J.B. Harold is a series of Japanese adventure games that started in the mid 80’s with the game Murder Club. As you can guess, each game involves you playing as the detective J.B. Harold and you investigate murders. While some of the games have received official English translations, a lot have not. So I’m thrilled to see that the 1994 game Blue Chicago Blues has just received an English fan patch. This was one of the later entries in the series and most importantly, it’s a FMV game!
Screenshot taken from MobyGames
Most of the game is made up of interactive movies and making choices whenever the movie stops. Each choice advances the clock and it’s up to the player to solve the murder before time runs out. If you’d like to check the game out, the English fan patch is available here.
Between my own collection and the one at my parents, there are plenty of random old cookbooks I can flip through. One I stumbled across today was A Little Cooking, a Little Talking, and a Whole Lot of Fun, a cookbook by Florence Henderson based off a television show she had in the 80’s, sometime after The Brady Bunch had ended. I’m sorry if you follow this blog for posts about old technology and video games.
The book itself is pretty straightforward. It has a variety of recipes from celebrities and before each recipe is a page or two talking about the celebrity and their accomplishments. These photos I took with my phone aren’t the highest quality, but you can see all the recipes and who they’re from.
The one that immediately stood out to me was the Curry Pepper Steak from Jim Varney. Jim was most known for playing Ernest P. Worrell is a series of films that include Ernest Goes to Camp and Ernest Scared Stupid (ok, and Slinky Dog in Toy Story 1 and 2). I haven’t seen any of them in decades so I’m guessing these films don’t hold up but they were popular with kids in the 90’s. So here you have it, Jim Varney’s Curry Pepper Steak, first in photos from the book and then reprinted here so it’s easier to read. I have not actually made it (yet) and cannot vouch for the quality of the final product. You can also watch a video on YouTube of him cooking it
Ingredients
2 tbsp. Wesson Oil 2 lbs. steak, cut into strips 1 onion, cut into strips 1 tsp. corn starch 1 tsp. curry 1 clove garlic 1 green and 1 yellow pepper cut into strips 1/2 cup water 1 1/2 cups uncooked rice
Directions
Cut steak into strips. Cut onions and peppers into strips.
Saute meat in oil, add onion strips, then add corn starch and stir, cook until browned over low heat.
Add curry, garlic, peppers, water, and cover. Simmer over low heat until boiling.
Prepare rice according to directions on package, and serve meat mixture over rice.
Even if the games industry has largely moved on to making games for other platforms, there’s still tons of games being made for DOS every year. I’ve previously made a post about the DOS Game Jam, which also includes some recommendations, but someone from the DOS Game Jam discord has put together this really good list of native DOS games that were submitted to the jams.
A screenshot from DZZEE
There’s also lots of DOS games outside of game jams on Itch such as The Aching, Hibernated 1, and many others with the DOS and msdos tags on their product pages. Some of the games with these tags are just (very good) games inspired by classic DOS games, but there’s plenty that run natively on DOS as well. If you’d like to find more DOS games, including ones outside of Itch, this site seems to have a good list of some of the games out there.
If you want to talk about DOS game development, find out about upcoming DOS game jams, just want to talk about DOS games in a welcoming and inclusive environment, consider joining the DOS Shareware Zone discord.
Here is a series of ads for a place called State Street Computer in Ann Arbor, Michigan showing the initial excitement for the Amiga, ads selling the computer, and then the final ad for the store showing their liquidation sale. I don’t have dates for all the ads because I saved these images a while ago and didn’t take notes then, but I can guess that it’s roughly from the mid 80’s to the very late 80’s or very early 90’s. These images came from looking through local newspapers and also from the Ann Arbor District Library website.
There’s a few other ads that I found as well. I’m guessing the freedom of the press one is aimed at college students looking to start their own zines or newspapers since this was right next to the University of Michigan.
Unfortunately I cannot find any images of the actual store. I looked up the location of the store on Google Maps and it would have been a high traffic spot near the University of Michigan.
If you have any photos of the store, I would love to see them posted somewhere.
There’s been a bunch of new free games that I’ve really liked playing so I thought I would put them all in one spot so people can check them out.
Dead Petals Bliss
Dead Petals Bliss is a twin-stick shooter with lots of nice colors and felt great to control. One of the designers previously made a twin-stick game called satryn/satryn deluxe which I was a huge fan of, so this was an instant download once I saw it. It reminded me a lot of freeware and solo dev pc games from the late 90’s and early 00’s, or at least what I remember those games being like. The co-op mode works really well too, with each player starting with their own set of health but if someone loses it all, the other player can sacrifice one health to bring them back. It sounds like this game is going to follow the same model as satryn, where it will eventually get a deluxe version on Steam at some point so I’ll have to pick that up when it’s out too.
Cellosseum
Cellosseum is another new twin-stick shooter I’ve been playing this week. It was developed by WolverineSoft, the University of Michigan’s student game development club. I’ll have to do a longer post about them sometime because they’ve done a lot of neat stuff over the years. and have been around for a while. I thought the artwork in this was very nice, with a more watercolor style that you don’t see very often in games. The upgrade system between rounds helps add some variety to the game too. It’s just a nice arcade game and would be impressive even if it wasn’t by students with little game dev experience.
Tommy Gun Witches
Tommy Gun Witches is a short (30-60 minute) point-and-click adventure by Cosmic Void where you investigate a murder suspected to be by a witch. I’ve been a big fan of Cosmic Void’s previous games and this was just as fun as those. The game moves very quickly and I never felt stuck on anything too long, partially due to its nice features like a map that lets you quickly travel to various locations and the mouse cursor changing color when you’ve done everything you can with a specific object or person. If you enjoy this game, I highly recommend their previous game Elsewhere in the Night.
My Miconoid
My Miconoid is a character creator by Rose that originally appear in Indiepocalypse 43. Come on, look at this lil guy. He’s so cool!
Just finished watching Hyperland, a documentary about hypertext and other related computer technologies in 1990. It was created by Douglas Adams and stars Tom Baker (Doctor Who) as a software agent that shows Douglas the future of tv, Interactive Multimedia. I thought it was a fascinating time capsule of what Douglas thought the internet was going to be like in the future, even before people were using web browsers. The documentary talks to a variety of people like Ted Nelson and Robert Winter, but the highlight for me was Amanda Goodenough presenting Inigo Gets Out, an application for kids made with Hypercard. There’s even a fun little reference to Douglas Adams writing interactive fiction in the 80’s.
Hyperland gets some stuff wrong as anything like this is always going to but he was right about a surprising amount. Even less desirable elements like your fridge being connected to the internet are predicted here. If you have an interest in Douglas Adams or computer history I think it’s worth checking out. There’s a lot of interesting interviews about hypertext history, Tom Baker is a lot of fun to watch, and it’s only 50 minutes. You can watch it for free on the Internet Archive.
A weird but fun thing I like to do is post photos of old computer stores on Cohost and Mastodon, which means that I have found a ton of random things over the last couple of years. I’m going to start posting more organized collections here in case something happens to either place, since that account is now the only source of some photos after the sources have gone down (see my CompUSA post here).
One I’ve always loved finding more photos and documents of has been Egghead Software. If you’re feeling nostalgic for computers in the early 90’s, or specifically the Egghead Software store chain, check out their quarterly reports that have been archived here. For some reason it’s a chain that doesn’t have a ton of photos like other computer stores do, so it was fun finding these. I also thought it was interesting reading the reports in the later years and watching the slow decline they were going through.
I’ve also found a lot of random photos of now closed computer stores by checking out Facebook groups that former employees post in. I’ve only gone in public groups but there’s been a lot of interesting things that employees kept from the store like these items. Unfortunately the groups seem to randomly disappear, probably from Facebook constantly making changes, so there’s always a feeling I have to grab the photos before they’re gone forever.
I was a massive fan of the Atari 50 collection by Digital Eclipse so I was thrilled when they announced The Making of Karateka. I think people have been asking for decades for a Criterion Collection style rerelease of old games, where interviews and documents are packaged with the game. It follows the same format of the Atari 50 collection, where you are presented with multiple timelines, each documenting a different era, and scroll through the timelines to see various documents, interviews with people involved, and games to play. I wasn’t sure how much you could do for just one game but it’s the perfect rerelease to me, no complaints. It’s stunning how much was preserved by Jordan. I knew he had journals during the making of his games because I had read the one he released for Prince of Persia, but the collection also features playable prototypes for games that were never released and letters sent back and forth between him and Broderbund. The remakes created by Digital Eclipse for the games in the collection are a lot of fun too.
I’m hoping the collection is a big hit and we’ll see more of these. I don’t know how many are possible because it’s hard to imagine anyone preserving everything as well as Jordan Mechner has, but I’m sure Digital Eclipse has a few in the works if they announced this is the beginning of a Gold Master Series that “presents iconic games in an innovative “interactive documentary” format, putting the shared history of games and their creators into one comprehensive package.” I think my dream version of one of these that I think would actually be possible, meaning a game not owned by a giant company like Lucasarts or Sierra, would be something like Llamasoft. Seeing prototypes and interviews for anything they put out would be fantastic.
This is a spoiler-free guide for people who wish to check out Beneath a Steel Sky, a point-and-click adventure game created by Revolution Software and released in 1994. This is not a walkthrough and is just meant as an intro to help people get into the game and a little background on it.
Why Should I Play It?
Even though it was released a few decades ago, it still holds up very well! It was an early game by Revolution Software, who would go on to create the Broken Sword series. The cyberpunk mystery was co-designed and features art by Dave Gibbons, most famously known as the artist for Watchmen, giving the game a distinct style. The game also has a charming mix of comedy and earnestness. The game became a cult hit and eventually led to a sequel, Beyond a Steel Sky, in 2021.
How Do I Get Started?
It’s very easy to start playing the game. The game was made freeware in 2003 and is available on the ScummVM website. If you haven’t used ScummVM and want everything configured for you, it’s all set up in a free download on GOG.
This next part is completely optional. The ScummVM Music Enhancement Project is a site containing alternate/enhanced versions of soundtracks for games that run in ScummVM, They’re all available for free and have instructions for how to replace the music. If you would like to see how the two soundtracks compare, you can check out this video here and see what you like more.
Tips for Playing Beneath a Steel Sky
For the most part, Beneath a Steel Sky is easy to get into if you’ve played other point-and-click adventures but here’s a couple things to keep in mind when playing.
Read the Comic Prequel Packaged with the game was a comic that sets up the game and explains the backstory. For the most part this comic also appears in the game’s intro but it’s still worth reading to see an extended version with more art by Dave Gibbons. You can read the comic here.
Save Often You will want to save regularly and rotate between a few save files. There are a few points in the game where you can die and the game does not automatically restore you to a safe point when it happens. It’s not in a ton of places but it’s still a good idea to save just in case. It’s also a good idea to rotate between a few save files. There aren’t really any softlocks except technically at the end where forgetting an item in a room may lead to a dead end scenario in the next room, but it’s nothing to be concerned about as long as you have a couple save files you are actively switching between.
Using Hints is Ok Compared to a lot of adventure games from the era, Beneath a Steel Sky isn’t on the more difficult end of the genre. But everyone finds different puzzles to be difficult and if being stuck is ruining your enjoyment of the game, feel free to look up a hint. I think the page for the game on UHS Hints does a good job of helping with puzzles without giving away too much.
A year ago I wrote a couple of articles (here and here) recommending some indie adventure games for Halloween, and since it is the Halloween season again, or at least it is according to a lot of enthusiastic people, I thought I would do a few more recommendations.
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is a folk horror point-and-click adventure game developed by Cloak and Dagger Games and published by Wadjet Eye Games. I’m a big fan of both studios and even mentioned Football Game by Cloak and Dagger Games in a previous recommendation article. This may be their best game so far. The game features some fantastic art and sound. I especially love the use of light and color in the artwork. The game is very approachable for people newer to point-and-click adventures, with a more simplistic interface and never feeling too frustrating.
The Aching
I’ve mentioned this game on the blog before but it’s a very nice game and I’d love to see more people check it out. The Aching is a parser graphic adventure inspired by classic Sierra adventure games from the 80’s. I enjoyed the game’s horror setting and how it feels like a game from the 80’s without the frustrating softlocks you frequently run into in those games. I don’t mind death in adventure games but this game has a unique take on it where you must do things that would typically cause player death to proceed. I also think it’s cool that the game is built to run on DOS, although it has a DOSBox wrapper so it runs on Windows without any issues.
ParaMonsters and the Haunted Escape Room
If you’re looking for something a little less scary this Halloween season, check out ParaMonsters and the Haunted Escape Room. It’s a very short (30 to 60 minutes) and cute adventure game where you help a group of monsters investigate an escape room that may be haunted. It’s been in one or two of the big bundles on Itch too so you may already own it.
No Rest for the Wicked
No Rest for the Wicked is a short, comedy game where you are a vampire’s servant and must help him make the spell that will bring humanity to an end. The free game features voice acting, nice pixel art, and well-designed puzzles. But don’t take my word for it, it won the 2023 AdventureJam game jam, where teams have 14 days to develop an adventure game.
