Day 8: PC Games, 3rd Rock, and Brett Butler
In the news March 1996, President Clinton vowed to have every school on the internet by the turn of the century, GM unveiled their first electric vehicle called EV1 with a price tag of $35,000 ($58,000 today), and a book written by Magic Johnson titled “What You Can Do To Avoid AIDS” was removed from a high school after a parent complained the descriptions of sex were not appropriate for students.
You can afford two Saturns, one Corvette, or this. What will it be?
“I don’t mind the sun sometimes, the images it shows
I can taste you on my lips and smell you in my clothes
Cinnamon and sugary and softly spoken lies
You never know just how you look through other people’s eyes”
Once again, thanks to GOG.com and their most recent super sale, I was able to graze a 1996 PC game buffet for cheap. A lot of the games I grabbed may be considered classics by the old school PC crowd, but I know nothing about them. Those games are Strife, Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri, Alien Rampage, and Timelapse. I’ll briefly summarize each below.
Future victim.
Strife is the last game developed using the idTech1 engine and looks really good in motion. It’s a first person RPG that feels like a cross between Doom and Fallout. It wasn’t until after I had viciously maimed about 15 guards around the starting village with my knife by sneaking up behind them and repeatedly gouging away at the space between their shoulder blades until they were just a heap of organs that I realized maybe I didn’t need to kill the guards at all? I eventually got to a part I couldn’t get past because the mayor was really upset with me and it could be because of all the guard-murder I committed. Are games in 1996 that smart? Probably. I’ll likely go back to this one soon. I glimpsed another guard that was still looking alive just before I quit playing.
Hell yeah!
Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri is a mech game and I have always strayed away from those because they feel slow, the missions are too complicated to me, and they don’t translate as well to console controllers. I was pleased to learn this one has a decent lead up tutorial to teach you all the ways you can mech out and the starting missions were very basic, enough to hook me. The voice overs and full-motion video quality is perfectly cheesy for a 1996 game and that scored it a few charm points from me. I’m likely to try this one again soon because who doesn’t like to be a badass? Am I getting into mechs now!? 1996, I swear to God, I’ll burn all your calendars.
“I am the chosen one? But my tum-tum hurts!”
Alien Rampage looks like a really fun gun-and-run platformer reminiscent of Blizzard’s Blackthorne that was on Super Nintendo and Sega 32X, but I could not get it to run with either of my USB control pads. The game would recognize them but would jank up the controls so that my guy was just running while squated the whole time like he had jungle diarrhea. While that amused me, it made the game much more difficult to play. I wasn’t a fan of the default keyboard controls, so I abandoned this one for now. It did make me think that modern games should add difficulty options that give your player various human conditions, like an upset stomach after a late night Taco Bell hit, some double-vision after the bottom of the bottle, or gout on one foot just to force a wonky camera from all the limping.
Less fun than Google Street view
The last thing I tried was Timelapse, a game revered for the time because it was Myst but involved Easter Island. It’s not my cup of tea. It’s just a series of still images with clues on them that amounts to an extra tedious point and click adventure. The visuals were supposed to be vivid in the day but don’t hold up as well now. It’s certainly playable from a technical sense, but my patience for something like that wasn’t great in 1996 and hasn’t improved since.
He’s trying so hard not to crack.
I cashed out the night with some sitcoms. It was recommended for me by a friend (Hi Jeffrey!) to watch a pair of 3rd Rock from the Sun episodes: “Dick’s First Birthday” and “Jolly St. Dick”. I have to lodge the disclaimer once again that I did not watch sitcoms hardly at all, aside from the occasional Seinfeld, so while I knew this one existed, I had never watched a single minute. I was very confused out of the gate about the character’s motives and backstory, so before the first ten minutes were up, I had to consult Wikipedia to see what the hell was wrong with these people. Ah, aliens. Got it. As the perfect test subject here, if you did not know they were from another planet, which I should have gathered from the name of the show, you are left to assume they just escaped their caretaker. While it didn’t click at first, I slowly warmed up to the idea and couldn’t help but notice all the times Lithgow was trying to stifle his own laughter, like when wearing tight leather pants to appear younger in front of Jane Curtin’s character (Curtin is a legend) or when he’s confused about the purpose of mistletoe and believes it’s a weed that keeps growing downward and through the ceiling in his office. Of the two episodes I watched, I didn’t find anything that really dated it. There are moments here and there with fashion and technology that I’m starting to get used to but it’s a timeless show with a silly, yet, unique premise. I might go back for more.
Unfortunately not a show where a family defends themselves from waves of armed enemies like I thought it was.
I closed out the night with an episode of Grace Under Fire. I barely remember this show from my youth, I think my mom watched it for a little while. She probably stopped when Brett Butler relapsed and the show went downhill and everyone else stopped watching it too. This is the kind of show that most people I know wouldn’t go near because it’s too… southern? To me, it’s just too real. I can’t relate to the show note for note, but barely getting by in the rural south was what we did. Everyone spoke with that accent and people with that accent can be smart and funny, like Grace. The show is fine for what it is and having never seriously watched it before, I was surprised how much I could connect with Butler’s character in the show. I feel like I’ve known that woman. She’s a sister or cousin, or maybe a teacher I had in school. The show in general reminds me of Roseanne, which in turn has family dynamics and motifs I can connect with from my younger days, for better or for worse (mostly worse). Just because they remind me of growing up in similar situations does not make them comfort food though. If nothing else, it reminds me of people that are no longer around.
For the rest of the day here in 1996, I’m listening to indie rock, reading some PC and gaming magazines, and will probably jump back to Quake for a spell. Looking ahead, the ‘96 Olympics are coming up soon and I might go back and watch that Sugar Bowl featuring my alma-mater. Pro-wrestling is on the docket at some point, too. If you have more suggestions for 1996 entertainment I should soak up, fax it my way!
