretty big deal. Keen was released as a shareware game; it came in three parts and the first part was free. The idea was that if you liked the game, you could order episodes II or III, or both. I wasn’t even born when the game was originally released, but my dad used to download lots of these shareware DOS games for me when I was very young and I have a huge amount of nostalgia for them.

Tombi! (Tomba! in the US, for some reason) is a Playstation game released in 1997-1998. It follows a young boy with bright pink hair named Tombi, who spends his life carefully guarding his grandfather’s gold bracelet. The gold bracelet is, of course, stolen by an evil pig named Koma Pig and so Tombi must go on a wild adventure to recover the bracelet. It is unknown whether Tombi’s hair is naturally pink or if he dyes it.