Review: Pandora’s Box

Developer: Microsoft Game Studios
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Year: 1999
Genre: Puzzle

Lately I’ve been playing Pandora’s Box, a 1999 puzzle game published by Microsoft that was designed by Alexey Pajitnov, the designer of Tetris. It’s really unfortunate that it seems to have been completely forgotten because it’s a really charming collection of puzzles.

screenshot of the puzzle select screen showing New York City's skyline

It’s a pretty straightforward collection of puzzles. There’s technically a plot about you having to recapture some tricksters that have escaped from Pandora’s box, which isn’t really how the story originally worked but whatever, it’s just there to give an excuse to do a variety of relaxing puzzles. The Wikipedia page has a good description of all the puzzle types. Not all of them are winners, the weirdly named Image Hole is a tedious slog where you just have to slowly move holes around until you see the place in a painting where they can fit in, but most of them are good and it’s a fun way to pass the time when I want to play a game to relax. I think the ones that I prefer the most are the ones that are closer to your traditional jigsaw puzzle. Overlap, Jesse’s Strips, and Outer Layer are the highlights for me and all involve you putting pieces together to form either a painting or photo, or in the case of Outer Layer, some sort of 3D artwork. Overlap and Jesse’s Strips have fun twists on the jigsaw puzzle by having pieces that overlap with each other.

a screenshot of the overlap screen, showing a jigsaw puzzle being put together

The game’s very 90s aesthetic and calming soundtrack just make this a really peaceful game for me to play, with the North and South America regions being the highlights in the game’s soundtrack. It’s too bad that Microsoft doesn’t seem to care about any of their old computer games outside of Age of Empires. There’s plenty of games like this, Motocross Madness, and Freelancer that could really use a rerelease but are just kinda stuck as abandonware and forgotten by most people.

Pandora’s Box is no longer available for sale but it has been updated to work for modern computers on the abandonware website The Collection Chamber.

Review: Inca

Developer: Coktel Vision
Publisher: Sierra On-Line
Year: 1992
Genre: Action, Adventure

Played Inca, an adventure game/rail shooter by Coktel Vision and released in 1992 about Incas and conquistadors fighting in space. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is! You journey through time and space to grab some important looking orbs to become El Dorado and bring the rebirth the Inca empire, all while fighting conquistadors flying boats in space. The game has you alternating through these shooting segments (there’s also some on foot) with traditional point-and-click adventure game parts. Since this is a French DOS game, none of it is really that well designed but it’s all fascinating and certainly a lot more playable than other DOS games that hop around between different genres, even with the difficulty spikes. I’ll definitely play Inca 2 at some point because the weird combination of it all and the FMV is very interesting to me.

I’ve been playing Goblins 3 this month for Adventure Game Club, which is by the same developer, so it’s fun looking at the credits and seeing that the people involved with that goofy game also worked on this right before that game. I don’t know if I could recommend it because it certainly is a clunky game and it becomes too difficult towards the end, but it’s easy to get running in DOS Box if you want to try it and it has passwords and stuff you can do to make the action segments a little bit easier. I would definitely recommend watching the intro which starts off normal enough and then suddenly shifts into “what the hell am I watching?”

I love French DOS games.

Inca is not available for sale but is updated to work on modern OS on the abandonware site The Collection Chamber along with Inca 2.

Review: Terminal Velocity: Boosted Edition

Developer: Terminal Reality
Publisher: Ziggurat
Year: 2023 (original version: 1995)
Genre: Action

I didn’t even notice it until I saw it in my GOG library, but I guess a rerelease of Terminal Velocity happened a couple months ago. Apparently buying the game on GOG over 10 years ago meant that I get the new version for free, which is nice. I’ve been playing it for the last day and…..it’s fine. The game was previously on GOG but running on DOSBox but with the new remaster it does the things you’d expect one to do, higher resolutions, adds achievements, improves the view draw distance, and runs natively on Windows. The original game is still included as a bonus too. It’s all fine even if I expected a little more from it. I’m sure it’s nostalgia doing most of the work but I’m having a good time with it. I find it kind of amusing that fixing the draw distance introduces a new issue, that you can see and shoot your enemies far before they notice you.

If you haven’t played the game before, it’s pretty straightforward stuff. You fly a spaceship around a planet’s surface, blowing up targets while avoiding or fighting enemy ships, and then make your way to the exit. Occasionally you have a boss fight but it’s basically this over and over. Everything feels and controls just fine, if maybe a little dated, but the repetition will probably be too much for most folks.

first person view of a ship over a planet's surface with mountains and another ship in view

I’m certainly not upset at all about this existing but I’m not really sure who it’s for. I don’t think I could really recommend the game to people who never played it before since it’s a pretty repetitive game and feels odd to fly around in, and people either already bought the DOS version or they’re busy moaning about the new version on GOG. It’s a perfectly fine update though and I’m glad it exists. I’d love for it to lead to a rerelease of Fury³ and Hellbender, which aren’t available anywhere since they’re Windows 95 games and won’t run anymore. This is probably unlikely to happen since Microsoft seems to have no interest in any of their old games outside of Age of Empires, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

Terminal Velocity: Boosted Edition is available on Steam and GOG.