Dolla Dolla Bills, Y'all

●Do you like this site? ●Have you ever enjoyed reading anything here? ●Did you ever find anything helpful, informative, or even just funny? Then now’s the time to pledge your support and not get a free tote bag or whatever PBS is shilling these days. I don’t even have any cool interns to man the phone banks I also don’t have, so don’t expect any of that business, either.

PROGRESS TO GOAL: 70% What I do have is the yearly renewal on my hosting plan coming up, with nothing budgeted to pay for it. I recently started a new job, which required a small move, which required fighting a ridiculous custody battle that I can’t even describe, which depleted any savings we had, etc… Things are fine now, financially and in every other way. We’re back on our feet and things are turning around; I can pay our bills and our lawyer (because that particular nightmare isn’t over yet), I can put food on the table and a nice new roof over our heads. I could probably even pay to renew my hosting plan, if I really wanted to. But that’s money that could be better spent on Trey, so that’s where I want to spend it. So, that being said, what am I going to do with Coquetting Tarradiddles? Well, that’s entirely up to you. To renew my server hosting at its current level (which is pretty necessary, unless you want the site crashing every time I get a traffic spike, or whenever some jellyheaded script kiddie tries to hack my Gibson), it’ll cost me $250 clams. That I don’t want to spend anymore. I don’t run ads here, because I think they’re annoying. I get no revenue from this site whatsoever, so it’s all just expense. Back when I was helping fight the good fight to fix the local school district in Beaumont, Texas, I hosted gigabytes of data for the community to access – and none of it came free. Or even cheap. But I could help, so I did help. Or tried to, anyway. I’ve written a lot of stuff about a lot of different things. Some of what I’ve written (such as my posts on Depression ) have had a significant impact on the lives of a surprising number of people, which is why I wrote them. I’ve helped people, and they’ve helped me. I’ve tried to entertain you guys with silly posts, goofy jokes, and even a few short stories ( the most successful of which ended with a pathetic SWATTING attempt by just a really super cool dude, so that was fun). What I’m getting at here is this: I’ve been writing and paying to host this site for a little over 8 years now, and I’ve always done it for free. And I want to keep doing it for free, but I just don’t feel like paying to do it for free anymore. Which is where you come in. I need to raise $250 by the 15th, or Coquetting Tarradiddles will cease to coquette or tarradiddle. Forever.

So, I ask you again: ●Do you like this site? ●Have you ever enjoyed reading anything here? ●Did you ever find anything helpful, informative, or even just funny? If the answer to any of those questions is yes – and if you want this site to continue – then head over here and toss me a couple of pennies to pay for the hosting renewal. NOTE: THIS IS NOT CHARITY. This is for nothing more or less than paying the minimal cost to keep Coquetting Tarradiddles alive and running for another year. If that’s something you want to see happen, then contribute what you can. If it’s not, then don’t. Simple, really. I might come back later and add some kind of progress bar or something, to indicate how close to (or far, far away from) we are to the $250 goal.

PROGRESS TO GOAL: 70% Once (if) we hit it, I’ll update this page and tell people to stop sending me money unless they just really, really want to because they’re crazy and rich and wipe their gold-plated butts with $100 bills or whatever. Like I said, this isn’t charity. I’m not asking for a handout, or for any money to do anything other than keep this site alive. I considered setting up Patreon, but this isn’t a regular thing. I don’t need you to pay me to write. I’ll do that for free; I just don’t want to pay for the privilege. Besides, I don’t have nearly enough hipster facial hair for patrons. I’ve paid the tab here for 8 years now. If you want me to keep going, it’s your turn. I’ll probably come up with some kind of thank you to send to anyone who contributes, although I have no idea what that will be yet. I might put up a poll, and you can just tell me what you want. A new short story? An insightful commentary on the dichotomy of good and evil? A ten page report of the efficacy of fart jokes? The possibilities are endless. The point is, you’ll get something for giving anything. I just don’t know what that is yet.

All the cool kids are doing it. Don’t you want to be cool, too?

The Click-Clack Man

I was going to post this all in one go, but people seemed to really like the serialization I did throughout this past October with my Halloween horror story , so I thought it’d be fun to do it again. When I started writing this, I had something very different in mind than where the story actually went, which is something new and scary for me since I like to know exactly what it is I’m writing as I write it. But this one took on a life of its own, and I just went where it led me. I’ll be posting new entries irregularly, so check back often. I hope you enjoy it.

The Click-Clack Man “I like your shoes.” “Thank you,” replied The Click-Clack Man. He crossed one of his long, thin legs over his lap and pointed to the shiny black dress shoe on his right foot. “Do you have any like these?” The boy paused for a moment, nibbling his bottom lip as he thought. “Yes,” he said, his eyes wide with recognition. “For Sunday mornings when we go to church sometimes.” The Click-Clack man tilted his head to the side, his thin lips parting into a wide grin. “Only sometimes?” he asked the boy. “Yeah. For, like, Christmas and Easter and stuff. We don’t go much other times.” “Pity,” said The Click-Clack Man. “Church is good for you.” “Do you go to church a lot?” “Oh, yes,” said The Click-Clack Man. “Every Sunday. You can come with me,” he said. His lips stretched thinner as his grin grew wider. He leaned closer to the boy and whispered, “if you want.” The boy pushed back a little in his bed until his back touched the wall of his bedroom. It was covered in comic books his dad had made into wallpaper the year before, and his shoulder smooshed into Superman’s face. “I don’t think my mom would let me,” he said, trailing the sentence off as he spoke. He was nibbling his bottom lip again. “Do you know my mom?” he asked. The Click-Clack Man nodded. “I know everyone,” he said. The boy relaxed a little. “Then I can ask her, if you want.” “That’s okay,” replied The Click-Clack Man. “She wouldn’t like that.” “Why not?” The Click-Clack Man uncrossed his legs and stood up, the fabric of his thin black suit letting out a gentle whoosh of air as he rose. He took a few steps away from the boy’s bed, nodded, then turned toward the door. As his hand reached out to open it, he turned his wide grin back to the boy and said, “She doesn’t know I’m here.” The door closed behind him, and the hallway light switched off. click-clack, click clack The boy listened to The Click-Clack Man’s shiny black shoes fade into the distance, then went to sleep. ************ He came like that at first, when the boy was young; brief visits in the nighttime. The Click-Clack Man was always friendly, always smiling. The pair talked about random things, while The Click-Clack Man made the boy laugh with a well-placed joke or a funny face. The boy would answer his questions. “Do you remember the first time I met you?” The Click-Clack Man asked the boy. “No,” he replied. “I don’t think so.” He nibbled his bottom lip again as he always did, making little sucking noises as he thought. “Haven’t you just always been here?” The Click-Clack man smiled. “It seems that way, doesn’t it?” “Yeah,” said the boy. “It does.” And it really did. ************ “Are you ready to go?” asked The Click-Clack Man. The boy looked at the superhero clock by his bed, noted the time, then grabbed the handle of his backpack and pulled its straps over his shoulder. “Yes,” he replied. “I’m ready.” The Click-Clack Man smiled, the smooth, thin skin of his face wrinkling only slightly around the edge of his cheeks. “Good,” he said. “Let’s go.” He reached out his long right arm to the boy and extended his hand. The boy reached out and grabbed it. The Click-Clack Man turned and walked toward the boy’s closet door, which had been propped open by a little toy firetruck. The light inside had been left on. As they got closer, the bulb in the top of the closet flickered slightly, then switched off. The Click-Clack Man extended one long, thin leg and gently nudged the firetruck aside as they walked through the door. It closed shut behind them. ************ On the other side of the closet door, The Click-Clack Man led the boy into a large, green field with waves of soft grass rippling as far away into the distance as he could see. “Wow,” said the boy. “Where are we?” “This is my home,” said The Click-Clack Man. “Where’s your house?” The Click-Clack Man pointed to a gnarled oak tree on the other side of a small, quiet lake. Its water reflected the sky. “You live in a tree?” asked the boy. “No,” said The Click-Clack Man. “The tree lives in me.” The boy furrowed his brow and shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Come,” said The Click-Clack Man. “I’ll show you.” They walked up to the edge of the quiet lake, until the perfectly still water just barely touched the tip of The Click-Clack Man’s shiny black shoes. The water crackled and popped as ice crystals began to form, first from the edge of the lake, then shooting out in a straight line across to the other side. The boy’s jaw went loose and he chin dangled in the soft breeze. “Woah,” he sighed. The Click-Clack Man took a step forward, onto the ice. Water lapped around the edges of the little frozen bridge. “Follow me,” he said. The boy stayed where he stood, jaw still agape as he listened to The Click-Clack Man cross to the other side. click-clack, click-clack The Click-Clack Man stepped off the bridge, turned, and smiled at the boy. He raised one long, thin arm and waved him over, his wrist bending and twisting as his long, thin fingers curled out, then in. The boy stepped on the ice, but it cracked under his weight and startled him. “Don’t worry,” shouted The Click-Clack Man from the other side. “It won’t melt until I tell it to.” He took another step. Another crack. A pop. Another step. Inch by inch and foot by foot, the boy crossed to the other side. As he stepped onto the grass, he heard a gentle plop behind him. When he turned around, the bridge was gone. “Melted,” said The Click-Clack Man. “Just like I said.” “Wow,” sighed the boy. Again. “That’s cool.” The Click-Clack Man smiled. Again. “Thank you.” He led the boy up to the gnarled oak tree, then reached out his arm and placed his hand on the trunk. “Watch this,” he said. The oak groaned a deep, throaty creak from somewhere far inside the wood. The boy could feel it more than he could hear the sound. The ground rumbled, and his feet tickled from the vibration. “What’s happening?” asked the boy. The Click-Clack Man said nothing, and closed his eyes. The thin, pale skin of his eyelids were almost see-through, which the boy had never noticed before, back in the darkness of his bedroom. The rumble grew stronger as the groans and creaks of the tree grew louder. The long, twisting branches began to sway, and then to move. They bent and curled, and wrapped themselves around the boy and The Click-Clack Man, who still had his eyes closed and was still smiling. “Stop it,” the boy pleaded. “I’m scared.” The Click-Clack Man opened his thin lips and laughed. “Please? I want to go home!” cried the boy. The branches fully enclosed them now, and the world went dark. The Click-Clack Man opened his eyes. ************ The darkness vanished in the brightest light the boy had ever seen, which hurt his eyes. He shut them, and started to cry. “Wait,” said The Click-Clack Man. “Wait.” The boy fell to his knees and sobbed, his face buried in his hands. “I just want to go home.” The Click-Clack Man reached out and touched the boy’s head. “Open your eyes.” “I don’t want to.” “Please?” asked The Click-Clack Man. The boy cautiously opened one eye, slowly. The light wasn’t as bright now, and it no longer hurt his eyes. He opened the other one and blinked. “Woah,” he said, once more. “See?” said The Click-Clack Man. “Nothing to worry about.” The boy looked out into a massive room, the entrance hall of a grand mansion. The walls were thick and dark, like the gnarled bark of the tree. The floor was polished marble so shiny it reflected everything around it. In the middle of the room, a grand staircase went straight back and up, then branched off in two directions, each leading to an opposite side of the second floor. There were candles everywhere. “Are we inside the tree?” asked the boy. “Yes,” said The Click-Clack Man. “And no.” “I don’t understand.” “You don’t have to,” replied The Click-Clack Man. “Come this way. I want to show you something” The boy followed as The Click-Clack Man led the way upstairs, to a small door in a small corner of a small room. The little door opened as they approached, with the tiniest of creaks. The Click-Clack Man stopped short of walking inside, and stood beside the door. He motioned for the boy to walk on through. “What’s in there?” he asked. “Home,” said The Click-Clack Man. The boy walked through the door and into more darkness. He felt something soft brush his face, then heard a slight buzz from somewhere over his head. A little light flickered, and another door opened. He was back in his room, walking through his closet. He turned to see where he’d come from, but all he found were clothes and toys, and that thing in the corner that his mother had told him to throw away but he hadn’t. The Click-Clack Man was gone, along with the little door he’d just walked through. It was nighttime again, and the boy was back in his bedroom. The superhero clock next to his bed showed the same time as when he’d left, which was half past bedtime, and his mother would be coming to check on him soon. The boy crawled into bed, pulled the covers up over his chest, then closed his eyes and listened. The Click-Clack Man was walking away, somewhere beyond his closet, in his mansion inside a tree by a quiet lake in a green field of soft grass that went on forever. click-clack, click-clack ************ To be continued… Enjoying the story? Want more? Click here to let me know by sending me money. Or you can just click Like and Share or whatever. I won’t judge.

I’ve Got A Golden Ticket!

Once upon a time, a legendary candyman held a contest in which five lucky children won a tour of his mythical chocolate factory. That man was Mr. Wonka, and this is the story you were never told… The moment Wonka launched his famous contest, rival candy maker Slugworth Cruz immediately began trying to steal Wonka’s secrets for himself. He prowled the streets at night, looking for the first winner by approaching random children in the darkness to ask them about golden tickets and candy. It was kinda weird.

“Hey. Got any candy?”

The first winner was a large, angry young man who was driven by an all- consuming passion to consume anything could. Augustus Christie was his name, but he never made it to the factory. Tragically, he insulted Wonka’s union workers in his acceptance speech, who then tricked him into mistaking the brown water of one of New Jersey’s rivers for chocolate. Augustus Christie dove in, head first, and was never seen again. “Trumpa Lumpa, Doopa Dee Doo…”

The next winner was also the youngest. His name was Rubio Teevee, and Slugworth Cruz found him before he ever left for the factory. No one knows what Cruz whispered into Rubio’s young ears while the pair sat on his mother’s couch in the family room, but from that moment on, all Rubio Teevee could do was repeat the same three or four sentences over and over.

“Wonka knows EXACTLY what he’s doing.” Ben Carson would’ve won a ticket, but he fell asleep before he finished opening his Wonka Bar, then stashed it away in a pyramid for later after he woke up. Violet Fiorina also would’ve won a ticket, but she laid off the entire staff she’d hired to unwrap candy bars just before the winning one was found.

The next lucky winner was Veruca Clinton, who felt winning the contest was her birthright because she felt that winning everything was her birthright. Spoiled, loud and obnoxious, she was last seen demanding Wonka give her a goose to lay gold eggs for Easter. Wonka just smiled and tossed her down a garbage shoot. “Bad egg,” he said.

“It’s mine. Whatever it is, it’s mine. Gimme!”

The last young man to win a ticket was approximately 800 years old, which was getting on for a 12 year old boy, but the years had not been kind. Born into poverty, Bernie Bucket was convinced he would win a ticket, because he wanted it more than anyone. Positive that he could use the contest to infiltrate the inner sanctum of the 1% and expose Wonka for the elitist fraud that he was, Bernie fished around in raw sewage for a coin some rich guy dropped, then miraculously bought the last winning Wonka Bar in existence. “Let them eat chocolate.”

But then he redistributed Fizzy Lifting Drinks to the 99% and bumped into the ceiling which then had to be washed and sterilized, so he got nothing. None of the children won the real prize that day, which would’ve seen one of them inheriting Obama Wonka’s factory after he retired. However, Wonka was now more convinced than ever that no other living human would ever be qualified for the job, so he just smiled to himself, breathed deeply, and decided to stay. Forever.

“I said good day, sir!”

My Top Ten PC Games of ALL THE YEARS As I write this, it’s the last day of 2015 and I’m surrounded by Top Ten lists for everything from the best games of the year, to the best fast food burgers in the nation.

It’s annoying, so I thought I’d write my own, because my Top Ten Games of 2015 are way different than everyone else’s Top Ten Games of 2015. But then I thought, I don’t want to do that because Top Ten of the year lists are stupid and predictable and omnipresent. So I decided to do it anyway, but not just for 2015. BUT FOR ALL THE YEARS. Well, since 1988, anyway. Which is when I got my first IBM-compatible PC and entered the Real Gamer demographic. I had an Apple ][ clone for years before that, but I’m doing a PC gaming list, so I’m limiting it to games I played on the PC. This means that only games I played on my PC will be here. Any cross-platform titles that I played on, say, my Xbox or Playstation or whatever won’t be. It’s also a list of my top ten games of each year, so it’s not necessarily made up of the objectively best games. All that’s here are the games I actually played the year they were released. Remakes, reboots, and remasters won’t be included, either. Your favorite game will probably be omitted, because it’s my list. You can just go make your own, if you feel that strongly about Speedball 2. I was originally going to post this all at once here on New Year’s Eve, but it’s kind of a monumental task. I bit off more than I can chew, as usual, so I’m just going to add years as I complete them. My plan is to add at least one year each day until we hit 2015, but I’ll try to squeeze in a few more here and there, time permitting. Now go! Gather your party and venture forth or whatever. My Top Ten PC Games of 1988 #10 – Life & Death

I beat Doogie Howser to surgeonhood by a full year by playing this game. Neil Patrick Harris wouldn’t start suturing patients until 1989, and his character was 16 when the show started. I was only 13 the first time I started up Life & Death and immediately murdered a patient. I forgot to administer any anesthetic before I cut into him, so he screamed out in agony and promptly died. I never did get the hang of this game because screw it, I was only 13 years old. I still had a lot of fun trying, though. And the lamentations of my patients never got old. #9 – Rocket Ranger

This game. My first PC was an 8088 with an EGA monitor, which I thought made me pretty hot shit, until I bought Rocket Ranger based on the the screenshots on the back of its box. After I got back home and installed it, I realized EGA was actually pretty crap. The screenshots were from the Amiga version, and they were beautiful. However, the image on my monitor was limited to 16 colors of sadness. The game was still great fun, though. Flying around, zapping Nazis, falling on your face over and over when you can’t manage to take off because you suck at life. Running out of fuel and crashing on your way to save the day because you didn’t read the code wheel right. Good times. #8 – Battle Chess

I’ve always enjoyed chess, but I’ve never been very good at it. I like to laugh at people who think that mastering the game is some sign of superior intelligence rather than just being really good at a game, and nothing was funnier than playing Battle Chess. All of the little animations were genuinely comical to my 13 year old brain, and I’m sure I remember more than one crotch-shot, which was pretty much the pinnacle of human achievement in comedy as far as I was concerned. The only problem with Battle Chess was that after you’d seen every animation for the hundred billionth time, they just got annoying. I’d eventually switch them off, but then I’d realize that I was just playing chess at that point, which was pretty damn boring. There isn’t a lot of staying power in this classic, but the fun times are pretty great. Until they’re not. #7 – Battlehawks 1942

The first in Lucasfilm’s WWII flight sim series, Battlehawks 1942 was as fun to play as it was to not. That’s because it came with a big, spiral-bound manual filled with all sorts of WWII facts and tidbits. One of the best ways to play the game was to read through a bit of the manual to get psyched up, then hop into the game to shoot down some baddies. I played it a lot with my dad, who was always better at it than I was. The jerk. This game also ignited my interest in WWII history, which would continue through college when I accidentally signed up for a graduate level course as a freshman. I managed to pass, but just barely. Ah, memories. #6 – BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception

Outside of Ultima II (which I played on my Apple ][ clone), I never knew you could combine sci-fi and RPGs until I played this game. The title screen was much cooler than anything the actual game had to offer, but it was still a lot of fun. I never made it very far because it was kind of complicated, I was only 13, and I didn’t have a manual for it because reasons. Still, I always had fun trying to figure out what the heck I was doing in a universe I didn’t understand. Plus, giant robots. #5 – Police Quest II

They don’t make games like Police Quest today. And they didn’t really make them like Police Quest back when they made Police Quest. Sierra went out on a limb with this series, and it usually paid off. I wouldn’t play the first game until years after I played part two, but it’s just as well. The first one was super short and focused more on the mundane routine of an officer’s life (which was way more fun than it sounds) more than it did its central story. The sequel improved on that, and by the time Police Quest III came out, I was pretty sure the series was going to be around forever as it kept improving. Then Daryl Gates happened, and it wasn’t anymore. #4 – Playhouse Strip Poker I was never very good at card games, but I was getting older and thought it was a skill I should pick up so I could fit in at parties as an adult or whatever. I discovered this questionable poker simulation on a local BBS and found that it had a surprisingly robust and challenging AI that would help me quickly learn the basics of the game before moving on to the more challenging difficulty levels as I made my way toward mastery over the various complex systems governing the game of poker.

Yeah, whatever. I was a 13 year old boy. Shut up. #3 – Manhunter: New York

Manhunter was one of the weirdest games Sierra ever made. Heck, it’s one of the weirdest games anyone has ever made. It’s set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic version of New York after giant intergalactic eyeballs have enslaved humanity and forced everyone to dress as monks or something. It was never very clear. It was also the first point and click adventure game I’d ever played, since it did away with Sierra’s traditional text parser in favor of a 1st person slideshow view more like we’d see in Myst years later. I spent hours trying to figure this game out, but mostly I just wandered around and died a lot. My most distinct memory of this game comes from very early on (which is about as far as I ever got), where I was able to do the knife/hand thing I saw Bishop do in Aliens. So that was cool. #2 – Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny

I’ve played and completed every Ultima game…except Ultima V. It is my secret shame. It was actually one of the first games I bought after getting my first PC, because I’d been unable to run it on my old Apple ][ due to the game wanting a crazy amount (64k) of RAM. My machine only had 48k, so it’d play the intro but always crap out when trying to start up the game itself. Which sucked, because Ultima V is widely regarded as being one of the best entries in the series. So why didn’t I ever complete it? Or even get very far? A couple of reasons, really. The biggest one probably has to do with my top game of 1988. Once I found it, I had very little time for anything else. But the second reason is that Ultima VI was just around the corner… #1 – Maniac Mansion

This game changed everything for me. Hell, it changed everything for everyone. Multiple characters, different endings, a mouse-driven point-and-click interface. Humor. Maniac Mansion had it all. Once I discovered it, I never went back. All the Sierra games were suddenly clunky nightmares of keyboard controls and fiddly text parsers, and I wanted nothing more to do with them. I also didn’t want more serious narratives or overly fanciful, saccharine fairy tell nonsense. I wanted good jokes, funny characters, and skewed humor. I wanted…Lucasfilm Games.

My Top Ten PC Games of 1989 #10 – Pipe Dream

Lucasfilm Games didn’t just stick to one or two genres, back in its early days. It tried its hand at a number of different games, sometimes developing them in-house, and sometimes buying up an existing property to publish. Pipe Dream was originally released for the Amiga under the name Pipe Mania. Lucasfilm grabbed it, ported it to other platforms, and called in Pipe Dream. It was a fun time killer that could get pretty challenging for my budding young intellect. You might remember having played it every single time you hacked a machine in Bioshock. # 9 – 688 Attack Sub

I sucked at this game, but boy was it fun. I never had any idea what I was doing, since I was again playing a game sans manual because reasons. (Hey, I was 14. BBSs were a thing, and I was friends with a lot of sysops. Sysops who had “special” file sections for trusted users. Don’t judge me.) It was far too complicated for my stupid newly-teenaged brain to quite grasp. There were lots of controls and fiddly systems, and I just wanted to blow things up. But something about figuring out how to make the game do anything was part of the fun, which I guess was the case with a lot of old games. #8 – Populous

My first god sim. Everyone’s first god sim. There’s not much to say about Populous that hasn’t already been said before. I liked it for the same reasons everyone else liked it. You got to play as a god, you had little worshipers you could smite at will, and you could murder everyone. Or help them. Whichever. I never did get the hang of raising and lowering land, though. And I never understood why a god would need to bother with such mundane levels of civic planning. Why not just set a bush on fire and command it to tell of one of your subjects to “Go ye forth and grab yonder shovel”? Ah, well. It’s still a fun game. #7 – Hero’s Quest / Quest for Glory 1

Hey, you got your RPG in my adventure game! No, you got your adventure game in my RPG! Two genres that should have never worked together somehow blended like chocolate and peanut butter. Yeah, it still had Sierra’s crappy interface and you died stupidly every five minutes, and you could get yourself into no-win scenarios like other people get into their clothes, but damn was it a fun game. It was originally called Hero’s Quest, but Sierra forgot to trademark the name. After Milton Bradley trademarked an electronic version of HeroQuest, they were forced to change the name to the now familiar Quest for Glory. Sierra had a real thing for sticking Quest somewhere in their titles. #6 – The Colonel’s Bequest

The first in the long Laura Bow series of two whole games, this one was an absolute mess. It had a lot of timed events where you had to either follow characters or be in a certain spot at a specific time, and the puzzles were traditionally Sierra Stupid™. Yet, even with everything the game got wrong, it was still intriguing as hell. It was a murder mystery, which we still don’t have a lot of in today’s gaming. It focused on characters rather than puzzles, and had an interesting story, even if it was mired in the typical bad puns and cliches of Sierra’s writing. #5 – Tunnels of Armageddon

Yet another game acquired from the dubious file section of a local BBS, this game had absolutely no point. I’m sure there was a story involved in some way, but whatever it was didn’t matter. All you did was fly through these colorful tunnels while trying not to crash into walls and explode. That was pretty much it. And it was awesome. I used to put on some ’80s heavy metal and then pretend I was an ace tunnel pilot in some alternate reality where tunnel pilots were a thing, and then I’d tear into the game for hours. If you manage to track this game down to give it a whirl – and I highly recommend it – be advised that a joystick is a must. All the cool tunnel pilots have them. Don’t you want to be cool, too? #4 – SimCity

The original city planning game. What more is there to say? It birthed a genre, eventually led to The Sims, and you could build nightmare roadways to cause epic traffic jams. It was great. I played a lot of this one, but mostly just when I was bored with all my other games and couldn’t think of anything better to do. It would take a few sequels for the design to really come together, but there’s still a quirky charm with how simple yet rewarding the first game can be. #3 – Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain

I spent more hours in this flight sim than with any other action game I had on my PC, including Tunnels of Armageddon. It took everything that was great about Battlehawks 1942 and cranked it up to eleven. Or really, just 10. The eleven wouldn’t come until the next game in the series, but Their Finest Hour was responsible for some of the best gaming memories with my dad that I have. We played the Ultima games together, and we played Their Finest Hour. It was our thing. #2 – Prince of Persia I desperately wanted a VGA card and monitor, along with a sound card around the time I discovered the original Prince of Persia. I remember that distinctly, because one of the selling points of the game was that its EGA graphics weren’t bad, and it had surprisingly good PC speaker support.

I never managed to save the princess or whatever because the game was crazy with its time limit and lack of saves, but everything else was awesome. The animation remains impressive to this day, and the sudden deaths from the various traps still make me laugh. My favorite is the blade chomper death. So good. #1 – Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Graphic Adventure

This was – and remains – THE BEST MOVIE TIE-IN GAME EVER MADE. Yes, the caps were necessary. The Last Crusade is one of the most influential, yet overlooked point-and-click games ever, and I honestly don’t understand why. It took the story from the movie, added a bunch of stuff (and cut out a little bit), then combined it all together in a great adventure game that didn’t take itself too seriously. It even came with an awesome copy of Henry Jones’ Grail Diary, complete with little scribbled notes and coffee stains on the pages. It introduced dialog trees, and also eliminated no-win scenarios, and even in the one spot where you could die (while navigating the traps at the end of the game), it made a great joke out of it and you didn’t lose any progress. You just tried again until you got it. The design philosophy behind The Last Crusade would go on to dominate all subsequent Lucasfilm (later LucasArts) graphic adventures, along with the point-and-click genre as a whole. Eventually, even Sierra would get in on the game, even if they never managed to get it quite right. Find this game. Play it. YOU ARE WELCOME.

My Top Ten PC Games of 1990 #10 – Life & Death 2

The year I finally got a VGA card, Life & Death 2 showed up with 256 color graphics and brain surgery. This one is even better than the last, because you can kinda sorta actually tell what you’re doing once you’ve cut some poor soul’s head open, which is nice. These days, I can only think of it as a Ben Carson simulator, though. I played it a little bit last night, and every time I cut into someone, I shouted something about pyramid grain silos and then tried to cut the gay out of my patient’s brain. Good times. #9 – Star Control This was a cool little game that had to wait until its sequel to really get good, but it was still fun. It’s totally not a Star Trek simulator, though. And you totally don’t use the Enterprise to shoot at Klingons or anything. Those are Ilwraths. Obviously.

It was mostly an arcade affair, though I remember there being a bit of light strategy involved, as well. Mostly, you set things up and then went into the pew-pew battle screen where you shot at other ships until they exploded. And that was pretty much it. And yet, it still somehow managed to become a huge time sink for me. Go figure. #8 – Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire

Origin tried to mix things up a little with the Ultima franchise by taking everything everyone had grown to love about the series and throwing it away. But it worked. In the Worlds of Ultima games, of which there were only two, you still play as the Avatar, but aren’t on Britannia. In Savage Empire, you’re whisked away to the Valley of Eodon, which is basically the set piece of any given pulp fiction rag of yesteryear featuring a lost jungle world filled with giant insects and dinosaurs. It wasn’t a proper Ultima, but it was close enough to kill some time while I waited for Ultima VII to come out. #7 – Quest for Glory 2 The second entry in the Quest for Glory series took the player away from the familiar tropes of European medieval fantasy and plopped you down in more of an Arabian Nights setting. It was a breath of fresh air at the time, and it all seemed super exotic.

If I went and replayed it today though, I’m pretty sure I’d notice all the stereotypes and subtle racism that was sort of an undercurrent in most Sierra titles that I was incapable of perceiving as a kid. Maybe not, but I don’t want to replay it and take any chances. Better safe than sorry. #6 – It Came from the Desert

Another Cinemaware game, but this time I finally had a VGA monitor! After seeing this beauty running on a demo loop in my local software store for ages, I couldn’t wait to buy it and run home to check out the amazing graphics I missed out on with Rocket Ranger. I installed the game, ran the executable, and then…EGA graphics. Again. The store had been running the Amiga version, of course, and Cinemaware hadn’t bothered to start adding 256-color graphics to their PC ports yet, so I was screwed again. I still enjoyed the game and put a lot of hours into it, but I learned to never trust screenshots again. #5 – King’s Quest V I hadn’t played a King’s Quest game in ages when this one came out, but I was suckered in by Sierra’s new engine. VGA graphics! Point and click interface! All the cool things!

It’s too bad its puzzles were awful, but the worst part about the game was how they hadn’t fully embraced point and click yet. No, you didn’t move around with the keyboard anymore, and yes, you clicked where you wanted to go and your little dude went there, but…he didn’t always. Because Sierra loved killing the player ALL THE DAMN TIME, so sometimes you had to click in just the right spot and make a million little clicks so he’d walk inch-by-inch through a screen because you couldn’t rely on his pathfinding to not have him plummet to his death from off a cliff. Fortunately, the original version of this game came on floppies because CD-ROMs weren’t a thing yet, which meant I only had to read the bad dialog rather than hear it “acted” out by whoever happened to be walking by Roberta William’s office on their way to the bathroom that day. #4 – Ultima VI: The False Prophet

I have a deep and unyielding love for the Ultima series, so you might be wondering why Ultima VI isn’t higher up on the list of my top games from 1990. It’s pretty simple, really. It just didn’t grab me like the other entries in the series. There wasn’t anything wrong with the game – and, in many ways, it was much better than all of the previous games. But for whatever reason, it just didn’t grab hold of my like, say, Ultima IV did or Ultima VII would a couple of years later. I think it mostly had to do with the user interface. It was pretty clunky, but it was also the first mouse-driven Ultima game, so I cut it some slack. It did some things better and some things worse, but the story was still great. And all my old friends were back, so I didn’t mind too much. #3 – Loom

My big Christmas present in 1990 was a sound card, along with two Lucasfilm Games. Loom was one of them, and it was the perfect showcase for my new Sound Blaster card, since the entire game is based around using music to cast magic spells. The game was short and obviously planned to be the first in a new series that never materialized, but it was magical. It was designed by Brian Moriarty, who also designed Wishbringer, one of my favorite Infocom titles. The game even came with an audio cassette containing a radio drama setting up the game world and your place in it. I lost count of how many times I listened to that thing. #2 – Wing Commander

A friend of mine gave me a copy of this game, and I was immediately hooked. So was my dad. We used to fight over who got computer time, just to play it. It had everything: a great soundtrack, awesome graphics, a cool branching storyline. It was a Star Wars sim before there was a Star Wars sim, and I loved it. Unfortunately, since I had a new VGA monitor, I used to enjoy playing my games in EGA mode for a few minutes, just to appreciate how much better the graphics were on my new rig. For most games, this was fine. I’d check out EGA, laugh at all the dithered red people, then pop back over to VGA and relish my graphical snobbery. However, the way Wing Commander changed graphics modes was by way of overwriting the VGA files with EGA ones, which meant that once I’d converted it to EGA, it was stuck that way until I was able to get another copy from my friend. When my dad came home later that day and tried to play a game, he was…displeased. #1 – The Secret of Monkey Island

Another year, another Lucasfilm game in the top spot. But no one can argue with this choice. The Secret of Monkey Island was an even better showcase for my new Sound Blaster card than Loom, with a much better soundtrack that I still listen to and love to this very day. (The main theme is even my wife’s ringtone on my phone.) Everything about the game was great. EVERYTHING. The puzzles were fun. The dialog was sharp. The characters were fully realized. The music was amazing. The graphics were crisp. I was in love.

My Top Ten PC Games of 1991 #10 – Lemmings Ah, Lemmings. Many countless hours were devoted to both saving and annihilating these little bastards, in equal measure. There’s a reason this game has seen so many iterations and sequels over the years: it’s damn addictive. Even today, starting up the original game risks me losing oceans of time to it. I can’t play just one level, and I always have to just see what the next level looks like after I beat one.

Until I get super frustrated and just nuke them all, that is. Which kind of happens a lot, actually. #9 – Night Shift

I still love this game, and I still play it fairly regularly. Another one of Lucasfilm Games’ dip into the wading pool of other genres, Night Shift was developed by a third party who brought it to Lucasfilm. They rebranded it and published it as a toy factory making Star Wars and Lucasfilm Games related action figures. You play as a guy or a girl charged with keeping The Machine working, which is a crazy, multi-storied contraption that’s constantly failing in spectacular ways. The toy company is called Industrial Might and Logic instead of Industrial Light and Magic, and the title screen of the game is a clever modification of ILM’s old wizard logo. There are also lemmings involved, but not the suicidal kind from other games or any of Disney’s fake True Life Adventure movies. There are two of the little beasts in this game: one that slows you down by humping your leg, and another who runs around and mucks up the machine. Then, there’s an angry lawyer who constantly tries to bludgeon you with the hammer of litigation or whatever, so it’s a constant race up and down the machine, repairing what’s broken and trying to keep everything in sync. It starts out pretty simple, but gets really crazy before you get to the end of the game, which explains why I’ve never made it to the end of the game. I’ve been trying for a couple of decades now, but I only ever manage to progress one or two levels every few years. Maybe by the time I die, I’ll have completed it. But probably not. #8 – Space Quest IV

This was the first Space Quest game I played, because it had VGA graphics and a point and click interface. For whatever reason, the series just didn’t appeal to me any sooner. I remember looking at the screenshots of SQIV before I had my VGA monitor and was longing for one with my nose pressed up again the pages of a Computer Shopper magazine like a Dickensian street urchin peering at day old bread in a bakery window, imagining that I could never get bored with a game that looked that good. Unfortunately, it was still a Sierra game. It was funnier than other Sierra games, and even the multiple deaths were kind of endearing, but it was still filled with the same no-win states and lousy design decisions that plagued almost every Sierra title. The last straw for me was probably around the time I found their little joke about Loom, which was one of my favorite games. It was basically Sierra taking a stab at Lucasfilm’s design philosophy, and it irked me. I never did complete the game, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. I just eventually gave up. You know, like with life. #7 – Eye of the Beholder This was the game that taught me I have absolutely no sense of direction. It was super cool and super Dungeons & Dragons, which was a pen-and-paper RPG I always wanted to play, but never got a chance to on account of not really having many friends because I’m a giant weirdo.

Booting up Eye of the Beholder for the first time was a revelation, because I could finally play D&D instead of just sitting in my closet alone, reading sourcebooks and pretending I had friends. Unfortunately, the stepped slideshow movement and making my own graph paper maps proved far too daunting a task, and I just ended up getting lost and dying a lot. It didn’t stop me from playing, though. Or from playing the next game in the series. Or the next one. While getting lost and dying in each and every one of them. I suck. #6 – The Adventures of Willy Beamish

The tagline for this game was something along the lines of, “Who wouldn’t want to be 9 years old again?”, which was weird because I’d just been nine years old, like, 7 years earlier. But whatever; I was already nostalgic. Plus, this game looked like a freaking cartoon, which was amazing back in 1991. I bought it immediately. It wasn’t as open as other adventure games, because you couldn’t just click to walk anywhere. You could only click on interactive objects and room exit points, but it was still a great technological achievement. The story is about an evil corporation pumping sludge into the town’s water supply or something, and it’s up to Willy Beamish, his gang of treehouse pals and his pet frog Horny to save the day. And somehow win the Totally Not Nintendo (Nintari) world championship along the way. I haven’t played it in years, so I honestly have no idea how well it holds up today, but I loved it way back when. I think it was even ported to the DS not too long ago. I should probably try to track a down a copy. #5 – Police Quest III

The creeping racism of Sierra really started to bubble up to the surface with some of the traffic stops in this game, but solving the main storyline was a lot of fun. It’s basically the same as the other Police Quest games, but with VGA graphics along with point-and-click gameplay. I don’t remember any no-win situations exactly, but I do know you could screw up some of your traffic stops when they went to court if you didn’t exactly follow proper police procedure. Which is weird, because this was California in the ’90s, when proper police procedure was basically just, “Beat up all the black guys and then lie about it later”. Which is kinda still the procedure, really. The next game was called Open Season, which was “designed” by Daryl Gates and filled with racism and horrible FMV. Seriously, the game was awful. Just awful. But PQ3 was still fun. I replayed it not too long ago, and still enjoyed it, even if I winced at a few characterizations. Here’s a friendly tip to everyone on the planet: Don’t try to write in dialect. Ever. Just don’t. #4 – Wing Commander II Same as Wing Commander I, only better.

What else is there to say? It was the last great hurrah before Chris Roberts’ Hollywood envy would drive him down the dark, dark road of FMV. And then actually to Hollywood, where he made the Wing Commander movie that we do not speak of. Ever. Seriously, there’s nothing more to say here. Besides, I KNOW THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TIGER’S CLAW WAS YOUR FAULT! #3 – Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe

The third and final game in Lucasfilm’s WWII flight simulators was also its best. It took everything great about Battlehawks 1942 and Their Finest Hour, and cranked it up to eleven. (See? I told you it would.) Better graphics, better sound, and experimental jets. The game had everything, and SWOTL was one of the last games my dad and I actively played together on a regular basis. I don’t mean we played competitively or anything. He’d play his missions and I’d play mine, but we’d talk about them later and it was basically like playing the game together. It was pretty much the 1991 version of co-op. #2 – Civilization I don’t really need to write anything about this one, do I? We all know Civilization. Everyone knows Civilization. We all live it every day.

But Sid Meier squeezed it into a few floppies and unleashed the first real taste of gaming crack to the world. You don’t just play a quick game of Civilization. You play epic games of Civilization that take as long as they need to in order for you to either vanquish your enemies or die trying. Or maybe go for one of those namby-pamby non-military victories all the hippies seem to love so much. Damn hippies. #1 – Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge

Monkey Island 2 remains the gold standard for adventure game design. Non-linear progression, interconnected puzzles, brilliant writing, great characters, multiple interesting locations, constant new art rewards, etc… This game had it all. I still love it so much, I used it to propose to my wife.

True story. My Top Ten PC Games of 1992 #10 – Stunt Island

This is probably one of the least known titles on my entire list. Released by Disney, it was an odd combination of flight sim, movie maker, and non-linear video editing simulator. Whichever area was its focus depends on who you talk to. Some people think it was first and foremost a flight simulator; specifically, a stunt flying simulator. You played the role of a pilot working for a movie studio, and it was your job to pull off various stunts and get the shot for a film. Other people think it’s a movie creator, and all that stunt flying business is just one of the flim-making tools the game gives you. Whichever camp you fell into, it was a really fun game. Unique in every way, its flight model was a little wonky and its editing tools a bit clunky, but playing it taught you a little bit about a lot. You had to learn light scripting to move “actors” around in the world at the right times, light flight-simming to get your plane to do what you needed it to do without exploding, and light video editing to put it all together. Stunt Island also used a fully polygonal 3D engine with gouraud shading, and was almost entirely coded in assembly, so chew on that. It also produced what was I think were probably the first recorded machinimas in gaming. But I can’t prove that, so please don’t write me angry letters about your awesome Halo videos or whatever. #9 – Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood This Sierra game doesn’t really feel like a Sierra game. It kind of plays like one, but it’s actually really good. It’s also one of their lesser known titles, which is just inexplicable to me.

You play as Robin Hood, and you pretty much know the story from there. The game has the usual inventory-based puzzles of a traditional adventure game, but it also has little minigames like light archery and an medieval board game called Nine Men’s Morris, which I became so obsessed with, I made my own board out of a piece of plywood and the wood-burning kit I had because I was a weird kid. The game also opens with a lyrical intro, although the lyrics weren’t sung by anyone because CD-ROMs weren’t a thing yet, and Sierra would’ve probably just had Diana down in Purchasing sing it anyway because she was always going on about how great her church choir was or something. Still, it was an original lyrical song opening a video game, which is the first time that ever happened, I think. Sierra would do it again the following year, but more on that when I get to ’93. #8 – Alone in the Dark

Lovecraftian horror meets the impossible geometry of 1992 polygonal characters. The true horror of this game obviously came from the LSD-infused visuals of Triangle Man beating Particle Cthulhu or whatever, but the rest of the game’s scares weren’t too shabby, either. Beating Resident Evil to market by four years or so, Alone in the Dark was the very first survival horror game. It was slow and clunky and kind of goofy, but horror games without Elvira’s boobs in them were few and far between back in those days, so we took what we could get. The sequels would get progressively ridiculous and awful as the years went on, so if you’ve ever had any curiosity about the series, play the first one first. It makes swallowing the spooky cowboy-shaped triangle people that come later go down a lot easier. #7 – Quest for Glory III: Wages of War

More Quest for Glory! Again, it’s basically more of the same, but this time we leave the Arabian Nights setting and move on to darkest Africa. Except it’s called Fricana and is entirely populated by lion people. Which made sense, because there was a brief period in the early ’90s when an African setting was all the rage, back before new age “spiritualism” crept in and made the appropriation of Native American traditions by white people a thing. One of the lion people’s names was Simba, who was even the son of the king if I remember correctly, but don’t get your hopes up. Nobody ever holds him up on a rock to a rising crescendo of Elton John or anything. The whole plot revolves around stopping a war between the lion people and the leopard people that’s being orchestrated by an evil wizard who somehow isn’t named Jaffar. Do that, and you save the day and are ready to move on to the next Quest for Glory, which I never actually played. Sorry. #6 – Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but this was my first Wizardry game. It had some really great music, and creating my characters at the start was detailed and a lot of fun. Then, the story happened and I had no idea what was going on.

There was something about spaceships and intergalactic overlords, and then there was crashing on a medieval planet or something, and none of it made any sense, but I’m pretty sure it was about Scientology. Fun game. Played it a lot. Got lost and died, mostly. Basically, it was Eye of the Beholder all over again, but with the occasional space alien rat monster. #5 – Star Trek: 25th Anniversary

Who knew that Star Trek would lend itself so well to the adventure game format? Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and its sequel, Judgment Rites, proved that the franchise could not only work as an adventure game, but was incredibly well suited for it. As long as you pretended the atrocious realtime, starships-as-nimble- fighters battle segments didn’t happen, anyway. Because they were awful. just awful. But everything else about the game was great. The puzzles even managed to mostly avoid traditional adventure game logic, which was probably a side effect of being confined to the sciencey-science of Star Trek. Then again, that also means you ran into the occasional ridiculously obtuse puzzle, like one where you had to convert Base 10 math to Base 3 math, which I guess was this game’s version of Leisure Suit Larry’s “Prove You’re An Adult” quiz, but for nerds. #4 – Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

I looked forward to this Lucasfilm (which had now become LucasArts) game probably more than any other, including my beloved Monkey Island series. It was more Indy, which was always welcome in my Indiana Jones obsessed brain. (Yes, I own a licensed Indy fedora. And a brown leather jacket. And a whip. Shut up.) Everyone loves this game, and people are always citing it as the objectively best Indy game to date, which is kind of silly because The Last Crusade exists and is clearly the better game. Fate of Atlantis is by no means bad or anything, but everything it did, The Last Crusade did just a little bit better. I’m pretty sure Fate of Atlantis was also the first game I bought on CD after finally getting a single speed CD-ROM drive, which means it was the first “talkie” adventure game I ever played, which is what they were called back when things like adding digitized sound to games was a huge deal. Some games did this with optional add-ons you could buy that were usually called Speech Packs. They were basically the precursor to the money-grubbing DLC we have today. #3 – Wolfenstein 3D I remember downloading the shareware version of Wolf3D from a local BBS back in ’92. It was near the end of my junior year in high school, and the sysop of the Around The Clock BBS broke into chat after I dialed in, to tell me about this amazing new game I just had to try. Having played Castle Wolfenstein on my Apple][ and remembering it as a really fun game, I headed over to the Files section and started my download of Wolfenstein 3D Shareware. Then, I went and ate dinner. And watched some TV. And then went to school the next day, because these were the days of 1200 baud modems, noisy phone lines and non-resumable file transfers. That shit took time.

Anyway, once I finally got my hands on it and installed the thing, I was hooked. I burned through the shareware levels, and decided that I actually wanted to buy a copy. I’d never actually bought any shareware game before, seeing as how the demos were usually enough to warn me off of most of the crap that was out there, but Wolf3D was actually good. And I wanted more. Unfortunately, my parents didn’t feel the same way about putting a check in the mail, or giving their credit card info to some unknown game studio they didn’t care about, so I had to either wait until retail copies started showing up, or for the sysop of the BBS to buy it…and then make it available in the secret file section. Sadly, the rest of the game didn’t live up to those initial Shareware levels (which was often the case, back in those days, when the best of the game was shoved to the front to convince people to buy it), but it was still a good time. #2 – Ultima Underworld This game pissed me off. It ran a lot slower than Wolfenstein 3D and had a much smaller view window! How could that even be possible?! Those guys are Origin just don’t know how to program!

Then, I played it. And I slowly realized that there was a whole helluva lot more going on in Ultima Underworld than there was in Wolf3D. I could look up and down, for starters. The graphics were also more detailed, with more textures and animation. Then there were the RPG stats, the combat, the magic system, NPCs, puzzles, etc… It was Ultima, but underground. It was all those dungeons I’d crawled through years before in 1st person that looked like the scribbled line drawings of a coked up four-year-old with an awful drug habit for a toddler, only this time it was in “real” 3D. I was hooked, and I couldn’t stop playing it. I’m still playing it. I go back to it every year or two, just to experience the Stygian Abyss all over again. And, thanks to the handy automap and full movement (as opposed to the stepped slideshows of, say, the Eye of the Beholder series), I can even manage to play it without getting lost and dying ALL THE TIME. #1 – Ultima VII: The Black Gate

The perfect Ultima. No game in the series before or (especially) after ever came as close to realizing a simulated world better than Ultima VII and it’s kinda/sorta sequel, Ultima VII: Part Two: The Serpent Isle. The story was great, the Guardian was a terrific villain, and all my old friends were back, but it was the world that got me in U7. You could cut down wheat and take it to a mill, where you could grind it into flour that you could then add water to and make dough, which you could then stick in an oven to make bread. And that was just one of the many things you could do in the game. NPCs went about their business, independent of the player’s presence. People had lives, the world had a schedule, and things mattered. Or they seemed to, at least. Which was good enough for me. The only real downside to the game was the “realistic” way all the shit in your backpack would jostle around as your walked, thereby making the three-pixel key you needed to find later a damn near impossible task. Also, getting everyone to sit the hell down in that damnable wagon was a pain in my ass I’ve still not fully recovered from. But everything else? AMAZING.

My Top Ten PC Games of 1993 #10 – Coaster

Another little-known title that I loved is once again from Disney Interactive. Coaster really kindled my deep love of the marriage of art and science that is the rollercoaster, and I’m still thankful to it for that. The things used to terrify my as a kid, mostly because I weighed negative pounds and always felt like I was one corkscrew away from sliding under the safety bar and plummeting to my untimely death. That never happened, though. Spoilers. I was never very good at this game, which is something I’m now realizing was kind of a common theme with me and the games of my youth. Still, I loved trying to make legitimate coasters that would thrill the crazy panel of judges assembled in this game. But it was freaking hard. You designed your rollercoasters on what to my soon-to-be-a-high- school-graduate mind was a veritable fully-realized AutoCAD workstation, but was really just a simplified bit of trickery. The hardest part of any coaster design, though, was connecting the final bit of track to the station. Which is probably a pretty crucial thing to get right if you want repeat customers, but it was so infuriating, I usually just gave up and made a simple track with impossible G-forces that would pretty much kill anyone who looked at it funny. #9 – Space Quest V

The last Space Quest I played was also my favorite. I don’t know exactly why SQ5 clicked with me, but it was probably because I was a huge space and Star Trek nerd, so it hit all the right parody notes rattling around inside my dusty braincase. From cheating on my final exam at the Academy, to doing time in the totally-not-the-millennium-falcon simulator, I loved every minute of it. Even the stupid fart joke every time Roger sat down in the captain’s chair of his garbage scow made me giggle like I was 12 years old. I don’t remember there being a single no-win state in the game, either. Which was kind of amazing, considering it was a Sierra title. It’s probably the only real reason I was ever able to complete the thing, now that I think about it. #8 – The 7th Guest / Dracula Unleashed Okay, this one is a little bit of a cop-out, but I couldn’t choose one of these games over the other. They were my first (and last) willing forays into the FMV-crazed world of the ’90s (not counting Wing Commander and one or two other misadventures in really bad videoland), and my memory of both of them really is a flat tie.

The 7th Guest had the cooler atmosphere, but the whole thing being more or less just Myst dressed up in a Halloween costume really put me off. I don’t mind the occasional logic puzzle in an adventure game, but I don’t want to play a whole game entirely composed of moving chess pieces around and dividing up slices of cake evenly between demon ghost people. I don’t want to re-arrange soup cans in an obtuse word puzzle, and I absolutely hated how none of the puzzles ever told you what they wanted you to do, or even what the rules were.

Dracula Unleashed went the complete opposite route, had no logic puzzles at all, and was really just a choose-your-own-adventure VHS tape on a postage stamp-sized screen. It wasn’t all that fun and was pretty much an awful soap opera filled with awful soap opera actors in awful soap opera makeup, but I sunk a ton of hours into it, just to pretend like I was amazed by how my COMPUTER was playing a MOVIE. We were easily amused back in those days. #7 – Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist

The second Sierra game to feature a lyrical song in the intro was also the second of any game to feature a lyrical song in the intro, the first being Conquests of the Longbow. This time, you followed a bouncing ball over the lyrics, just in case you weren’t able to hear them in your head along the obvious melody. It worked, though. The game itself is really, really short, but it was probably Al Lowe’s best game. It still has some of his trademark puerile humor, like when the town is overcome by a noxious cloud of horse farts, but most of it is solid, clever dialog in a setting we’ve always seen too little of in gaming: the old west. Saying too much about the plot would spoil the few surprises it has in store, but it’s still entirely playable today and is as fun as it ever was. My favorite part was when the game actually let me be a pharmacist, which is also how it worked in its copy protection. The manual had a list of ailments along with their appropriate cures, which you then had to prepare in Freddy’s little laboratory according to the instructions provided. It was one of the better uses of manual-as-copy-protection, and making all the little pills and elixirs for the townsfolk was a lot of fun. For some reason. #6 – Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

One of the last Sierra games that will show up on this list is this one, the first Gabriel Knight game. The series took a nosedive into crappy FMV followed by crappy 3D and never quite recovered from either, but the first game still holds up. It’s devoid of most of the negative trappings of Sierra games, although by this time, they were making CD versions of most of their games, which meant they had voice overs usually done by whoever wasn’t busy working on categorizing their nose mucous according to booger viscosity that day. Gabriel Knight actually had real voice talent though, even if actors hadn’t quite figured out how to do VO for a game yet. BUT…Tim Curry was an awful Gabriel Knight. I love the guy, but he didn’t sound anything at all like either someone from the Deep South or a New Orleans native. Here’s a tip, Hollywood and game devs: New Orleans natives don’t sound like they’re from Gone With the Wind. The New Orleans accent is a whole lot closer to a New England one than it is to the typical drawl-ridden caricature of the typical southern accent. The game is filled with voodoo and mystery, and they even managed to get most of the locations right. Or at least sufficiently recognizable as background art. They remastered it recently, too. I’d recommend the original over the remaster, but hey. Paddle whatever floats your dinghy, kiddies. #5 – Sam & Max Hit the Road

I’ve never loved this game as much as everyone else seems to love this game. It was fun enough, but it always seemed like it was trying just a bit too hard to be different or whatever. I don’t know; it’s an intangible thing. Maybe I just didn’t dig the sideshow vibe or the road trip aesthetic, but something about it just never really clicked with me. It was good enough for 1993, had some great art and animations, and I still played it from beginning to end and even chuckled at most of the jokes along the way – but if I ever had to rate my top ten adventure games of all time, it probably wouldn’t make the list. I know. I’m the worst. #4 – Ultima Underworld II Taking place after the events of Ultima VII, UU2 was more of the same from Ultima Underworld…but a LOT more of it.

There were more characters, more locations, more puzzles, and even more world to discover and explore, thanks to a faceted Blackrock gem in Lord British’s basement. There were even the internal drama-plagued politics of British’s castle to manage, with things like preventing (or encouraging) a worker’s revolt and stuff. It had a lot more going for it than UU1, but it lost some of the original’s charm along the way. I’m not sure if it had more to do with me getting older, or maybe I was just getting burned out on dungeon crawlers, or maybe the damn game was just too big – but I never finished it. And I’ve never really wanted to, either. I’m awful. #3 – Doom

There’s a reason this game launched a genre, and that’s because it’s ridiculously fun. It’s tightly designed, has great enemies, satisfying weapons, smart levels and AI bad guys who can piss each other off until they spend more time trying to murder one another in the shotguns than they do aiming their death barrels at your face. Doom improved on Wolfenstein in every way. It brought dynamic lighting to the table, for example, so you could run into a fully lit room with a lot of ammo and the big, shiny key you needed sitting on a pedestal, and just know that picking it up was going to turn out the lights and unleash hell. Literally. But even more than its single player campaign of shooting monster demon muderbots in the face with shotguns was shooting your friends in their faces with shotguns, because Doom introduced multiplayer to the world, which changed everything.

LAN parties suddenly became a thing. You’d drag your giant PC over to a friend’s house, where you’d meet up with several other friends who were all dragging their giant PCs, too. Then, you’d spend an hour hooking everything up through either a crappy Ethernet hub or ridiculous BNC connections, and another hour getting all the computers talking to each other. But then – eventually – you would launch the game and meet your friends on the battlefield. And it was glorious. Pizza, soda, chips, friends and Doom were all any self-respecting geek needed over a weekend, and Deathmatches quickly became regular after- hours affairs at many a workplace. Doom was everywhere, and if you weren’t playing it in ’93, then you either knew someone who was or you hadn’t been born yet. #2 – Day of the Tentacle DoTT narrowly missed my #1 spot for this year. It probably would’ve made it to the top, if someone had bothered to allow the CD-ROM version to BUFFER THE COMMON SOUND EFFECTS. Or maybe at least install them to the hard drive.

I have no complaints about Day of the Tentacle as a game. As a game, I love it. It’s perfect. The art style showed what you could accomplish with great art direction and true mastery over Deluxe Paint. The writing was top shelf, and the voice acting was great. The puzzles were fun and funny. But those damn sound effects… See, I had a single-speed CD-ROM drive back in ’93, just like a lot of people. This meant it was painfully slow to seek out information from the shiny plastic Phantasm disc, which translated to incredibly annoying – and lengthy – pauses every time it had to stop whatever it was doing to go load up the sound effect of, say, purple tentacle’s suction cup sloshing along the ground. Every. Single. Time. It. Happened. Buffering the sound files would’ve fixed that. Loading them onto the hard drive would’ve fixed it, too. But noooo. I had to go buy a double-speed drive JUST TO PLAY DAY OF THE TENTACLE. Which I loved. But that mistake cost it the gold. #1 – Star Wars: X-Wing X-Wing was a space combat simulator set in the Star Wars universe that allowed me to pretend I was in the Rebel Alliance which was more of less everything I ever wanted video games to be.

I had long debates with a couple of friends over whether Wing Commander was better than X-Wing, and in my mind, they always lost. Sure, WC had more cinematic flair, but it was an arcade game. X-Wing was a simulator, with power management and locking s-foils in attack positions and other crap. I played the hell out of this game, much more than I played either Wing Commander 1 or 2. And I didn’t just play it, either. I pretended while I played it, which is something I’m rarely able to do in a game anymore. But while I was playing X-Wing, I could make believe I was actually inside that cockpit. I was really pew pewing my lasers at TIE fighters. I was really the best hope for the Rebel Alliance. I really was Luke Freaking Skywalker, dammit!

My Top Ten PC Games of 1994 #10 – System Shock

I can already feel your scorn, so just stop it. I put System Shock at the bottom because I’m rating these games from the years when I actually played them, not through the magic space goggles of retroactive internet peer pressure. The simple fact is that the original System Shock was kind of a mess. The virtual reality segments alone should’ve been enough to exclude it from my list altogether, but 1994 was kind of a slim year, so it made the cut. Barely. When this game came out, it punished my PC – which was fine, in a way. Or expected, at least. This was an Origin game, after all. They loved to punish inferior PCs. But more than that, it took the Ultima Underworld engine and made it overwhelmingly complex. The screen was crowded with the interface, the level of interactivity with the world was high (a good thing), but actually interacting with anything was cumbersome and clunky. Still, it had potential. There was a spark there that I could see somewhere behind the crowded pixel vomit on my monitor, so I played it. And I played it some more. And then a little more, determined to find the diamond somewhere in all that rough. I never did. #9 – Ultima VIII

Yes, I put U8 above System Shock. Grab your pitchforks and ham sandwiches, Internet. You march at dawn! I actually enjoyed Ultima VIII, as much as anyone could. Sure, a lot of the design decisions were stupid – and I do mean a LOT of them – but it was still an Ultima, and I still wanted to get at the story, despite the awfulness of pretty much everything else. The graphics were really pretty, at least for the Avatar, NPCs, and various monsters. The world art wasn’t all that impressive, and everything seemed to be drawn on the wrong scale, but the animations were amazing. They were 3D before PCs could do (realtime) 3D, so they were pre-rendered and smooth as a baby’s buttered butt. But the jumping. And the drowning. And the minimal dialogs. And the nearly unreadable font. And the ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE was terrible. Still, the story wasn’t bad. I liked how it made the player take the paragon of virtue they’d been playing as since Ultima IV and turn him or her into a monster. I liked the super complex magic system. I liked a lot of things. So it makes the list. Above System Shock. Because I actually completed it, and I enjoyed my experience on Pagan must more than my time with Shodan. So shut up. #8 – Jagged Alliance

Tex. Everything I like about this game can be summed up with Tex Colburn. He was a Japanese tourist turned cowboy turned mercenary, which more or less describes Jagged Alliance in a nutshell. The game had great turn- based combat wrapped in a package that never really took itself too seriously. The characters weren’t just interchangeable stat sheets. They had faces and voices and personality, which is why Tex sticks out so strongly in my memory. He was crazy, over the top, and ridiculous, which was everything I loved about this game. The sequels would eventually move away from that sense of zaniness as the crippling angst of the ’90s slowly crept into every facet of popular culture and infected absolutely everything. For gaming, that meant things would soon get more serious, darker, and grittier, as the industry clamored to inject “realism” into every damn thing they could. #7 – Magic Carpet I got to be a wizard smiting my enemies by throwing explosive fireballs at them from atop a magical flying carpet. What’s not to love about that?

I don’t remember ever finishing Magic Carpet, but I also don’t remember not finishing it, either. Its levels were pretty short and sweet, with clear objectives that could easily be completed in a single sitting, so I don’t remember if I did all of them, or just a lot of them. But they were all fun. The magic spells get bigger and better as you progress, your magic carpet moves at warp speed, and the landscape deforms around you as you blow things up. The only thing I didn’t care for was the…I don’t know, Jell-O quality to the world? It’s hard to describe, but it was always just kind of…wiggly. Gelatinous, even. It was weird. #6 – Under a Killing Moon

After spending years watching him do cool things in Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum on the demo PC of my local software store, I finally bought my first Tex Murphy game. Yes, it was filled with FMV – but it was self-aware FMV. It knew how awful it was, or at least it seemed to. It also knew how terrible its puns were, how ridiculous many of its puzzles were, and it just sort of satirized the entire adventure genre while still managing to be a compelling game. The best bits were the little investigatory sequences outside of NPC interactions and puzzle solving. Creeping around someone’s apartment and rummaging through their stuff was good, clean fun. This was probably the first game I was able to actually slide open drawers, which was pretty revolutionary. People forget. But its biggest achievement was that it finally – FINALLY – left Access Software’s ridiculous “RealSound” system behind. For those who don’t remember (or who weren’t around back in the early ’90s), RealSound was a clever little hack of the PC speaker that allowed it to convincingly convey digitized sound files. I say convincingly, but really it was just awful. It might’ve been okay if sound cards had never been invented, but they had and Access kept insisting that they hadn’t. The problem with RealSound was that every digital sound that came through the PC speaker was cocooned in this awful high-pitched squeal that was like fingernails on a chalkboard to my young and fleshy ear holes. It’s why I refused to play any Access Software games until they sorted that mess out and stopped forcing it on players who had perfectly good sound cards sitting in their machines, ready to not assault their delicate senses with high-frequency death squawks. Which is why Under a Killing Moon was my first Tex Murphy game. The end. #5 – Al-Qadim: The Genie’s Curse

I picked this game up on a whim one day from the local software store where I was working at the time, having graduated high school the year before. It was a fun enough college job, if I ignored most of my co-workers’ aggressive geekery. I mean, I was a huge nerd myself, but these guys always wanted to out-nerd each other in terrible, which just led to awful, awkward moments too horrible to describe. So I won’t. As for Al-Qadim, I didn’t expect much. I just wanted something to play, it was there, so I bought it. And it turned out to be a lot of fun. It was an action RPG before there really were action RPGs because Diablo hadn’t been invented yet. It wasn’t the clickfest that Blizzard’s game would become, but it wasn’t turn-based, super strategy, either. It was quick, light, and…fun. The best way to describe Al-Qadim is to compare it to the Quest for Glory series. Where QFG inserted an RPG into an adventure game, Al- Qadim inserted an adventure game into an RPG. You should try it. #4 – The Elder Scrolls: Arena

Boy, did the guys in the software store LOVE this game. They wouldn’t shut up about it. It was this and, if I’m remembering correctly, some fighting game on the Genesis called Eternal something or other. I guess it came out around the same time as Arena, and it’s all they wanted to talk about. Well that, and going to the BattleTech center in nearby Houston. It was their dream. Eventually, I caved and bought myself a copy of Arena and was instantly swept up in its world. Sure, it wasn’t very detailed, a lot of it seemed awfully cookie cutter, and if I ever hear that one public domain sound file of a creaking door opening ever again, I’ll probably murder someone in the pancreas – but it was still somehow captivating. But the funny thing about Arena is that I remember absolutely nothing about most of it. I couldn’t tell you a thing about the story, or even describe a single sidequest. I don’t remember my character, or any distinctive locations. I don’t recall anything special about the combat or the magic system or anything. The only memory that really stands out is walking into a tavern while it was snowing, and having a little box of flavor text pop up describing how I shook the snow from my boots and trembled from the chill as I walked into the warm glow of the inviting pub. Or something like that. That’s what I remember from all my time with Area. That one thing. Oh, and all the stupid riddles. They were awful. #3 – Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger

For some inexplicable reason probably involving Luke Skywalker, I didn’t really mind the FMV in WC3. It just seemed to be a natural fit, I guess. The series had always used its cinematic flair as its main selling point, so adding in some actors in cheap costumes just seemed like a natural progression. The game was still your standard Wing Commander fare, only this time with rudimentary polygons and a whole lot less action ever going on at once, to avoid melting your PC. The detailed, if chunky, bitmapped ships of the past were gone in favor of super low poly-count models, but it all still worked. It was still a Wing Commander game. Right up until it turned Luke Skywalker into Grand Moff Tarkin as he WIPED OUT AN ENTIRE PLANET at the end of the game. A planet that, it turns out, was entirely devoid of life and cities and settlements and even vegetation because the engine just couldn’t be bothered with any of that business. Kilrah was really just a big, grey rock in space, and you had to drop a bomb on its thermal exhaust port to COMMIT MASS GENOCIDE of an entire civilization. Way to be a dick, Chris Roberts. My kid didn’t like it very much. #2 – Doom II

Doom II was more Doom. More LAN parties. More carnage. More chainsaw. The only thing disappointing about it was how lame the super shotgun reloading animation was. I usually opted to stay with the standard pump action, because that classic cha-chink was just a lot more satisfying. #1 – Star Wars: TIE Fighter

TIE Fighter was, is, and will likely remain the BEST Star Wars game ever made. Or, at least the best one with starship combat in it. I didn’t see how this game would be any better than X-Wing. Who wanted to play as part of the Empire? Who wanted to fly weak, shield- less TIE fighters around, just to get exploded by a Porkins in an X-Wing? Nobody, I reasoned. Until I played it. Not only was everything about X-Wing improved, from the graphics (now sporting spiffy gouraud shading and light texture work) to the flight model, the between-mission bits and all that jazz – but LucasArts actually made the story work. They made flying for the Empire fun. And they didn’t go stupid with it. The game expertly walked a delicate line between having the player do evil things without ever actually feeling evil, or that any of your actions were unjustified. It was a great bit of imperial propaganda, and it worked. If you never played it, I don’t know what you’re doing with your life. Go. Play it now.

My Top Ten PC Games of 1995 #10 – The Dig

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. By ’95, LucasArts was already on its way out, even if it didn’t know it yet. The Dig was supposed to be this amazing, legendary collaboration between LucasArts and ILM and Steven Spielberg to produce one of the most visually impressive, emotionally gripping game narratives ever created. Instead, we got Myst with dialog trees and pixel art. And way too much of the ol’ Showing Off Of What We Rendered in unskippable showcase animations. The story was neither exceptionally compelling nor emotionally gripping. The much-touted collaboration with ILM didn’t amount to much of anything we hadn’t already seen in a ton of other games by the time the much-delayed and overhyped The Dig finally crawled out from under whatever alien rock it was hiding beneath. It took itself too seriously while blissfully unaware of its goofier parts. The characters were shallow and one-dimensional. Nothing about it was special in any way. At All. It was a massive disappointment for me, but I’m still putting it on the list of the year’s ten best games because I don’t know why. Probably because I’m still waiting for it to get better than it never will. #9 – BioForge

Origin would be right behind LucasArts soon enough, in their own fall from grace. But at least they were still taking risks. (So was LucasArts; just not with The Dig.) BioForge was a crazy blend of survival horror, awful combat mechanics, and adventure game tropes. But it did have realtime, texture-mapped character models with skeletal animation, which was new. I still remember online debates about whether or not they were pre-rendered like the backgrounds. People can be pretty stupid sometimes. BioForge had a really good story, tons (and I do mean tons) of exposition to digest in the form of mountains of text, and an interesting interface whenever you had to operate anything with your hand. It was similar to an older game I didn’t put on this list called Captain Blood (which I think got a sequel titled Commander Blood), in that whenever your character needed to interact with, say, a terminal or his PDA, you did it by way of actually moving his big sausage-fingered mitten across the screen. Clumsily. It’s a weird game and definitely not for everyone, but it’s worth trying. However, if you’ve come for the fork, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Just an FYI. #8 – Descent This was one of the first games I ever bought more for its multiplayer than its single-player mode. In fact, I hardly remember anything about the single-player game other than some kind of red robot things you shot at a lot.

Descent was kind of like a first person shooter where your body was actually a spaceship flying through caves and stuff. It was extremely disorienting until you got the hang of it, and the game’s AI was nothing to write home about, but the multiplayer…oh, the multiplayer! It took some doing if you wanted to play outside of a LAN party, though. You needed, if I remember correctly, Winsock and Kali. Or maybe just Kali. The idea was to turn TCP/IP traffic into IPX/SPX traffic so the game could understand it, which the two utilities took care of through your 9600 baud modem. Or a 14.4 if you were lucky. A lot of games didn’t like this approach, but Descent worked remarkably well with the setup, so it was a great candidate for online multiplayer insanity. And it was insane. And also tons of fun. #7 – I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

Before I even knew who Harlan Ellison was, before I’d even read the story this game was based on, and years before I would ever exchange words with the man himself (who is one of the kindest, most gracious people on the planet as long as you don’t piss him off), I picked this game up on a whim. It had a cool title, the screenshots looked decent, and the blurb on the back of the box intrigued me. I had no idea what I was in for. The game is cruel, the antagonist AI is brutal and condescending and bitter in a way Shodan never was (voiced by Ellison himself, who always does an amazing job with narration). It’s hard to describe much of the game without ruining everything, but just know that it will mess with your head. And you heart. And soul. And everything in between. With any luck, it’ll cause you to go pick up one of Harlan’s anthologies. I’d recommend The Essential Ellison and, if you can find it, Edgeworks Vol. 3, which contains a collection of some of his best essays. Trust me. #6 – Command & Conquer

Dune 2 might’ve started the RTS revolution. Warcraft: Orcs and Humans continued it, but Command & Conquer made it something special. You knew you were in for a treat when you were installing the game, which was normally an activity about as exciting as tying your shoes reaaaalllly slowly. But C&C (the game, not the Music Factory) did something different. It made the installer part of the experience. It had graphics and voice and made it all seem super HIGH TECHNICAL! The game itself was pretty meh, though. I don’t remember anything about the story other than Tiberium was a big deal, and the harvesters were stupid. Oh, and grenade troopers were the shit. Beyond that, it’s all a blur. But a fun, killing-my-dad-in-epic-battles kind of blur. #5 – Mechwarrior II

This was THE mech game in a completely uncrowded field of all the mech games that didn’t exist until after Mechwarrior II showed everyone how it was done. Your mech was fully customizable to the point that made some die hard pen-and-paper BattleTech fans all itchy in their nether regions because this kind of laser can’t go there, or that kind of missile shouldn’t be that powerful or whatever, but no one cared. We were too busy being thrilled by one of the most immersive combat sim experiences ever. You had to worry about heat dissipation (unless you were on a cold planet). You had to manage jump jets and weapon sets and firing orders. And your mech constantly talked to you in this cool sci- fi computer voice, keeping you abreast of everything that was going horribly wrong that was about to lead to you exploding all over the battlefield. It was a magical time. #4 – Full Throttle The next to last gasp of the dying LucasArts adventure game, Full Throttle was a tour de force of Tim Schafer’s lunatic dreams. And it was awesome.

Well, except for the stupid realtime bike-fighting sequences that should never have been there, but let’s not dwell on the negative. The game had a rockin’ soundtrack, the BEST pixel art / Deluxe Paint animations ever created for an adventure game up to that point, and made great use of larger than life characters in both style and stature. Shame about it being so damn short, though. #3 – Star Wars: Dark Forces

If you haven’t been able to tell from some of the other entries on this list, I was a little bit of an enormous Star Wars fan growing up. Dark Forces was Doom in space, which was weird because Doom was technically Doom in space, but it was in the kind of space that had marines and shotguns, whereas Dark Forces was the kind of space that had laser blasters and stormtroopers. The map design was also different than Doom, or other FPSs of the time in that it made an effort to actually make some kind of sense, rather than just being a big maze filled with battle arenas for blowing things up. It had those, but they were wrapped in the illusion of real places, so it didn’t (usually) feel like you were running around a video game level. It felt like you were blasting stormtroopers in real places. Plus, it had a three dimensional, rotating point model of the Death Star. THAT YOU COULD WALK THROUGH. It was fantastic. #2 – Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness

Warcraft II perfected the RTS genre in a way that Dune 2, Command & Conquer, and even the first Warcraft hadn’t managed. It had a fun story that didn’t take itself too seriously, varied units and locations, and you could even fight sea battles over patches of oil. Just like real life. It was also a terrific multiplayer game. It didn’t care much about latency and the slow ping speeds of dial up modems, so you could play without too much worry that your buddy would wander up and kill you right in the face before you ever even saw him, just because his modem could squawk a little bit faster than yours. Three daboos out of four zug zugs. #1 – The Terminator: Future Shock Yes, my top game of 1995 is one a lot of people have probably never even heard of because it came out in ’95 and wasn’t called Quake. But you know everything Quake did that id gets credit for inventing?

Future Shock did it first. Full polygonal 3D environments and free, three-dimensional movement. Mouselook. Fully 3D models (with the exception of ammo pickups and weapons). Vast, open spaces and vehicles. Wait. Quake didn’t even do those last two. Terminator: Future Shock didn’t deliver the smooth, polished ballet of death that Quake would the following year, but what it did, it did well. To this day, no game has quite managed to capture the sense of verticality that Future Shock offered. It knew you were moving in three dimensions, and it exploited that. Enemies would appear above or below you as often as they did at eye level. You’d have to navigate tiny catwalks up towering scaffolding, palms sweating as you looked down, hoping not to fall. Plus, you got to shoot terminators. So, like. Bonus.

My Top Ten PC Games of 1996 #10 – Star Citizen…oops, I mean Battlecruiser 3000AD People only call Battlecruiser 3000AD an awful game because no one has invented a better word that defines the bad, terrible, ridiculous, horrible, broken, overhyped, underwhelming, buggy, broken mess that was Star Citizen. Er, I mean Battlecruiser. Sorry, but it’s hard not to confuse the two if you were around back in the ’90s and active online. The proposed feature sets of both games are remarkably similar, as are the egos and arrogance of their creators. Star Citizen’s Chris Roberts is a only more humble than Battlecruiser’s Derek Smart in the same way that one of these squares is a slightly different shade of green than the others. I’m putting Battlecruiser into the bottom slot, but still consider it one of the best games of 1996 because of what it was supposed to be, and what I desperately wanted it to be. I tried really, really hard to find the positive in this game when it came out, because I identified with Derek Smart at the time. Back in ’96, I was also an arrogant loudmouth who was the best at everything, thought everyone else on the planet was a moron, and was constantly getting into online pissing matches with the world. Which is basically still me today, but tempered by a couple of decades worth of failure and self-loathing. I hope Star Citizen can buck the odds and be everything that Battlecruiser wasn’t, but I have serious doubts. While everyone is busy throwing money at his promises, people tend to forget that Chris Roberts doesn’t really have a very good track record. The only games he developed of note while at Origin were the first few games in the Wing Commander series. WC had a great narrative with a branching storyline, but outside of that, it was pretty lackluster. It was a Hollywood tentpole movie that distracted you with really cool set pieces so you wouldn’t pay much attention to what wasn’t going on. Wing Commander’s flight model was basic. Every dogfight became a war of just turning in tighter circles than your enemies, and by the time Roberts’ last entry in the series came along, the game was more about cheesy FMV than anything to do with what the player accomplished in a starfighter.

After he left Origin, he started working on Freelancer, which he touted as doing a lot of the same things Battlecruiser didn’t, and that Star Citizen is promising. What the game ultimately became was fun enough, but nowhere close to what was promised. And even then, Freelancer only ever finally materialized in any form once he left Digital Anvil – a company he founded that went belly up after two decent, if mediocre releases (the other being Starlancer). After that, he thought he’d make some more movies and started a studio that failed until Kickstarter became a thing and he found a way to milk the nostalgia cow to fund his newest project. Which is exactly like his last project…which didn’t deliver. Time will tell – and I hope Star Citizen is as amazing as its enormous list of promised features and seemingly bottomless budget suggest – but I was around in 1996. I’ve heard these same promises before. I’ve played Battlecruiser 3000AD. #9 – The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall

Speaking of bug-ridden releases, the second game in The Elder Scrolls series was pretty awful, too. It was more of the same from Arena, but everything was a little more focused this time around. A little more polished. The narrative was a bit better, the world a little more dense, a little less spartan. But it still felt hollow. Artificial. Much of Daggerfall felt like a computer put it together, ticking off boxes of required parameters as it cobbled together random dungeon layouts laid on top of a procedurally designed overworld. Which is exactly what it was. I’m not sure how much – if really, any – of Daggerfall was hand crafted by human designers. I’m sure some aspects of it were, but none of it felt that way. Nothing about the game felt “real” in any sense. It was all just random (or procedural, or procedurally randomized), and it lacked any sort of the you-are-there sense that, say, the Ultima Underworld games managed to capture. It’s still easy to sink dozens of hours into the thing, though. Which is what I did, and why it’s on this list. #8 – Circle of Blood / Broken Sword

Originally titled Circle of Blood here in the states, the first game in the Broken Sword series was a terrific return to what the industry had already labelled a dead genre back in ’96: the point-and-click adventure. It’s a genre that has experienced many phantom deaths over the years, but that keeps coming back like either some kind of noble Lazarus figure, or a tattered old whack-a-mole in the corner of some dirty traveling carnival. Depending on your point of view. Personally, I love the genre – and Broken Sword hit all the right notes. There was murder, an overarching conspiracy, great art and animation, intriguing characters, etc… I played this game from start to finish, and couldn’t wait for more. It wasn’t the best game of ’96 by any means, but it was a really, really good one. #7 – Duke Nukem 3D

Another generally beloved game stuck pretty far down on my list is this little crescendo to dying misogyny, and I’m probably not going to make many friends by saying that. Or by putting it in the #7 spot for this year. I’m sorry, but Duke Nukem 3D was not a very good game. The shareware version was fine – kind of great, even – but after that, things went downhill fast. The levels were poorly designed mazes, the ripped off catchphrases grew stale, and everything about the game just got boring. Or plain bad. People argue all the time that Duke was an homage to the over the top action heroes of ’80s action movies – and maybe they’re right. But I was around back when the game came out. I was very active online, interacting with other gamers and developers, following this trend or that one, and I have to tell you…anyone who thinks that the character of Duke Nukem was anything other than the absolutely sincere, most flattering version of himself that George Broussard sees whenever he looks in the mirror is fooling themselves. Plus, Levelord was a creepy ass dude. The only originality in the game came from its inventive weapons – which made multiplayer a blast, even if everyone always limited games to the shareware maps. The engine was impressive for its level of interactivity and destructability, but it’d take the skilled hands of Any Other Developer to fully realize its potential (more on that next year). So, yeah. Duke3d is fun, but it’s not great. It threw its best ideas at players in the shareware version, which probably should’ve just been the full release. Less is usually – and this is especially true with a character like Duke – more. #6 – Discworld 2

I’m a huge Discworld fan, and a great admirer of Sir Terry Pratchett. I think he’s one of the greatest voices of our time, and will go down in history as the British version of Mark Twain. (Which is how you have to describe Pratchett to Americans who’ve never heard of him.) The first Discworld game didn’t make my list because it wasn’t really very good. It wasn’t bad or anything, but it wasn’t at all memorable, and the interface made it a chore to get through. Its sequel, on the other hand, is one of the better adventure games of the ’90s – which is saying something, when you look at some of the other gems from the decade. Discworld 2 went the way of cel animation, which was the downfall for a lot of other games that tried it. Fortunately, this game pulled it off and managed to convey the humor of the novels in game format for the first time. I’ve never really been a big Rincewind fan, but playing him here was fun. Interacting with other characters was fun. Everything was…fun. The story was a mashup of Reaper Man and Moving Pictures, if you’re following along with your Pratchett books at home. There are a lot of nods to other novels in the series, but you’ll definitely recognize RM and MP as you play. Which is something you should totally go do. Right now. #5 – Tomb Raider Back in ’96, I was away at college in a strange town without many friends except for the staff at the nearby Hasting’s, which was an entertainment store that sold everything from comic books and movies to video games and collectibles. It also rented games, which was nice.

One day, I walked into the store and bought my very first 3D accelerator, along with a shiny new 3D-accelerated game. For testing purposes, you understand. The card was a 3DFX Voodoo. The game was Tomb Raider. The experience was amazing. The dithered colors, chunky textures, and low framerates of the past were…well, a thing of the past. Textures were sharp, colors were crisp, and the framerate was buttery smooth. Everything just looked better, played better, and ran smoother than it ever had before. The game itself was pretty lackluster and nothing I thought was too fascinating outside of the weird way you could make Lara do a split coming out of a handstand from dangling over the edge of a wall. Which was pretty fascinating, at the time. Ah, memories. #4- Diablo The birth of the action RPG. The clicking simulator. The shallow, empty, almost narrative-free, nearly stat- less roleplaying game that never had any right to be good arrived in 1996.

And it was brilliant. Nothing at all about Diablo sounds appealing. You run around a mostly empty town so you can dive down into one randomly generated dungeon to spend hours clicking your mouse button like a coked-up lab rat hammering the reward level in fruitless pursuit of its next fix. But it worked. For whatever intangible, crazy reason, it worked. And the multiplayer was even better, whether it actually made the game any more compelling or just because misery loves company, it was tons of fun. Hours. Upon hours. Clicking. Click, click, click… #3 – SimCity 2000

What more is there to say about SimCity 2000 than that it’s a very good city management sim? It was orders of magnitude more complex and compelling than SimCity 1 had been back in ’89, and would remain the perfect game in the series until SimCity 4 came along in 2003. Everything SimCity did, SimCity 2000 did better. Or actually did at all, because SimCity 1 was pretty damn basic. In fact, a lot of what SimCity 2000 does is what I imagined SimCity 1 was doing (that it totally wasn’t) when I played it years earlier. Back in the ’80s, you kind of had to insert your own imagination into the games you were playing, in order to fill in the gaps left by the developers and the technology available at the time. I think that’s one of the reasons classic games were so good, actually… But never mind any of that now. It’s 1996 and SimCity 2000 does all that pesky imagining for you. What a time to be alive. #2 – Civilization II

If Civilization was a brilliant game, then Civ 2 was its smarter, prettier, funnier, more interesting cousin who never got invited to Civ 1’s parties, but who somehow just started showing up anyway and upstaging everyone there. I’ll never know how many hours I logged in Civilization 2 because I can’t count that high. It’s a time sink of a game; it’s a black hole into which one pours every waking moment into either actively playing it or thinking about playing it, or planning how you’re going to think about it the next time you play it. It’s infinitely customizable, infinitely replayable, and infinitely satisfying. It’s digital crack. #1 – Quake Quake remains the best FPS ever made, and I’ll have words with anyone who thinks differently.

It doesn’t have much of a story, there are no characters to speak of, and the maps are abstract and meaningless. There is no point to anything you do in the game, apart from the satisfaction you get from killing things and winning. Which is why it’s so good. Among all the other standard “innovations” to the genre that Quake doesn’t have include, but are not limited to: ●Weapon carry limit ●Regenerating shields ●Regenerating health ●Sprinting stamina ●Realistic damage model ●Realistic physics ●Realistic movement speed ●Realistic anything Quake is the essence of the first person shooter, distilled and concentrated into its purest form. It’s a ballet of death, and it is exquisite. Running down corridors, constantly in motion, constantly swiveling your view, shooting a volley from your nailgun at a distant enemy before rocket jumping up to an otherwise inaccessible platform, spinning on your way up to shoot another rocket down at your pursuer before righting yourself as you land and lob a grenade around the corner to catch the guy running up the stairs to frag you. It was – and still is – a thrilling, almost zen-like experience. I still play Quake regularly today, as it’s one of my mood games. Which is not at all weird or anything, right? I mean, surely you have mood games, too. Mine are: ●General anxiety – Unreal ●Hopeless depression – Quake 2 ●Furious rage – Quake 1 Don’t talk to me when I’m Quaking. You wouldn’t like me I’m Quaking.

My Top Ten PC Games of 1997 #10 – Fallout

I never really liked Fallout. There, I said it. Feels good. There’s nothing really wrong with Fallout, I guess. The box was really cool, which is what enticed me to buy the game in the first place, so the marketing department gets a big thumbs up. That’s something. But the game itself? Meh. I’ve never understood what other people saw (and still see) in this game. It had horrible graphics, even for the time – and not in a technological way. The art design – outside of the Fallout boy and the manual, really – was just muddy and brown and ugly. Nothing about the wasteland of Fallout 1 was remotely interesting. It was just the same thing, over and over. The combat was also ridiculous, with companions that would murder you in the face as often as they managed to hit an actual enemy, and the whole thing was driven by a random number generator so absurd that you could have the best gear and still manage to be mortally wounded by a cockroach. The story was its saving grace, I guess. But I wouldn’t really know. I played it a lot, trying to figure out what everyone was making such a fuss over, but I never finished the damn thing. And I don’t intend to. So don’t paw at me with your petty little guilt. #9 – Age of Empires

This crazy little game from Microsoft – back when they made games – tried to be a blend of Civilization and Warcraft II, but never managed to be either. Instead, it became its own animal which carved its own unique niche in the RTS genre. The campaigns were kind of stupid and pointless, but the multiplayer was fantastic. I couldn’t even come close to telling you how many hours I poured into this game, playing epic campaigns against my own father. He was really good at AoE (but was awful at Warcraft II), so he enjoyed having a fighting chance against me. This even matching of our skills led to several stalemates along the way, the most memorable of which was one game where we literally exhausted all the resources of the map while managing to annihilate both of our armies. We spent the last hour of the game trying to hunt down our remaining peasants so we could have them fight to the last man with hammers and pitchforks. Until he managed to find THE LAST TREE on the planet, and was able to use it to craft a spear or something, which made short work of my last couple of useless villagers. Einstein said it best, when describing that epic match: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Smart guy. #8 – Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II

I’ll keep this one short and sweet: the game was great, the FMV was awful. Really, you’d think being made by LucasArts would give the upper hand to a Star Wars game featuring full motion video. I mean, the Lucasfilm Archives were literally right next door. It’s not as if they had to just cobble together fan made costumes or anything. But they did. And all of it was bad. The acting, the lighting, the direction, the costumes, the makeup, the special effects – all of it was terrible. It kept me from ever finishing the game for years. YEARS! And that’s all I have to say about that. #7 – Blood

In the skills hands of any developer who wasn’t 3D Realms, the Build engine was capable of producing good games, with this one being the best of them. Blood has catchy one-liners and the same homage to B-movies as Duke Nukem 3D, but it wasn’t stupid about it. Because it wasn’t fueled by George Broussard’s wish fulfillment fantasies, Blood actually managed to be original and clever without just ripping off everything that had come before it. It was a low budget horror movie come to life, with you as the star. It was dark and gritty in the way of all things ’90s, but it didn’t fall into the black pit of angst like so many other titles of the decade. It was funny, fun, self-aware, and difficult. It’s still very playable today, despite there not being any source ports available for it. Just remember how I said it was hard. It’s not 1997 anymore, kids. Adjust your difficulty levels accordingly. #6 – Interstate ’76

Ever wonder what would happen if you took those CGI guys in that Dire Straits video from the ’80s and stuck them in a video game set in the ’70s? No? Well, someone did. Which is how Interstate ’76 was born. It’s a combat driving sim set in an alternate ’70s America where you drive around and shoot things and wreck things and blow up things. The soundtrack is funky. The characters are funky. The funk is funky. It’s a weird game, and probably not for everyone. But if you can manage to get it working properly on modern hardware (even the GOG release has issues), you’ll be in for a unique experience that has never been replicated, even by its sequel. Which kinda sucked, by the way. #5 – Quake II

Back in ’97, id Software took everything that made Quake amazing, looked at it for a minute, thought about life while considering the futility of man, and threw all of it into the garbage can. And then they made Quake II. In every way technically superior to Quake, it was vastly inferior in all the ways that actually mattered. It injected a ridiculous and stupid “story” into the franchise, then – probably as an over-correction to criticisms regarding Quake’s schizophrenic level design – tried to make all of its maps interconnected, with backtracking and multiple objectives and just a bunch of lame crap nobody wanted. We wanted more Quake. id tried to give it to us later, by putting more Quake into Quake 3 – but by then, it was too late. The damage was done. So then they tried to give more Quake 2 in Quake 4, which was probably the worst id game id ever didn’t make. That one came to us by way of Raven Software, who completely missed the point and developed the world’s most unnecessary and unwanted sequel. And then somehow made it even more boring and awful than anyone could have predicted. I still played a lot of Quake 2, though. And it’s grown on me over the years – but I can’t help but wonder what the game would’ve looked like if Romero hadn’t left after Quake, and id hadn’t begun its slow and steady decline into irrelevance. #4 – Dungeon Keeper It took years – decades, even – but someone finally realized that playing the bad guy could be fun. And boy, was it ever fun.

Dungeon Keeper charged the player with taking on the role of the evil bad guy at the end of every RPG plot. It relished being evil in a good, clean, campy sort of way that all those goody-two-shoes heroes could never hope to understand. This was a game that not only let you literally slap your own minions, but actively encouraged it as being motivational for the little bastards. It had you abduct good guys, then convert them to evil in your torture chambers – which was really pretty forward-thinking of Bullfrog, seeing as how the U.S. wouldn’t figure that out until years later, after waterboarding became everyone’s favorite party game at blacksite prisons. You could abandon enemies in your cemetery, and they’d arise as skeletons. You could create warlocks and vampires, and then give everyone a big casino to play in to let off some steam by way of giving you back some of their salaries when they lost. And you could rig the games. Its sequel only got better, but more on that later. For now… IT IS PAYDAY. #3 – Outlaws A severely graphically underpowered latecomer to the FPS scene, Outlaws was overlooked by a lot of people who just couldn’t go back to 2.5D, sprite-based gaming. Which is sad, because they missed out on the best Clint Eastwood simulator ever made.

Probably the only Clint Eastwood simulator ever made, but still. It’s a fun game. Crank the difficulty up to the maximum, and get ready to be murdered in one or two hits – FOR REALISM. It makes the game a lot more fun. Trust me. Or just keep it on easy and blast your way through the levels like an unstoppable death machine on a quest to the next cutscene. I hope you plant better than you shoot. #2 – The Curse of Monkey Island

The last great Monkey Island game was actually the first Monkey Island game without Ron Gilbert. However, enough of the old LucasArts staff were still around to make sure that it didn’t turn out awful. (That wouldn’t happen until the next game.) Decidedly different in tone (not to mention art style) than the previous two games, it stands on its own as a unique entry in the series. In some ways, it’s superior to even Monkey Island 2 – but only in flashes, really. Like when your crew mutinies via song. The rhyming insult sword fighting was pretty lame, though. And the ship combat was objectively awful. But most of the characters and jokes still worked, and Guybrush finally got a voice, which was nice. Dominic Armato perfectly captured the voice I had for him in my head, which almost never happens. That said, there’s something to non-voiced adventure games that you just can’t replicate with a full cast. Some jokes – some narrative styles (namely, Ron Gilbert’s) – just work better as text. Some methods of writing dialog only really work when read, rather than spoken. Which is just one of the reasons I’m so excited about Thimbleweed Park. #1 – Ultima Online

Yes, I know MUDs and BBS DOORS had been around for ages, but Ultima Online was the first graphical MMO to catch on. And it was amazing. Until it wasn’t. Eventually patched with enough Band-Aids to cover a small continent until the original game was all but unrecognizable, the early days of Ultima Online were something special. I was one of the many people who signed up for the first beta, and I was hooked from that moment on. (Until it started to suck, anyway.) In a way no other game to date has ever managed to recapture (although one came close, but more on that next year), Ultima Online really felt like a second life. Britannia was a new world to not only explore, but to live and work in. I spent hours upon hours mining and working on my blacksmithing skills to the point that I started to wonder how good I’d be at making swords in real life, if I’d only devoted a fraction of my time to actually learning how to be a blacksmith. I’d probably have a killer beard by now, at least. And one of those cool leather apron things. Sadly, the game eventually devolved into the min/maxer paradise something like WoW would later manage to exploit to its full potential. People stopped caring so much about living a virtual life, and started focusing more on just being the biggest PvP badass, more obnoxious than the last. Origin tried patching the game to fix different exploits while expanding the PvP nature of the game, until one day it just wasn’t fun anymore. But it took a good while before any of that happened. For much of ’97, I was a happy resident of Britannia, content to forge crappy pieces of armor on the outskirts of town before trying to sell them at the ping-crippling bank in Britain. VENDOR! BUY! BANK! GUARDS!

My Top Ten PC Games of 1998 #10 – Baldur’s Gate

So fleshy

Oh, god. This again. HEYA! Look, I don’t like this game. I’ve never liked this game. I bought it when it came out, then spent the next 15 years trying to like this game. I even recently went back and forced myself to play through it from beginning to end, which was a misery so exquisite that I documented my (hilarious) pain every step of the way . It still amazes me that, to this day, people hold up Baldur’s Gate as some kind of shining example of great storytelling in a game. Yeah, maybe if you played this when you were twelve and thought that one episode of Power Rangers was emotionally powerful, but there’s absolutely nothing special about BG’s story. Go kill the big bad guy. The end. Sure, there’s a little more to it and there are some kinda/sorta interesting sidequests that you’ll do for your companions just so they’ll stop their INCESSANT CRYWHINING, but none of them are very special. If you want a version of Baldur’s Gate that’s actually good, go pick up Pillars of Eternity. If you want something unique and thought provoking, pick up any Ultima from 4-7. I’m only including this game on my list for the massive amount of time and energy I sunk into the damn thing, trying – desperately – to understand what was so amazing about it. I never did. Also, shut up, Imoen. #9 – Starcraft

I enjoyed Starcraft, but not in the way that a zillion internationally competitive professional gamers did. It was Warcraft II in space, which wasn’t a bad thing. I liked Warcraft II, but Starcraft never really clicked with me. It wasn’t boring or anything, but I guess I just didn’t really dig the sci-fi setting. I don’t actually remember much about the game itself, other than that I played it and thought it was fun enough. The multiplayer was enjoyable, and it gave us the term Zerg Rush, which gamers still use today, so that was something, I guess. Strangely enough, I would really get into its sequel years later. I’m not sure why that one grabbed me when Starcraft didn’t, but maybe I just didn’t have my head in the game back in ’98. Or maybe the oversaturation of the genre just had me burned out at the time. I dunno. It’s a good game, and worth playing. But never go head to head against a Korean if you do. That’s just good advice, right there. #8 – Descent: Freespace

I still have no idea what this game had to do with Descent. I’m sure it was explained at some point, but I’m reasonably certain it just came down to the marketing department trying to create a franchise that never really happened. Descent: Freespace one of the last, great space combat sims, and it was fantastic. The only thing better than Freespace was its sequel, which is still being played and improved upon to this day, thanks to a great community. The story in this one is nothing to get excited about, but the dogfights were amazing. The graphics were great, the game was smooth and fast and fun. Everything was just top shelf, all the way. Plus, no crappy FMV anywhere. Bonus! If you want to play it today, make sure to grab FS2Open and a copy of Freespace 2, so you can play the original in the new and improved engine the community has been working on for years. #7 – Thief: The Dark Project I’m probably not going to make many friends by putting Thief so far down on this list, but there were better games in ’98. I’m sorry, but there just were.

Thief was great fun and brought excellent stealth-based gameplay to the FPS genre, but it wasn’t great. Thief II was, but we’re not there yet. Right now, we’re still in ’98 and Thief is still trying to figure itself out while also competing against some landmark titles. Because 1998 was a pretty great year for gaming. All of the things that Looking Glass would eventually perfect in the sequel were there in the original, but they just didn’t really come together well enough to put Thief in the top 5 games from ’98. It’s in the top 10, though, so please don’t murder me with a water arrow to the knee or anything. I apologize. #6 – Unreal

This one makes me sad. Years before Unreal was released, I was super involved in tracking its development. It promised to be the FPS I’d been dreaming of for years, so I found a community online and joined in. I hung out in IRC and got to know most of the developers, wrote articles for the game’s top fan site, and met a lot of people I’m still friends with today. I got to play early builds of the game as it was coming along, since I was trustworthy enough that a few of the devs would send them my way as long as I promised not to tell. (Since almost everyone that was at Epic at that time is gone now, I figure the statute of limitations on my silence has run out.) Unreal held a ton of promise, and was brimming with potential. Then it came out, and it wasn’t very special. Which made me sad in my feelings hole. Some of the maps were brilliant – Bluff Eversmoking will forever be one of my favorite levels in any game ever – but the game itself ended up being more of a technology demo than anything else. The Unreal engine could do some amazing things, but the kinaesthetics of the combat just felt…off. Floaty, even. It’s hard to describe.

The one super shiny spot in the whole game (for me) comes from an enemy type called the Krall. They have a big spear they’ll hit you with that launches you high into the air, which I thought would be a brilliant thing to have happen in a FPS. Which is why I campaigned to the dev team to put something like that in the game, even though my idea was to have them actually impale you first (which actually made it into the throw animation). At any rate, my “flinging beasties” made it into the final game, even though Bleszinski would later swear it was his idea from the beginning and that they’d always been there. (Except I knew that they hadn’t, because I’d played all those early builds.) It’s not like I was going to sue Epic for “stealing” the dumb idea I begged them to put in the game in the first place, but I guess you can never be too careful. Fortunately for Epic, the Unreal engine would eventually go on to eclipse id’s offerings for licensing to other developers, and the 2000s would come to be absolutely brimming with Unreal-powered games. So everything worked out. #5 – Starsiege: Tribes

Back before every online multiplayer FPS became either Call of Duty or Battlefield, or a clone of Call of Duty or Battlfield, there was Starseige: Tribes. And it was wonderful. I sunk oodles of time into the game, and I don’t even know how much a single oodle is. It’s probably a lot, though. Because I played the absolute hell out of this game. It had all your standard game modes, which were nothing special. Capture the flag was probably the most popular, but it was how Tribes went about everything that made it amazing. There were vehicles to pilot – including transports for your team. There were bases to maintain, areas to protect, and defenses to build. There were multiple character types that radically changed the way you played, and what tools and weapons were available to you. There were even jetpacks. JETPACKS! The weapons were almost universally awful, but that’s what made them great. No gun was very accurate – and the most common weapon fired a fairly unpredictable disc that took forever to make it to a target. You had to really practice with it to become any good, but once you’d mastered it, you became deadly. Oh, and there was the skiing. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, too bad. Go google it or something, because it was awesome. #4 – Half-Life

I know what you’re thinking. How is Half-Life not my #1 game of ’98? Well, it’s pretty simple, really. I loved the game. It was immersive, had a unique way of actively presenting its narrative, played out in maps that felt very “real” and made sense, etc… It also had terrific AI (for the marines) that would work together to try and flank you or lead you into an ambush. Everything about the game was terrific. But there were other games I liked more in 1998, that I still go back to today on a regular basis. Games that made more of a lasting impact on me, and have stood the test of time. But most importantly, they were games I put a lot of time in back when they came out. They impressed me by doing something very new, very different, or very, very well. I loved Half-Life. I just loved a few other games more. #3 – Trespasser

Having developed a reputation over the years as one of the worst games ever made, including Trespasser in my #3 spot might seem like a weird choice. And maybe it is. I dunno. I can never tell, really. I’m a weird dude. To get the obvious out of the way, I’ll acknowledge up front that Trespasser failed to deliver on a lot of its promises, which wasn’t helped at all by the fake screenshots they used to market the game that showed off dynamic shadowing from tree leaves on the backs of bump-mapped dinosaurs wandering the jungle. None of that was in the game. And it was buggy and strange and goofy. But it was also way ahead of its time, which is something I recognized even then. Trespasser was the first major FPS to have a fully-realized physics engine, which no one had ever seen before. I used to spend time in the game just dropping things down stairs to watch them bounce and roll realistically to the ground. The sound engine was materials-based, and used something they called Digital Foley (I think), which would blend sounds on the fly, so that when you hit a wood plank against a tree trunk, it sounded differently than when you hit it against a metal post.

The much-maligned “rubber arm” that was the game’s main method of interaction with the world was, I admit, a silly mess. It took time to get the hang of, and even once you were really good with it, waving your hand around like a fleshy arm tentacle still looked pretty stupid. The dinosaurs were also stupid – even the raptors. The AI was crap, even though the dinos would attack each other. Sometimes. They also weren’t animated in any traditional sense. The game used inverse kinematics to move them on the fly, which was supposed to allow them to navigate complex terrain and react realistically to wounds. But mostly, it just made them limp around like drunk reptilian idiots. So why is this in my top 3 for ’98? Simple. I LOVE THE GAME. For all its many faults, the game is incredibly immersive. Once you let yourself get into the game, you are in its world. You’re creeping through Site B, dodging dinosaurs and interacting with the environment in very tangible ways. It’s tense, exciting, and rewarding. It’s a great game. You just have to give it a chance. #2 – Heart of Darkness

I promise I’m not trying to be hipster cool with some of these more obscure games. I’ve just been an avid gamer for a very long time, so I’ve played a lot of shit that you probably haven’t. That’s not me trying to be cool or anything; it usually just came down to being bored and picking up a new game some random Saturday because I didn’t have anything else to play. Which is how I found Heart of Darkness. Better than Another World (also by this game’s designer) or Flashback (not by this game’s designer, although a lot of people think it was, for some reason), or even Oddworld, Heart of Darkness is the pinnacle of the cinematic puzzle platformer. You play a kid whose dog gets kidnapped by some evil dark shadow wizard dude (technically by a purple Q-Bert with a mucous control problem that mistakes the dog for you and take it to his master), and its up to you to get him back. You start the game by watching a really badly animated pre-rendered cutscene that involves you getting in the transdimensional rocketship you just happen to have lying around in your treehouse, and you fly away to save the pooch. The in-game graphics are actually much, much better than the pre- rendered cinematics, with excellent animation and brilliant pixel art. It’s probably the best pixel-based animation I’ve ever seen, to this day. The game is imaginative, challenging yet forgiving, and is a pleasure to play. I’m also pretty sure Heart of Darkness was the very last cinematic platformer, which was a short-lived genre with only a handful of games to its credit, but I really liked it. The only game of recent memory that comes somewhat close to the style is Shadow Complex, which is more Metroid than Oddworld. I wish GOG could get their hands on this game, because tracking down a copy is a pain if you don’t already own it on CD. But it’s totally worth picking up, if you can find one. #1 – Grim Fandango

This one shouldn’t come as a shock if you’ve been following along with my list up to this point. I’m a huge adventure game fan, and this was the last, great adventure game of the ’90s, and one of the best ever made. Period. I’m not even going to tell you why this game is so good. It was remastered recently in a great way that’s now the preferred way to play the game. If you’ve never played Grim Fandango, I suggest you stop reading this right now. Go away, grab a copy of the remaster, and enjoy. YOU ARE WELCOME.

My Top Ten PC Games of 1999 #10 – Requiem: Avenging Angel

I sometimes think I’m the only person who ever played this game, and it’s not hard to understand why. During a time when games like Noah’s Ark 3D and Captain Bible were on store shelves, a game with “Angel” in the title probably got overlooked by everyone who didn’t enjoy horrible religious games. Which is a shame, because Requiem is religious in the same way that The Prophecy was a heartwarming tale about the power of prayer. You play as an angel named Malachi in a dystopian future where other angels (called The Fallen, naturally) have taken over Earth and enslaved humanity because dudes just weren’t righteous enough or whatever. It’s sort of a sci-fi heretical bit of first person shooting fun, and it’s a surprisingly good game. Plus, you can shoot lightning from your palm and kill your enemies with plagues of locusts. Oh, and you get to turn people into pillars of salt, too. Tell me what other FPS lets you do that. #9 – Rollercoaster Tycoon

I fell in love with this game right from the start. It was like Bullfrog’s old Theme Park, but this one was actually really good. (Not that Theme Park was bad, but it was pretty basic.) Designing coasters and placing rides and shops was only part of the fun, though. The real joy from the game came from screwing with your guests by sucking every last penny from their wallets in the most devious ways possible. Want to sell more drinks? Build a french fry stand. Then, jack up the prices on sodas next to it because salty fries make people thirsty. Is it raining? Quickly! Triple the price of umbrellas at every umbrella stand. Rollercoaster Tycoon was deceptively simple, yet brilliantly complex. Mastering the interconnectedness of the game’s different systems was the key to becoming a true theme park tycoon, which took time and experimentation. Or you could just create coasters that would murder ever single rider stupid enough to trust you not to kill them. Whichever. #8 – Dungeon Keeper 2

Just like Dungeon Keeper, but better. Dungeon Keeper 2 featured an improved engine, better graphics, and just more being deliciously evil. Of course, I’m probably in the minority on this one. So no big shock there. But the general consensus among Internet People is that DK2 is vastly inferior to DK1. I have no idea why they think this way though, because they usually just go on about how the first game had the better “atmosphere” or something. A more cynical person might take this to mean that they played the first game when they were young and more impressionable, so it made more of an impression on their squishy brain jelly. But maybe they’re right. I honestly wouldn’t know, because I love both of the games – I just love DK2 a little bit more. Maybe it’s because I like the “dumbed down” gameplay the haters like to deride, but I’ve never noticed any drastic changes that made the sequel any easier than the original. In a lot of ways, it actually gets significantly more difficult. Then again, I could just be stupid. #7 – Ultima IX: Ascension Yes, I played and enjoyed Ultima IX. I know a lot of people didn’t. Heck, most people didn’t – but its reputation for being awful is usually just in retrospect, in that same misguided way that People Who Weren’t There genuinely think E.T. was the worst game ever made. (It wasn’t.)

U9 is certainly not without its flaws. It’s got a lot of them. But it gets a lot right, too. And it’s actually a pretty fun game, if you can get past the snobbery. But I’ve already written at length about my thoughts concerning this over-despised diamond in the rough, so I won’t rehash those arguments here. Just trust me that it’s not as bad as people say. Or don’t trust me, and just go read this . #6 – The Longest Journey

Yet another resurgence in the “dead” point and click adventure genre, The Longest Journey was a masterpiece. Lengthy, difficult (sometimes to the point of absurdity…I’m looking at you, rubber ducky puzzle), with a terrific narrative and great characters, this game had it all. It also understood what a lot of adventure games seem to forget: that, while the Big Reward for playing an adventure game is getting to the end and experiencing the story, the little rewards that keep you motivated to keep playing come in the form of New Art. The Longest Journey had tons of locations, all distinct and varied in dramatic ways. You were always discovering new places to see and new people to talk to, almost every time you solved a puzzle. Then, it took things even further by offering two different worlds: the dystopian future where the game begins, and a medieval fantasy kingdom where it eventually leads. It mixed things up, kept everything fresh, and was great fun from beginning to end. It wouldn’t get a sequel until years later, which would turn out to be a really good game in its own right, but The Longest Journey was the proverbial lightening in a bottle. I don’t think we’ll ever see its kind again. #5 – Homeworld

I suck at this game. And yes, I used the present tense there because I still suck at this game. I sucked at this game in 1999, I sucked at it every time I’ve tried to play it since 1999, and I still suck at it today. Even then new remaster is too hard for me, which is just ridiculous. I feel like an idiot. Yet, there’s something strangely compelling about Homeworld that always draws me back in. I’d love to play it while binge-watching Battlestar Galactica again, but the bastards took it off of Netflix and I don’t know if it’s ever coming back. But the “going home” and “last of humanity” vibe that Homeworld captures just seem like it’d be a perfect fit for a sci-fi series that does the exact same thing. We need to talk about that damn asteroid mission, though. Or the other one with the alien base on the far side of the sector with a zillion miles of radioactive death dust between it and you. Or how, if you screw yourself in Mission 3, you might not feel it until Mission 9, but by then it’s too late, so you might as well start over and TRY AGAIN NEXT YEAR. Story of my life. #4 – Unreal Tournament

Ah, Unreal Tournament. Sure, the weapons still felt floaty, but the Flak Cannon was super sweet. The maps were all tightly designed for multiplayer madness, too. CliffyB’s “Curse” and Myscha’s “Deck 16” were my two favorites, and I spent countless hours murdering my friends and co-workers in them. Good times. The story was stupid; basically, it was just Mortal Kombat in space and the big bad guy was a robot (or maybe that was UT2003? or 2004? Hell, I lost track.), but nobody played UT for the single player story. All that business was just prep work for the real show, which was exploding your friends with a fully loaded 8ball gun, or tossing a well-placed flak grenade around the corner. Unreal Tournament managed to recapture a bit of the magic of the original Quake, which is something id would also try to do when they released Quake 3 a month later. But that game had jump pads, which were just stupid. #3 – Nocturne I love this game way more than should be legal. Unfortunately, it somehow managed to be both ahead of its time and behind the times simultaneously, like it had one foot in the past and the other in the future. It was ostensibly a survival horror game – a genre people were already tiring of – with all the standard trappings: 3D characters over 2D pre-rendered backgrounds, hunting monsters out to destroy humanity. It had all that, sure, but it had a whole lot more.

It was the first game I can remember with cloth simulation, which means The Stranger’s coat billowed in the breeze and reacted to the wind. Any wind. Seriously, the thing would flap around like a panicked woodland creature if anyone so much as breathed in its direction. But more than the rudimentary coat physics, the game had brilliant lighting. Nocturne wasn’t just 3D characters over 2D pre-rendered backgrounds, because those backgrounds – while pre-rendered, still had physical geometry reflected in the game world. (Which you could see when you used the night vision goggles and went into 1st person mode.) This allowed the game to have something for light to interact with, so everything would cast realistic shadows – and boy, did it ever work. Nocturne – to this day – has some of the best use of lighting and gorgeous shadow effects of any game I’ve ever seen. The super cool look of the laser sights (er, I mean the ectoplasmic targeting system) along with the flashlight beam through fog was just icing on an already cool cake. Nocturne also had a great narrative, and was a sort of prohibition-era X- Files. You play as The Stranger, the top field agent in a secret government organization known as Spookhouse, which was started by Teddy Roosevelt after he encountered a monster on a hunting trip. They’re charged with protecting the world from the forces of darkness, which leads the player through ancient castles to a small Texas town on the back of a train, to fighting the undead mafia from out of a speakeasy in Chicago. Terminal Reality would eventually develop a Notta Sequel in the Bloodrayne series, but it just wasn’t the same. And we won’t even talk about the Uwu Boll movies.

#2 – Freespace 2

I went back and forth with whether to put Freespace 2 into my #1 spot for 1999, or give it to another equally amazing game. Both games deserve the highest honors I can’t give them because I’m just some nobody writing a stupid blog on the internet, but in the end, Freespace 2 just wasn’t my game of the year for ’99. Not that it didn’t have every right to be, though. I still play this game, and it’s still the best looking space combat sim to date, thanks to a little thing called FS2Open and the brilliant community of modders and developers that have kept the franchise alive and kicking all these years. The game looks better now than it ever did, and it’ll look just as good ten years from now, as long as people keep working on it. Which I’m sure they will, since people have already been working on it for 16 years now. I have no reason to think they’ll suddenly stop any time soon. If you’ve never played the game, you owe it to yourself to grab a joystick, head over to GOG.com to buy a copy, then download FS2Open and experience what is, hands-down, the best space sim ever made. That’s still being made. #1 – System Shock 2 Every glimmer of potential I saw in System Shock that wasn’t fully realized back in ’94 was finally perfected in System Shock 2. Sure, the game was ugly even by 1999 standards, but the graphics really don’t matter in this game. They’re serviceable and get the point across, and that’s about it. What saves the game is its atmosphere. It’s so well realized that you forget how blocky the character models are, or how stiffly everything moves as soon as you’ve been playing for five minutes.

This was the game that truly started the Shock “series” that would be continued through the Bioshock franchise, while bleeding into everything from Deus Ex to the Thief games and everything in between. The story is pretty standard sci-fi fare and I’m not going to spoil any of it for you here, but it’s not what the story is about that grabs you. Because, like with any good story, what matters is how it’s told. And System Shock 2 is told brilliantly. The player has immediate agency in the world, there’s an omnipresent sense of tension and foreboding dread, it feels like time is never on your side. There’s action and retreat and careful planning. There’s stealth and hacking and…well, you get the idea. There’s a lot of stuff to do. Shame about the weapon degradation, though. Nobody has ever liked it when games pull that crap.

My Top Ten PC Games of 2000 #10 – Baldur’s Gate II / Planescape Torment / Icewind Dale I know Planescape came out in 1999, but I bought all three of these games in 2000, and all three of them get the bottom slot on my list. Baldur’s Gate II managed to improve on its lackluster, overrated predecessor ( but not by much ), I’ve never been able to get into Planescape Torment despite spending hours upon hours upon hours of my life trying to, and Icewind Dale was…kind of fun.

I think I liked Icewind Dale because it dropped most of the heavy-handed and almost universally awful narrative and dialog of the Baldur’s Gate series to focus on the one thing those two games did well: the combat. Still, even that was hampered by the ridiculous D&D ruleset, so you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have…the Infinity Engine. I guess. I know Planescape Torment is good. I believe everyone who says it is. I know its writing is vastly superior to any of the other Infinity Engine games. I know all of this, but for whatever reason, I just can’t get into it. I get bored with it after way too long trying to not be bored with it, and eventually give up. Then, I’ll give it another try the following year, just in case I’ve, I dunno, grown or something. As a person, I mean. This has been going on for 16 years. I still don’t get it. #9 – Hitman: Codename 47 For some reason, whenever Jack Thompson was running around like a millennial Chicken Little and yelling about “murder simulators” – he never once mentioned this game, which was odd because that’s exactly what Hitman is. A murder simulator.

Ever wanted to be a cool assassin, silently taking out targets without leaving a trace? Well, good. Because you can do that in Hitman. Or you can run around and murder everyone in sight, if that’s more your style. Take off and nuke the planet, sort of thing. It’s the only way to be sure. The series would take a few iterations to fully come into its own (before eventually losing the plot entirely and devolving into the generic dick- waggling nonsense that categorizes present day AAA titles), but the first entry still occupies a warm spot in my cold, black heart. I never did like all the clone business, though. It got in the way of my murder simulating. #8 – Heavy Metal FAKK2 This is an awful little game. It’s an action platformer and is entirely competent at what it does – and I liked it a lot when I was a horned up twenty-something with little regard for societal norms or gender equality – but, in retrospect, it was pretty bad.

The game itself was good, mind you. It had nice platforming, with decent combat mixed in. But good lord, everything else was just dripping with either blatant misogyny or sexual frustration. Or both. (It’s usually both.) Granted, it’s a game under the Heavy Metal brand, so what it is shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. But still, going from the start of the game fully clothed to barely wearing a thong and nipple strap by the end as your clothes slowly get ripped off is kind of ridiculous. Oh, and of course you play as an extremely busty female with SUPER ACCURATE boob physics and an extremely shiny butt. But that’s not all. Giant alien mosquito queens attack you with their six fully rendered mammaries flapping in the breeze, and by the later levels, full on H.R. Geiger machine porn comes into play. You’ve never seen machinery so phallic. If you ever decided to play this one, trust me when I say that you’ll never look at piston the same way again. #7 – American McGee’s Alice The third and final action platformer this year was Mister Fancypants’ Alice. After cutting his teeth at id software on classic titles like Doom and Quake, American McGee figured that he could make himself into his own brand, so he just started throwing his name onto everything he could.

American McGee’s Alice takes place after the events of Everyone Else’s Alice, which has led American McGee’s Alice to be locked up in an asylum where she’s, I dunno, in a coma or something. What distinguishes American McGee’s Alice from Other Alices is how he pretty much just vomited Tim Burton all over everything and called it a day. American McGee’s Alice is more or less Wednesday Addams, who has to trek back into Wonderland to track down American McGee’s White Rabbit while fighting American McGee’s Evil Cards and hanging out with American McGee’s Chesire Cat on her quest to stop American McGee’s Queen of Hearts. This takes her on a journey through American McGee’s Tim Burton’s Wonderland, where she hops on mushrooms and does freaky things with a knife until she wins the game. The End. #6 – Ground Control

One of the first fully 3D RTS games I remember playing was this gem from Massive Entertainment (which would later become Ubisoft Massive and not ever make anything too spectacular again until Far Cry 3). Apart from the 3D thing, its biggest claim to fame was doing away with most of the standard conventions of the genre to focus solely on tactical command. No base building. No resource harvesting. No tech tree climbing. Just pure, tactical fun. The story is also really engaging, especially for an RTS game. Until Ground Control, no one had really figured out how to pull off injecting a narrative into an RTS, although Command & Conquer tried really hard. Bless its heart. It wasn’t until Warcraft III came along a couple of years later that anyone managed to do a better job of creating compelling reasons to continue playing an RTS that didn’t involve just blowing everything up. In Ground Control, you quickly become invested in the story and what’s going on with the characters, so you keep playing to see it through to the end. And then you do it all over again, from the other guy’s perspective. #5 – Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption

This was the first PC adaptation of my favorite angst-ridden, no-one-understands-me-but- I’m-actually-super-awesome-and-just-have-to-hide-it-because-hey-look- I’m-in-my-20s-and-the-world-doesn’t-make-any-sense-anymore-but-I- can-drink-and-have-casual-sex-now-so-I’ll-just-focus-on-that-as-if-no- one-else-in-the-world-has-ever-been-through-this-before-me pen and paper RPG series. As such, Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption did a pretty good job of capturing the essence of everything I just described via ridiculous hyphenation. The story is predictable fare for the Vampire crowd, and spans a few centuries from the Crusades to the present day. Although, to be honest, the game kind of falls apart once you’re in the modern world with guns and everything. It not only just feels a little off, but your companions are horrible with firearms. They’ll mow each other down without blinking, which just causes them to compulsively suck down blood packs like they were candy, just so they can stay alive a little longer to shoot back at your other companions who shot at them in the first place, then the whole filthy cycle repeats itself. But when it’s good, the game is a lot of fun. It’s a bit like a more sophisticated Diablo, with a decent story, multiple characters, and full 3D. Oh, and the marble floor in the Prince’s castle was just AMAZING to look at, back in 2000. So there’s that. #4 – No One Lives Forever

Completely outdone in every way by its sequel, the original NOLF still stands as one of the best games of 2000. It relied a little too much on cheesecake for its heroin in this first entry, but by the sequel, she wasn’t just a hot chick in a shower scene who could also shoot bad guys. She was a fully realized (well, as much as one could be in 2002) character who just happened to be a spy who just happened to be a woman. But back in 2000, she was a WOMAN who just happened to be a spy. Which is totally different in subtle, but important ways. Not like that mattered much to me back when I played it originally and just thought it was a crappy Austin Powers knock-off. I was wrong. The only thing bad about NOLF was the LithTech engine, which still hadn’t managed to figure out proper kinaesthetics yet. The animations were a little janky, the models were pretty rough, and the guns just felt…off, in some weird way. But it made up for it in the story, which gradually breathed more life into Cate Archer than the beginnings of the game would suggest. The gameplay itself was hit or miss, with occasional spot-on moments blending gadgets and gunplay, to complete misses with forced stealth sections and often unclear objectives. It’s still a fun game, and if you can put up with a few of the worse missions, it’s well worth your time. Or you can skip ahead to the vastly superior sequel and just tell everyone you’ve been a fan for years. No one will know. #3 – Blair Witch, Volume I: Rustin Parr

Remember Nocturne, one of my top games from last year? Well here it is again, with the closest it ever got to a sequel. Back in 2000, The Blair Witch was a huge thing. Love it or hate it, it was a phenomenon – and three PC games were developed to capitalize on its popularity. Two of them were stupid and horrible, and should be forgotten to the desert of time. But one of them – the first one – was actually really, really good. All three games used the Nocturne engine, but only Volume 1: Rustin Parr was developed by Terminal Reality, who managed to tie the license into their own IP, thereby making Nocturne a sort of unconnected prequel to Blair Witch. And then this game, which I guess would be a sequel to that prequel, was still a prequel in its own right. Taking place decades before the events of the movie, the game explores the aftermath of the Rustin Parr incident, which played a big part in the film’s backstory. Elspeth Holliday, a minor character from Nocturne, takes the starring role in Rustin Parr, and heads out to Burkittsville Maryland to explore the Black Hills while investigating the Blair Witch’s role in Parr’s murder spree. There are plenty of jump scares in the game, but where it achieves true success is in the atmosphere. The woods are as foreboding as any haunted woodland area could possibly be. It’s filled with odd sounds and spooky happenings, including invisible children’s feet kicking up a pile of leaves as they run by in the background, giggling. I’m not going to ruin anything by going into any more detail than that, because you really should track down a copy and play the game yourself. It’s more of an adventure game than survival horror, and while some of it can be pretty clunky at times, the end result is a complete package of creepiness that shouldn’t be missed. #2 – Thief II

Thief II figured out what the series was supposed to be about: a thief. The first game suffered a bit from being a little schizophrenic in its approach, probably because no one had ever created anything like it before, and the development team wasn’t sure which ideas would stick. So they just threw a lot of crap at the wall and scooped up whichever bits dribbled down the slowest. As a result of taking what they learned from the first game, Thief II is a much more focused experience. It’s more refined and polished and tighter than its predecessor, with a greater emphasis on what made that game work while almost completely abandoning everything that didn’t. It also took a few cues from System Shock 2 (as did the #1 game on my list this year), and ended up tying everything together into a cohesive masterpiece. No other game has ever pulled off being a Medieval Thief like Thief II. Not the first game in the series, not the third, and definitely not the fourth. Play it. #1 – Deus Ex If you know anything at all about PC gaming, you saw this one coming.

Deus Ex is the perfect game, but it was also lightening in a bottle. Attempts to recapture it have proved fruitless, with varying degrees of success. I actually enjoyed Deus Ex 2, but most people despised it for a number of reasons, some entirely valid, some not so much. Human Revolution got a lot more right than DX2, but also got plenty wrong. And it was super yellow, for some reason. If you’re not familiar with the original, I don’t know how you look at yourself in the mirror without crying. It’s got grand conspiracies, ultra cool sci-fi guys in trenchcoats, nanotechnology, and – most importantly – the complete illusion of choice. Every level boils down to one of only a few approaches the player can take to complete it, but it does such a great job at feeling like you could do anything you want, it doesn’t matter. Stealth, combat, negotiation, hacking: they’re all there at your disposal, but which one you’ll be able to take will depend on how you’ve built your character, which makes repeated playing a rewarding must. One thing Deus Ex did that I don’t think it gets enough credit for – and definitely something that hasn’t been implemented in any other game trying to recreate the Deus Ex magic – was how artfully it blended player skill with character skill. The sniper rifle is the best example of this. If you’re a sufficiently talented player, you can use it effectively without every putting any skill points into it. The game shows this by having the the sight wobble all over the damn place in unpredictable ways, but if you’re quick enough, you can still pop off a perfect headshot when the crosshairs wobble in just the right way. Or, if you’re not very good at wobble sniping, you can invest some points in the skill and your rifle will become as steady as a rock sitting on a bigger rock that’s sitting in a pit of bedrock. I don’t think I need to gush any longer about Deus Ex. If you haven’t played it by now, you’re probably never going to, no matter what I say. Which would be a shame, because you’ll never be able to fully appreciate what Ion Storm accomplished back in 2000.

One last thing, though. Warren Spector usually gets all the credit for Deus Ex’s success, while Harvey Smith gets entirely blamed for its sequel’s failures. This is unfair for a lot of reasons, but mostly because Smith was as integral to the design of DX as Spector was, and the blame for DX2’s design decisions should be focused more on the changing market than anything else. Yes, it was a victim of so- called “consolification” – but as you’ll soon see as I get deeper into the new millennium, this was just the way things were going. Cross platform titles quickly became the standard after Deus Ex 2. It just had the misfortune of being one of the first. (Smith would later make up for DX2 with Dishonored, which is probably the best Deus Ex game that isn’t a Deus Ex game.)

My Top Ten PC Games of 2001 This was probably the most difficult list to put together, because 2001 was a pretty rotten year for PC gaming. I don’t know if it was the collective shock of September 11, or maybe every developer on the planet just assumed Y2K was going to melt everyone’s PC so why bother making new games, but for whatever reason, the year kinda sucked. #10 – Oni For some reason, I always get this game confused with Omikron: The Nomad Soul. I have no idea why, because Oni and Omikron came out two years apart and are nothing alike, but I guess one starting with On and the other with Om is enough to fry the delicate circuitry inside my fragile braincase.

While Omikron was David Cage’s first game back when he was still making games with things like actual gameplay rather than QTE-powered B-movies or whatever, Oni is a third-person action-adventure cyberpunk beat ’em up. And it’s pretty good. I wasn’t completely burned out on anime back in 2001, so the art style still seemed kind of fresh. These days, it seems like every artist under 30 only learned how to draw manga characters, so the style is absolutely everywhere. Everything looks the same, whether it’s an emotionally moving RPG or a quirky dating simulator involving inanimate objects growing penises and asking salt shakers to the prom. I’m totally over the style at this point, but what can you do? That’s what I get for getting old, I guess. Anyway, Oni had (for the time) a cool, semi-unique setting in that it was basically an anime movie brought to a PC game. Shogo tried to do the same thing a few years earlier, but it was clunky and horrible. (I know a lot of people liked it, but the old LithTech engine really bugged me, for some reason.) Oni focuses mostly on melee combat that’s very polished and feels great, which is good because the rest of the game feels pretty awful. Guns are fairly useless, since aiming is wonky and ammunition is so rare it might as well have been manufactured from the crystallized tears of chronically depressed moon unicorns, so you rarely use them. Enemies use them though, and with pinpoint accuracy from miles away, which sometimes makes it very difficult to get close enough to them to kick punch their spleens. The story is fun enough and intriguing, the cyberpunk vibe is strong (which is something we got a lot of after The Matrix dropped in ’99), and the game on the whole feels very polished. The environments are pretty spartan and the map design falls victim to the Everything-Is-A-Square aesthetic that defined ’90s shooters, but if you can look past the rough bits, Oni is well worth your time. #9 – Red Faction

Destructible environments! The big selling point for Red Faction was its proprietary GeoMod technology, which allowed for fully destructible environments in the game. Casual destruction was nothing new for FPSs though, but GeoMod wasn’t limited to just destroying “actors” (objects and such) in the game world; rather, it was capable of allowing the player to destroy the actual geometry that defined each map. Do you need to get through a door, but don’t have a key? No problem! Just shoot a rocket and blow a hole in the wall. Which would’ve made GeoMod amazing, if it had actually done any of that. In reality, the only things you could destroy were pre-configured to allow destructibility, so if the game wanted to force you into gated progress via keycards, then that’s what you had to do. In certain situations, GeoMod seemed pretty amazing, though. But they were rare in a game that was otherwise filled with all the standard tropes of the genre. It was a neat bit of tech when it worked – or, more accurately, when it was designed to work – but at the end of the day, Red Faction turned out to be a very standard FPS. It’s not bad or anything. Some of it is good fun, but if you go in expecting the fully destructible environments as advertised, get ready to be disappointed. #8- Max Payne

Saying that Max Payne drew heavily from John Woo movies and The Matrix is a bit like saying a fetus draws heavily from its parents DNA. Simply put, Max Payne would not exist without them. Sure, the story of The Matrix might not be not at all similar to the hard-boiled cop drama of Max Payne, but the gameplay is all Neo, all the time. Hell, they even called the game’s main feature Bullet Time (slow motion dodges), which was what the Wachowskis called the technique when they “invented” it. That doesn’t make it any less cool, though. Even if it does get pretty ridiculous really quickly. The only way to trigger the Bullet Time effect – which the game basically forces you to use all the time – is to initiate a dodge move. Max will jump backward to land on his ass, forward to land on his stomach, or to the side to slide onto the floor. It’s all very cool and impressive the first 800 times you do it, but by the end of the game you start to realize this dude can’t go 5 seconds without launching himself into a dramatic flop to the ground.

It’s fun, but more than a little silly. Unfortunately, while the gameplay is decent, the story is horrible. Well, maybe not horrible, but wholly cliched and told through ham-fisted dialog so on the nose and ridiculous that just thinking about it makes me wince. Which, now that I think, is probably why Max has that constipated expression on his face through 95% of the game. #7 – Return to Castle Wolfenstein The first attempt to reboot id’s Wolfenstein 3D franchise was an entirely competent, if totally mediocre shooter. It doesn’t really do anything wrong, but nothing it does right is particularly memorable.

You fight your way out of the titular castle filled with Nazis, then do some stuff, then fight your way back into the castle and kill the big bad guy. There are mad scientists and ancient relics, along with mystical junk like the undead and oh god, I’m bored just talking about it. The shooting is solid, and the standard FPS gameplay loop is still as satisfying as it ever was, but everything else about this game is a dialtone. Return to Castle Wolfenstein had decent graphics for the time, so that’s something I guess. I enjoyed it as much as I could during a bleak year when almost nothing worth playing came out, but in retrospect, nothing about it was remotely special or interesting in any way. It would take a couple more years before anything about this Wolfenstein succeeded in being something special, but I’ll get to that when I make it to my top ten games of 2003. #6 – Runaway: A Road Adventure

Oh, hey. Check it out! It’s yet another resurrection of an extinct genre that’s been declared dead more times than the damn Highlander. Runaway was notable for its excellent art and animation, which took pre-rendered characters and stuck them into hand drawn rooms with a cel-shaded aesthetic. And it all worked pretty well. The puzzles were fun, and the game constantly rewards the player with new art, which is nice. The story is decent and interesting enough to keep you playing, although much of the humor falls flat. I don’t blame the designers, though. Most of the time, it’s an obvious failure of translation, since the original game was developed in Spain. I’m not sure why international developers don’t spend more time and effort on proper localization. I mean, it’s fine to translate a game’s dialog and everything, but a simple translation is never going to capture the intent of the language. Good localization takes into account native speech patterns, common grammar, and colloquialisms. But that almost never happens. Usually – and I suspect this was the case with Runaway, as well – a game just gets a simple literal translation and that’s it. In a best case scenario, the dialog and narrative might be written by someone who speaks multiple languages, but that’s as good as it gets. However, if developers would just spend the extra time to take that one more step and send the script to a native speaker to doctor a bit and tailor it to the natural language of the region, then jokes wouldn’t fall flat. Dialog intended to be emotionally moving wouldn’t come off as clunky and weird. Things would just work as they were intended (and probably do, if you speak the game’s native language), and everything would be fine. But that almost never happens, so we end up with games like Runaway. Which, while still an entirely competent and decent enough game, falls short of being anything great simply because of poor localization. #5 – Empire Earth Empire Earth is best described as Age of Empires 3D, or maybe as Age of Empires meets Ground Control. Whichever.

There’s really not much more to say about EE than that. It doesn’t do anything remarkable other than letting you progress from the stone age all the way to a sci-fi future with ray guns and probably hoverboards and self-drying jackets or whatver. It doesn’t do anything particularly amazing, and rarely does anything terribly wrong. It’s not as polished as AoE, and not as focused as GC, but for what it is – a developer’s first attempt at bringing the historical RTS into the world of 3D, it’s not bad at all. There are certainly better games of a similar nature out there, but this was 2001. Pickings were slim. #4 – Gothic Clunky combat and abysmal localization are about the only things wrong with this version of Ultima IX.

To many gamers, the Gothic series picked up where Ultima left off – or, rather, where Ultima never got to go because EA led the series into the Stygian Abyss and threw away the key. And, in most respects, they’re absolutely right. Gothic drops the player into a highly interactive world simulation that gamers hadn’t seen since Ultima VII, only it does it in all three of the big Ds. Sure, the animations are a little janky and the combat can be rage inducing, but everything else about the game just screams Ultima. In a good way. If you like classic RPGs and are looking for something that’s not too old, but not too new, you can’t go wrong with Gothic. Give it a whirl. Tell Diego I sent you. It’s a shame about the dialog, though. It’s downright painful. #3 – Tribes 2 Ah, Tribes 2. The best iteration of the series, this one got everything right.

More or less just a graphical upgrade from the first game, Tribes 2 also featured improved net code and server browsing, better character management, and increased support for the mod community. My favorite way to play this game was on a server with – and I could be remembering the wrong name here, so please don’t disc-blast me in the face if I am – the Renegades mod installed. After playing on one of those servers, it was impossible to go back to vanilla Tribes 2. Renegades added tons of features to the game, mostly in the form of base building and defensive enhancements, and it was glorious. I had more fun running around placing various turrets and keeping everything repaired than I did with assaulting the enemy base and capturing flags. If you’re a modern gamer with no point of reference, you can imagine Tribes 2 + Renegades as Team Fortress 2. It’s basically the same game, but with more jetpacks and less ridiculous DLC. #2 – Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos This one almost made my top spot this year, but it lost by hair. Or a parsec. I really don’t understand the difference.

Surpassed only by Freespace 2, Edge of Chaos is the second best space combat sim ever made. Also, it’s unlike any other space combat sim ever made. The thing that most separates the Independence War games from the space sim pack is the use of inertia. Most space combat sims are basically just WWII dogfights without gravity, which is fine. That’s a lot of fun, and I love it. But when you throw full inertia into the mix, things get MUCH more difficult. And interesting. If you’ve ever watched Babylon 5, you know how combat works in this series. You fly in one direction with your main thrusters, while using manuevering jets to turn and fire on enemies. You’ll keep flying in one direction until you do another burn in the opposite direction to slow your ship. They space physics in Independence War (both 1 and 2) are top shelf. I prefer the sequel to the original by a fairly large degree, which is why the first one didn’t make it onto my list back in 1997. Edge of Chaos has the better engine, better graphics, better flight model, and – most importantly – a much better story. The game starts you out as a kid who has to disappear after his dad gets murdered. Then, an old AI pops up and directs you safely to your granny’s old smuggling operation, where you’ll find your ship and learn to become an intergalacitc space cowboy grown- up. Or smuggler. Freedom fighter. Whatever. It’s a fantastic game with a steep learning curve, but well worth investing a little time in. #1 – Clive Barker’s Undying

I love horror games. And horror movies. Books. TV shows. Comics. I just dig the genre, so when Clive Barker lent his name to an Unreal-powered shooter, I was immediately on board. Part Clive Barker, part Lovecraft, the game is all FPS at its core, which was a little disappointing. However, the story helps make up for the fact that you’re basically playing Any Shooter But With Sometimes Magic, and the whole package ends up being a lot more than the sum of its parts. The game isn’t particularly scary or anything. There are no real jumps or unsettling atmospheric setpieces to wander through, but it nails the Fun/Creepy vibe of, say, a skewed version of the Addams Family. I don’t think this is what the game was going for or anything, as it’s fairly obvious it’s desperate for you to take it seriously and be afraid, but it’s just too campy for that. Take it for what it is rather than how I think it was intended to be, and you’ll have a great time with Undying. It’s kind of like Buffy, if Buffy were an Irish dude in the 1920s. Just try it.

My Top Ten PC Games of 2002 #10 – The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind I never completed Morrowind, but I did play a lot of Morrowind. I just didn’t particularly enjoy enough of Morrowind to see it through to the end of Morrowind. But, since everyone else kept going on about how amazing Morrowind was, I tried to find the fun in Morrowind.

I failed. It was decent enough to make it into my top ten for the year, but it gets the bottom slot for a couple of reasons. First, the world was beautiful, but completely static. It was a set to wander around it, with virtually every damn thing either nailed down or glued to the floor. I enjoy world simulation in my RPGs as much as I do hacking and slashing, and Morrowind completely failed on that point. It was also just trying way too hard to be different. Sure, the land of giant mushrooms and floating insectoid stage coaches was kind of cool, but nothing about the game seemed to be anchored in any kind of familiararity, which I think is vital to fantasy worldbuilding. It’s really easy to go too far, which is what Morrowind did. The character models were also butt ugly, which actually turned out to be foreshadowing for every other game Bethesda would ever make. Four “Speak quickly, Outlanders” out of ten. #9 – Neverwinter Nights The exact opposite of Morrowind going too far in trying to be different and strange, Neverwinter Nights was happy to stick to the all too familiar tropes of the fantasy RPG genre, and was pretty much a dialtone because of it.

It was also mired in the terrible algebra of pen-and-paper D&D, so any immersion it might’ve had was quickly broken whenever pages of math would pop up every time you tried to hit something with a stick. The story was lame, the characters uninteresting, and everything about it was just…boring. BUT, it had an amazing editor. I spent more time creating my own little single-player campaigns to run around in than I did with the actual game itself. It was like being alone in my closet again, reading D&D sourcebooks and pretending I had friends to play with. Only this time I did, even if did have to make them myself, like some kind of Forever Alone Dr. Frankenstein. Community mods and the eventual expansions saved the game, and ensured it a spot in my top ten. #8 – Battlefield 1942 Back before the Battlefield series turned into a frat boy dick measuring contest or a safe space for female gamers to play in without fear of being hit on every five seconds by the aforementioned frat boys and all the other sexually frustrated penis-holders of the Internet (ok, that part is a lie), Battlefield 1942 was a breath of fresh air.

It wasn’t the zen-like (what less imaginitive people might call braindead) experienece of Deathmatch, it wasn’t the base-building CTF joy of Tribes, and it wasn’t a strategy game. It was kind of blend of all these things, and it was great. Of course, everyone really just played the Wake Island map from the demo over and over again, even after the full game came out. Something about it was just perfect, and I lost many a sleepless night to epic battles over control points. Or whatever Battlefield called them. The only problem with the game was people who spawned and insta-stole a vehicle or plane I HAD BEEN PATIENTLY WAITING ON. Those guys were jerks. #7 – Mafia A lot of people didn’t really like Mafia, but I enjoyed the heck out of it. They complained that the cars were too slow, or that the game wasn’t big enough, or the world didn’t feel Grand Theft Auto enough – and they were right.

Which probably explains why I loved it so much. From crusing down city streets and keeping an eye on my speed so I didn’t get pulled over, to blaring period music from my radio like some kind of 1920s hipster, I loved every minute of the game. It wasn’t the Prohibition-era GTA people expected, but it was still a ton of fun. The story was classic gangland drama, the sense of place was well realized, and you got to be a mobster without having to worry about pesky things like actually going to jail or sleeping with the fishes. #6 – Star Trek: Bridge Commander

One of my favorite Star Trek games, Bridge Commander put you in the captain’s chair of a starship and turned you loose onto the galaxy. Or at least onto the parts of the galaxy that the linear story took you to, but it was good enough for me. You can play Bridge Commander one of two ways: Either manually controlling the ship in excellent, fully 3D capital ship combat, or you could leave it up to the AI while you shouted orders at your crew. I tended to favor the latter, but would take direct control whenever my crew just wasn’t quite up to getting the job down before we got exploded by Romulans or whatever. Shaking back and forth in your chair like a spastic monkey whenever your ship gets hit is entirely optional, but highly recommended. As with most Star Trek games, it’s almost impossible to find today due the licensing hell that defines the franchise. But if you can manage to track down a copy, go grab the Maximum Warp community mod. It adds some nice touches to the game, and will keep you shouting ENGAGE! at your screen for hours on end. Like a giant nerd. #5 – No One Lives Forever 2

The sequel to the excellent but flawed No One Lives Forever corrected almost every problem the first game had. Cate Archer became a more fully realized character, with the fact that she was a woman being made a secondary or even tertiary concern. The in-game characters would comment on her being a female super spy, sure, but in a self-aware way that belittled the mysoginy that still plagues the gaming industry today. The graphics were greatly improved, and for the first time, the LithTech engine finally started showing a little progress toward nailing down the kineaesthetics of FPS combat. The weapons still felt a little off, but Monolith was almost there. (They’d hit their stride soon with F.E.A.R., which was an excellent game in all the ways except the one it was trying the hardest to be. But more on that when we get to 2005.) The game is smart, funny, and full of excellent setpieces. My favorite series of events take place in a trailer park as it’s being hit by a tornado. The lead-in to when the tornado appears, along with its aftermath was a thing of beauty. And I’ll never forget the high-speed tricycle chase with a mime and a fistful of bananas. Good times. #4 – Star Wars: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast

Star Wars: Dark Forces III: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast was the best entry in the overly subtitled series when it came out. Aside from running on the Quake 3 engine for vastly improved graphics, JK2 finally nailed lightsaber combat in a way no one had seen before. You could switch between Strong, Normal, and Speed stances, each of which brought along a different moveset to include with your Jedi acrobats. The number of styles coupled with the acrobatics and speed of battle made multiplayer lightsaber combat a ridiculous, frenetic mess of whirling dervishes with deadly laser swords. It looked chaotic and random if you didn’t know what you were watching, but once you mastered the different moves, you knew exactly what you were doing. As for the single-player side of things, the FMV was mercifully gone, replaced by in-game cinematics. The story was decent enough, but nothing spectacular – and it took far too long to get your lightsaber. Even when you finally got to where your lightsaber was, you still had to jump through a bunch of stupid tutorial hoops to get it. But once you did, every other weapon became a distant memory. While using the right Force powers – either Light or Dark – and a lightsaber, Kyle Katarn became a virtually unstoppable killing machine. My favorite go-to power was Speed, which slowed everything down but me. The world became a blur as I weaved in and out of stormtroopers and dodged blaster bolts on a slice-and-dice campaign of virtual carnage. Ah, memories. Still, even with all the improvements JK2 made to the series, the single- player level designs could still be maddeningly complex and frustrating. But then again, you could walk around with your lightsaber out, and it’d leave a glowing trail of burned wall everywhere it touched. Which was a lot cooler than it sounds. #3 – Arx Fatalis

The first “spiritual successor” to the Ultima Underworld series, this game took everything that was great about the Looking Glass games and brought it all into the modern world of polygonal 3D. (It was actually developed to be Ultima Underworld III, but Arkane Studios couldn’t pry the license from the cold, dead hands of Electronic Arts.) It had more interactivity than the UU games, voiced characters, and a deeper magic system. It took the world simulation of Ultima 7 and blended it with the first person dungeon crawling of Ultima Underworld, then removed all the Ultima stuff and called it Arx Fatalis. The basic idea is that the whole world moved underground ages ago after some kind of unimportant calamity I never paid much attention to, so you have humans and goblins and troll, etc… living together in one giant, sprawling series of caves and subterranean fortresses. Each faction is vying for control, and you can interact with all of them in whichever way you see fit. Notoriously buggy at launch, AF has since been patched and is ready to go. It’s a wonderful little trip through a Totally Not Ultima Underworld underground world, and you should give it a try. Plus, you can taint his cookie dough and give the Goblin King diarreah. So there’s that. #2 – Freedom Force

One of the best titles to come out of Irrational Games was this little gem (along with its sequel). For some inexplicable reason, developers have always struggled with making superhero games, so we don’t really have all that many. (And the ones we do have kinda suck.) But Freedom Force doesn’t. The game puts you in command of the Notta Avengers (or the Notta Justice League, if you’re a filthy DC-loving mudblood), and charges you with saving the world from the forces of evil. Naturally. There’s an enormous number of hereos in the base game – ranging from versions of Marvel’s characters as well as Irrational’s take on DC heroes – and all of it is wrapped up in the Golden Age aesthetic of comic books. Which is to say it’s campy as hell. This put some people off of the game who were expecting an edgy, modern take on the superhero genre, but I loved it. If you got what they were doing, then you understood how much they nailed it. And the campiness suddenly became kind of the whole point. With extensive mod support as well as in-game character creation, you can find just about any hero you want on the the web. Want to add Booster Gold to your team? He’s out there, somewhere. Just download his files and stick ’em in the game. How about Batman? Well, pick your favorite version. He’s out there, too. The game itself is a realtime, pausable strategy sort of thing, along the lines of a hyperfocused Baldur’s Gate, but without all the stupid D&D rules and terrible writing. The system is very simple to use, but due to the number of heroes and the different combinations of powers at your disposal, the actual gameplay can get pretty complex. Don’t play it on Hard your first time through. #1 – Warcraft III

Before Warcraft III came out, everyone was worried that Blizzard had lost the plot. Adding hero characters to an RTS? What were they thinking? And adopting a cartoonish art style? Come on, Blizzard! Get it together! Fortunately, Blizzard didn’t listen to the empassioned outcries of its fans and just did whatever the hell it wanted to, which was a good thing because Warcraft III is probably the best RTS ever made. The hero characters didn’t break the game; they added to it. The art style was amazing. The gameplay was refined and polished and tweaked to balanced perfection. If they’d only stopped there, Warcraft III would’ve still been a great game. But then they added the story and the cutscenes, and everything came together in this wonderful bit of synergistic madness that defines the game and the Warcraft universe. Everything people love about World of Warcraft came from Warcraft III. The lore from War1 and War2 are there, but the aesthetic, the major characters, the tone of the universe, and everything else about WoW is pure Warcraft III. Which is kind of a shame, really. Because I don’t think we’ll ever get a Warcraft IV now, since WoW pretty much became the sequel no one asked for but that everyone seems to have wanted. Except for me. I still want my Warcraft IV. Sadface. My Top Ten PC Games of 2003

#10 – TRON 2.0

I remember this game coming out of nowhere back in 2003. The TRON reboot wouldn’t happen until 2010, and TRON itself came out way back in 1982, so no one was thinking about the franchise in 2003. TRON 2.0 just sort of appeared one day, with no real reason for having been called into existence. It was weird. It was also pretty fun. The internet was still new enough to be a novelty, but old enough that people were used to it by then, so whereas the original TRON movie dealt mainly with PCs and mainframes, the TRON 2.0 game focused more on networking and email and the plague of viruses. They even included an entire lightcycle mini game, which is always welcome. The game itself was a fairly typical FPS, which wasn’t really helped along very much from being powered by the LithTech engine. But where other games suffered from the weird, disconnected effects the engine gave to weapons, TRON 2.0 managed to sidestep the issue by making all the weapons suck except for one. The disc. Just like in the movie, you carry around a disc on your back that you can use as both shield and weapon, and it’s really the only thing you’ll ever need in the game, at least until you get to one of the levels where the developers realize you’re probably having too much fun and take it away from you. Probably some designer’s nephew worked on the Rod Primitive, and he didn’t want him to feel left out. There’s also a fun RPG-lite aspect to the game, where you can level up (which changes your character’s version number) and decide which subroutines (bonuses and buffs, basically) to load into the limited space you have available. You can pick up new subroutines all the time, but they might need to be ported to your system or cleaned of virus corruption before they can be installed. It was a strange, but fun little game. #9 – B-17 Flying Fortress: The Mighty 8th!

This game was a nightmare. A simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation, B-17: The Mighty 8th was kind of like Inception, but with incredibly detailed instrument panels and an instruction manual thicker than a fat baby’s corpulent thigh. Once you managed to get in the air, the B-17 itself actually controlled pretty well. I guess the developers figured everyone would spend so long just trying to figure out how to start the damn engines that people would lose patience pretty quickly if it was actually hard to fly. Getting off the ground took well over two dozen individual steps involving fiddling with this knob over here and flipping that switch over there, and god help you if you didn’t get the sequence exactly right, or you’d never make it off the runway. I look at B-17 as more of a bomber sim than a flight sim. You can hop between ten different stations, where each crew member is doing his own thing. If you want to be the bombardier on a mission, then let the AI fly while you rain death upon the ground walkers. Feel more like pretending you’re Luke Skywalker shooting down TIE fighters from one of the Millennium Falcon’s turrets? Grab a spot and start shootin’, Tex. It’s a very deep, very rewarding simulation and you should totally give it a try. Just RTFM first. #8 – Gothic 2 Gothic 2 took everything that worked about Gothic 1 and made it bigger and better. Then, it took everything that didn’t work in Gothic 1 and made it bigger and worse, because screw you, that’s why.

The series’ developers took a hardline stance that the wonky combat in their games was intentional, and player’s damn well better just get used to it, if you know what’s good for you. Sure, you can get murdered by a wolf that repeatedly stun-locks you so much that you can never even manage to hit it with a single stick before it’s munching on the bloody remains of your battered corpse, but hey. Them’s the breaks, kids. If you could manage to get through the combat and different aspect of the interface that I can’t recall specifically right now but that I remember having annoyed the piss out of me back in 2003, there’s a very deep, very Ultima-like game to discover. The world simulation is very strong in Gothic 2, so much so that I remember starting a family feud between two farming brothers because I stashed a frying pan in one of the brother’s rooms. When the other brother discovered (on his own, by walking into the room) HIS frying pan had been stolen, he freaking bolted out the door, ran out into the field where his brother was working, then proceeded to murder the crap out of him with a pitchfork. I’m not sure if I’m remembering all the details correctly in that little story, and I was never sure if it was scripted or not, but the end result was the same. It was awesome. #7 – Freelancer The first time Chris Roberts pitched Star Citizen, it was called Freelancer and crowd funding wasn’t a thing yet. As a result, he was stuck working with a publisher who demanded unreasonable things like meeting milestones and producing an actual game within a well-defined budget and stuff. I know. Crazy, right?

Over time, most of the promises Roberts made regarding Freelancer would be scrapped, he’d get all huffy about it, then take his toys and go home by way of leaving the company he founded, and then the game would eventually come out. A shadow of what was promised, Freelancer actually turned out to be a pretty fun game when taken in short spurts. It was very linear and progressed along well defined narrative rails, but the mouse-driven combat no one was sure about ended up feeling very natural and smooth. I completed the game and enjoyed the standard sci-fi story well enough, but the repetitive nature of everything you did crept in fairly early on and never let up. You just do the same things over and over again until you unlock another story mission, wherein you do the same things you’ve been doing but now there’s a cutscene at the end, and then you repeat the whole process for hours until you win the game. It’s fun, but only in small doses. #6 – Star Wars: Galaxies The best way to describe Star Wars: Galaxies is by calling it Ultima Online in space. Or Star Wars UO. Whichever.

The early days of SWG were a lot like the early days of UO. There was a big, functioning economy with an emphasis on player crafting to drive it, and the crafting itself was highly detailed and very complex. There was adventuring, too. And player housing, and planets to explore with landmarks to discover, etc… If UO felt like living an alternate life in medieval times, then SWG felt like living an alternate life as an extra in a Star Wars movie. Professions outside of combat were viable and encouraged. Whole cities sprung up organically, with some even having elected officials like mayors and such – all emerging from the player base itself, rather than driven by the rules and design limitations of the game. Sadly, just like with UO, a bunch of annoying asshats ruined everything for everyone by griefing the hell out of the system in their madcap pursuit of making the game more about DPS and min-maxing PvP builds, so patches and band-aids were applied until the game was completely unrecognizable as a second life inside the Star Wars universe. It got so bad, the developers eventually just said screw it, basically gave everyone Jedi powers and then walked away while the world burned. Not long after, the servers went offline for good. #5 – Uru: Ages Beyond Myst I never liked Myst. I kind of hated it, in fact. So why I bought Uru will forever be a mystery to me. Maybe it was on sale? I dunno. I was still in my twenties, so maybe I was drunk. Who knows?

Point is, I bought the damn game – and I loved it. I’m not sure if it was the switch to realtime 3D, or if I’d always wanted to like Myst but just never understood it before, but whatever the reason, Uru hooked me. It was originally designed to have this whole social, multiplayer aspect integrated into every part of it, but that never really took off, and the cost of developing it nearly destroyed the company. But I didn’t much care about playing with other people, anyway. By 2003, I was beginning to tire of multiplayer gaming and trying to have fun with random Internet People, so I was happy to work my way through the strangely immersive world of logic puzzles and cryptic books all by my lonesome. #4 – Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

I said I was starting to tire of multiplayer games, but I wasn’t completely turned off by them yet. This little freebie came along out of the blue, and all my online friends started playing it. So, yielding to the power of peer pressure like a kid who hadn’t grown up listening to Nancy Reagan’s dire warnings about such things, I jumped on the bandwagon and joined in. Enemy Territory became my go-to multiplayer game for most of the year. It had great gameplay, interesting modes, and the different character types meant you could play in vastly different ways depending on your mood. Except that everyone always wanted to be an engineer. Whole teams of engineers. It was madness. I’m a soldat! #3 – Deus Ex: Invisible War

The game that was never as bad as people say it was might not have been a super duper sequel to one of the greatest games ever made, but it was competent enough to be part of the series. I enjoyed it, at least. I think what people hated the most was down to it being one of the first AAA cross-platform titles. To get the game working well on both a controller and the hardware of the original Xbox, concessions had to be made, which the annoying PC Master Race assholes always took as some kind of great insult to their people or whatever. As for myself, I just shrugged, loaded up the game, and made my own fun. Universal ammo was a good idea, even though people hated it at the time. The streamlining of the augmentations was a good idea, even though people hated it at the time. In face, most of the things Deus Ex did would eventually become accepted elements of standard FPS design that people love today, but that they hated then. Sometimes, people can be pretty stupid all the times. The only real hit the game took by being cross-platform was in the size of its maps – and this is where all the angry Internet People are right. They were freaking tiny as hell. The miniature size of the levels meant that a lot of the illusion of freedom from the first game was lost, even if all the same “freedom” was still there. It was just, by necessity, more obvious. You can creep in this one air duct to do stealth, you can hack this one door to go an alternate route, you can say this one thing to this one character in the area to try and talk your way through, etc… Most all of the same gameplay choices were still present in DX2 as were in DX1, only this time the elusive illusion of freedom was missing. It was freedom that had never really been there to begin with, but the original did such a good job of hiding that fact that the sequel just stood out like a sore thumb. But it’s still a Deus Ex game. It’s still fun. And you shouldn’t listen to other people. #2 – Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

The best game in the Dark Forces series wasn’t actually part of the Dark Forces series. Except that it was, but it didn’t want to admit it because doing so would turn the full title of the game into a colon-saturated, marketing nightmare. Star Wars: Dark Forces IV: Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Academy doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, you know. The single player story was fun and extremely condensed into very tightly designed, self-contained levels. There was much less wandering around aimlessly, trying to figure out what the game wanted you to do when all you wanted to do was murder stormtroopers with lightsabers. Jedi Academy knew what players wanted, and it gave it to them. Which, because it’s the Internet, pissed a lot of people off, for some reason. At the time, people griped about Jedi Academy because you didn’t play as Kyle Katarn, the levels didn’t progress linearly, and the story wasn’t epic enough or whatever. But nobody cares what angry Internet People think, so let’s move on. The best thing Jedi Academy did was to absolutely nail the lightsaber combat so well that the multiplayer mode is worth the price of admission alone. From fully customizable characters and lightsabers, to crazy acrobatic moves at super speeds, multiplayer matches were where Jedi Academy truly shined. There has never been better melee combat in an FPS (even though it became a 3rd person game for lightsaber fights, because trying to control your flippy, spastic self as while doing somersaults and backflips and super jumps in first person was a sure fire recipe for migraine-inducing unpleasantness). #1 – Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

I don’t like KOTOR today as much as I did in 2003, because back then, Bioware hadn’t just been recycling the same plot elements in every damn game they made. At the time, KOTOR was essentially Neverwinter Nights in a Star Wars costume, which was good enough for me. The characters were, for the most part, engaging. The dialog wasn’t totally awful (except for whoever thought it was a good idea for every alien to say “Moolay-rah” ever other damn word), and the combat was good, turn-based fun. (Or real-time, if you played on Easy and didn’t care about anything other than the story.) It took me ages to finally get into the game, though. The first planet goes on for days, and nothing much interesting happens until you finally get off the rock and snag your first lightsaber. But it took hours to get to that point. There were hours upon hours of slogging through tedious battles, lengthy and pointless conversations, and there was absolutely no end to running around the tiny worldmap over and over again, back and forth between this location and that location, all of which looked exactly the same. Seriously, it was so awful that people have made mods specifically to remove the whole first part of the game. It’s just that bad. That opening world was enough to make me hate the game and stop playing it until one day when I had nothing better to do than to force myself through it. Once I did, the game opened up a bit and I finally caught a glimpse of what everyone was talking about that made KOTOR so special. The big plot twist was awesome, too. Which is one of the reasons I remember liking KOTOR a lot more in 2003 than I do now, after Bioware has repeated the same damn twist over and over. Or a variation on it, at least. I’ll never understand how this studio is so beloved by so many people. My wife is a big fan of Dragon Age, which is inexplicable to me. I found it to be a boring, shoebox RPG with a ridiculous “dark fantasy” world and one-note characters. But hey, everyone likes different things, so if you’re a Bioware fan, more power to you. I mean, I like Trespasser, after all. So what the hell do I know?

My Top Ten PC Games of 2004 #10 – Doom 3

Let’s just get this out of the way up front: Doom 3 is not a Doom game. It’s neither fast paced nor colorful, there’s no sense of thrill, no adrenaline rush of rocking metal MIDI music, no satisfying cha-chink of a shotgun. It’s just not that kind of game. That doesn’t mean it’s not good, though. Back in 2004, I once again found myself the odd man out in an ocean of people who hated a game I enjoyed. They griped about everything I just mentioned, but they loved – absolutely loved – to drone on about how dumb it was that most of the guns didn’t have flashlights. Because I guess “realism” is super important when you’re fighting cybernetic hell demons on Mars. I liked the slower pace and the thicker atmosphere, and I dug the tension that not having a flashlight taped to a gun provided. Doom 3 wasn’t an action game, but it wasn’t really a survival horror game, either. It was somewhere between the two, in its own weird, stylish little place. And it looked amazing. #9 – The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth It’s an RTS in Tolkien dress-up. What more do you really need to know? Back in 2005, Lord of the Rings mania was still in full swing because Peter Jackson hadn’t stretched The Hobbit over too much film like butter scraped over too much bread yet, and everyone was riding high off the success of The Return of the King.

The Battle for Middle-Earth was light on the base building, and heavy on the army clashing. I’d like to say it was heavy on tactics, but that would be a lie. It isn’t a tactical game. It’s a build-up-a-bigger-army-and-crush- your-opponent-through-canon-fodder type of game. Unless you have the Rohirim, because cavalry beats just about anything. The game got extra points from me for its super awesome, Hildebrant- like overworld map. That thing was gorgeous, and I wanted to hang it on my wall. #8 – S2: Silent Storm

This is a really odd game that I don’t even remember why I bought, but it sticks out in my mind for all the stuff it did right. It’s a turn-based tactical game, with RPG and adventure elements, all wrapped up in a WWII storyline. What made S2 stand apart was its quirky charm, which reminded me a lot of Jagged Alliance, if Jagged Alliance had taken itself seriously – but just didn’t know that no one else would. The dialog was awful, the voice acting was worse, and the story was goofy. But it was fully 3D. It had ragdoll physics, destructible environments, and a super tight focus on doing what it did better than anything else: out X- Com’ing X-Com. I was never a big X-Com fan, but after playing S2, I could at least understand why people liked it so much. S2 was better, though. #7 – Rome: Total War

The Total War games are weird. I kind of half hate, half love them, mostly because the strategic campaigns are always slow and tedious and I suck at them. But the tactical battles? LOVE. The Rome entry in the series is probably my favorite, just because of how straightforward the combat and unit types are, which is nice for my slow, sloth-like brain to take in. I’ve played other games in the series, and the only other ones that have ever really grabbed me were the Medieval entries. I guess I just don’t dig firearms and cannons and crap. Or maybe they just make things too difficult. I dunno. But few things are better than binge watching the full series of HBO’s Rome (which, I know, wouldn’t come out until 2005), then grabbing some artisan bread and a little olive oil before settling down to a nice big game of murder in the name of the Empire. #6 – Soldiers: Heroes of World War II Yet another WWII game, this one was an even weirder beast than S2. I guess it was kind of an RTS, but not really. It was a bit of a third-person action game, but that isn’t quite right, either. Maybe it was a RTASAGT? (Real Time Action Strategy Arcade Game Thing).

At any rate, it was an isometric RTS that allowed you to take direct control over any unit (kind of like how you could possess minions in the Dungeon Keeper games, although Soldiers doesn’t switch to first person). You could command your troops to go here or there and to do this or that, then take direct control of one of your tanks to jump into the fight alongside your men. It was weird and engaging and great. The environments were also fully destructible, which meant that you really got a feel for how much damage even a small skirmish could do to a quaint little village. Once a battle was over, very little was left of the buildings and scenery other than rubble, dust, and giant tank tracks in the mud. #5 – Painkiller A proper sequel to Quake that was never a sequel to Quake, Painkiller did its best to evoke an earlier era of FPS games, before things like regenerating health and shields and two-weapon carry limits became the norm and ruined everything. And, for the most part, it succeeded.

Painkiller was part Quake / part Doom. It was Quake in the sense of its fully 3D environments and its Gothic aesthetic, and it was Doom in its approach to enemy encounters. It liked to throw hordes of baddies at you all at once, which was something gamers hadn’t seen for a long time when Painkiller came out. (Not counting the Serious Sam games, of course. But who does, really?) The story was even more at home in the ’90s than the mid 2000s, with its angst-ridden, leather-jacket wearing, pseudo-religious angry angel demon retribution payback revenge whatever story. Honestly, I stopped paying attention after the first cutscene, because why bother? I just wanted to murder things. Don’t judge me. #4 – Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 Take everything good about KOTOR, then remove all the Bioware from it and you have KOTOR 2. Except what made KOTOR 2 so special wasn’t just how much Bioware wasn’t in it, but what all that Bioware had been replaced with. Namely, Obsidian.

The guys at Obisidian tend to take an established property that held promise it never quite realized, then they make a sequel to it that far surpasses the original in every way. However, where Obsidian truly shines is in their writing. Nuanced stories, well-defined (or intentionally ambiguous) characters, excellent dialog – all these things are what Obsidian brings to the table when they make a sequel better than someone else’s original. The first time I saw this was with KOTOR2. The next time I’d see it would be with Fallout: New Vegas, but more on that when we get to 2010… The only real problem with KOTOR2 was how rushed and unfinished it was, and how amazingly buggy the final release build ended up being. It would take a lot of patches – including some from the community – before the game was ready for prime time, which is the only reason the original release of KOTOR2 isn’t higher up on my list. I’m ranking the games I played in 2005 as they were in 2005, and Knights of the Old Republic needed a couple more years in the oven. #3 – Thief: Deadly Shadows Take most everything I said about Deus Ex 2 and apply it to Thief 3, because the fan reactions – and mine – to both games were nearly identical.

Accusations of being “dumb down” and “consolified” were leveled at both games, but Thief suffered a little more unfairly than DX2, in my opinion. Thief’s levels weren’t nearly as small as DX2’s, and even when they were, they usually meshed better with a larger whole. Thief’s focus on stealth also did away with the problem of perceived freedom that the Deus Ex series continues to struggle with, but that didn’t really matter to people who were ready to hate this game well before it ever came out. People tend to double down on that kind of longterm loathing when a game finally comes out, rather than admit they were wrong. I know I’ll probably be shot for this, but I actually think Deadly Shadows was the best entry in the series, just ahead of Thief 2. It has a stronger atmosphere, some excellent sound design, and is the most immersive game in the series. Plus, it has the Shalebridge Cradle. If you don’t know what that is, then you’ve never played the game. And you’re missing out on one of the best levels ever, in any game. #2 – Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2 took forever to finally make it out, but when it eventually did, it blew everything else away. It just nailed everything. Graphics, tech, characters, voices, physics, music, story – everything it did, it did better than any FPS before it. Well, better than any FPS in the style of Half-Life, that is. ‘Cause it sure wasn’t Quake. I don’t think there’s much I need to say about Half-Life 2 that everyone doesn’t already know, except maybe to explain why it’s #2 on my list instead of #1. It’s pretty simple, actually. While HL2 did absolutely everything right (except for that annoying stuttering sound problem it seemed to always have), it was still a FPS. It threw in some physics puzzles, but I’d already seen those way back in ’98 with Trespasser. HL2 just did them better. Which is what defines Half-Life 2: it just did everything better, but it didn’t do anything I hadn’t seen plenty of times before. Which is why it slipped to #2, because the #1 spot this year went to a game that, while using the same engine as HL2, managed to create something new and greater than the sum of its parts. #1 – Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines

The best Deus Ex game that wasn’t Deus Ex (until Dishonored happens in 2012, anyway), Vampire: Bloodlines was not only the best vampire game of 2005, it was the best damn game of the past several years. In any category. Why? Because shut up and I’ll tell you. To begin with, it was a first person RPG in the true sense of the word. You didn’t just create a stat sheet to hold numbers to plug into your ridiculous THAC0 equations; you created an actual character. And then you used it to play a role in a story, which is what RPGs should be, but rarely are. Once you had your character ready (which, depending on how you created your him or her, could dramatically alter how you played the game), you were plopped down into a brand new world of darkness to explore and get used to, just as your character was the night it became a vampire. Remember that illusion of freedom Deus Ex did so well? Bloodlines managed to do it, too. There are multiple ways to complete any quest, and the choices you made not only during character creation, but also the ones you make throughout the game will determine which options are valid. Nothing will close down because you don’t have this skill or that stat, but some options will just be a whole lot harder to pull off than others, depending on your character. The story is good, the dialog is great, the gameplay is tight and fresh – and there’s absolutely nothing at all wrong with the game. Even when it was new and buggy as hell, you could tell that the diamond underneath all that rough was going to be worth digging out. Today, with the various mods and community patches having addressed most major issues Bloodlines might’ve had when it was released, you really have no excuse for not having played it. Plus, it has the Grand Ocean House Hotel. If you don’t know what that is, then you’ve never played the game. And you’re missing out on one of the best levels ever, in any game. Including Thief: Deadly Shadows.

My Top Ten PC Games of 2005 #10 – Myst V: End of Ages

If you’re surprised that a second Myst game made one of my top tens, don’t be. By the mid- 2000s, cross-platform releases were becoming the standard mode of release for AAA games, which meant I played a lot them on a console because PC upgrades are expensive and despite my sincerest efforts, I have never been able to actually poop money. For the next few years, my lists will get a little weird, because I’m only adding games that I played on my PC at the time – which means either PC exclusives, or games my machine was able to run decently when they came out. The end result of all this is that I played a lot of console games in the mid-2000s, as my PC aged and became less and less able to keep up with the big titles of the day. Which explains why another Myst game is here. But in its defense, I actually did enjoy Myst V. It did away with the series’ previous devotion to crappy FMV, and also kept the realtime movement of Uru – which made it playable for me in a way none of the other Myst games are, because I hate first person slideshow “gameplay”. I was also used to Myst’s formula of puzzles after playing Uru, so I wasn’t as lost as I might’ve otherwise been. Go to some place new, figure out how to turn on the power, fiddle with levers or some shit, and boom. You’re done. Consult a walkthrough. Move on. #9 – Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy)

I played this on my console at first, before abandoning it for the PC version because I’d heard the console release was “censored” – and it was, but not in any meaningful way. Some crude polygonal nudity was cut out, which I guess was done for the sex-shamed American audience, but really was kind of a service to mankind in general. The sex scenes were awkward and painful, with frightening clipping issues that could seriously traumatize kids who might grow up thinking sex happens when one person’s leg phase-shifts into another person’s thigh. As for the nudity? Meh. Draw a triangle and color it in the flesh tone of your choice, then put a little dot in the middle. Congratulations! You’ve just drawn a 2005 video game boob. The game itself was interesting and different, and I enjoyed it right up until the story just said screw this noise and went home. It’s hard to explain the disconnect between the early parts of the game which celebrate the mundane in fascinating ways (just walking around your apartment doing normal, stupid things is strangely compelling), and the second half of the game that gets rid of all that business and focuses on mid-air Dragonball Z kick punching via quicktime events. It’s weird. #8 – Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

This game had an extremely long development cycle – stretching all the way back to 1999 – with a lot of steady hype coming out of Headfirst Productions along the way. By all accounts, the game was going to be awesome when it was eventually released in 2005. Amazing graphics, a physics system, sanity effects, tons of interactivity within the environment, smart AI, co-op, etc… Of course, the game we finally ended up getting after six long years of waiting had none of that. Changing publishers midstream probably didn’t help much, especially after the game was picked up by Bethesda who, at this point, had actively started avoiding innovative gameplay at all costs, like some kinda of phobic vampire to garlic bread. With most of its promised features stripped, Dark Corners of the Earth was shoved out the door early and unfinished. But it was still fun. Somehow. Maybe it was the setting, which Headfirst nailed. Lovecraftian horror is always welcome, especially back in 2005 before it penetrated the mainstream and Cthulhu bobbleheads started popping up at gas stations. The game is more or less a retelling of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which seems to be a go-to story for people wanting to make a game or movie around the mythos. Personally, fish people annoy me, but hey. A cult’s gotta do what a cult’s gotta do, amirite? While most of the features were gone, the skeleton of the game remained intact, and glimpses of what could have been were everywhere – most notably during a tense escape sequence, where you’re pushing things in front of doors to try and block your pursuers as you scramble through rooms and out windows. Then there are the stealth sections. Which I’m not going to talk about, because my Mama always told me, if you can’t say anything nice… #7 – Still Life

One of the few “serious” adventure games I’ve ever actually enjoyed, Still Life is a sequel to an earlier game I didn’t like very much called Post Mortem. But I guess the developers realized most people didn’t like the first game, so they decided to just pretend it never happened. Therefore, even though Still Life sometimes throws you into the roll of the protagonist from Post Mortem via flashbacks, experience with the first game is not remotely necessary. I’m not sure what it was about Still Life that grabbed me, but it was probably the murder mystery angle. Without giving anything away, the story involves you working as a detective in the NYPD, trying to track down an elusive serial killer while flashing back to the experiences of the protagonist from the first game, who was tracking down another serial killer with the same bizarre M.O. decades earlier. It’s got a rich story, and the puzzles are fun. Sadly, the dialog is almost universally awful and the voice acting is ridiculous, but by the mid-2000s, you had to take what you could get with adventure games. #6 – Project: Snowblind

If gaming were framed in a drug metaphor, then Deus Ex would be that first hit off the pipe for some woebegone soul lying in the dingy light of an 1800s opium den. It was wonderful and amazing, and every game after it is just chasing the dragon of that first glorious hit. Which is why Deus Ex just keeps popping up on my list. Everyone keeps trying to recapture whatever magic dust that game had, but no one ever seems to get as close as that first time. Even when the game is a direct sequel in the franchise, like Snowblind. “What?” I hear you cry. Hang on, I’ll explain. Project: Snowblind was intended to be a multiplayer-focused game in the the Deus Ex franchise, which probably seemed like a good idea to some asshole in a boardroom at the time. Take one of the most immersive and well executed single-player games that defines the pinnacle of achievement in narrative-based interactive gameplay, then get rid of all that and turn it into a multiplayer pew-pew shooter. It’s brilliant! Somewhere along the line, I guess someone came to their senses (or was fired) and the Deus Ex connection was dropped. Officially, anyway. Unofficially, the soul of DX had already been infused into the game to the point where it was impossible to cut out, so they didn’t. They just wrapped a different story around it that sidestepped direct references to the Deus Ex universe, and called it a day. And it was fun. The best way to describe Project: Snowblind is to call it an impatient man’s Deus Ex, even though stealth is still kinda/sorta in the game, if you want to bother with it. But the shooting is so tight and fun, and the pacing of the game so well executed from that angle, that you’d be missing out on most of what the game has to offer. The FPS gameplay in Deus Ex always kind of sucked. The shooting was probably the weakest part of the game, really. In Snowblind, it’s the other way around. The shooting feels right, it’s satisfying, and the game never gets too bogged down with story or exploration. It knows you just want to kill things, and it wants you to have fun killing the things you kill, so it gets out of your way and lets you start killing them. The nanoaugmentations (a direct carry-over from DX) are useful and easy to call upon, with everything from ballistic armor, to a nano-powered riot shield, and x-ray vision at your disposal. Each augment feels solid and strong, and by the end of the game, you are as an empowered god, ready to smite your foes with the swift hand of nano-fueled justice. #5 – F.E.A.R.

After years of producing shooters that never quite felt right, Monolith finally nailed it with F.E.A.R. – which I’m just going to type as FEAR from now on, because acronyms are stupid. Especially when they stand for First Encounter Assault Recon, which is a paranormal law enforcement agency the game actually wants you to take seriously. FEAR desperately wants to be a horror game, which is the one area where it fails spectacularly. It’s neither scary nor suspenseful, and all of the horror elements come off as trite imitations of superior material that itself was never very good to begin win. But the shooting. The shooting is where FEAR shines, which is a 180 degree shift for Monolith, whose previous FPS titles normally excelled at everything but the shooting. The weapons feel great, the environments feel real, and the enemy AI is spectacular. When its working at its best, the AI will impress you with how it coordinates different enemies to surround you, flank you, drive you into an ambush, etc… It’s still some of the best AI in any shooter to date, and well worth the price of admission. #4 – Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 World War II is the proverbial well from which all game developers seem to go back to when they run out of ideas. Which is fine, because it normally works, even if that means we have more WWII games in the world than just about anything else, including unused AOL discs.

The Brothers in Arms series really wants to be an interactive version of HBO’s Band of Brothers. Even the title cards between missions look like the ones from the series. The grim, philosophical voice overs, the witty banter between troops, the gritty realism of having a grenade explode too close to your headface are all there. And, for the most part, they work. Where the game truly shines, however, is in its blend of FPS action and squad-based tactical combat. It accomplishes this through a clever and simple to use one-button mechanic for deploying soldiers to specific locations, and telling them what to do once they get there. Of course, most encounters boil down to having some guys lay down suppressing fire while some other guys run around to fire on the enemy’s flank. And by most encounters, I mean every single one. You’d think it would get old after a while, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t. Securing your objectives and moving on the next mission feels solid and rewarding, and by the end of the game, you leave with a clear sense of progression and accomplishment. #3 – Freedom Force vs The 3rd Reich The first of two Irrational titles in my top three for this year, Freedom Force vs The 3rd Reich takes the superhero squad from the first game and adds Nazis. And that’s pretty much it.

There’s time travel involved and internal strife within the team along with plenty of connections back to the first game, but really it’s just more of the same. But with Nazis. Because of the proverbial WWII well. And it works. Because it almost always works – especially when you get to melt fascist faces with fireballs from your fists. It’s campy and funny and glorious. Go play it. #2 – SWAT 4 I love this game. Love, love, love. SWAT 3 was the first game in the series to go first-person, but it was clunky and cumbersome and generally not all that great. It was fine for its time, but it wasn’t until Irrational got their hands on the franchise that it truly found its footing.

You play as the leader of a SWAT team, and you go around doing SWAT things like serving warrants and busting serial killers. Each mission starts with a briefing and (usually) an accompanying 9-1-1 call, then you outfit your team, pick an entry point, and it’s off to the races. The interface for commanding your team is handled through an elegant right-click menu system that is fast, functional, and easy to use. Of course, getting the hang of smoothly issuing commands while moving through an environment trying not to get killed takes some time. Once you get your head around it though, the game really opens up for multiple playthroughs of each level. The idea is to be as non-lethal as possible, which is pretty easy on the first few missions, but gets progressively more difficult as you move through the later levels when enemies start wearing body armor and gas masks like great big jerkfaces. You have to adjust your tactics and equipment for each mission, which you can play over and over again thanks to random enemy and civilian placement. It’s never the same twice, and the lethality of the weapons means that one door you opened last time that was safe might end you with one bullet from a bad guy’s gun this time. And, since there are no quick saves, every mission becomes a tense, nail-biting affair as you try to accomplish your objectives while saving as many lives as possible. Including the bad guys. #1 – Psychonauts I originally played Double Fine’s first game on my Xbox, but I loved it so much that I bought the PC version and played it all over again. You’ve surely heard of Psychonauts by now, so I shouldn’t really need to go into the details. But shut up, because I’m about to anyway.

You play as a kid who runs away from the circus to sneak off to a psychic summer camp and learn how to invade people’s minds in order to solve their psychological problems by way of third person platforming. Which is all somehow even weirder than it sounds. The platforming itself can be a little floaty at times, but it doesn’t matter because it’s really just there to move you through the interesting, imaginative environments that make up each person’s brain. One level might have you tromping around the mind of a carnage-obsessed general, another puts you in the 1950s conspiratorial mind of a paranoid milkman, while others throw you into a black velvet painting, a levitating discotheque, or in the middle of a tabletop board game. Every mind is wholly unique, with nothing recycled between them. The story is witty, the dialog is sharp and hilarious, the voice acting is spectacular, and everything about the game is just…perfect. Well, except maybe for the Meat Circus. But I’ll let you figure that one out on your own.

My Top Ten PC Games of 2006 #10 – Sam & Max Save the World Back when Telltale was still trying to figure out how to modernize the point and click adventure genre before they just said screw it, gave up, and started churning out licensed choose- your-own-adventure books with sometimes walking, they really did try to make games. The problem was nobody wanted modernized point and click adventures, and Telltale never quite managed to nail down the magic of the genre. Which probably explains why they just stopped trying.

The first series of Sam & Max episodes was competent, but it was nothing spectacular nor particularly memorable in any way. The writing was as good as it ever was, the art was great, the animation fine, but some intangible something was missing. I think maybe it was the timing. In a comedy, timing is everything – which isn’t always compatible with a somewhat sluggish game engine that never feels like it’s very confident with itself, like the nerdy girl in every high school movie who could easily be the most popular kid in the cafeteria if only she’d take off her glasses.

For whatever reason, nothing ever really came together with the series. I played the first one and a bit of the second season, but lost interest somewhere along the way. The best episode was one where Sam & Max hop into virtual reality, which worked partly because it was just plain funny, and also as a throwback to when the original game did the same thing back in 1993. I like Sam & Max as characters. I loved the comic strip you’d get inside most promotional material from LucasArts, and playing Find The Hidden Max inside different LucasArts titles was always a fun minigame. I even watched the short-lived animated series ( bet you didn’t even know there was such a thing ), and Steve Purcell is awesome. But for whatever reason, the franchise has never really worked for me in game form. I’m probably just broken. #9 – Secret Files: Tunguska

If your favorite parts of old adventure games involved the occasionally ridiculous puzzle, then Secret Files: Tunguska is the game for you. The puzzles here are absurd, and not just every now and then. They’re always absurd. Taping a cell phone to a cat to eavesdrop on a conversation is one of the most straightforward and sensible puzzles in the entire game, if that gives you some idea of how crazy things get. The weird thing is that the wonky, Rube Goldberg meets MacGyver style puzzles actually add to Tunguska’s charm. They’re set against a desperately serious story, filled with conspiracy and intrigue and a fistful of cliches, and the contrast between all that and the super silly puzzles just works on some unconcious level or something. I don’t know, I’m not a psychiatrist. It’s a very pretty game, and it’s the first point and clicker I can remember that had a system that highlights all the interactive elements in a scene, which is a super nice feature for an adventure game to have so you don’t have to hunt down pixels when you’re already doing things like getting a key out of a fishtank by using a magnet you get from a little girl after you give her batteries for her camera and fix her bike’s flat tire with a rubber glove and some glue. Even though the cries of the adventure genre being dead have never really been true, 2006 was probably the year it was relying the most heavily on life support. # 8 – Neverwinter Nights 2 I’ve played a lot of Neverwinter Nights 2, but I never get very far. The story is just painfully cliche and boring. The writing is dull, the D&D mechanics annoying, and really just everything about the game is mediocre. Except that it’s really pretty, I guess.

So, like any self-respecting shallow jerk, I keep trying to like the game. It’s attractive, other people seem to dig it, and I want to be where the cool kids are. But then I have to play through that stupid harvest festival or whatever it was again, and I lose my will to live. I hear the expansions add some good content, but I’ve never tried any of it. I guess I should, but something about skipping through the start of a game always feels off to me. Like, I wouldn’t start watching Breaking Bad in the middle of season three or anything, so why should I do that with a game? Although, to be fair, Walter White never made me endure an excruciating hour of Renfest tutorials, either. #7 – Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

Yet another game on my list with a Looking Glass pedigree, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic was created by Arkane Studios, whose previous game, Arx Fatalis, made my list back in 2002. (And their next game will show up when we get to 2012.) The Looking Glass bit comes into play by way of Floodgate Entertainment, which was made up by a bunch of former LG folks. Dark Messiah, I guess of Might and Magic although I wouldn’t know because the story is completely boring and I never liked the Might and Magic series anyway, is a game that isn’t quite sure what it’s supposed to be. One way to look at it is as a Source engine-powered version of the Hexen games with a little Thief sprinkled in for flavor. But the other way – probably the better way – to look at it is as a prototype for Dishonored. There are multiple ways to build out your character, multiple ways to proceed through each map, and there’s even a rope arrow that you’ll use all the time. There are magic spells, melee combat, and ranged attacks, but it’s the melee kills where you’ll feel the most connection to the (vastly superior) Dishonored. Dark Messiah isn’t a bad game, but it’s all over the place. There are brilliant moments that will make you feel like a powerful badass or a clever little bastard, but there are just as many (or more) moments when you’ll absolutely hate the game and curse everyone involved in its creation. It’s terribly unbalanced, especially once you make it through the game’s midpoint when you stop getting significantly more powerful but the enemies don’t, and certain builds become increasingly hard to play as the game goes on. It can be frustrating at times and downright maddening at others, but when the game hits the mark, it really hits it. If you like Hexen or Heretic, or Deus Ex or Thief, you’ll find something to like in Dark Messiah. You’ll just also find a lot to hate, too. #6 – SWAT 4: The Stetchkov Syndicate

Yes, I’m putting an expansion pack on my top ten games of the year. Some people might cry foul at this, since an expansion isn’t a proper game, but these are foolish people who will probably have no problem with me adding another expansion pack a little higher up on the list, because they don’t consider it an expansion when it clearly is. Whatever. People are weird. Everything I loved about SWAT 4 comes back in the expansion pack, only this time instead of disconnected SWAT calls, every mission progresses through a cohesive storyline, which is nice. If you care about that sort of thing in a game like SWAT 4, anyway. With the expansion pack adding 7 new missions to the base game’s 13, it brings to total up to 20 missions of brilliant, squad-based tactical FPS goodness, and I don’t care what anyone says. The Stetchkov Syndicate has some great, challenging missions and it stands as its own game. This is especially true since I’m only covering games I played on my PC and it’s 2006. The industry shift toward cross-platform titles and my aging PC at the time conspired against me when I started putting together my list, so you’ll just have to take what I can give you. I only played so many PC games in 2006, so I’m adding what I add. Deal with it. #5 – Rogue Trooper

A weird little game that I wish had become a proper series but am also kinda glad it never did because they’d just muck it up with modern AAA aesthetics and crap, Rogue Trooper is a quick romp through a bizarre world that is just good, simple fun. You play as – surprise – a genetically engineered trooper named Rogue who, through circumstances not entirely unforseen through the clever use of foreshadowing nomenclature, goes rogue after all his buddies get killed and he has to put their mindbrains inside his clothes and shit. What? Yeah. Whenever one of the GI troopers dies, you have 60 seconds to remove his “biochip” and slot it into something, like a gun, a backpack, or even your helmet. Once slotted, the troopers live on inside whatever you stuck them in, and lend a bit of AI control to whatever it is they’ve become. Your gun suddenly helps out with auto-aiming, or you can place it down as a turret. Your backpack can manufacture upgrades and ammo, and your helmet learns how to hack things and fly sci-fi helicopters and stuff. It’s weird and it’s short, but it’s tightly focused, well designed, and great fun to play. I’m not sure why all the genetically engineered troopers are blue, though. And I have no idea why all the blue dudes run around shirtless while all the blue girls get to wear sports bras, or why every single one of them has a white mohawk at birth, but I’ve been playing games a long time. I learned to stop questioning some things years ago. #4 – Company of Heroes

Hey, look. It’s a WWII game! Something new and different! Company of Heroes was gorgeous back in 2006, and nearly melted my PC even with scaled down graphics settings, but the gameplay was a fresh and innovative take on the RTS genre. Well, it was fresh and innovative for me, anyway. But I’d grown tired of RTSs by the time Company of Heroes came out, so some other title in the genre might’ve already done all the things it did, but who cares. I didn’t know about them at the time, and this is my list so you can just hush it. There’s light base building in CoH, but your resources come from captured control points that you can gain or lose throughout the course of a mission. This shifts the focus more on aggressive defense and inch-by- inch gains, and brings tactical strategic combat into the mix. I use tactical and strategic in the same sentence, because that’s really what the game tries to do. There’s more strategy involved than tactical commands, but the control you have over your units coupled with their significance in each setting means tactical use of them as part of an overal strategic plan is important. Which is all, like, super serious and crap. #3 – Hitman: Blood Money Probably my favorite entry in the Hitman series, Blood Money managed to distill the essence of what makes the franchise great and concentrated it into a tightly focused series of missions that range from assassinating the seedy former manager of an abandoned theme park, to stomping through the crowds of Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras while hunting down people in ridiculous bird costumes.

There’s really nothing new about Blood Money. It doesn’t radically change the franchise or try anything daring or risky, but what it does do, it does better than the series ever has. Fulfilling your objectives is always satisfying, and managing to achieve a Silent Assassin rating for any mission on the hardest difficulty is an incredibly difficult and rewarding experience. After the success of Blood Money’s focused approach on getting all the good parts of the franchise just right, the next game in the series decided nobody much liked the best game in the series, so they turned it into an testosterone-fueled game with grimdark action, a steamy shower scene, and sexy killer nuns in latex. Sigh. #2 – Half-Life 2: Episode One

Remember when I said a second expansion pack was going to make this year’s list? Well, here you go. Half-Life 2: Episode One is the first of three-but-really-two-because- we’re-never-getting-the-third-one-so-suck-it-up-buttercup add-on episodes for Half-Life 2. I bet nobody’s going to gripe about this expansion being on the list, because it’s Half-Life and people love a good double standard. Jerks. Episode One focused heavily on the relationship between Alyx Vance and Gordon “No Lips” Freeman, and felt a lot like I was playing a co-op game with an AI partner because I’m awful and nobody wants to play with me. Which was fine by me, because I’m kind of awful and nobody really wants to play with me. Taken together, Episode One and Two are arguably better than the entirety of Half-Life 2 itself, but I can’t take them together yet because this is 2006 and Episode Two hasn’t come out. Taken on its own, Episode One is a brief but enjoyable trek through City 17 as you try to escape before some Science Event happens and everything explodes or whatever. The focus is on working together with Alyx, who was woefully underutilized in the base game, and the approach works really well. Still could’ve used more Dog, though. #1 – Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

The sequel to one of the best adventure games of all time didn’t disappoint by the shift to 3D and away from the point-and-click mechanics of The Longest Journey. Sure, there were some clunky bits, and the introduction of combat was a ridiculous choice, but the story was still there. The characters – especially the new protagonist Zoë, as well as the return of April Ryan from the first game – were just as memorable and engaging as they ever were in the original, and the settings just as interesting and unique. It’s a very sad game, too. There’s an undercurrent of melancholy running through everything to the point that, even when things are going well for the characters, there’s always this sense that everyone knows that their happiness is tenuous, at best. I’m not sure if Ragnar Tørnquist was actually going for the sort of ambigious, elusive feeling of nihlism that the game gives off, but kudos to him if he was. Because it does exactly that. The whole game feels like a metaphor for lost innocence, really. The awkward and depressing transition from childhood wonder to depressing adult pragmaticality is conveyed not only through Zoë’s character arc, but through off hand, on-the-nose interactions, like when she has to cannibalize parts from her childhood stuffed animal. It’s a heartbreaking game, and a powerful one – if you’re in the mindset to take it in.

But it’s also an adventure game from 2006 that’s making the transition to 3D and trying to break through to a mainstream audience. That means there are plenty of missteps along the way, and your reaction to the game could be much different than mine. But for me, it was my game of the year. What can I say? It pushed my buttons.

My Top Ten PC Games of 2007 #10 – The Lord of the Rings Online One of my last dips into the tepid waters of the MMO world, The Lord of the Rings Online kind of reminded me of Ultima Online, but not enough to keep me playing very long. I remember it having a very detailed and interesting crafting system that was nice, and running around The Shire was a nerdy joy that warmed my cold, dark heart. But beyond that? Meh. MMO.

In its defense, it was a game more focused on story than most other MMOs, but it was a story I already knew, and any deviations from the established narrative – however slight – just felt off. If I were to go back and play an MMO today, I’d probably give LotR: Online another shot, but I’m not likely to do that. Massively multiplayer games tend to be absolutely filled with Internet People, so I like to avoid them whenever I can. #9 – DEFCON: Everybody Dies

Would you like to play a game? The most effective Wargames simulator this side of a VR-enabled Matthew Broderick, DEFCON is a bleak, disturbing look at mutually assured destruction, but in a super fun and stylish sort of way. Lots of blues. Very high technical. There’s not much to the game, but that’s more to do with elegance than simplicity. There’s plenty of strategy involved to emerge victorious, but the whole point of the game is that there are no winners in a game of global thermonuclear war. It’s a game every single Presidential candidate should have to play before going on stage at a debate to talk about how badass they’re going to be with the lives of other people’s children. #8 – S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

My PC could barely handle S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which has to be one of the most ridiculous acronyms I’ve ever heard. Supposedly, it stands for Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers, and Robbers, but I had to dig that up on the internet just now, because it was never made clear in the game so I guess it doesn’t matter. I’m just calling it Stalker, though. Like I said, my PC could barely run this monstrosity of a game, even though the graphical returns were meager at best. I don’t know much about programming and suchlike, but I always felt like Stalker didn’t really care about scalability or running on older machines, or even newer machines. When it came out, it was notoriously demanding, even on top of the line rigs. As a result, I never got very far in the game because I’d either get annoyed at getting a crappy framerate at the lowest detail settings, or I’d get frustrated with dying all the time. Maybe it was both. I never quite got Stalker, although I really loved its atmosphere. It absolutely nailed the tone it was going for, and the much-touted guy playing his guitar around a fire was as effective as everyone says it was. It was bleak and depressing, and if only my machine had been able to run it better, I probably would’ve been more willing to overlook its rough edges and dive into its depressing world. #7 – Team Fortress 2 An absolute gem when it came out, Team Fortress 2 was a Pixar movie come to life, if Pixar movies involved people on a Red Team killing people on a Blue Team for reasons never properly explained. The gameplay was fast, the character types well incorporated (even if everyone just wanted to be Engineers), and the art style phenomenal.

It’s just a shame Valve eventually made it Free to Play and completely ruined the game with add-ons and DLC and unlockable nonsense. I tried to get back into TF2 not long ago, and what I found was a jumbled mess of a game, so overcome with stupid add-on crap that the simple elegance of the original game had been entirely lost. But hey, some dude who killed me was wearing a pretty cool hat. So there’s that. #6 – Jade Empire

One of the very few Bioware games I actually like (the other being Knights of the old Republic) is, just as it was with KOTOR, entirely down to setting. Whereas one hooked me with Star Wars, Jade Empire snagged me with its mythical interpretation of ancient China. I loved it. I also enjoyed the one aspect of the game tons of people hated, so no real surprises there. I thought the combat was very well done, in a realtime rock-paper-scissors style that allowed for some truly epic Kung Fu battles with genuine strategy involved. Of course, you had to play on the hardest difficulty level for any of that to surface, and even then it was still way too forgiving, but I liked it all the same. The overall story was the Basic Bioware Plot, but the side and character quests made up for most of the main quest’s predictability. As did the setting, and the beautiful aesthetic the game offered. Everything just felt sufficiently mystical, bathed in faint glows and awash in colors that ended up making it feel more like playing inside a painting than anything else. #5 – Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened

Like chocolate and peanut butter, Sherlock Holmes and H. P. Lovecraft are two flavors that go surprisingly well together. The Lovecraftian elements take a while to get going, but once they do, the game hits its stride as Holmes and Watson are pulled hip deep into the waters of the Cthulhu mythos. It was the first title in Frogworks’ series to feature full 3D gameplay, which took the game in a new, more exploratory direction that the previous point-and-click titles weren’t really capable of. It misses the mark several times along the way, but it hits more often than it doesn’t. There’s a really stupid chase through an area that passes itself off as New Orleans for people who have never been there, and it doesn’t really work. The chase, I mean. I don’t really care it NOLA is depicted accurately or not. The first Gabriel Knight game got it mostly right, but missed a few key points . I don’t hold anything against The Awakened for getting it wrong, although there’s one puzzle where you can’t get to where you need to be because of a lingering swarm of giant mosquitoes. Which is about as accurate description of the Deep South as anyone could ever hope for, I guess. #4 – Half-Life 2: Episode Two Episode Two was the best part of the entire Half-Life saga that probably won’t ever be resolved until Valve licenses the property to a company who doesn’t own a massive online storefront and still cares about making games. Until that happens, we’re stuck with what we’ve got.

The interaction between Alyx and the player is the best it’s ever been, once you get through the boring bits at the beginning of the episode when Alyx needs to be saved by Male Power Fantasy #37. Once that’s done, the game really picks up and becomes a great single-player co-op experience. The final battle at the end of the episode is lengthy and memorable, without ever devolving to the point of a boss fight. It was satisfyingly frantic and ultimately rewarding. The ending cliffhanger was a real bummer, though. Ah, well. Maybe one day. I mean, nobody thought Duke Nukem Forever would ever come out, either. #3 – The Witcher

I did not finish The Witcher in 2007, but what I was able to play before I got to an area that very nearly melted my PC was an excellent return to form for the RPG genre. It was kinda/sorta/not really grimdark without being absurd (*cough* Dragon Age *cough*), and felt very grounded in “reality” – insomuch as there can exist a reality wherein a mutant white-haired assassin murders monsters, anyway. The initial release was a little rocky, but CD Projekt RED released an Enhanced Edition the following year which not only corrected most of the problems, but also added a bunch of stuff that wasn’t really necessary, but that contributed greatly to the quality of the overall product. This dedication to making the best game possible, as well as showing a devotion and commitment to its customers would come to define CD Projekt RED as the years went on, but more on that later. I wouldn’t finish The Witcher until I upgraded my machine a few years later, but it’s still getting a spot in my top three for 2007 because it not only completely captured me for the time I was able to spend with it, but it exposed me to a brand new type of fantasy world I hadn’t really considered before. It was a gritty fantasy, with one foot in myth and the other planted firmly in the depressing swamp of reality. Game of Thrones did it, too, which I hadn’t heard of it yet, either. But after playing The Witcher, I went looking. #2 – Penumbra: Overture

I came very close to giving this year’s top slot to Penumbra: Overture, but in the end I opted for a game that was arguably more original and clever than anything I’d seen in years. Which isn’t to diminish everything original and clever about Penumbra, because it did a lot of really cool stuff, as well. Part first-person adventure game, part survival horror, and part physics simulator, Penumbra hit all the right buttons with me. From keeping me fully immersed in the environment by having me actually interact with every object in physical ways (e.g. to turn a valve, most games would have you hold down a button; Penumbra makes you grab and actually turn it with your mouse), to the suspense of not knowing what was around the next corner, Penumbra captivated me. It was a fine first entry in an excellent series, and the folks behind it would eventually go on to create the gold standard for first-person horror gaming, but I’ll get to that in 2010. #1 – Portal (not Bioshock)

If I were making a Top Ten Games of 2007 list, Bioshock would probably be here. But it’s not, because this isn’t a top games list. It’s a list of the top 10 games I played on my PC the years they came out, and I did not play Bioshock on my PC. I played it on my Xbox 360. Like some kind of animal. (This will happen more and more, as this list moves through the late 2000s. Sorry.) I did play Portal on PC though, and it was amazing. Apart from the brilliant puzzle solving in the game, the narrative wrapped around everything was what really sold me. The dialog was sharp and witty, and the whole package was subversive and brilliant. It was funny, sometimes creepy, and always entertaining. The fact that Valve effectively turned a first person shooter into a puzzle game, then into an adventure game, and finally into a subversive tragic comedy was something I’d never seen before in a game, and wouldn’t see again until Portal 2, when they took it even further. It’s my PC game of the year for being the most original, most inventive, and most effective use of gaming as a unique storytelling platform than I’d ever seen before. And it was fun, too.

My Top Ten PC Games of 2008 This year’s list was probably the hardest to put together. Life was coming at me pretty hard in 2008, so it was a crappy year for me. I played a few good games, but mostly I stayed in my living room and played them on a console with a carton of chocolate ice cream and a bucket to catch my own tears by my side. I didn’t play much on the PC, and what I did play was generally awful. #10 – The Lost Crown

This game was generally awful. It’s a point and click horror game with a lot of pointing and clicking, very little horror, and tons of ridiculous character animations. Very, very slow and ridiculous character animations. Even the protagonist’s walk cycle is mess. Every time you click to move anywhere, his body just starts sliding across the ground for a couple of steps before his legs realize they’re supposed to be doing something. The good part of the game comes from the little town where all the lack of action happens. It’s made up of enhanced real world photos, and everything is presented in black and white, with small splashes of color for emphasis every now and then. This isn’t anything new, but where The Lost Crown succeeds is in never feeling like it’s going for the cheap artsy aesthetic. It just kind of…works. Shame about the rest of the game, though. #9 – Art of Murder: FBI Confidential

This game was also generally awful. Ostensibly a detective game, it’s mostly just an inventory-based point and click puzzler with no real redeeming qualities apart from the fact that it looks nice and the characters don’t look like they were animated by a particularly serious robot. You do solve crime, though. Along with doing things like trying to give a bottle of whiskey to a bum who doesn’t like whiskey, so naturally you have to switch the label on it so he thinks it’s scotch, so naturally you have to find a way to peel the label off by plugging up a sink with a drain stopper you find in a bathroom where you can’t use the sink, so naturally you take the stopper to a kitchen sink where it fits perfectly and allows you to soak the bottle until you can peel the label off the scotch and stick in on the whiskey bottle so the alcoholic bum will accept FREE ALCOHOL since he’s a liquor snob. Which seems like an awful lot of trouble for an FBI agent to go through, especially when it’s 2008 and we’ve got seven years of the Patriot Act working in our favor to rendition the hell out of this guy until he cracks down at gitmo or whatever. Waterboard him with bourbon. I dunno. Why are so many detective games not really detective games? They’re always detective-themed games, where you mostly do something else and only kinda/sorta do some detective work every now and then. If games had rules like food does with the FDA, then we’d have a bunch of Detective Flavored games like we have lots of cheap Chocolate Flavored candy with little to no actual chocolate in it. #8 – Overclocked: A History of Violence

This game was generally nothing special. It starts out as a promising point and click adventure with an interesting story involving several people snapping and going on homicidal rampages, but it quickly spirals down into the depths of repetitive nonsense and annoyingly unskippable crap. The worst part of the game is the entire central mechanic upon which it relies. You have to talk to characters to get them to have a flashback so you can figure out why they went all cray-cray and started killing people all day-day. What this translates to in the game, however, is just listening to the same damn dialog over and over and over and over and over and over again. It’s like that song that never freaking ended on that Shari Lewis show with the puppets. But worse. #7 – Alone in the Dark

This game was generally mediocre. It’s not as bad as its reputation, but it’s not really very good, either. The whole problem with rebooting Alone in the Dark (and they just keep trying, bless their little hearts), is that the first game was never really that good to begin with. It was impressive for its time, yes. It birthed the survival-horror genre, yes. But it was triangle man fighting triangle tentacle, and the controls and inventory and everything else about the game were all pretty bad. But the first game hooked players because it had atmosphere. It had to have atmosphere, because it sure as hell didn’t have much else going for it. But every time they try to reboot the series, they ignore atmosphere and try to shove some crappy AAA nonsense in to take its place. With this one, it was supposed to be advanced item interaction that was all super impressive in the carefully scripted demos leading up to release, but that all fell apart once us gamers got our hands on it and realized that everything pretty much came down to using sticky tape on crap and making flamethrowers out of hairspray bottles. By my count, we just had our third failed attempt at a reboot, with the latest going in the bizarre direction of making an ALONE in the Dark game multiplayer co-op. Because of course that makes sense. #6 – A Vampyre Story This game was generally disappointing. Crafted by a bunch of ex-LucasArts veterans, this point and click adventure should’ve been great. But it wasn’t.

It’s not bad. It has its moments. It’s cute. But it just doesn’t execute any one thing particularly well. The jokes fall flat more often than not, the animations aren’t bad, but they’re limited, and the locations aren’t very varied. I’d hoped A Vampyre Story would bring back the point and click comedy and revive the lost LucasArts charm, but I’d have to wait until Thimbleweed Park did that in 2016. Which it had better do, or I’m going to mail vials filled with my tears of disappointment directly to Ron Gilbert until he makes me laugh again. #5 – World of Goo

This game was generally inoffensive. It was basically a fun mobile game before there were really any mobile games, so it had no idea it was on the wrong platform. It’s a decent diversion from doing things like playing fun games, but it’s not much more than that. For those of you who don’t know what World of Goo is all about, it’s basically down to building wobbly towers out of gelatinous goop until they fall down and you realize you’ll never beat the high score you got that one time when you were just randomly clicking things while catching up on the first half of the final season of Battlestar Galactica and wondering just what the hell happened to Starbuck, anyway. Other than that, there’s not much else to the game. It’s cute and it’s fun in small doses, but it’s nothing all that special or interesting. And yet it’s #5 on this year’s list. Go figure. #4 – Left 4 Dead

This game is generally not too bad. It’s repetitive as all hell, but it takes a while before that sets in and everyone gets bored so they just start setting each other on fire. It’s a multiplayer co-op game where you fight off a zombie horde as your try to reach objectives. It’s fun. It encourages team play and cooperation, and even patience and understanding as you refrain from murdering the crap out of that idiot who ignited a gas can while we were all trapped inside a tiny closet. The only real problem with Left 4 Dead is that it always plays out the same way. The scenarios don’t really matter, because it’s always run here, shoot these things, go there. Repeat. The only time things get moderately exciting is when a giant Tank zombie comes out in the totally-unscripted and dynamically “directed” way that happens at the exact same point near the end of every damn scenario. Then, either everybody dies and the game is over, or one jerk manages to hide out near the boat while everyone else dies and then it’s game over, except for the one dude who ignored everyone else and lived because we all want to think the guy who lives in a horror movie is the noble hero who sacrifices and leads, but really it’s all down to whichever sniveling weasel managed to hide the best. Which kind of explains evolution, really. #3 – Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis

This game was generally decent. It’s more Sherlock Holmes, which is usually a good thing. There’s more Creepy Watson. There’s more Victorian London – a lot more of it, actually. The game seems to pride itself on how exactingly, painfully British it is, even going so far as to have entire swaths of the game built around British history as if I’m supposed to be intimately acquainted with whatever the hell happened in Trafalgar Square back in some historical period I never learned about because I was born in the filthy colonies. There’s plenty of detecting to be done, but the big problem with the Sherlock Holmes games is just how annoying all of it is. If I want to measure someone’s boot print, just let me click the measuring tape and then click the print. Don’t make me drag the tape across it like some kind of crime scene Bob Vila, because half the time I don’t do it right and Sherlock just says some bullshit to me like a condescending asshole and I have to do it all over again. The best parts of the game are when you get to fiddle around in Sherlock’s mini-laboratory to figure out what chemicals are in this bit of evidence, or where that bit of clay comes from. Also, I’m prettty sure it’s where he makes his drugs. #2 – Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway

This game was generally good. It’s more Brothers in Arms, which means it’s more Trying To Be Band of Brothers and Flanking All The Things, but it still works and it’s still fun. Hell’s Highway is the best looking game in the series, since the first two were made on older tech. Hell’s Highway was all next gen before that gen became last gen, which means it mostly looks the same as the other two game in the series, but shinier. I remember a lot of pre-release hype on the cutting-edge visuals of this one, but by the time it eventually came out after multiple delays, it didn’t look all that spectacular. It’s fun, though. And it looks as good as it needs to in order to get the job done, which consists of yelling at these dudes to lay down suppressing fire while yelling at these other dudes to follow me as we move around behind the Germans. The protagonist is also having some kind of bizarre, melodramatic existential breakdown throughout the whole game or something, but since none of that really had anything to do with flanking maneuvers, I didn’t pay much attention. #1 – Penumbra: Black Plague

This game was generally great. It’s more Penumbra, which means more physics puzzles and things going bump in the darkness. The main thing Black Plague did differently was realizing how much the first Penumbra’s combat sucked, so it pretty much got rid of it. The focus in Black Plague is on avoiding bad guys and hiding, which is what the guys over at Frictional Games would eventually specialize in by the time they got around to making the hiding simulator called Amnesia. Black Plague was originally going to be the conclusion of the two-part series, but then they went and added a third game that was really just an expansion pack that I didn’t care much about because I remember it taking place largely in some kind of dream world or fantasy world or I don’t know what world, but there were a lot of stone walls and a maze and screw it. If you play it, just end the series here before things go to crap. My Top Ten PC Games of 2009 Coming soon…

Christmas Saved

Last month, I was a mess. I was in a flat spin and spiraling my way into a deep, deep depression. I was even doing things like listening to country music, which is a good way to tell just how awful things are. It moves along a sliding scale, starting with Dolly Parton and ending somewhere around Kenny Rogers, which – if you’re listening to anything other than The Gambler – is when you know you’re nearing rock bottom.

Personally, I started by absentmindedly humming Hard Candy Christmas and worked my way down to listening to Kentucky Homemade Christmas in a parking lot while choking back tears and wondering where it all went wrong. Christmas can be awful. Later that day, I posted this: Trey’s Christmas Fund . It was a shot-in- the-dark, last ditch effort to try and appeal to the all seeing goat of the Internet for a small sip of the milk of human kindness. Which I guess in this metaphor would actually be goat’s milk, which I’ve always thought was kind of gross for some reason, so maybe let’s just go with human milk. Except that’s actually worse, because that has to mean breast milk and oh god what the hell is the milk of human kindness, anyway? I can’t imagine it’s anything not gross. But that’s not the point.

Screw the Elf on the Shelf. We got a Dwarf in a Drawer!

The point is, I was desperate to give my kid – the objectively best kid on ever on the planet – some kind of a Christmas that didn’t involve me turning tricks outside a Dollar Tree for enough money to buy a couple of things inside a Dollar Tree. He’s an amazing, wonderful nine-year-old boy, with a heart as big as Texas and a smile larger than…wait. I’m slipping into metaphor again, which kinda freaked me out a minute ago. Let’s just say he’s awesome and deserves way more than I could ever give him, even if I were a rich man. (Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.) So I wrote the post. Then I posted the post. Then people read the posted post, and then the most amazing thing happened: it worked. People began sending me money . Almost immediately, I started getting little dingle-ding-ping notifications from PayPal. People were helping. ME. Or, rather, they were helping Trey – who, let’s face it, is a much more likable guy than I’ll ever be. For the next few weeks, that little notification kept going off. $5 here, $25 there, $2, $7… – each notification was someone out there who gave a crap. Some came from people I know, some didn’t. Some people surprised me, some didn’t. But every last cent that came in went not only a long way toward saving Christmas for my little boy, but it saved me, too. Restored my faith in humanity, sort of thing. Without getting too sappy about it, you understand. I’d planned on writing a personal thank you to each person who helped out, but then again, I only expected a few people to help out. I never imagined there would be so many people out there who would care at all about the problems of some little family in some little no name Texas town. Anything I could try to write as a personal thank you would quickly turn into a form letter somewhere around the I don’t even know what number, because I lost count of how many email notifications I was getting. That isn’t to say that we struck it rich with your donations or anything. Most of them were very modest contributions that added up to us being able to give Trey a modest Christmas (slightly above really, thanks to a couple of really good sales and Amazon lightning deals). But there were a lot of them. Every single dollar helped, and all the small contributions quickly added up to larger presents, but I still have the post-Christmas crash to deal with, same as everyone else. The traditional post-Christmas coma.

Except I’m not just confronted with eating Beanie Weenies every night in January to make up for what I spent in December. I’m not more broke than I was a month ago – I’m the same broke. Because you can only ever really be just so broke. I don’t have credit cards, but I also don’t have money to pay the mortgage, and the bank is breathing down my neck. Foreclosure looms. I’m going to have to start juggling which utility works this month, and which one we can do without until next month. I still don’t know how we’re going to pay Trey’s school tuition for the rest of the year. Basically, everything is just as crappy as it ever was – but at least we gave Trey a good Christmas. At least he still doesn’t know anything is wrong. At least he went to bed on the 24th still believing in Christmas Magic, and woke up on Christmas Day to see it realized. And, at the very least, I still have that memory to hold onto while I continue fighting to keep the rest of our world from crumbling around us. And you guys made that happen.

I don’t know if I could’ve made it through this Christmas without what all of you did for us. I don’t know if I could’ve watched him walk into the living room Christmas morning, to see his face as reality came crashing over him like a horrible tidal wave. He still believes good always triumphs over evil, that love wins out over hate, that good people are out there in the world doing good things, and that he’s one of them. And you know what? I think maybe he’s right. Despite every horrible thing that has happened this year, after what happened this Christmas, I’m a little less cynical. A little less jaded. A little less defeated. Because good does triumph. Love does win. And good people are out there in the world, doing good things. You magnificent bastards are proof of that, which is just one more thing I’m grateful for. You grew this Grinch’s heart this year. All three sizes. And then some.

Trey's Christmas Fund In my last post, I wrote about how amazing the GOG.com community is, and about how GOG’s Twitch Stream Team helped me get through a rotten Thanksgiving . They were great, as usual, but another – and infinitely more terrifying – holiday is coming up: Christmas.

And I don’t have any money. Which is where Twitch comes in! UPDATE: You did it! You saved Christmas! Click here for a small token of my thanks. If you don’t know what Twitch is, it’s a streaming service that lets people watch other people playing video games. I know what you’re thinking, but it’s a lot more fun than it sounds. There’s a chat channel attached to the stream, so you get to interact with a bunch of great people while usually laughing at the antics of the streamer. It’s a good time. TRUST ME. But what does Twitch have to do with me not having any money for Christmas? I’m glad you asked! You might recall that, after finishing my horror novella back in October, I added a Donation page to this site. Many some a few groovy people donated, and helped me pay a couple of bills. That was great and all, but I have more bills coming up – and, more importantly, I have Christmas coming up. And no money to buy the best kid on the planet any presents. I was laid off back in May, after my position was outsourced. I made it through two rounds of layoff before a middle manager I like to call Hillbilly Voldemort was inexplicably promoted to upper management, who then proceeded to use the layoffs as an excuse to get rid of everyone he didn’t like. So that was fun. So now I’m a 40 year old systems administrator with decades of experience, and I can’t find a job. I live in the swamplands of Southeast Texas, in a city that God forgot called Beaumont. It’s a petrochemical town, which means there are tons of jobs if you’re a refinery worker, but not so much if you’re in IT. Around here, computers are how the devil gets inside you.

We have the World’s Largest WORKING Fire Hydrant, though. So there’s that.

Moving isn’t an option either, unless the job is absolutely perfect. My stepson, Trey – the aforementioned BEST KID EVER – needs to see his dad, so moving would only complicate his visitation schedule. I’d rather avoid that by finding remote work again (which is what I did at my last job), but I haven’t had any luck so far. (But feel free to check out my resume and hire me!) Now Christmas is coming up right after my unemployment ran out, and things are pretty desperate. I need help. And, while I’m not above charity, I would rather do something to earn a little money for the holiday. Which is where Twitch comes in. I’m going try doing a little fundraiser for Trey’s Christmas by performing a marathon stream of a full play-through of Baldur’s Gate. Which, if you know my history with that game , should be hilarious. I’ve set up a tip system for the Twitch channel, which will make donating super easy during the stream. However, if you hate video games and would rather just send me a few clams the old fashioned way, you can just head over to my Donate page and take it from there.

Clearly, I’m a professional book cover artist.

As a way of thanking you for your support, everyone who donates – either on my site here, or over Twitch – will receive a DRM-free eBook of my horror novella. (Which you can also read for free here .) The Baldur’s Gate stream will start this Saturday, December 5, at 10:00 A.M. CST, and will probably run all weekend. (Baldur’s Gate is a loooooong game.) I’ll also be doing practice streams all week long, starting at 6:00 P.M. CST every night this week, so you don’t have to wait for the marathon stream this weekend to swing by and send me a tip. I might even do some surprise streams, if I’m feeling really wacky. So jump on in and watch me flail around with no idea what I’m doing, while I get a handle on streaming. Mock my ineptitude! Good times. Whenever the stream is active, you can go watch it by clicking here . I’ll also add an embed of the stream to this post, just below this paragraph. While I’m not streaming, you’ll just see a graphic letting you know what I’ll be streaming next, and when.

Watch live video from Unclejeet on www.twitch.tv

Before you go, let me tell you a little about Trey. He came into my life nearly eight years ago, after he’d just turned two. I’d just been through a terrible divorce, and his mother, Brittany, was going through the same thing when we met. We were friends first, with the potential for more always on the table, but I didn’t get to meet Trey until we were serious. He didn’t need more upheaval in his life, if we weren’t going to work out. But we did. And I’ll never forget the first night I met him. I went over to Brittany’s apartment, we ate dinner, and then turned on Charlotte’s Web. By the end of the movie, Trey was in my lap and I was done. Instant, unbreakable bond. Brittany and I were married around a year later, and have been a happy family ever since. Meeting my wife and son changed my life. I was heading down a rocky path, and they literally saved me from doom. I owe them everything, and now I can give them nothing. I feel absolutely worthless. As for what makes Trey so special, read this from my last post: About a month ago, he earned $10 from his Math teacher at school for having the best grade in his class on a test. When I picked him up from school and he told me about it, he said he wanted to donate his prize to charity. He’s nine years old, that $10 was all the money he had in the world – and he wanted to give it away. He is amazing.

So he did. I took him to get a money order since he doesn’t have a checking account because he’s 9, and he sent his life fortune to the UNHCR, to help Syrian refugees. (Thanks to Neil Gaiman’s influence, which just goes to show how important Good People are.) While adults are still busy arguing over whether to extend basic human decency to those in need, my kid just went ahead and did it. Because he’s a better man than most of the grown-ups I know. Then he took it a step further, while composing his letter to Santa Claus:

“I know I’ve been really good this year and you might have a lot of presents for me, but I don’t really need anything. I already have a great life, so please give my presents to kids whose lives aren’t so great right now. Like maybe the kids in Syria who need them more than I do. If you really want to bring me something, just surprise me. I’ll be happy about that.”

He really is the best kid ever – and yes, he still believes in Santa. He believes hard, too – which is going to make this year all the more painful, when I can’t buy him anything. Is there any worse way for such a great kid to find out the bitter truth than an empty tree on Christmas morning? So please, if you have any scrap of generosity left in the dark cockles of your cold, black heart, send a little of it my way. Help me make my kid’s Christmas better than it could ever be without your support. Help me not feel like a worthless failure. Just…help. Ok? *sniff* I’m no good at self-promotion, so I’ll only be sharing this on my own social media outlets. If you can’t help out with a donation, maybe you could share this post? The more people who show up to the stream, the better my chances of finding enough kind hearts to make my kid’s Christmas not suck. So put it on your Facebook. Tweet it to your followers. Share it on message boards, in forums, and chat groups. Pass the URL around at Bingo night. I dunno. Whatever works! THANKS!

UPDATE: You did it! You saved Christmas!

Thank you! I don’t have the words to express how amazed and awe-struck I am by the selfless generosity of so many of you. Your kind donations have given me the means to give Trey the Christmas he deserves. It will be a modest Christmas, but it will be Christmas – and all of it is because all of you. And you’re all wonderful and amazing.

One thing, though. Many of you who donated did so almost apologetically, including notes like, “I’m sorry it’s not much, but I hope it helps.” WHICH IS CRAZY. Of course it helps! Any dollars is better than no dollars, so every last cent has mattered. Each dime, every nickel, and all the pennies have mattered. You matter. I still have bills left unpaid, I’m behind on his school tuition, and I don’t even want to talk about the mortgage – but none of that matters right now. Every last cent of the money you’ve given has gone toward giving Trey the best Christmas morning I can possibly give him, and it will be a morning he remembers. He asked for nothing and expects nothing, but he deserves the world. And you guys have helped me give as much of it to him as I can. I’ll be sending out emails to all of you very soon (or possibly after Christmas, because things are kind of crazy) with the eBook and a special video just for you guys, detailing everything you made happen. I want to share the joy on his face with everyone who made it possible, but that will have to wait until Christmas has happened. I’ll probably even write a longer post thanking each of you, once I’m able to work through all these Feels enough to be able to Words again. I hate waiting, though. So I whipped up this small token of my gratitude to tide you ‘over until I can do something better. Like I said, I don’t have the words right now. But that’s why god invented Warren Zevon…

Life Bytes: Chapter 11 It’s Thanksgiving. I’m still unemployed, so I’m a little more broke today than I was yesterday. I’m sick, my wife is sick, and our kid is at his dad’s for the holiday. When he gets home, I’ll go buy a Christmas tree with money I don’t have that I can’t afford to put any presents under, and that’s probably how he’ll find out the truth about Santa Claus.

Life bites.

Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek

●Introduction ●Chapter One ●Chapter Two ●Chapter Three ●Chapter Four ●Chapter Five ●Chapter Six ●Chapter Seven ●Chapter Eight ●Chapter Nine ●Chapter Ten: Ultima 9 Edition ●Chapter Eleven ●BONUS FEATURE: Baldur's Gate ●BONUS FEATURE: Baldur's Gate 2 ●BONUS FEATURE: FPS Retrospective ●BONUS FEATURE: Star Wars Games I started the day off bleak and miserable, so I decided to do what I always do when depression’s razor claws dig deep into the tender bits of my fleshier regions: I retreated into nostalgia. Which is what this whole Life Bytes series is about, really. Wistfully looking back on yesterday, when things made sense and the world seemed kind of fair. Games were black and white – you were a good guy fighting bad guys, or sometimes you were a bad guy and that was okay, too. There were clear boundaries. You just had to stay within them, and everything was fine. This naive thought process extended beyond the games, too. When I was a kid growing up in the ’80s, anything was possible. ( More on that here . ) By the time the grunge-tinted ’90s rolled around, I graduated high school, started college, and became an obnoxious 20-something. And life was still good. I still believed in all the same things, even if I grew a little less innocent with each passing year. I still thought hard work would be rewarded with something other than just more work. I still believed in the American dream. I still bought into the idea that you could be anything you wanted, if you just worked hard enough. So that’s what I did. I worked. A lot. Which leads us into the new century. When everything went to hell. My last entry covered Ultima IX , which was released in 1999. I haven’t posted a new entry since then, because I didn’t want to get into the 2000s. The turn of the century, for me, marks an unhappy time in my life. Shortly after the nation was forever changed by the September 11th attacks in 2001, I began my own little medieval times: my Dark Ages, if you will. The whole period represents nothing more to me than wasted potential, missed opportunity, and lost innocence.

This is coming. I don’t like to think about those years, much less write about them. But if I’m going to continue this series, I guess I kind of have to.

But not today. Today, I need one more dip into the soothing waters of nostalgia before the 2000s come along and pee in the pool. I need…GOG. For a nostalgia-obsessed freakazoid like myself, there is nothing better than GOG.com . In the past, it was just a great place to buy good old games and some amazing new ones at a great price and DRM-free. But sometime last year, I found the GOG.com Twitch channel , and I discovered how amazing the GOG community is. The stream team is great, the chat regulars are amazing, and no one tolerates jerkfaces. That’s not to say that there’s any specific anti-jerkface policy or anything – and the moderators rarely flex any enforcement muscle. Rather, it’s just that a sort of self-policing thing organically happens in the chat, where annoying Internet People feel unwelcome as long as they’re being annoying Internet People. It’s kind of like spraying a petri dish with antibacterial juice and then watching as nothing awful grows in it.

People are nice to each other. Decent. It’s as welcoming a community as the one Jenny Lawson has built around TheBloggess , only it includes video games. If Jenny was a gamer, she’d stream for GOG.com. Truth. For example, shortly after I woke up this morning feeling awful and depressed, I tweeted about not being able to afford to buy any presents to put under the Christmas tree this year, and about how my son deserves better than me. (I feel absolutely worthless.) Almost immediately, I started getting messages from GOGers. They sent me kind words of support and compassion, of understanding and encouragement. Unprovoked, unsolicited kindness: the GOG community defined. I’m still going to stress about Christmas, even though my kid isn’t expecting any presents this year – not because he understands how much money we don’t have right now, but because he is amazing and wonderful. About a month ago, he earned $10 from his Math teacher at school for having the best grade in his class on a test. When I picked him up from school and he told me about it, he said he wanted to donate his prize to charity. He’s nine years old, that $10 was all the money he had in the world – and he wanted to give it away.

He is amazing.

So he did. I took him to get a money order since he doesn’t have a checking account because he’s 9, and he sent his life fortune to the UNHCR, to help Syrian refugees. (Thanks to Neil Gaiman’s influence, which just goes to show how important Good People are.) While adults are still busy arguing over whether to extend basic human decency to those in need, my kid just went ahead and did it. Because he’s a better man than most of the grown-ups I know. Then he took it a step further, while composing his letter to Santa Claus:

“I know I’ve been really good this year and you might have a lot of presents for me, but I don’t really need anything. I already have a great life, so please give my presents to kids whose lives aren’t so great right now. Like maybe the kids in Syria who need them more than I do. If you really want to bring me something, just surprise me. I’ll be happy about that.” He really is the best kid ever – and yes, he still believes in Santa. He believes hard, too – which is going to make this year all the more painful, when I can’t buy him anything. Is there any worse way for such a great kid to find out the bitter truth than an empty tree on Christmas morning?

He’s smart, too.

I’ll get back to writing the next real chapter in this series soon enough, but today I need my GOG friends. As I said, I’m sick and broke, so there will be no Thanksgiving feast with friends and family today. There’s just me, my equally sick wife, and our dogs. And Netflix. Obviously. But there’s also GOG.com, and the stream team. And the chat. And the games. Life might suck right now – and I’ll be just as broke and unemployed tomorrow as I am today – but for now, I can laugh and smile with friends I’ve never met. I can crack lame jokes, watch fun games being enjoyed, and generally not feel like I’m a Dickensian street urchin standing outside life’s bakery with my face pressed up against the window. Thanks, guys.

Beyond The Fields

I wrote this slightly creepy, family-appropriate story around 15 to 20 years ago, and dug it out of mothballs to read to my kid tonight after trick-or-treating. I thought it might be fun to share it here too, for All Hallow’s Read. You know, just in case any of you might want to read it to your own kids tonight. Get them in the spooky spirit. (If you’d prefer a much scarier story for grown-ups, try this .) Happy Halloween! A few weeks after my thirteenth birthday, three friends and myself began to concoct one of our usual mythic dreams of adventure. I grew up in either a large town or a small city, depending on your economic point of view. Almost the entire city-town was a suburb. We had a downtown, but there was hardly anything there other than city hall and the jailhouse. We had an indoor shopping mall, which was rather small but still the central vein of commerce for the area. Although such things never bothered me much as a child, I now sometimes wonder where anyone made any of the money they spent at the mall. The rest of the city-town was houses. Houses and woods. There were lots of woods. My house sat in a neat suburb in the west end of town. The west end was, apparently, where the rich people lived. I never thought of my family as rich, though…which I suppose was more or less accurate, and became evident not even a year after the event I’m about to describe, when our landlord politely evicted us from our home a few days before Christmas. A few months prior, in the prime of autumn, is when my birthday occurred and the scheming began. There was a section of woods near my house, beyond some oil fields, which was reached via an old shale road. It was forbidden by the parents of the neighborhood that any child should venture beyond the small patch of woodland before the road, which was really just a facade to hide the oil fields. I suppose the fear was that one of us would undoubtedly, and rather stupidly, attempt to inspect one of the insect-like oil pumps and be caught and mangled in its machinations. Whatever the parental logic, it was a commandment sent from on high to us children – and we dared not break it. Well, most of us dared not. All save one. His name was John Westgate, but we all called him Bird for reasons I’ll get to in a minute. He was a terribly sick little boy, severely undeveloped for his age, and constantly on medication of some variation or another. He’d had open-heart surgery shortly after his birth, to correct some defect which none of us could pronounce except for Bird and his parents. He was one of the first babies the procedure was used on, which was a fact he reminded us of constantly. His mother worried over him without end, as one would expect, and rarely let him out to play with the other kids in the neighborhood. This method of parenting created a rather strange child that was more introverted at age ten than most adults I’ve met as I’ve gone through life. On the rare days when he was feeling healthy and able, or when his mother wasn’t looking, Bird would come out to play with us. We’d taken to calling him Bird earlier, during the summer, when another neighborhood kid got a BB Gun for his birthday. There were scores of birds in our neighborhood, which was odd considering the severe and curious lack of trees in the area. In the entire neighborhood, excluding the woods of course, there were maybe seven trees. There were a lot of saplings, but only seven trees. However, we had power lines galore and the birds seemed rather fond of them. One afternoon that summer, myself and Andy, Bird, and a kid named Charlie all met in a vacant lot a few houses down from my house. Here, power lines crisscrossed and it was a favorite resting spot for the birds. Andy was first, since it was his gun, and after loading a palm full of BB’s into the rifle, he pumped it up until it took both he and Charlie pushing together to close the plunger. Andy carefully took aim, spouted off some hunter-in-the-woods Errol Flynn nonsense, and squeezed the trigger. The shot apparently missed enough to not startle the birds in the slightest. Next up was Charlie, who missed as well. I was next, but for some reason that I can’t recall at the moment, I passed the gun to John. Andy pumped it for him, since he lacked the strength for anything beyond three pumps, and handed the rifle back to John. He took aim, very carefully and very quietly. He pulled the trigger slowly, and a bird fell from the wire as hundreds of feathers began flapping madly above us through a deafening squawk of panic. We all screamed in excitement and ran to where the bird fell. Andy was the fastest runner, so he got there first. “Guys! This is awesome!” he shouted. Charlie and I ran up behind him and looked down. The bird was there, slowly moving itself a bit. There was no blood, though, and the BB hadn’t broken the skin. “Aw, it’s just stunned,” came from Charlie. Just before John caught up to the rest of us, I started prodding the little thing with my foot. As John walked up, it began to try to stand and squawked a bit. It was a pitifully tiny sound, and it made it just as he got to the scene and looked down. “Man, this sucks,” said Andy as he kicked some dirt beside the bird. “I don’t know,” said Charlie. “It might be dying.” I jumped in, offering brilliant kid logic. “It’s not dying, moron. It’s just stunned. If it was hurt, there’d be blood.” Just then, John got on his knees and reached out for the bird. Andy shot his hand out in front of him as John reached for the confused creature. He shouted, “Don’t touch it! You’ll get rabies!” Charlie, always handy with a random fact, chimed in. “Birds don’t carry rabies. You might get mites, though. Get it? Might get mites?” “Shut up,” said John. He reached out and picked up the bird. It squirmed in his hand as its squawks got louder. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Shut up,” he replied. Without saying another word, he just turned around and started out of the vacant lot, back toward his house. We all ran up behind him, shouting all sorts of nonsense about how the bird was fine and who cared, anyway? But John didn’t say a word. He just kept walking silently away from us. Just before we left the field, I grabbed his shoulder. “Come on, man. It’s just a stupid bird. It’s not your fault,” I said. John turned, looked up at me, and told me to &!%$ off. None of us had ever heard John swear, ever. I took my hand off his shoulder and took a step back. I could see tears in his eyes. A few weeks later, we’d all but forgotten about the bird. John and his mother tried to nurse the thing back to health, but it died anyway. John wanted to take it to the vet, but his mother convinced him that it wouldn’t have done any good. They’d buried it after a few days, after John’s repeated insistence, in a private ceremony in his backyard. Once we got wind of that, his name was permanently changed. The scheming after my birthday began as it usually did. We wanted to set out on an adventure. Andy offered up stories about how some bank robbers had stashed their loot in the woods beyond the shale road and oil fields. Charlie told him he was full of it, and I offered up my own idea for adventure. I’d heard my mother tell me about a kid that got caught in one of the oil pumps, and how horribly he died. Of course, it was just a story to keep us from venturing out there, but it was a story apparently concocted in unison by all the parents of the neighborhood – so we’d all heard it, and we all believed it. What the other parents didn’t tell their children, though, was something that my mother was happy to embellish upon. The kid’s ghost still walked the woods around the oil fields, trying to find its lost head. I, in turn, embellished further. I spun what was apparently a very convincing yarn about how there was something evil in the woods that kept the kid’s ghost alive and walking. The kid’s moaning could be heard at night, if you listened closely enough. This was true, in the sense that you could hear something coming from beyond the shale road at night. Granted, we all knew it was merely the metal of the oil pumps expanding and contracting – but it was enough to convince the other kids that my story could be genuine. This all sounded like a great adventure, and one in which we could potentially dare each other into grand acts of stupidity and torment. We decided to camp out one night beyond the oil fields. I’d pick the spot because I knew where the ghost was. Andy would provide the sleeping bags, and Charlie would supply the cover story. His parents traveled a bit during the year, on the weekends, to visit his sister at school a few hours away. He was the oldest among us, beating me to thirteen by about three months, and his parents let him stay home alone. We would all sleep over at his house, if we could get our parents permission. We could and we did, although I had to swear to keep my room clean and practice my piano every night. Andy didn’t really have to make such concessions. His mother let him have a surprising amount of freedom, which we all envied. We couldn’t understand then why his divorced mother would let Andy go where he pleased and stay as long as he wanted, provided she had a boyfriend at the time – but secretly I think that we all wished our mothers would do the same. The three of us were at Andy’s house, gathering supplies and preparing for the outing, when Bird knocked on the door. We hadn’t invited him on the camp-out for the simple reason that, if we had, there would have been no camp-out at all. He would tell his mother, who would tell our mothers, and then the whole thing would be over before it ever got started. We took turns explaining to him that we would have invited him, surely, but we hadn’t seen him at school the past week and assumed he was sick. He assured us that he was fine now, and we had no real choice left but to invite him. Surprisingly, Bird didn’t tell his mother. Instead, he brought his own sleeping bag and three flashlights. Part of our arrangement was no flashlights though, so we left them at Charlie’s and headed out for the woods beyond the shale road. We never made it past the oil fields. We set out late in the afternoon, and dusk was on our heels as we headed down the shale road. The sun had fully set by the time we neared the first of the pumping rigs. It was monstrous in its size. We’d all seen them, from time to time, along the highway – but this was the first close encounter with them for any of us. We pressed on a bit, past a few more pumps, until it was almost completely dark and the noises started. They were subtle at first, small metallic pings from every direction. Andy was the first to notice them. “You guys hear that?” he asked. None of us answered, save for a unanimous head nodding. “Maybe it’s just the pumps,” he offered hopefully. We tried to keep walking, but the sounds started getting louder. Louder, and different. “Scratches,” said Charlie, “it sounds like something’s making scratches.” We all took turns looking around, peering out into the impenetrable darkness. I spoke softly. “We should have brought flashlights,” I whispered. I felt a light tap on my shoulder, and turned to see Bird’s hand pulling back. “What?” He said nothing, but instead pulled a flashlight from his jacket pocket. “Excellent,” I told him. I aimed in the general direction of the closest noise and turned the flashlight on. Andy, unaware of the flashlight’s presence, let out a quiet yelp when a bit of an oil pump was illuminated out of nowhere. Charlie punched me in my arm. “We said no flashlights. What’s the matter? Scared?” he said, insult dripping from his mouth. “Bird brought it,” I shot back in defense. Charlie just sighed, and in one motion managed to roll his eyes, turn his head, and kick some loose dirt onto my foot. “Whatever,” he said. I traced the pump with the beam of the flashlight, exploring for any hint of what was making the scratching noises. Aside from an expected group of roosting birds, which appeared very much dormant until I shot at them with the light, there was nothing. They flew away, Andy and I jumped back dramatically, and then it was quiet again. Quiet, except for the tinny pings and the scratches. We could place a vague direction for each little creak and moan of contracting metal, and so our confidence in that regard was boosted somewhat. Of course, the yin to that yang was that, while we had no idea what was making the scratching noises, we were also at a complete loss as to being able to detect exactly where those noises were coming from. Andy snatched the flashlight from my hand. “Look,” he shouted as he painted a nearby tree with the beam. “What?” asked Charlie. “It’s just a tree,” I said. Andy argued. “No,” he said. “Look, right there on the ground. Beside the tree. What is that?” We squinted our eyes for no reason. “Get closer,” I commanded. Andy took a few steps forward before turning back to look at us. He didn’t have to say anything for us to know that he needed backup. Charlie and I exchanged a quick glance and a mutual shoulder shrug, then caught up with him. We walked slowly forward toward the tree. Just when we were almost near enough to make out the shape lying quietly in the shadows, a loud shriek shot through my right ear. I jumped back in terror as my heart decided that this was no place to be at all, and tried to crawl down into my stomach. I closed my eyes, and only managed to muscle them open with great effort. When I could see again, I was greeted with a vision of a maniacal Charlie, who was clutching his stomach in exaggerated hysteria. “Screw you,” I barked as I turn my back on him. “Shut up, both of you,” commanded Andy, who was a few steps in front of us now, and right on base of the tree. He froze. Charlie quickly stopped laughing, and we moved in beside Andy. There was a small patch of leaves covering something, with hints of gray sticking out between the foliage. A thin ribbon of pink was slipped underneath and to the right, and there was movement all across it. I knelt down while Andy focused the light. I realized what the movement was, but Bird beat me to it. We’d all forgotten he was even there. I remembered him giving me the flashlight, but that was my most recent thought of him. He’d been rather quiet through all of this. He walked up now, slowly and calmly. He picked up a stick from the ground and brushed away the leaves with it. “It’s dead,” he said in passing. “Probably died a few days ago. Look at the flies on its tail.” He knelt down and started prodding the thing with the stick. “Look at how mushy it is.” Andy, who was bent over slightly and holding his hands on his knees asked, “What is it?” Bird stood up and let go of the stick, which fell silently to the ground. “It’s a possum. A dead possum,” he said. “How do you know?” asked Charlie. “Because flies are eating it,” Bird responded. Charlie shook his head. “No, how do you know when it died?” Bird just looked at him. “Because that’s what happens after a few days,” he said sharply before turning his back to us, walking away into the woods past the oil fields. I don’t remember much of what happened next. Bird just walked away, leaving Andy, Charlie, and I standing by the tree. After a few seconds, I remember that one of us yelled something at him. He didn’t yell back. All I remember after that is the noise. In the excitement of our discovery, we’d forgotten about the scratches. They decided to remind us that they were still there. They started small, with a tiny scratching somewhere in the distance. Then they grew louder as they also grew in number. Eventually they surrounded us, light taps and scrapes on metal grew into louder and heavier chalkboard nails. Louder and louder they grew, behind us and beside us, above us and all around us. They grew heavier, too. It was no longer a scratching on metal, but a slashing of it. We could hear it with enough clarity to picture all of the oil pumps around us being ripped to pieces by something that we couldn’t see. Gashes appeared in the metal around us, in our minds, and something was slashing at it. Slashing at us. We ran. I remember that much. Running and screaming, the beam from the flashlight bouncing wildly around in front of us, not so much showing us where we were going, but all the places that we weren’t. Eventually, Andy stumbled a bit and dropped it. By then, though, it didn’t matter. We were back on the shale road, out of the oil fields and near enough to the neighborhood to pick up the spilled light of the street lamps. Once back on blacktop, we slowed down. Feeling more secure under the glow of the street lamps, and surrounded by cut grass and landscaped shrubbery, we stopped and allowed the breath we’d left behind in the fields to catch up with us and get back in our lungs where it belonged. We were so relieved, each of us, to be back in the security of civilization that it took several minutes before we realized that one of us wasn’t there. We’d forgotten Bird. Our parents, minus Andy’s mother, formed a makeshift search party the next morning. We went with them, in the daylight, out onto the shale road and beyond it, into the oil fields. What we found when we got there was absolute normalcy. There was no ripped metal, and no oil pumps lying in ruin. Everything was as it should be. Everything, that is, except Bird. He wasn’t there. We led our parents to the tree where we’d found the possum, only it wasn’t there either. The patch of leaves, yes. The stick Bird had used to poke at its carcass was there as well, but the animal was gone. We all fanned out, each kid sticking close to his parents, with Andy following Charlie. We looked for hours. We shouted until our voices rasped with gurgling consonants. We couldn’t find him. After hours spent searching, we gathered together into one group again, and headed back to the neighborhood. Our parents decided to call the police. Johnny was missing. I remember the walk back the most. I don’t remember the details of the it, except that it was silent. Barring the crunching leaves beneath our feet, there was no sound. No sound that I could hear, anyway. I was feeling something then that I’d never felt before. There was a hole where my stomach should have been, only it was more than a hole because it seemed to be sucking the rest of my insides into it. Our friend was lost, and it was our fault. My head was filled with concentration on the happenings inside my body. I completely lost track of my feet. It was more like I wasn’t there than anything else. A kind of floating. Then, without warning, there was a commotion. My stomach found its way back home, my mind reassembled itself, and I located my missing feet. They were running toward something. I looked ahead, and could see where they were heading. The entire group of us was racing to an oil pump. We’d passed it on the way in, but there was something new about it now. Something beside it, sprinkled with leaves. We got closer. There were flies. A man shouted. A woman fell to her knees. I saw what it was. He was lying there beside the oil pump, a few handfuls of leaves having fallen on top of him. Someone brushed them off. Something red smeared on his jacket. Blood. There were flies. I don’t know how we didn’t see him when we passed the pump on our way in. I don’t know what happened after my mother dragged Andy and I away and back home. I only remember seeing the blood. It came from what must have been thousands of tiny scratches all over his face and hands, his clothes, his eyes. His throat. Thousands of them. Tiny. My mother dragged us away. That night I couldn’t sleep. I was in my bed, covered up with my mother beside me. I’d been too scared to sleep alone. She fell asleep holding me, and I was caught under her arm. I tried closing my eyes. I tried counting sheep. I tried not trying. I just couldn’t stop hearing the scratches. They were in my head now, scratching at it from the inside, scraping against my skull. Then there was a tap. It was light at first, then another came. Tap. Tap tap. Louder, and not inside my head this time. Tap tap tap. I shot up. My mother startled awake. She slurred confused questions at me, wanting to know what was wrong. I didn’t hear her. I just heard the tapping. The tapping. I looked around. Tap tap. It was coming from my window. I shoved myself back against the wall my bed rested on. I brought my knees, shivering, up to my chest and held them there. My mother shook me, begging me to tell her something. Instead, I just pointed. I pointed to the window. She got up, went to the window, and pulled the curtain cord to raise the blinds. There was nothing there. Tap tap. My mother looked down at the window. I shivered – she’d heard it this time. It was real. She looked out. Tap tap tap. It got dark. The next thing I remember, my mother was stroking my hair and humming to me. I’d passed out. “What was it?” I asked her, pleadingly. “What was what?” she asked back. “At my window,” I said with a shake in my voice, not really wanting to know the answer. “Nothing,” she said, as she rocked me in her arms. “Just a bird.” *******

Happy Halloween!

Supernatural - The Aftermath

Guys. IT’S ONLY A STORY. You know, for Halloween. Please don’t call the cops on me. Again. If you’ve been following the little horror series I’ve been writing all month for Halloween , then you might’ve noticed a new update I posted to it last night, wherein I was forced to explain that it was only a story because this is Texas, where people can apparently convince the police that shadow ghost demons are real and need to be investigated. Which is why three officers showed up at my house last night and interrogated me in my own living room. After they saw that my wife and child were fine, that I was fine, that everyone was fine, they eventually left laughing about the whole thing and clearly annoyed that they were ever called out to begin with. But the point is that I had the cops called on me OVER A GHOST STORY. (Pssst! Hey, you. Did you know you that could pay what you for a cool eBook version of the Supernatural story? Because you can! Ask me how .) In their defense, they’re required to investigate any calls that come in, and the person who called them made sure to send them carefully edited and very specific quotes from the story, with no context or explanation, which is probably why the officers were pretty confrontational when they first showed up, with one of them taking the lead and trying to coax me into telling them that I was depressed and violent. It was surreal. She just kept repeating questions like: ●Have you ever been depressed? – “Um, yeah. Who hasn’t?” ●Have you been struggling with depression? – “Sure.” ●Do you sometimes want to hurt other people because of your depression? – “Uh. No.” ●This is about your blog post, where you wrote about wanting to hurt your family. Are we not supposed to take that seriously? – “Well, the post isn’t about hurting my family. It’s a horror story. About ghost demons. For Halloween.” ●So you haven’t hurt anyone? – “Uh. No.” ●Because your post says… – “It also says I’m being stalked by a shadow ghost demon. Do you believe ghost demons are real, too?” It was at that point that I went and got Brittany out of bed, so that they could see that she was fine and unharmed. Trey was already in the living room, happily playing on his computer the whole time. Once Brittany came out and saw the cops, she just started laughing. They saw that her face was very much un- hit and that everything was fine. Then, we all laughed about it, they said goodnight, and went on their way.

At first, I was kind of flattered that anyone would actually believe the story enough to call the police. I mean, that’s a pretty big compliment to a writer. I also thought it was really sweet that someone was concerned enough to call the police to come check on us. But mostly, I was shocked that I was answering my door and being grilled by cops at 9:00pm over a freaking ghost story. Then, it dawned on me that the call might not have been made out of concern, but of malice. So, I did a little digging and found out who it was, and yup. Big fat malice. The person who called the cops on me is an omnipresent source of stress in my life, but it’s unavoidable. He makes it very difficult to write passionately or with any honesty about difficult subjects, because I always have to be on the lookout for him to pounce on what he sees as an opportunity or a weakness he can exploit. It’s annoying, but nothing I haven’t been through before. In truth, any genuine concern would have resulted in a phone call or at least a text to one of us before the cops were called. I actually received quite a few such messages from concerned friends yesterday, and I responded to each one, letting them on to what it was: a Halloween story. It all started as a way to prank Brittany, back in July. When October rolled around, I decided I could turn it into a scary story for Halloween, so I started writing. Then, somewhere along the line, the whole thing became one giant metaphor for Depression. If you’ve ever struggled with depression, then you understand why a psychological horror story was a good fit. And every horror story is a metaphor for something. ●Freddy Krueger has represented everything from the dangers of moral absolutism, to homosexuality, parental distrust, the threat of pop culture and society, etc… ●Jason Voorhees is basically enforcing punishment for the seven deadly sins, making Friday the 13th an unlikely metaphor for Christianity ●Michael Meyers is a metaphor for both the consequences of rebellious sexuality and an assault of conventional domesticity, at the same time ●Vampires have been a metaphor for almost everything ●Zombies have been a metaphor for how man is the real monster (so often that it’s immeasurably boring now) ●Frankenstein was a metaphor for the dangers of reckless scientific progress ●And so on…

The list could go on forever. Horror is always a metaphor for something else. The monster is never just a monster. My shadow ghost demon was an obvious metaphor for Depression, because depression is scary. It stalks you, you can’t predict when it’ll show up, and you’re powerless to stop it. All you can do is deal with it as it comes, but you can’t do anything until you accept it. Acknowledge it. Own it. Then, you can work on dealing with it. Which is exactly what my story is about. I didn’t want to write a traditional narrative, so there’s no discernible plot to it at first glance. It’s random. Things just happen, and then they happen again. Sometimes, they seem like they might be tied to something else, some events seem to echo earlier ones, etc… This was all by design, because I worked hard to actively avoid standard storytelling. Plotting a standard story arc would’ve been much, much easier. But I wanted it to come across as an as-it-happens journal of some poor guy’s descent into madness. The best way to do this was to not write a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. To not write characters or situations and plot. I had to write it from the first person and write it in the same style as the rest of the posts on this site, so it would be believable. I wanted it to seem real, but never to actually be real. At best, I wanted to instill in readers a small grain of doubt that maybe it was really happening, even if they mostly suspected that it was just a story. That little nugget of doubt is all it takes to get someone to suspend their disbelief enough for the horror to work. It’s easier in a conventional narrative, because when someone sits down to read a horror story or watch a movie they know is fictional, they come prepared to accept certain tropes of the genre, so they won’t think twice about a ghost moving things around or the walls bleeding or whatever. Because they expect it. It’s all just part of a horror story. But what I was trying to create was, in a way, a text-based version of a found footage movie, but one that the reader follows more or less as it’s happening, rather than years later when someone discovers an old video tape stuck inside the walls of their basement. This presented a lot of problems though, because when you’re writing something to seem real and you’re using real people, you have to stick to real things. Or at least not push too far into the standard conventions of horror, because then the illusion breaks and the whole thing falls apart.

Still, I wanted to break the spell, on occasion. I wasn’t trying to convince people that what was happening was real. I was trying to convince them that it could be real, even if it probably wasn’t. Uncertainty and doubt are central themes of the story, and I wanted them to come across organically in the reader’s mind. The best way to do that was to do things like tell them up front that nothing they are about to read is real, and then undermine that by mixing (possibly) supernatural elements into what are otherwise very normal posts using natural language, very informal writing, and some jokes. Just as the main character (me) in the story doubts the supernatural bits are actually happening, I wanted the reader to doubt them, too. I actually scaled a lot of things back, because I wanted to maintain that sense of uncertainty. I injected some “physical evidence” of the goings-on to further blur the line, because I knew such proof would only work against anyone’s belief that any of it was real. Creepy images and scary sounds are fine in a movie, but in the context of what I was writing – as if it was all actually happening, as it happened – then any tangible evidence I provided would only stand out in stark contrast to the psychological elements of the story. In short, they’d seem fake. So I kept purposefully blending obviously staged supernatural events with (seemingly) very real, ordinary events to keep the reader swaying back and forth from being 100% certain it wasn’t real one minute, to not being quite so confident the next. If I had to put a number on it, I really only needed like 5% doubt. My aim was to make the reader feel somewhat like the narrator: questioning his own reality while the reader questioned the story’s veracity. I think it worked. Maybe it didn’t. I don’t know. But anyway, that’s what I was going for: a scary story for Halloween, wrapped in a metaphor for depression. I wanted to have it ready to be read in its entirety for Halloween week, which is why I ended it yesterday. I didn’t want to give it a climax or any real resolution, because it wasn’t a traditional narrative. I left it open-ended and on kind of a downer, because that’s how depression works. There isn’t a satisfying ending to an ongoing struggle. Because it’s ongoing. Then again, my ending might not be such a downer, after all. Accepting depression, letting it in and owning it is the only way to get through it. So, in that respect, it’s actually a happy ending. Or is it? DA-DA-DAAAAAAAAAAAA! Happy Halloween, kids.

Now click over here and share the bejeebus out of the Supernatural story . Please? It’s currently within striking distance of overtaking Ridiculous Baby Headbands as my most shared post, and that’s really all I want out of life. Also, if you feel like helping me out so that I don’t, I dunno, maybe die alone on the street, penniless and curled up inside a drainage ditch for warmth while hungry buzzards peck at the ancient disposable contact lenses stuck to my eyeballs, then you could always head over here to send me a few clams . There’s even a DRM-free eBook version of the Supernatural post in it for you. HOW GENEROUS OF ME! I mean you. Whatever.

Lies. All Lies! I was a very trusting child. If someone in a position of authority told me something was true, I usually believed them. Which, now that I think about it, is probably why I grew up to distrust all authority as an adult. Because authority is full of shit.

My parents were my first authority figures, which probably isn’t all that much of a surprise, since parents are pretty much everyone’s first authority figures. And I believed everything they ever told me, which is a fact they routinely exploited with the kind of sadistic relish only parents delivering a little payback to their weirdo kid can. For example, a favorite pastime of my folks was alternating between telling me that they were either going to ship me off to the orphanage, or some supernatural force was going to murder me. ALL THE TIME. My Other Questionable Decisions ●Growing Up Nerdy ●My Monster Ear ●Death Metal ●Zapped ●The Martian Incident ●Attack of the Killer Bees ●The Special Class ●The time I met The Bloggess ●Lies. All Lies! The orphanage threats usually came at the end of some parental frustration involving my being annoying, obnoxious, loud, or excessively weird. Probably all at the same time. And in public. We’d get in the car, and they tell me they’d had it. They couldn’t take it anymore, and it was off to Boy’s Haven with me, which wasn’t really an orphanage so much as it’s a great local organization that takes in boys aged 5-17 who need a little help, and gives it to them. But in my home, it was basically a Dickensian work house for pickpockets and street urchins. I did not want to go to there. But every time I acted up, we were, in fact, going to there. My parents would even start driving and pointing out landmarks along the way, like they were following some kind terrifying treasure map that led directly to my incarceration. The whole time, they’d be telling me things like no one there would be nice to me, I wouldn’t ever get tucked into bed, and – when I did go to bed – I wouldn’t be able to snuggle with my favorite stuffed animals BECAUSE THEY WOULDN’T LET ME TAKE THEM. It was basically the saddest scene in a Toy Story movie, but worse because I knew they wouldn’t understand. My stuffed animals, I mean. I hadn’t even been given the opportunity to explain the situation to them or even say goodbye. For all they’d know, I just got tired of them one day and never came back. The guilt weighed heavily on my young soul. Of course, I never did get shipped off to the orphanage. Because they lied. Spoiler alert, I guess.

Happy Teddy! Nooooo!

The times when they’d convince me that the devil himself was out to eat my soul were, I think, meant more playfully. I don’t think I was being punished for anything when my dad suddenly cut power to the house one night and started walking into the living room with a life-sized, glow-in- the-dark skeleton while he made moaning sounds and said things like, “Mister Funnybones wants your soul.” Yeah, I think that was just being playful. Or all the times when we were riding in the car at night, and both my mom and dad would start FREAKING THE FUCK OUT because they’d just seen a witch out the rear window, and she was chasing us. My dad would pretend to speed up, my mom would start having a panic attack, and then…then the witch would attack the car. We could hear her big, buckled pilgrim boot-heels scraping against the roof. We could hear her long talon nails tearing through the metal of the trunk. We dared not look. I’d find out later that all the noises came from the power of suggestion and a little help from the retractable radio antenna on the car. It made this whirring, electric, scraping noise that, if you didn’t know any better (because you trusted your parents when they told you that evil, soul- sucking monsters were out to murder your entire family), sounded a lot like a witch attack. And that’s not even going into how, when we’d go to visit my grandparents on my dad’s side, the car would always barely make the drive across the Swamp Monster Bridge, where all the elaborate stories of supernatural murder, death, and mayhem were that much more believable because the bridge was is Louisiana. Which you’d understand if you’ve ever been to Louisiana. Those were just the standard lies, though. Then there were the exceptional ones. The very same year I was being shipped off to The Special Class every few days at school, my dad decided to tell me how BBs were made. We’d gone on a camping trip with the Indian Guides (because I was way too nerdy for the Boy Scouts, and I guess my parents figured adding racially insensitive feathered headdresses into the mix couldn’t really make things any worse), when it happened. I was marveling at a super tall lookout tower near a lake at the campground (which could’ve just been a normal lifeguard’s chair, now that I think about it), when my dad decided to ruin my life. He pulled me aside and, in whispered tones, conveyed to me the secret of BB manufacturing. “You see that platform up at the very top of the tower, son?” “Uh-huh.” “That’s where they make BBs.” “Really? How?” “Well,” he said – and this is where he would’ve leaned back in his chair and taken a long, satisfied puff off his pipe if we were near a chair and if he’d smoked a pipe – “it takes two guys. One guy climbs way up to the top with a bucket of water. And another guy stands underneath him on the ground, with an empty bucket.” “Then what?” “Then, the guy at the top takes an eyedropper and sucks up a little water. Then, he carefully squeezes out just one drop over the edge of the platform. And as it falls, it spins and spins and spins so fast that it turns into a metal ball, and the guy at the bottom catches it in his bucket.” Seems legit. “But,” I asked, seriously concerned for the safety of the poor guy at the bottom, “what if he misses the bucket?” “Ah,” replied my dad, taking another happy draw from his imaginary pipe, “that’s why he wears a hard hat.” And that’s how I learned how BBs were made. Which I would excitedly tell all of my classmates at school the following week, but not before I’d burned my foot on a hot coal and rescued a fish from certain death. See, on that same camping trip, we also went fishing. I only remember two things about it, though: the kid who went to cast his line, caught his hook on his own back fat and then…well, it was gruesome. Let’s not dwell. The other thing I remember was The Fish. I think it was a perch, because every fish is a perch to me since I know exactly jack shit about fish. At any rate, I managed to catch a fish, and I think it was a perch. But that’s not the important part.

The important part was my immediate regret over having caught the fish. I didn’t want it to die, but I also didn’t want to be the one kid who didn’t want to kill a fish on the camping trip, so I didn’t throw it back. We tossed it in a cooler where it flopped around, gasping for water-air and crushing my soul. I showed everyone I caught it, then closed the cooler and went off to pack up our tent and cry. Which is when I walked right over the fire pit someone did a horrible job of covering with dirt, because my bare foot found a still-hot coal. Right in the arch. Burned like hell. So now I’m crying and my foot’s on fire, my fish is dying in a cooler, and all I want to do is go home and never again venture into the great outdoors where sadness lives. We finish packing up, then hop in my dad’s old red truck and head on down the road. With me still crying, my fish still dying, and my foot still burning. My dad pulls off into a gas station along the way, then goes inside and comes back out with a little styrofoam bowl of water. He sticks The Fish inside, then pops a lid on the bowl and tells me to hold onto it. But not to open the lid, because then bad things would happen and it would probably die. It was already dead, of course. But I believed him when he said it wasn’t, because authority figure. He gets back in the truck, then turns on the air conditioner and tells me to stick my foot up next to one of the vents. The AC cools it down and I manage to stop crying for a little while, with my foot getting some relief up on the vent and my fish potentially not dying in my lap. *Styrofoam bowl not to scale

Of course, it was basically Schrödinger’s Fish at that point, both alive and dead at the same time, and only by opening the lid would I collapse the probability wave or whatever. So I kept the lid on tight. But any time I would start questioning why it didn’t feel like the fish was moving around in the bowl, my dad would come up with some kind of believable reason, and then switch the AC over from Cool to Heat. Which my foot would quickly realize before I did, after which I’d scream and start crying again. My dad would laugh and shout, “Say hello to Mister Fire!” After a minute of that, he’d switch it back, and, for a little while, I’d be too angry and confused to question the condition of The Fish. Before we got home, we took a slight detour near a drainage ditch. My dad hopped out of the truck, came around to my side, and asked me for the fish. I handed it to him, then he told me he was going to set it free in this large body of water I thought looked nothing at all like a drainage ditch. Probably very little poop in it. He walked over to the water, knelt down, I heard a little splash, and then he came back. My dad shouted, “He made it!” – and I didn’t question a word of it. That was a good lie. But then I went back to school Monday morning and decided to tell everyone who would listen how BBs were made, which is how I ended up getting into a fight with a kid named Chuck because SHUT UP, MY DAD WOULDN’T LIE TO ME!

Am I crazy weird?

As I’ve started opening up a little about my various absurd struggles with depression and all my weird little quirks – thanks, in large part, to Jenny Lawson making me feel like it’s okay to be broken – I’ve noticed something not good: there aren’t many dudes talking about their feelings.

Not in the way that the women are, with jagged bone honesty and brutal humor to highlight how ridiculous everything is. The few men who are writing about mental health tend to write like, well, men writing about mental health. It’s usually very cold and antiseptic, as if depression can be conquered through spreadsheets and actuarial tables. Now, I don’t subscribe to the idea that men are from one planet and women are from another, because I really don’t think we’re all that different from each other. Not really. We tell ourselves we’re different – and, more importantly, we’re told how different we are all our lives – but it’s all just stupid marketing. Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina. And that’s about as deep as it goes, except that my penis doesn’t bleed every month, and I can’t grow babies in my testicles. I suspect there was some divergent limb on the evolutionary tree that tried this once – men being the baby makers – but natural selection probably kicked in after every single dude just started lying around in the fetal position, clutching his balls and crying for days at a time every month, and nipped that in the bud. The point is, while plenty of brilliant women are writing brilliant things on the subject, men remain pretty silent. Why? If we’re not so different, then why aren’t more men trying to do what I’m probably failing at doing?

I think it’s probably down to gender roles and behavioral psychology and stuff. You know, the same crap that tells little boys they can’t play with dolls, or that girls need princess tiaras and pink everything. But that’s all over my head, and best left to people who have, I dunno, gone to school and learned something about it or whatever. The tweed jackets with elbow patches crowd. All I know is that writing about this crap has helped me not only keep pushing through a serious bout with depression, but with putting my entire life into ridiculous perspective. Some of the things I’ve done have just been crazy weird. Most of the things I still do are crazy weird. I’m crazy weird. And so are a lot of other dudes. Even if they haven’t been able to admit it yet, because no one has told them it’s okay. Instead, we lurk over at The Bloggess or find quiet solidarity in Hyperbole and a Half, but as far as anyone else knows, we’re only there to laugh at the jokes, and all the touchy-feely stuff is for the girls. Like watching a romcom – we’ll do it as long as there’s enough John Cusack to counteract the Katherine Heigl, but we’ll pretend like we’re not really enjoying it the whole time. Men also hide behind manly manliness, which here in the south means taking long hunting trips or talking about sports. We’ll buy things, too. Cars in the shape of a midlife penis crisis, expensive sunglasses, stupid active wear we pretend does some really cool sciency thing, but that we’re only buying for the stupid logo, etc… We’ll even plop down a stack of cash for a ridiculous ice chest because it’s the cool new thing to do. (See also: Toyota’s Scion, Ray Bans, Under Armour, Yeti Coolers…) Which is fine, I guess. Whatever gets you through it. It’s better than breaking up with your girlfriend or cheating on your wife, like a whole lot of other dudes do along their misguided quests to find fulfillment. But what are guys who hate brand marketing, can’t stand sports, despise trends, and would never cheat on their spouses or go to the store for a loaf of bread and not come back until 20 years later supposed to do? Oh. Wait. I hope you’re not expecting me to have an answer for that one, because I don’t. I play video games, watch Netflix, read books and write dumb blog posts. And cookies. I eat a lot of cookies. I have no idea what I’m doing. The only thing better than gingerbread is nerd gingerbread.

I’m not even sure I have a valid reason to be depressed, which is how depression likes to make you feel. Sure, getting laid off and being pretty hardcore unemployable when I live in the Deep South and write about things like feelings and how stupid I think the God, Guns, and Jesus mentality is around here is probably a “valid” reason for feeling depressed, but I was depressed even before my job went to India. I worked hard at my last job. I was called the “go to” guy of my group. I routinely resolved more cases than everyone else on my team combined. Every week. I was basically on call 24/7/365 because I was “the guy who gets things done”. But I also had Hillbilly Voldemort. Hillbilly Voldemort, if you’re new around here, is the name I gave to the opportunistic, slackjawed bully who was my last middle manager, before he failed upward and moved on to upper management after contract renegotiations with our client took a turn and my company ended up partnering with an outsourcing firm. And, armed with the power of layoffs, he systematically went through the company roster and eliminated everyone who was ever a threat to him, or who he just didn’t like. It was a common theme in hushed employee-to-employee conversations when it was all going down. Someone else being laid off would ask, “Oh, hey. Did you, by any chance, ever happen to piss off Steve?” And then The Stories would be told, and yup. Common theme. So maybe I have a right to be depressed now, but why was I depressed back when I was making good money, before The Dark Lord rose like a pimple off the back of some slimy dude’s head? I have no idea. I didn’t have a bad childhood. If anything, my childhood was too good, because I constantly want to go back there. It’s why I’ve devoted countless hours to writing a nostalgia-soaked trip down memory lane . Sure, life wasn’t perfect back then, but it was a damn sight better than it usually is now.

I was such a cute kid. WITH PERFECT EARS.

Yeah, I was a goofy kid. I didn’t have many friends and I was kind of a weirdo, but my parents made time for me and made me feel loved, even if they did worry a little too much about my weirdness at times. In short, I had a nice time. Even if I’ve filled my life with Questionable Decisions . Even if I always worried about everything. Even if the emotional scars left by my childhood peer groups haunt me to this day, to the point that if I ever walk near any group of people who start laughing, I’m instantly convinced they’re laughing at me, and I start running through a mental checklist of everything I’ve been doing since I’ve been in their eyeline, trying to track down exactly what it was that set them off in their open mockery of everything awful about myself. And that goes triple if it’s a giggling group of teenage girls, which is basically the scariest thing on earth. But the way depression works – for me, at least – is that it makes me feel bad for feeling bad. Right now, I have something to be depressed about: I’m unemployed, money is running out, and I can’t find a job anywhere. So I’m good on the nodding heads and sympathetic looks from people I know front. For now. (Speaking of…if you’re looking for an employee, I’m great at IT work, systems administration, web solutions, and SharePoint. I’m comfortable working remotely, and I can even handle PR, technical writing, and making really lame jokes during awkward staff meetings. Hire me! ) All the other times, though… Times when things are good, when I’ve got money in the bank and plans on the horizon, when things are happening and all seems right with the world – those are the times when I hate myself for feeling like I hate myself.

Other people have it worse! Be grateful for what you have! Stop whining. Why are you so awful?! The shouts in my head never stop, even as some other part of my fractured psyche shouts back that I DON’T KNOW WHY. I don’t know why I wake up every morning feeling like a failure, even on the increasingly rare mornings when I wake up after having not recently failed at anything. I don’t know why I don’t trust good days, or why I think happiness is out to get me. I don’t know why I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop, the unexpected phone call, the red letter in the mail. I DON’T KNOW WHY. I don’t know why I feel like I haven’t accomplished a damn thing in my life, or why it feels like I peaked in high school when I really didn’t do anything in high school. I wasn’t class president, I hated pep rallies, I didn’t have many friends, and I did the bare minimum needed to pass my classes and graduate. If that’s my peak – then my life is a damn greek tragedy. But without any of the heroic, monster-slaying bits. I don’t know why I’m sitting here, typing this out and making myself feel worse. I don’t know why I wake up every morning, and the only thing I look forward to doing all day is going back to sleep. Or eating cookies. Preferably just before going back to sleep. I don’t know why every post I write that gets a lot of traffic but hardly any shares feels like a waste of time. I don’t know why I keep hoping someone influential will find what I’ve written and help get me noticed. I don’t know why not being noticed makes me feel like a failure, when being noticed makes me feel like a fraud. I don’t know why I think the success of nerds being nerds has created a bizarre tiered nerd hierarchy, where someone as awesome as Felicia Day makes me feel like even more of a loser because I’m not a cool enough nerd to roll 20-sided dice and eat cold Pop-Tarts at her super nerdy lunch table. I DON’T KNOW WHY.

But I do know I wish other guys were talking about it. I’m sure they’re out there – and if you know of any, or if you’re one of them – please let me know. Send me an email, or leave a comment and link me in their direction. Because as great and inspirational as it is to read Jenny and Felicia and Allie, I need to know that there’s at least one other tripod out there who’s been where I’m at. Who’s going through what I’m going through. Who knows the difference between who’s and whose without having to look it up every damn time. Ok, maybe not that last one. But really, why isn’t there a community of struggling daddy bloggers? Or depressed single guy bloggers (who aren’t misogynistic asshats)? Or stay- at-home dads who constantly get emails from their kid’s school addressed to Moms? Where’s my tribe? Don’t get me wrong. I feel a great sense of community and belonging from the wonderful people who frequent the other sites I’ve mentioned, but I need more dude stories. Are there other guys out there one leaky pipe away from a total breakdown because plumbing is terrifying? Do any other dads try to follow the “some assembly required” instructions of any given toy, only to feel like an abject failure when none of the included, easily-followable instructions make any damn sense at all? Does the thought of interacting with other dads scare the shit out of anyone else, when all anyone ever wants to talk about are hunting, sports, and cars? Are any other husbands kinda scared that writing about all your internalized oddities will freak out your wives, who will inevitably leave you for someone less weird who’s the exact opposite of you and therefore cool and sexy and everything you aren’t? Or am I just alone out here, shouting nonsense at the heart of the world? Because it sure feels like that, at times. It feels like I don’t have a right to be depressed, or to worry, or to be depressed over worrying about things, and then angry at myself for being worried that I’m depressed about how much I worry. It still feels like I’m weird for enjoying video games rather than football. It still feels like I’m weird for wanting to pet animals rather than murder them. It still feels like I’m weird for never feeling like I’m doing enough for my kid, or that everything I am doing is wrong. It still feels like I’m weird when I talk about how much I love him, or that I crave his hugs. Because none of that is man stuff. It’s just stuff that makes me weird. I just fixed this today. Not ideal, but it’ll quiet my head demons. FOR NOW.

And that’s not even going into all the things that make me feel crazy. Like… ●How I can’t stand for anything to be upside down, even when it’s a soggy candy bar wrapper underneath a layer of leftover spaghetti in the trash can. AND I MUST FIX IT. ●My weird fetishes for certain numbers, all of which are even. I really dig 4 and 12, for some reason. ●My equally weird aversions to other numbers, most of which are odd. Basically, any number between 1 and 25 that isn’t 4 or 12 is suspect, and should be treated with caution. ●My obsession over symmetry. Shelving, for instance, must have EXACT SPACING, and then whatever I put on them has to balance out on all sides or it’s just a nightmare and I want to burn the house down. ●My handwriting, which is just made worse by the fact that I can’t have a single unclosed letter anywhere in a word. If the circle part of a lowercase d doesn’t fully connect to the tall part, I go back over it. With fury. ●My nail biting, which is ridiculous. ●My social anxiety, which makes me fear the pizza man and has seen me hiding in my back bedroom with the door closed whenever the lawn crew has shown up when I didn’t want them to mow the grass. ●My compulsion to personify inanimate objects. I still have my two favorite stuffed animals from childhood and fuck you, THEY’RE ALIVE. Shut up. ●My crippling aversion to change, which has kept me in bad situations for a lot longer than should be legal. ●My outrage over stupid things. Like bad font choices, or crappy grammar in ad copy. THAT SOMEONE APPROVED. ●My debilitating fear of being wrong. Or looking stupid. Or being wrong because I’m stupid. ●My certainty that everyone, everywhere is always making fun of me. Especially those damn groups of giggling girls. ●My tendency toward hoarding, which has seen me digging one of my kid’s school workbooks out of the trash, after my wife thought she could quietly slip it in there and DEPRIVE ME OF MY MEMORIES. ●The weird way I have to “unwind” myself if I make a complete circle in one direction, which even extends to video games. Poor Mario. How many times have I made you run clockwise into the lava, after you narrowly dodged a koopa shell by running counter- clockwise? I AM SORRY. ●How I can never click the Save icon just once. Or even twice. And I certainly can’t stop clicking on an uneven number, so… You get the idea. Maybe I am alone. When you start listing out just a handful of your odd little quirks off the top of your head as bullet points, it tends to put things into perspective. Yeah. I’m crazy weird.

The time I met The Bloggess This is going into my Questionable Decisions section because…well, you’ll see. Spoiler alert: I chose wisely.

I met Jenny Lawson tonight. She was super sweet and gave me a bunch of compliments. It felt great and awkward, and everyone was looking at me, so I wanted to run for the exit as soon as it was over. Only that would’ve probably drawn even more attention, so I just decided to walk normally. But then I felt like I was overcompensating and walking too slowly just so I’d look like I was walking at a normal pace, so I sped up a little until I started to feel like I was walking too fast, then I just gave up and looked at the watch I wasn’t wearing so I could pretend I was late for something. By the time I had it all sorted out, I was already back at my car. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before any of this happened, it was just a normal Friday, and I was doing normal Friday things like not cleaning my house. That all changed today though, because I’ve been wrestling all week over whether or not I was going to go to Jenny’s book signing in Houston for Furiously Happy . However, since I’d never been to a book signing before, I didn’t know what to expect. I had it in my mind that it would be a tiny space crammed with people who would all recognize me from my bit in the video I was in for the book trailer , and then I’d have to talk to them and explain my sign (because I’d be holding my sign since part of the reason I was going was to get Jenny to sign my sign), and I just couldn’t handle that sort of pressure. So instead of not cleaning my house today, I spent most of the morning dusting and sweeping and rearranging my living room with pathological tidiness characteristic of both ’50s TV housewives and lunatic serial killers. I did this because I’d decided to go to the signing, and I was terrified of following through with it. My Other Questionable Decisions ●Growing Up Nerdy ●My Monster Ear ●Death Metal ●Zapped ●The Martian Incident ●Attack of the Killer Bees ●The Special Class ●The time I met The Bloggess ●Lies. All Lies! So I cleaned like a madman until it hit me, and I realized that I was panic cleaning. Which is something I’ve never in my life done before, as I generally feel more comfortable amidst the detritus and refuse of my own filth than I do in any sort of properly maintained and orderly environment. But I was doing it today like I was making up for lost time. Until, of course, it was time to go. It’s Trey’s weekend with his dad, so instead of waiting for him to drive into town to pick him up at 4:30, we left at 2:30 and met him halfway at the one gas station of a tiny little town called Devers, which is only really notable for the fact that it has exactly one gas station. We met up and said our goodbyes around 3:30, then headed onward to west Houston. Which should’ve only taken about an hour to get to from where we were, but if you roll into the Houston area around 4:00 on a Friday expecting to get to where you’re going without frustration and heartache, you’re gonna have a bad time. We had a bad time. If you’re not familiar with the Houston area, it’s roughly the size of Connecticut. This is not an exaggeration. Sure, Houston itself isn’t all that big, but nobody actually lives in Houston. They live in the Houston Area, which is made up of all the little suburbs that dot the landscape around the city. It’s basically like a big fallout map from a nuclear explosion, if ground zero were Downtown and the radioactive cloud was just cars. Lots of cars. Everywhere. With madmen behind the wheel. We didn’t arrive at Blue Willow Books until around 5:30, after having spent nearly an entire hour driving the last 15 miles. But we managed to get there safely, with me only suffering a few micro heart attacks from swerving assholes and maniac lane cutter-offers. (That’s a real term. No need to look it up.)

Blue Willow Books was, in fact, a tiny space – just as I’d feared. But it was a nifty little bookshop with a lot of character to it, and the reading was going to happen outside, behind the store. So it’d be open air and I could hide in a corner someplace. No problem. My wife and I (my wife and me? I can never remember the rule) went to the counter and bought a copy of the book, since I hadn’t bothered to buy one earlier. I considered this good manners, since turning up with my own copy of Furiously Happy that I’d bought somewhere else would’ve been like showing up to a friend’s house for dinner with my own hamburger because I wasn’t sure if I’d like whatever they were serving and also if i had friends. You get the idea. So we bought a book, got our place in line – we were in Blue Group, which was cool because it’s my favorite color, but also a little less cool because it was the penultimate signing group, which is just a polite way of saying we were just one step away from being dead ass last – and then made our way out back. There were a whole bunch of white plastic chairs, and my wife picked the 4th row back – which was cool, because I’ve always liked 4 and I have a deep aversion to odd numbers, but also less cool because that left rows 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 behind us. Which meant I was sitting with people to my back, and I hate that. Seriously, I can’t stand it. For example, when we go to a restaurant, my ideal table is the one in the corner, and my chair is the one on the wall so nobody can sneak up on me. If there’s no corner table, then I take whichever chair gives me the best view of the entrances and exits of the place, so I can keep my eye out. For what, I have no freaking clue. It’s not like Virgil Sollozzo is going to suddenly creep up and garrote me from behind or anything. I’m not in the mob, and I hardly know any Italians. But it’s still a thing. By the time things got going, most of the seats were filled, and I was just sitting there uncomfortable as hell, from both the plastic chair of questionable rigidity I was sitting on, and the fact that hundreds of eyeballs were looking at the back of my head. And I started to feel like Luca Brasi.

I spent most of Jenny’s excellent reading laughing while having my arms crossed in front of me in the universal sign of I AM NOT AT EASE HERE. But even then, I still wasn’t comfortable because I bite my fingernails like any self-respecting neurotic psychopath, and my hands basically look like Snausages. I’m super self-conscious about them, which is a problem when I spend so much of my time with my arms folded across my chest. I have to either tuck my hands into my elbow holes to hide my secret shame, or ball up my fists and just kind of rest them on my forearms in a way that makes me feel like, for some reason, one of those “wooden indians” you see in old movies but never in real life. Anyway, Jenny read a couple of chapters from Furiously Happy and everyone laughed at the funny parts and nodded in sage agreement with the serious parts, and it was generally a good time for everyone. But by the time she started the Q&A, the backdrop the bookshop had put up behind her started to make me dizzy. Something about trying to focus on Jenny with this bright white and blue- dotted tarpaulin behind her just started to confuse my brain, and I had to actively concentrate to keep things in focus as my eyes conspired to trigger a migraine. So that was fun. Once the reading was over, it was signing time. But they started with Red, and after I saw the horde of people in just one group, I realized that Blue wasn’t going to come up until much later. They were taking them in the order of something called Roy G. Biv, which I’ve been told has something to do with the order of colors in the rainbow or something, and that I really should’ve learned that in school, only I never did because I was probably off in the special class that day, playing with parachutes and that weird ass plastic thing with a ball in the middle to improve my handwriting. At any rate, it meant that I had time to kill. There was an HEB grocery store nearby, so I walked over to pick up some snacks for the wait. On the walk there, I had to pass an AutoZone, where I witnessed a very large, very old man leaning under the hood of his car, with the folded crevices of his upper butt crack just flapping in the breeze. I tried not to stare, but how could I not? It isn’t every day you get to see an origami ass crack.

Anyway, I eventually made it to the HEB and ended up checking out at the register with one bottle of Coca-Cola, some fake HEB Doritos, a caffeine candy bar, and a bag of Skittles. As I dug into my pockets for the last of my cash and counted out change, I realized this is probably the menu of a drunk person. Or possibly a stoned person, although I really only understand the drug culture from afterschool specials and Nancy Reagan PSAs from the ’80s, so I’m just guessing. By the time I got back to the sitting area for the signing, my wife had Made Friends, and was busy chatting them up about my sign: the sign I’d carefully kept hidden via discrete book placement so nobody could see what was written on it. And here she was, chatting about it. Just like that. Openly. In public. With strangers. I was mortified. But then they had to start telling me how much they liked it, so it got really awkward and I wanted to crawl into one of the nearby garbage dumpsters to hide. After they finally left (they were nice, but I hate talking about myself in person…which is weird, because I write about myself all the time), I relocated to a safe area and sandwiched myself between a Volvo and one of the dumpsters while I waited for something to happen. Which is basically just a metaphor for my entire life.

Time passes… By the time Blue Group came up, we missed it because I wasn’t paying attention. We ended up getting in line with Pink Group, which I’m pretty sure was the last group, instead of the next-to-last one we would’ve been in, if I hadn’t been so busy being awful. Once we’d realized my mistake, we hopped in line and were eventually ushered back inside the store, where we then began waiting in another line while I looked at a bunch of children’s books to kill time and avoid making eye contact with other humans. Then, it was my turn. The lady working the signing table wanted to read my sign, so I showed it to her. Then, she told me I needed to hold it up while she took our picture with Jenny. Which was horrible. But also wonderful. I’m not going to say much about what Jenny said to me while she was signing my shit, because it was all way too nice and I’m embarrassed. But the takeaway is that she really loved the Furiously Happy side of my sign, and told me that a lot of other people did, too. Then, she said a bunch more super nice things before signing my sign and writing, “You are my hero.” Which very nearly wrecked me. But in a good way. After we got done with the chatting and the signing, it was picture time. I held up my sign as the nice lady from the bookshop took a few snaps as everyone else in line was LOOKING RIGHT AT ME. And reading my sign. Like I said: Terrifying.

Knowing me all too well, my wife redirected attention away from me and back onto Jenny by telling her the shape of her eyeglasses temples looked like the Elder Wand, and that she was probably a badass wizard. Or witch. Whichever. Everyone laughed and I said thank you and goodbye, followed by my aforementioned walk/run/walk to the door. If you’re thinking about going to one of her signings, all I can say is do it Even if you have to drive through crazy traffic both ways, do it. Even if you’re socially awkward with an aversion to large groups, do it. Even if you’re a complete weirdo, DO IT. It’s not scary. It’s uplifting. As for me, it was hard, but I’m glad I did it. I’m probably going to frame my sign now, assuming I can either scrape up the cash to have it done, or just try to do it myself (and probably end up spending more money to fix it after I inevitably screw it up). I want to hang it someplace important that I’ll see every day, as a reminder to myself to always stay FURIOUSLY HAPPY.

The Special Class I have some sort of mysterious, undiagnosed developmental disorder. Or, rather, it was diagnosed, but said diagnosis has been hidden from me for the past several decades of my life, ever since I was in 2nd grade and found myself going to a special PE class just for me and a few other kids.

Which was actually, I would come to find out years later, a special class. You know, for kids who have something wrong with them or whatever. Only no one told me that at the time, so I just bounced along, happily thinking I was getting out of class for an hour or so every few days to go play on a janky teeter-totter and some weird-ass plastic thing with a ball in the middle. But what I was really doing there was working on my penmanship. SUPPOSEDLY. My Other Questionable Decisions ●Growing Up Nerdy ●My Monster Ear ●Death Metal ●Zapped ●The Martian Incident ●Attack of the Killer Bees ●The Special Class ●The time I met The Bloggess ●Lies. All Lies! According to my parents – two people who I love dearly, but who would also, without question, be safely categorized as Unreliable Narrators in the Story of My Life – I was enrolled in the class after my teacher, Mrs. Wenner, suggested it because she felt that I was a stupid kid who couldn’t write good. Ok, maybe she didn’t use those exact words… It also had to do with me having trouble telling left from right and tying my shoes, and really just being kind of goofy and clumsy, because I guess the diagnostic criteria for General Nerdiness hadn’t yet been defined back in the early ’80s, so everyone just figured I suffered from some kind of mental illness, rather than simply being a gangly stick figure of a boy, with a bowl cut and an unhealthy obsession with computers. Well, they probably thought it was unhealthy, anyway. Them. The Powers That Be. So, just because my handwriting was awful and I liked science fiction, I found myself enrolled in some sort of “coordination class” since I couldn’t be trusted to walk across a room without tripping on my own elbows or something. I actually liked the class, though. We played all sorts of different games, and we almost always got to have time with THE PARACHUTE – which was always a highlight of gym class in elementary school – but we didn’t have to share it with the unclean masses of normal kids. It was just us weirdos, so we could totally spaz out and nobody would punch us later or push us into the urinals when we were trying to pee. Because that tended to happen. A lot. This is actually from third grade, but it’s close enough. The happy, smiling kid is the one I’m not.

Looking back, I think maybe my teacher just needed a break from me for a while, every few days. If she could send me off to the special class, then she could have herself an hour free from my constant questioning, horribly unclean desk (I had (have) a hoarding problem), and general disregard for the social rules of the classroom. She called her class The Apple Core for some reason, and one of the things she would do is give everyone a little construction paper apple she’d cut out. We would pin them onto a construction paper tree that was pinned onto the classroom bulletin board, and every time we did something good, our apple would get a “nibble” – which was really just a hole-punch. From a standard hole puncher. After we’d accumulated so many nibbles, we could exchange them for things like computer time or extra recess and stuff. I always went with the computer time, because most of the other kids didn’t give a crap about them, and I’d spend my recess inside where I was safe amongst the glowing phosphors of an Apple ][ monitor. Which also meant I was alone in the classroom a lot. Which meant I could go up to my apple and punch a few extra nibbles in it without anybody noticing, which I could then trade in for more even computer time later after I hadn’t done anything to deserve it except circumvent the teacher’s authority. I liked that part. ( More on that here. ) But I was still weird and annoying, so she probably hated me. I know she hated me the day she made me stay late, after tipping out the entire contents of my desk into the middle of the classroom floor while all the other kids watched and laughed. I had to throw almost everything I cherished away and “get organized” like a good little cog. OR ELSE! She also hated me when I threw together a science project at the last minute (because I always did (still do) projects at the last minute), and ended up winning at my school, then later at the district-wide science fair… I built a robot. Which probably sounds a lot more impressive than it actually was. All I did was spray paint a shoebox silver that I stuck it on top of a remote control car I had. I glued another box vertically onto that one and stuck the guts from a couple of Intellivision controllers to it because they looked cool and all electronic-y. I used toilet paper rolls in the sides where his arms would come out, then fashioned a little mechanism with a servo from one of my dad’s model airplanes so they’d move up and down. I used some kind of building toy I can’t remember the name of off hand for the arms themselves, but it was kind of like opposite Lego. They were little flat pieces of plastic with holes in them that you’d join together with little plastic rivets. They were fun. I built a robot.

Anyway, one arm was functionally useless. It went up and down, and that’s about it. But for the other arm, I attached an electromagnet I put together from a battery, some old wire and a rusty ass nail I found in the garage. It could pick shit up. Totally rad. The head was just a styrofoam ball we picked up at whatever passed for a craft store back in the ’80s, with some funky metal coil things I got from somewhere jabbed into the sides and a face hastily scribbled on the front with a magic marker.* *Sidenote: The head would’ve been silver, too – but it turns out that silver spray paint is basically fluoroantimonic acid to styrofoam. It ate right through the first head as soon as I pushed down the nozzle on the can. Literally, it just sort of melted. I’m not sure if the same thing would happen today, though. There’s a lot more concern with not poisoning children with death cancer paint these days, so I imagine modern spray paint is a bit more on the mild side. Anyway, that was my robot. I called him 2-KAB after my own initials because I was an egomaniacal little bastard. All he could do was wheel around the room, picking up paperclips and bumping into shit. But I was pretty sure I was kind of a genius. But I don’t think she liked that I was successful with my crappy little project. I was, after all, one of those kids. You know, the kind of weirdo that has to be dealt with before He Becomes A Problem. My parents obviously felt the same way, or they’d never have allowed me to be enrolled in the special class to play with the weird plastic thing with a ball in the middle. They were just trying to do what everyone was telling them was right, I guess. Which I appreciate, but it didn’t work. I’m still weird. In order to further help me assimilate into the armies of mediocrity, Mrs. Wenner (or maybe one of the teachers from the special class) also suggested to my parents that they could help me overcome my shyness and aversion to social situations by buying me a little black boy to play with. Wait. That sounds wrong. This was the early ’80s – the early 1980s – a full 120 years or so after the Civil War ended. And yes, we lived in Texas, but it wasn’t like that. The little black boy was actually a dummy. Ok, stop. I feel like this is going all wrong. Let me try again.

My parents bought me a ventriloquist dummy on the recommendation of some authority figure, with the reasoning being that, by learning to speak through the dummy, I would overcome my disdain for ever having to actually talk to people. So my parents took me to the toy store, and the dummy I picked out just happened to be black. THAT’S ALL. His name was Willie Talk, which I guess was supposed to be a clever take on “Will he talk?” or something, but I just called him Willy and never did very much with him. Mostly, he just kinda creeped me out. But I played along and made a show of trying to master a skill that would SURELY expand my social circle, because who doesn’t love the dude who whips out his wooden dummy at parties? Amirite?* *Technically, he was plastic. The sad news is that, even after all their efforts to normalize me, I stayed weird. I still liked books. I still played computer games. I still pretended, well past the age when you’re supposed to stop. (I still play pretend, only now I can hide behind my kid and call it something like Encouraging His Creativity or whatever. Makes me look like a responsible parent.) Looking back, I kind of miss that special class. That was probably the first – and to this day, one of the only – times I was ever with my own kind. The weirdos. The freaks. The square kids who will never be squeezed into your round holes, no matter how much of their souls you try and carve out to make them fit.

I wear contacts now, so I’m totally cool.

Years later, I’m finally – and slowly – learning to acknowledge my insecurities, and to embrace being an introvert. All my life, I’ve had to pretend that I enjoyed the things other people enjoyed. That I could make small talk. That I was interested in anything normal people are fascinated by. And it’s been draining. But I’m finding my pace. My people. My tribe. And I’ll always be weird.

Attack of the Killer Bees

Growing up, I was incredibly close to my grandmother. I was even incredibly close to her as a grown-up, if a punk twentysomething kid counts as a grown up. (It doesn’t.) And I’d still be incredibly close to her today as a 40 year old husband and father, but she passed away many years ago and I can’t even talk about it, so don’t ask me to.

For real, though. I’ve never “dealt” with her…geeze, I can’t even write the word death in context with her without pausing for way too long while trying to think of another synonym that isn’t “passing” and getting weepy. It’s probably not at all healthy, never advancing past the Denial stage of grief, but I fear change. Don’t push me. This isn’t about my grandmother, though. So don’t worry. I only mention her because this post is tangentially about her, in the sense that she features as only a minor character in this particular embarrassment, but recalling it did make me think of her, and I had to process it before telling you about the night I was almost murdered by insects. You’ll see. It’ll all make sense in a minute. I promise. My Other Questionable Decisions ●Growing Up Nerdy ●My Monster Ear ●Death Metal ●Zapped ●The Martian Incident ●Attack of the Killer Bees ●The Special Class ●The time I met The Bloggess ●Lies. All Lies! I don’t know my exact age, but I was probably somewhere around 10 years old when this all went down, because that’s when KILLER BEES were really big in the news. If you weren’t around back in the mid-’80s, the media basically spent several minutes every evening warning everyone that swarms of homicidal rage bees were bearing down on us, and that we were all very likely to die any minute. That happened a lot in the ’80s. If I wasn’t abducted from the shopping mall and murdered, I was probably going to end up taking candy from a stranger and then get murdered. Or I’d fall in with a Satanic cult and murder some other kid who we offered candy to before I was murdered by the high goat priest or whatever. Or, of course, the bees would get us. Picture the movie Jaws, but with thousands of tiny sharks that fly. That’s how I imagined killer bees, only slightly worse because I assumed that they could actually kill me. Just one of them, I mean. Not an entire hive. A killer bee was a killer bee, and I figured that one was just as deadly as a thousand. You know, truth in advertising, sort of thing. They said it on the news, after all. Had to be true. I imagined they did this by way of poison stingers that would paralyze, then kill you in some terrible way. But all it took was JUST ONE STING. Because that’s how everything worked in the ’80s: ●Have unprotected sex JUST ONE TIME, and you’d either get AIDS or a baby. Or both, and you’d also quite possibly wake up in a motel bathroom with your liver hacked out. ●Try crack JUST ONE TIME, and you’d either die instantly, or develop a crippling addiction you’d sell your body on the street to support, which would likely involve unprotected sex. In which case, see above. ●Try marijuana JUST ONE TIME, and then you’d immediately try crack. In which case, see above. ●Play Dungeons and Dragons JUST ONE TIME, and you’d eventually start sacrificing kittens to dark gods while listening to Heavy Metal and smoking weed, which would lead you to crack, then on to bareback sex in dirty alleyways with underage prostitutes who had been abducted by other Satanists, who you’d probably get pregnant, but not before they stole your kidney. Or liver. Whichever. The ’80s were weird.

Back to the bees, though. I just assumed that, if one stung you, that was it. Card punched. Ticket taken. Death would show up on a pale horse, I’d lose at chess because I was still struggling to master Connect Four, and off I’d go into the undiscovered country. It was pretty terrifying. I mentioned in another post recently that I’ve experienced only one episode of sleep paralysis – and that was mostly true. And it was a pretty classic (and terrifying) example of the phenomenon. ( Click here to read about it. ) But it’s not entirely true, because it kind of also happened many, many years before I was a twenty-something and living in a crappy, probably haunted, apartment. I was somewhere around 10 years old the first and only other time it happened. And killer bees were in the news. And my grandmother had knitted me an afghan. With tassels. One night, I was sleeping under that afghan when I had a nightmare that I was being chased by a swarm of the murderous little bastards. I don’t remember when or where they started coming after me, but I do know that I somehow managed to outrun them just enough to barely escape inside my house. I slammed the front door behind me, and could hear them buzzing and crashing against it. And, being somewhere around 10 years old, I ran to my room and hid under my covers until they went away. Or, more specifically, I hid under the afghan my grandmother knitted for me. With tassels. Of course, as with any good horror movie, my dream didn’t end there. Not before I discovered that one lone killer bee had made it inside the house. And it had found me. That’s when I woke up. In some kind of crazy Inception moment, I’d awoken from a nightmare where I’d hidden from killer bees under the exact same afghan I was currently sleeping under. And one of them was o n my chin. It was just sitting there, waiting to pierce its terrible stinger into my tender flesh, rendering me helpless and immobile and very, very dead. I was terrified. Killer bees have faces. And also mohawks. TRUE FACT.

But I couldn’t move. I could barely even breathe, not that I really wanted to. I was scared that any tiny hint of movement would provoke the bee to sting, and that would be it for me. So I was just lying there, silent and still and screaming inside. It wasn’t quite sleep paralysis, because I don’t remember ever thinking I couldn’t actually move if I’d wanted to. I just really didn’t want to, because I wasn’t all that eager to piss off the tiny murderer standing on my chin. I don’t know how long I’d lain there, but it seemed like forever. Every now and then, I’d feel the bee move – just the slightest twitch, maybe one of its legs (but probably its stinger), and I’d panic. Eventually, I tried to call out to my sister across the hall. Which was mostly just like that almost-silent whimper a dog makes when you haven’t given it any of your cheeseburger, and it knows you’re about to eat the last bite. So she didn’t hear it. I tried calling out to my parents. Same thing. So I just stayed still in the bed, terrified and sweating until something snapped. At some point, I just gave in. I accepted my fate and started coming to grips with my own mortality. Yes, when I was somewhere around 10 years old and in otherwise perfect health, I was saying my goodbyes to friends and loved ones there in that bed, that night. Apologizing for all my secret wrongs and asking for forgiveness. Admitting that I did not, in fact, think my sister was a trollbeast, and that I actually kind of loved her. Wondering what would happen after I died… That sort of thing. Once I’d finished my little existential reckoning with the Powers That Be, I was ready to go. And I knew what I had to do. I might be walking into death’s door, but I’d do it on my own two feet. And maybe – just maybe – I’d defy the odds and live another day. Maybe I’d even manage to trap or kill the bee, after which I’d be a hero to my family and then probably be on the local news or something, and maybe even get invited to appear on Donahue. Who knows? I spent the next several minutes contemplating my pending fame, the end result of which was probably just me and Tiffany trying to get away into the night, then I’d put my arms around her and we’d tumble to the ground, and then I’d say, “I think we’re alone now.” Or something. I had a crush. Shut up. Either way – death or fortune – I was ready to end it. Mustering up all my courage, my body tensed. I took a deep breath, slowly, and held it. I let it build up in me until I was ready to gasp for oxygen, then I shot violently from the bed and swung around in mid-air to, I dunno, roundhouse the bee into oblivion. Except that never happened. Goodbye, cruel world.

What actually happened was that I screamed like a wet cat as I threw off the afghan and more fell out of the bed than leapt like a ninja. I scurried backward, away from my bed, dragging my ass on the ground as my heels dug into the carpet and pushed. All the while, screaming. My parents remained asleep. As did my sister. Maybe I screamed a lot in my sleep and they were used to it, or maybe they just figured times was hard, and if a killer bee wanted to lessen their financial burden by one nerdy child, then far be it from them to get in the way of nature’s wrath. It could’ve gone either way, really. When no one came to my rescue and the bee never dive-bombed my skull to deliver a death sting, I figured it out. Those damn tassels. I’d been dreaming about killer bees, one landed on my chin, and then I woke up. In bed. With one of the tassels from my grandmother’s afghan resting against face, which I then just naturally assumed was a murder insect come to kill me. I think that was the first time I laughed at myself. Properly, I mean. In the self-aware, slightly lunatic, way of an adult after you realize just how stupid whatever it was you just did was. It wouldn’t be the last…

I'm broken

Not too long ago, the Queen of the Internet (as far as I’m concerned, anyway) put out a call for help. Her name is Jenny Lawson, she’s known online as The Bloggess , and she’s weird and wonderful and damaged. One might even say broken.

She would say that, actually. She has said that. And she needed help from other broken souls to put together a trailer for her new book, Furiously Happy . Turns out, I am one of those broken souls. I’m in the Tribe! I responded to her request along with thousands of other broken people, which was pretty simple: she wanted us to tell her why we were broken, but why we’re also furiously happy. Because you can be both. At the same time. I thought about it, then decided to send her my deepest, most secret fear that I am (was) terrified of anyone ever finding out: I am a failure. I constantly fail. All the time. I try things, they don’t work, then I try the same things again, they don’t work again, then I try once more. And another time after that. And another after that. Constantly. I try. I fail. Incessantly. It’s part of what makes me who I am, both as a perpetual work-in- progress and as a chronically depressed, anxiety-plagued broken shell of a man. (I’ve recently started trying to write about my struggles with depression, which you might want to check out , if you haven’t. I’ve also started opening up about My Lifetime of Questionable Decisions , which are a lot funnier than depression. But more embarrassing.) I have the support of a great wife and amazing 9-year-old stepson, who see me through the really dark times. However, even when I’m feeling really low, I still hold on to the belief that success is predicated by failure as a necessity; there are no “overnight” successes. Anyone who wakes up a success one morning hasn’t been sleeping. They’ve been trying, working, and getting better at what they do until the lightning strikes: skill meets up with luck and timing, the stars and planets align, and Something Happens. I’m still waiting for Something to happen. And I’m still trying. And failing. And trying again. It’s what I do. I’m broken because I always fail at everything. BUT I’m furiously happy because the only difference between a happy ending and a sad one is where you stop the story. And I’m not done. Thanks for letting me be part of this, Jenny. You sure are a nifty person. I’ve embedded the video below, but do be sure to go read Jenny’s post about it . The comments alone are worth it. If you’re looking for me, my ugly mug turns up 5th in the video, right after the person who comes right after Felicia Day . Yeah, I’m in a video with Felicia Day now, which is kind of amazing. (If you don’t know how inspiring I find her, you should find out. Seriously, here .) Christopher Moore is there, too. Along with John Scalzi. And Patrick Rothfuss . And, of course, Jenny Lawson . And a bunch of other really amazing people who make me brave. Which is the only reason I’m writing this, because I’m still kind of crippled with anxiety over anyone I know ever actually seeing me sitting there with my sign, admitting my greatest insecurity to the world. I tried explaining this strange combination of excitement and crippling anxiety to my wife, and she responded in the way in which I’ve grown accustomed: “Think of something comforting. Pretend I said it.” It’s why I love her. I put myself out into the world every time I publish anything on this blog. Sometimes it’s ugly, and sometimes it’s embarrassing. Usually, it’s funny – but it’s always scary. But putting my greatest insecurity out there – letting everyone I know see how broken I feel sometimes? That’s downright terrifying. But it’s all right. I’m not worried anymore. I’m in the Cool Kids Club!