Season 2 of ADG sort of became the Season of Duke, as I covered all three of the original Duke Nukem games, starting of course, with the very first one. It's kinda crazy how far the character has come from his early days and the sheer number of different kinds of games Duke's been in, so it's interesting to see how it all began. Also, LGR's not the only one who can do the Duke voice! (Although he does it better.)

I'm very surprised how little attention this game has gotten over the years, as it's one of the simplest games of its kind and is very enjoyable despite its simplicity. OK sure, all the sounds are ripped from Doom for the most part, but because the game has always been free I'm less bothered by that. Making assets for games is a time consuming process and many people just wanna code stuff and see where they end up.

This is one of those games that I really shouldn't like, since it relies heavily on memorization and split-second reactions to the area around you. Surprisingly though, I find it enjoyable in its simplicity and you don't have to do extreme amounts of memorization until the very late stages. It's freeware now too and that's always a plus!

The "dungeon crawl" genre has been around a very long time and it's interesting to see just how primitive, yet feature-rich, the old ones were in comparison to the other kinds of games that were available. Telengard is extremely similar to an earlier dungeon crawl called DND, but where most copies of DND created for various systems were text-based, Telengard has graphics! I also really like that, as of this writing in mid 2016, Dan's website is still up, as is the page for this game and its download! Not 100% certain who's maintaining its presence, but they're awesome for doing so!

Few people had ever heard of or played the original MechWarrior for DOS as MechWarrior 2 basically eclipsed its predecessor, raking in critical acclaim due to its extreme amounts of customization and content, along with being very simple to play given its simulation nature. Even nowadays, this game is still just as fun to play as it was 18 years ago!

This is one of those curious games that nostalgia remembers extremely fondly, despite the fact the game is beyond hard... not quite Battletoads level but certainly somewhere between that and Ninja Gaiden. This game's also had one of the most confusing post-release licensing issues to date and I think it's changed even more since I made this episode years ago so... feel free to debate about it in the comments; I have no desire to try and disseminate it any further.

This is probably one of the most inventive Breakout clones to come out of the 80's. It just kinda sucks that it also has one of the smallest paddles in the entire history of Breakout games.

The action shooter game where you can't see more than five feet in front of you! To be fair, this game's less about the action and more about the story but it would've been a much more enjoyable game if you could see more of the action around you at a time given how fast paced this thing's supposed to be... and had a better story. Ah well.

There's not a lot of F1 racing games for some reason, though they were definitely more common in the past than they are now. Grand Prix Circuit is surprisingly playable given its age, though ultimately nothing special in the grand scheme of things.

Many people love this particular 2D shooter, but me personally, I feel its not very well designed, which isn't to say it's a bad game, just not something that sits well with me as a game designer. Amazingly, this video hasn't been downvoted nearly as much as I expected it to be given my controversial opinion of this game, though it's still downvoted a lot more than most ADG episodes. Also, monkeys.

Artillery games weren't really anything special in the early days of gaming, but Scorched Earth was one of the more popular ones considering its massive number of features and options. Though one thing that may come as a surprise to some retro gamers is that this game is technically a clone of the lesser-known "Tank Wars" which I covered back in Episode 36, though really, both games have their pros and cons. Tank Wars is more approachable, better balanced, and has better AI, while Scorched Earth has more features and is more customizable.

The episode in which it becomes very apparent that I've never watched Dr. Who... (Hey, if anyone knows a legit way to watch the original series nowadays, let me know!) But yeah, OverKill is an easily forgotten 2D shooter that's actually not that bad, but is a bit quirky and not very long or difficult. It also borrows a bunch of its planet names from other popular space-related things.

I'm still left to wonder what this game would've been like if it had all the stealth elements they had originally planned for it... Instead though, they left it simple so anyone could play it. Well... anyone who could adapt to its extreme difficulty.

I first played this game in the arcades and it was not only fun, but challenging without being sadistic. It had pretty cool special effects too. Thus when the PC port was released it seemed like it would be a fun thing to pick up. I mean, previous ports of Taito's arcade games to the PC were pretty top notch! ...well... not this one... ...sigh... where's Novalogic when you need 'em?

Very few games have been released into the public domain, but this happens to be one of them... which is kinda odd considering the game it's based off of is not in the public domain but whatever. As far as old CGA games go, this one's probably a bit obscure, owing to its BBC Micro roots, but is relatively simple to understand, even if the controls are a bit cumbersome.

It's curious that The Elder Scrolls series has endured as well as it has, given that the first game was frenetic, the second game is swimming in bugs, and everything between the second and third game really don't have the same feel. However, this is a rare case where despite the massive number of bugs, Daggerfall offers an extremely huge amount of content and things to do, which makes it fun despite its problems... at least until your save game becomes corrupted.

I found out not long after making this video that the side shields actually protect you from touching the sides of the road, which is why they don't appear on easy difficulty, since the sides of the roads don't hurt in that mode. Not a lot of mouse driven 2D shooters out there so while this one is very basic, at least it's very simple to play. Come to think of it... not a lot of 2D shooters where you DRIVE down roads either. Quite to mix of features going on here!

There's not a lot of games out there which are a total mystery as to how they even exist, but this is one of them. This game is incomplete and lacks credits and the hours I spent searching for details as to who made this thing simply led to a bunch of dead ends and false leads. However, I played it back when I was just 10 years old in the early 90s, so it qualifies as highly nostalgic, at least for me.

Nope, not a coincidence that I covered this game for my 69th episode. In fact, you can blame Al Lowe himself as it was his idea!

Yeah, ended up having to go with a different game because of the sheer amount of time required to make solid progress in X-Wing, but the Kroz games certainly weren't the only text-mode action games to come out of Apogee, as this lesser-known trilogy of games can attest to.

The Star Wars games had a really strong start as space combat simulations, but somewhere along the line they became less sim and more straight-up action. Whether this was a good or a bad thing mostly depends on how much you enjoy escort missions...

It's still interesting how humble Duke's beginnings were before he went all 3D and macho. It's also interesting how many people think this game uses 256 colour graphics, when in fact, save for the title sequence, it's pretty much all 16 colour VGA with heavily modified palettes. Also, this game would've played much better if you could see more of the stuff around you.

This was a game that came on the exact same disk as John Romero's "Dangerous Dave", and as you might expect, this game was made by John Carmack, both of whom eventually left Softdisk to form Id Software. Like the Dangerous Dave games, the original Catacomb games are now maintained and sold by Flat Rock Software. This one's always been freeware, though the pseudo-sequel "The Catacomb", the one that comes with a level editor, is not.

It's somewhat easy to draw parallels between this game and "party" games where you go around boards and play minigames, except this game came out long before Mario Party was a thing... It's also surprising how non-violent the graphics are given the kinds of things you actually DO in this game.

It's somewhat amazing how many similarities this game has to Skyrim despite being more akin in terms of gameplay to a cross between Ultima and dungeon crawls. Heck, you can even dual-wield!

Games revolving around taxi services rarely have anything to do with reality. Case in point: The taxi service you run in this game is with a flying thingamajig in prehistoric times with dinosaurs threatening you.

I originally found it odd that I had so many more requests for TIE Fighter than for X-Wing, but after playing this game for a bit it was easy to understand why. TIE Fighter is just an all around better game than X-Wing, which given the fact that it came out later, makes perfect sense.

This is quite the polarizing game for me, given that the shareware version is well enough, but the level designs in the registered version are just downright sadistic. Also, awkward fighting-move-style combos in a gun-wielding platformer are awkward. Even Epic MegaGames was guilty of this sort of thing back in Tyrian.

Extremely few games use the perspective this game does for presentation and control... and I learned not too long after trying to make a game with a similar control scheme and perspective that it's because it makes some people dizzy. shrugs I still enjoy it all the same.

Being a programmer, this game has a sort of special meaning to me. Even though it's technically flawed and extremely minimalistic, it feels very much like something I would've made on my own accord when I was much younger, given the proper tools to do so.

This is why you never have other people host your own shows... they play with all your neat little toys and break everything... or in my case trying to take over LGR, completely alienate your viewers. Also, for all the things we intentionally did, the whole rinse and repeat thing we both said was actually NOT intentional, as we didn't share any of the scripting we had planned after the collab segments. Hooray for coincidences! 8D

Making good educational games is hard enough, given the necessity to balance educational context with fun... usually to the detriment of fun. However, not only are the Googol Math Games fun, they were made pretty much entirely by a single person. Incidentally, having programmed math software professionally myself, I can safely say that math is much easier to make fun games out of than other educational topics like History, English, etc., although such games do indeed exist.

Something which came pre-packaged with a lot of early PCs with CD-ROM drives were "activity centre/studio" software intended for kids, often with an educational slant to them, where each such program was essentially a sandbox of pointless activities and mini-games. 3-D Body Adventure only barely qualifies as such a program given how few activities there are. The bulk of the program is just an encyclopedia on the Human body and medical procedures... with an apparent reverence for male genitalia given the way everything's been worded. (Female genitalia though? No issues.)

Usually the best way to go about making edutainment is to make a game where the educational component is as subtle as possible, where knowledge of the topic at hand is necessary to play the game, but players aren't actually direct questions about said topic. Word Rescue is one such game, which is part of the reason why it's as fondly remembered as it is. It was also shareware, making it far less expensive, both when it was new and nowadays, than most edutainment titles.

YES, I'm aware this game has AdLib support! I'm still not entirely certain how I missed this, though really, I still prefer the Tandy 3-Voice sound over the AdLib sound. This happens to be the only Super Solver game I had when making this video, mostly because it was the only one we had access to in elementary school, yet the school only had one license for it, not a site license, so only one person could be playing it at a time, meaning most students had to either watch someone else play or just play something else. It's funny... this is one of those edutainment titles which really shouldn't be all that fun because of how direct the educational component is, but what makes it fun is that there's more to the challenge than simply answering questions... plus the massive number of "prizes" to win as you play through several dozen times.

Whenever someone tells you gameplay is more important than graphics, the Moraff games are prime examples, as they're all fun to play but look hideous... the irony being they also were some of the most technically competent games, supporting a massive number of video modes and video hardware. TBH, that's par for the course for skilled, solo game developers. I speak from experience.

Sierra's old parser-based adventure games had a tendency to be non-linear but also tended to have some extremely ridiculous puzzles to overcome. Space Quest is atypical in this regards as it's a lot more straightforwards and linear and not nearly as challenging, but makes up for this by being something of a parody.

Pac Man was highly popular in arcades and with such a simple concept you'd figure PC ports and clones would be decent... except most weren't. Even the actual port of Pac Man in the early days of DOS was lacking. CD-Man isn't exactly the greatest clone out there, but it didn't have much competition to run against and is still better than most of the PC-based Pac Man games of the time.

AKA: The episode in which I make every brony jealous. It's still crazy how the transition from the original cartoony Duke Nukem to the womanizing, wisecracking Duke took place, but given that the game which resulted is one of the best and most innovative first person shooters ever made I don't think most people were complaining. Then 3D Realms tried to make Duke Nukem Forever... eh heh...

Populous was the progenitor of the "God Game" concept, where instead of controlling minions directly, you instead "influence" them by shaping the land and performing miracles. It was a very unique concept in strategy gaming... and oddly enough, I never knew a single other person who could play it while I was growing up and it remains one of the extremely few strategy games I'm actually really good at.

Dungeon crawls are rarely innovative, as most follow the typical formula set by classics such as DND/Telengard and Rogue, but Reaping the Dungeon (aka: Dungeon Rogue) was a very original take on the genre... even though the difficulty curve is a bit reversed.

Long before Wolfenstein 3D, John Carmack had made a little game called Catacomb. Well, that game turned out to be the perfect candidate to translate into three dimensions and the first Catacomb 3-D game was pretty much exactly that. Later Catacomb 3-D games were quite a bit better, with stronger controls, better graphics, more balanced gameplay (though still not quite as balanced as it could be), and time travel. ...yes... TIME TRAVEL.

Sometimes it surprises me how certain games end up getting published at all. Star Quest I has a lot of neat ideas in it, but the execution doesn't live up to any of them... save for the racing aspect. If this game was nothing BUT racing it would've been many times more fun.

Everyone has to have a hobby. In this case, we have an actor by day and a game programmer by night, who came up with a unique, difficult, and extremely random dungeon crawl. Just make sure you play the Windows version. This old DOS version is... pretty lacking by comparison. I've also since played the beta of CoX2 and the number of features in there trumps the Windows version several times over!

Commander Keen is a surprisingly significant game given that the engine which drives it is what led to the formation of Id Software and the many titles and engines which came from them following. That said, I'm not a huge fan of the Commander Keen games. They're not bad by any means, just not my cup of tea.

This game kinda goes to show how ridiculous the whole publishing thing was not too many years ago. Absolutely terrible games like "Big Rigs Over the Road Racing" and "Extreme PaintBrawl" easily found their way onto store shelves and sold numerous copies before people clued into just how bad they were. Amulets & Armor on the other hand was a surprisingly decent game which never really got any attention due to a lack of proper publishing, selling fewer than 100 copies. I should point out too that not too many months after this video was made, the game was re-released as freeware and a Windows port has since followed with enhanced features!

Galactix kinda goes to show why having a ship limited to horizontal movement in a space shooter is an outdated concept, but on the flip side, at least it's easy to play.

I am generally terrible at strategy games, but X-COM was one of the most requested games on my requests list... so I had to give it a go. I can see why this game is as well received as it is, but that doesn't negate some of its odd design decisions, as well as my inability to play it that well.

Normally I don't like to cover games out of order, but I had to make an exception in this case as I was having issues getting my copy of the original EGA version of the game working at first... stupid copy protection. In any case, this game really set the bar towards Sierra's adventure titles and I don't really feel like any other AGI engine titles come close to the same level of dynamic progression without being overly difficult... well... maybe Gold Rush, but I haven't played it... yet...

Who knew they made super-large, perfectly clear beachballs? Bubble Bobble is my all-time most favourite game. I had first played it in arcades when I was very young and got this DOS version back when I was about 7 years old. The overall design has stood the test of time extremely well, although not just because of the bubble-based mechanics. The massive number of items and levels, as well as the surprisingly non-random nature of the powerups, all add to the game's fun factor and removing any one of these aspects completely derails the experience. Mind you, this DOS version has some curious omissions... as well as unusual effects caused by improperly breaking the copy protection, which John Butrovich himself confirmed via eMail not too long after this episode first went live. Whoops. Also, bonus points if, without looking ahead at Filler #20, you know what I'm parodying in the live action at the end of the episode .