Xenonauts – Compatibility

Posted on June 4, 2018 by ElbinoBunny

Xenonauts Title Screen

System Requirements

Linux

Operating System: Ubuntu 14.04 or greater, Linux Mint 17 or greater
Processor: 2 GHz x86 or greater
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Video: SDL Compatible Video Card, 1280×720 resolution or greater required.
Hard Disk: 3 GB

These packages are required:
libc6:i386
libasound2:i386
libasound2-data:i386
libasound2-plugins:i386
libsdl2-2.0-0:i386 and dependencies.

Mac OS X

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.7 or greater
Processor: 2 GHz x86 or greater
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Video: 1280×720 resolution or greater required.
Hard Disk: 3 GB

Windows

Operating System: Windows Vista or greater
Processor: 2 GHz x86 or greater
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Video: 512 MB DirectX 9.0c Compatible Video Card, 1280×720 resolution or greater required.
Hard Disk: 3 GB

Ubuntu 16.04

The GOG version of Xenonauts appears to run natively with no issues in Ubuntu 16.04.

Xenonauts – Linux, Mac OS X 10.10, and Windows 10 Game First Impressions

Posted on June 4, 2018 by ElbinoBunny

Xenonauts Title Screen

It was in the summer time, likely 1996. My best friend was an only child and seemed to have a great knack for talking his mother into buying him computer games from the bargain bin section of whatever store they happened to be shopping in. During this particular week, he and his mom were shopping at Tuesday Morning and he was able to purchase a game neither one of us had ever heard of, but the box cover sure looked interesting. It was a game for MS-DOS and because of its outrageous memory allocation requirements, he couldn’t figure out how to get it to work with his family’s computer system. Since both of his parents worked full-time, he came over a lot during the summer, and one day he brought the game with him to my house to see if I could get it to work on my system. After building a special custom boot disk to boot into a favorable DOS environment to run the game, we both experienced our first contact with the game called X-COM: UFO Defense.

Select Your Main Base

X-COM: UFO Defense is a strategy game, developed by Mythos Games and released in 1994 by MicroProse, that combines real-time strategy with turn-based tactics. The player is tasked with creating and managing the global defense force protecting Earth from hostile invasion by extra-terrestrials. The player must spend their budget wisely purchasing aircraft to intercept and shoot down UFOs. They must hire soldiers to go on missions to eliminate the threat of downed alien spacecraft and to retrieve valuable alien technology. And they are also responsible for hiring and managing scientists to research new technologies to create weapons comparable to the ones the aliens carry.

Intercepting UFOs

Xenonauts, a game developed and published by Goldhawk Interactive in 2014, seems to have been created to recapture the same vein of nostalgia I had from when I used to play X-COM: UFO Defense with my best friend in the mid-1990s. The game developers state that the game is not meant to be a clone of X-COM, and it is not, but the spirit of that original game is certainly alive and present here. Gamers who played X-COM: UFO Defense will feel at home when selecting their beginning base site, managing their initial base, sending planes out to intercept UFOs and sending out a team of soldiers to investigate a UFO crash landing site.

A Close Encounter Shot to the Face

When playing through Xenonauts for the first time, I noticed it seemed to appear very spartan for the year it was released. No cutscenes or rich animations were employed, and I have been unable to find an actual tutorial on how to play the game as far as I can tell. With X-COM: UFO Defense a player had to rely on the manual. Without the manual it was easy to lose very quickly. Maybe Xenonauts was designed to cater to the more mature PC gamer who is used to reading a thick manual to get the most of their strategy game’s mechanics. There are tool-tips that pop up the first time a player accesses any new screen, however, so the player doesn’t have to fly completely blind. I realize having had played X-COM: UFO Defense as a child, I am not much of a newcomer to the genre, but without reading a manual or following a tutorial, I was able to intercept two UFOs and successfully complete my first mission to retrieve alien artifacts from my first downed UFO. There is also a Xenopedia that serves as an in game online help resource while playing.

UFO Secured

Upon further research, it appears Xenonauts was actually the product of a Kickstarter campaign that was able to raise the sum of $154,715 from 4,668 backers according to Wikipedia. This is an impressive amount, but far from the budget of a AAA studio. With this information to place things in perspective, what the developers of Xenonauts were able to accomplish with this game is impressive. The musical score is complex, easy to listen to, and fits the atmosphere of the game. The sound effects are rich and fit within their contexts as well. While the animations and graphics are simple, no extra imagination is required on the part of the player to discern what they are looking at on the screen at any given moment.

Research Alien Technology

Goldhawk Interactive allowed partial access to the Xenonauts source code which resulted in the creation of Xenonauts: Community Edition, a mod for the Xenonauts game. Those with a retail copy of Xenonauts can apply the community edition mod to expand and enhance their Xenonauts game experience. I’ll try to add another article covering the community edition mod at some later point.

I had a lot of fun briefly playing Xenonauts today, moseying down memory lane. The GOG summer sale just started today. Those that visit GOG.com before June 6^th can download a free copy of Xenonauts to play themselves. This is a good game. I’d recommend getting a free copy before the promotion runs out.

Zak McKracken and The Alien Mindbenders, FM Towns version – Compatibility

Posted on June 3, 2018 by ElbinoBunny

Zak McKracken and The Alien Mindbenders Title Screen

GOG.com Download System Requirements

Linux

Operating System: Ubuntu 14.04 or greater, Linux Mint 17 or greater
Processor: 2.0 GHz or greater
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Video: 256 MB VRAM, OpenGL compatible video card

Mac OS X

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.7.0 or greater
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz or greater
Memory: 1GB of RAM
Video: 64MB VRAM

Two-button mouse, or Apple mouse with Secondary Button / Secondary Click enabled recommended.

Windows

Operating System: Windows XP or greater
Processor: 1.4 GHz or greater
Memory: 512MB RAM
Video: DirectX 7 compatible 3D graphics card or greater

Ubuntu 16.04

The FM Towns version of Zak McKracken and The Alien Mindbenders offered by GOG.com works flawlessly from within ScummVM on my Ubuntu 16.04 machine.

Zak McKracken and The Alien Mindbenders – FM Towns Game First Impressions

Posted on June 3, 2018 by ElbinoBunny

Zak McKracken and The Alien Mindbenders Title Screen

Zak McKracken and The Alien Mindbenders is a graphical adventure game initially released in 1988 for MS-DOS and later released to the FM Towns system in 1990. Developed and published by Lucasfilm Games, it is the second game after Maniac Mansion to use the SCUMM engine developed by Lucasfilm for use in most of their adventure games during the late 1980s and throughout the end of the 1990s. This makes Zak McKracken an interesting adventure title. While it has many of the elements and style of future adventure game classics such as Full Throttle and the Monkey Island series, it’s also a little rough around the edges and lends itself to brute force trial and error gameplay on the part of the player, a feature of most adventure games of its time.

Zak McKracken and The Alien Mindbenders was one of those games that fans of LucasArts adventures had in their collection generally solely because it was a LucasArts adventure game. The LucasArts catalog would be provided in any retail boxed copy of LucasArts games such as The Dig or Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle. Flipping through the catalog, knowing how much fun it was to play the other titles, gamers would see an ad for Zak McKracken and couldn’t resist given that it was, “From the makers of The Secret to Monkey Island!”. That’s how I wound up playing this game as a child.

While the word that sums up my memories of The Secret of Monkey Island was, “Amazing,” the word that sums up my recollections of Zak McKracken and The Alien Mindbenders was, “Fun.” I remembered it wasn’t as colorful, having been developed in EGA 16 color mode, but it had that Lucasfilm/LucasArts feel to it that made it charming and the aliens were funny. I saw the game on sale on GOG.com a while ago. I had to get it to complete my collection of these graphical adventure games from this era.

I don’t want to work here, please fire me already and get this game over with.

I have been on a Linux kick recently given that my Windows computer has been occupied with running my business software that hogs all of its system resources. Closing all of my business applications to run a game and then opening them back up again when I’m done playing is cumbersome. Plus, I have always been a fan of the underdog operating system since I first used Caldera OpenLinux in 2001 when I installed it on one of the first computers I built. I’d like to spread the word of which games work and how well they work so other would be Linux gamers can be informed.

The SCUMM engine lent itself to being easily ported across multiple system architectures back when Lucasfilm was releasing their games on Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, IBM PC, FM Towns, and other systems. Today an application called ScummVM, which can be found at www.scummvm.org, offers a virtual machine environment to play these games across multiple modern platforms: Windows 10, macOS, Linux, and many others. ScrummVM is used by GOG.com as the basis for running Lucasfilm/LucasArts adventure games downloaded from their site.

The ScummVM Menu for Zak McKracken and The Alien Mindbenders

Running the installation script from GOG.com for Zak McKracken and The Alien Mindbenders was as easy as running a game setup program on Windows. Make sure you run the installation script without root permissions though or it will lock you out of being able to access your game once installed. A convenient link was added to my games menu that I was able to click on to run the game. ScummVM popped up and offered me two versions of Zak McKracken to play.

I blindly chose the first option and started the game. This was not the Zak McKracken and The Alien Mindbenders I remembered. The colors were way richer. Zak looked much different, and the title theme music was incredible! It was like discovering a whole new game I had never played before. Were my memories of the past so faded? How did this happen?

It’s the Two-Headed Squirrel!

In Zak McKracken and The Alien Mindbenders, the player assumes the role of Zak, a tabloid news reporter who hates his job and would rather be writing novels. The game begins with Zak whining to his boss that he’ll never get a Pulitzer prize writing “sleazy” tabloid articles when he is assigned to go to Seattle to investigate rumors of a two-headed squirrel attacking park goers in Washington State. Meanwhile, the aliens in a secret room are using a machine sending pulses through the global telephone network that are slowly making the population of Earth stupider so they can take over the world. Gameplay begins after the initial cutscene with Zak McKracken complaining to his boss. The player is then in control of Zak McKracken in his apartment preparing for his plane trip from San Francisco to Seattle.

Once again, the game looked far different from what I remembered. Not only were the graphics crisper and more vivid in color, but the expressions on Zak’s face and that of his boss were different from what I recalled. When I played the MS-DOS version I remembered it playing out like more of a sitcom, whereas this new Zak seemed way too serious and incredibly obnoxious to me. I seriously wanted to see him get fired by his boss, “Oh, you don’t want to write my ‘stupid’ tabloid articles? Fine, get out!” It was at this point that I noted something was certainly not right.

The aliens and their stupid machine. It has an effect on them too.

The two options of Zak McKracken and The Alien Mindbenders offered via the ScrummVM from the GOG.com download are for two different ports of the game. The second option was the MS-DOS version that came out in 1988 that I fondly remembered, while the first option was the FM Towns remake with 256-color redrawn graphics along with new and improved sound. It is amazing how a change in the graphics and sound of a game will influence my opinion of a game.

One would generally expect that better graphics and sound would lead to better gameplay. While the intro theme is indeed better and objects are easier to see and interact with in the FM Towns version, there are so many aesthetic design mistakes that make Zak McKracken and The Alien Mindbenders fall from being a classic to simply bearable retro graphic adventure. After playing it for ten minutes, the first thing you will want to do is kill the sound. Anywhere you go while in San Francisco, which is where you will be for the first 30 minutes of the game if you haven’t played it before, you’ll hear obnoxious white-noise traffic sounds with a random police siren mixed in constantly at the same volume whether you are out on the street or in your own apartment. Be careful if you pick up the phone in your apartment. Make sure you have any phone number you wish to call ready to dial, and don’t dial it incorrectly. Leaving the phone off of the receiver makes the most irritating beeping noise until you figure out how to pick up the receiver and get it hung up again. Getting to the airport to fly out to Seattle is a welcome, quiet change until you hear the airplane noises from being in the airplane.

I wonder how much clean water this plane has.

While spending time in the airplane was actually the most fun I had while playing in preparation for this first impressions article, it takes way too long to fly from place to place. To pass the time I would go to the plane’s lavatory and turn on the sink, press the flight attendant’s call button, and open the overhead carry-on compartments while in flight. I never noticed the little annoying details when I played Zak McKracken as a kid. Maybe games today do a better job of quickly getting to the important gameplay.

Playing through the first portion of Zak McKracken and The Alien Mindbenders is like reading through the beginning of a novel that is slow to ramp up. People tell you its a good story if you stick with it. There are a few humorous spots that keep you somewhat engaged, the aliens seem like they would be plucky adversaries, and there is the potential love interest named Melissa that haunts Zak’s dreams. All of these things lead up to a potentially good adventure if the player can keep the desire to see it through. With so many other graphical adventure games to play, and with this one’s sounds and artwork being so abrasive, it might be awhile before I come back and complete this one.

Carmageddon TDR 2000 – Compatibility

Posted on January 25, 2018 by ElbinoBunny

Carmageddon TDR 2000 Load Screen

System Requirements

Operating System: Windows 98 or later.
Processor: 1.8 GHz or better.
Memory: 1 GB RAM recommended.
Video: 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 9
Sound: DirectX compatible sound card
Hard Disk: 1 GB

Windows 10

Carmageddon TDR 2000 runs almost flawlessly in Windows 10. Multiplayer requires DirectPlay which is unsupported, but there may be workarounds to make multiplayer work.

Carmageddon TDR 2000 – Windows 98 Game First Impressions

Posted on January 25, 2018 by ElbinoBunny

Carmageddon TDR 2000 Load Screen

Carmageddon TDR 2000 is the third game in the Carmageddon series released in 2000. It was developed by Torus Games and originally published by Xicat Interactive for the Microsoft Windows 98 and 2000 operating systems on PC. The TDR in the title stands for “Total Destruction Racing,” for those who were wondering.

When I was a kid, I’d be sitting in the back seat when my parents took me along to the grocery store in the family car. More often than not when driving through the parking lot, a pedestrian would walk right out in front of my dad’s car without ever looking up to see if any vehicles were coming. Whenever this happened, my dad liked to jokingly say, “There’s fifty points!” as they crossed in front of his car’s grill. This is the kind of sense of humor the Carmageddon series is geared to.

I can drive a Steam Machine while playing on my Steam Machine.

If you are unfamiliar with the Carmageddon series, the original game’s tag line is The Racing Game for the Chemically Imbalanced with a pedestrian carrying a briefcase being run over by a fast-moving red sports car. Like most racing games, the player races against other contestants around a track for a certain number of laps, reaching check points along the way. If the player is able to reach the next check point in time, they are awarded more time as they make their way to the finish line. Where the Carmageddon series differs is that the player is awarded bonus points for each pedestrian they are able to run over.

These guys are about to get steamrolled.

In Carmageddon TDR 2000, railroading pedestrians rewards the player with satisfying crunch and squish sounds encouraging the player to produce more carnage. Performing fancy tricks also awards points to the player. These bonus points can be spent purchasing new vehicles or upgrading an existing vehicle’s engine power, armor, or weapons. Unlike real-life, many of the pedestrians really seem to have a death wish. In many cases the race track is clearly marked with innocent bystanders carelessly walking right into harms way, even when they are walking around the remains of their already previously unlucky comrades.

I didn’t know this doubled as a airplane. Vroom!

I forgot how much I have missed playing with Hot Wheels or Matchbox cars as a kid and pretending I was in the cars doing the incredible tricks and causing massive crashes. I had fun doing all of this in Carmageddon TDR 2000. The tracks I have played so far have not been linear like in other racing titles to the point of being rather impressive. The game seems much more open-world than most games ever got in the year 2000. There is plenty of room to drive around and explore provided the player doesn’t run out of time. I just figured out where the checkpoints were and made sure I drove through them in sequence whenever I needed to add time to the clock. The rest of the time I was trying to drive up and over anything I could, enjoying the full extent of fun the sandbox I found myself in could provide. The first track provides a loop the loop to speed through and a ramp to jump over a series of RVs and trailers.

It’s sometimes too easy to get stuck doing crazy fun stuff.

There are a number of interesting cars available to choose from even at the beginning of the game before any of the later cars are unlocked. I noticed one called the Steam Machine. Given that I am an avid PC gamer, I had to drive it. It was massive fun steamrolling everything in my path. With great freedom of movement comes great responsibility though. I found it trivial in many cases to pin myself in a place where I could not maneuver free. When aborting a race, a player keeps the points they accumulated up to the point they aborted, so it’s not much of a loss to start the race over when stuck. If you run the race straight along the track, you shouldn’t have this problem, but if you’re like me and enjoy pushing the limits of the game, it will likely become a fairly frequent occurrence.

Is that a car that’s just a moving wooden wheel? I want to wreck it!

The multiplayer functionality in Carmageddon TDR 2000 requires DirectPlay to work. When I attempted to install DirectPlay in Windows 10, the process locked up and wouldn’t let me proceed. A quick check of the Steam forums indicates there are people who were able to get it to work, but their solutions may not work in all cases. Microsoft’s official current stance from what I can tell is that DirectPlay is deprecated and therefore completely unsupported for Windows 10.

Got ’em!

Carmageddon TDR 2000 is available for download on both Steam and GOG.com for a fair price on each. This game is raw arcade vehicular mayhem and racing, and devoid of any meaningful plot or story-line. The Grand Theft Auto series probably fills this niche for gamers better these days, but I had a great amount of fun launching my steam machine around for the small time I have played. I do plan to revisit this one and see where the rest of the game takes me.

Psychonauts – Compatibility

Posted on January 7, 2018 by ElbinoBunny

Psychonauts Box Art

System Requirements

Linux

Processor: 2.0 GHz or higher
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Video: 128MB Video RAM with OpenGL 2.1 compatibility
Hard Disk: 6 GB
glibc 2.7+ required. Binary is 32-bit.

Mac OS X

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.6.8 or later
Processor: Intel Core I Series Processor
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Video: ATI HD 3870 or Nvidia 8800GT or better. 512 MB Video RAM required.
Hard Disk: 4 GB

Windows

Operating System: Windows 2000/XP or higher
Processor: 2.0 GHz Pentium IV or AMD Athlon or higher
Memory: 512 MB RAM
Video: 128 MB GeForce FX 5600 or ATI Radeon 9600 or higher, DirectX 9 compatible.
Sound: DirectX 9.0 compatible sound card
Hard Disk: 6 GB

Windows 10

The Steam version of this game appears to work flawlessly in Windows 10.

Psychonauts – Windows XP, Linux, and Mac OS X 10.6 Game First Impressions

Posted on January 7, 2018 by ElbinoBunny

Psychonauts Box Art

Psychonauts is a 3D-platformer action adventure game developed and published by Double Fine Productions. The original boxed version for the PC was published by Majesco Entertainment. First released in 2005, its story was written and directed by game design legend Tim Shafer.

The player begins Psychonauts playing as Raz, an adolescent who runs away from his parents to attend the secret Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp in order to learn how to use his psychic powers to become a Psychonaut. Since he is there without parental permission, he is only allowed to train at the camp until his parents arrive to either pick him up to take him home or grant permission for him to continue his training there. While Raz is eager to complete his training more quickly than his parents are able to arrive, most of his fellow camp residents are apathetic to the goals of the camp coaches and just want to go home. When Raz begins to demonstrate his abilities, some attempt to impede his progress.

Getting ready to attend “Basic Braining”

Those familiar with Tim Shafer’s other games such as Full Throttle and Grim Fandango will note the same signature charm in the story, dialog, and artistic nature of Psychonauts. However, unlike those previous games, Psychonauts is a true action 3D-platformer, not a relaxing point-and-click adventure game. This makes sense given that a version of the game was also released for the XBox and Playstation 2 game consoles.

A piece of mental baggage.

The first forty minutes of the game consists of cut-scenes introducing Raz and the characters at the camp and a tutorial on how to successfully implement the mechanics of the game across an obstacle course known as “Basic Braining.” The controls are a little awkward to get used to for a PC gamer utilizing the mouse and keyboard. I have played many more PC titles in the same genre that felt like they had much better controls. That being said, the effort to learn the awkward controls felt worthwhile in order to progress further into a rich, compelling game.

Swinging on poles was challenging until I learned you're supposed to press the direction arrow at the same time you jump

Swinging on poles was challenging until I learned you’re supposed to press the direction arrow you want to move in at the same time you jump.

Once through the tutorial, it is apparent that Psychonauts is a vast game with a great deal of depth to it. The player may press the “Esc” key to access the game’s journal. The journal keeps track of the quests the player has been sent on, any key game information the player needs, player stats, and games may be saved and loaded from the journal as well.The game may be saved at any time the player accesses the journal; there are no pesky save points.

Then there are these tightropes. A little tricky.

Every few moments at the beginning of playing Psychonauts there is something new being introduced. I sometimes hate writing first impressions articles on games like Psychonauts because I feel like I haven’t spent enough time playing yet to adequately describe the essence of the game as a whole, but only a sliver of the tip of the iceberg. The character acting and animation are phenomenal. The game does a good job introducing the player to a large, bizarre story world a little bit at a time to keep it all fresh, interesting, and fun.

But the trapeze was the most challenging of all.

Psychonauts includes a little something for everyone it seems. Collecting various items throughout the game allows the player to level up their character’s abilities. There are pieces of mental baggage to find and sort through. I felt all sorts of good when I received my first merit badge and could score more as the game progresses. Psychonauts is a challenging 3D platformer, and provides an intense, deep story for adventure gamers as well. This seems to be a classic in every sense in my gameplay so far. I’m eager to continue playing through Psychonauts to really see how good it is.

Treasure Adventure Game – Compatibility

Posted on January 6, 2018 by ElbinoBunny

Treasure Adventure Game Title Screen

System Requirements

Operating System: Windows XP or higher
Processor: 1.8 GHz
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Video: DirectX 9 compatible graphics cards
Hard Disk: 2 GB

Windows 10

The GOG.com version of this game worked flawlessly when I played it in Windows 10.

Treasure Adventure Game – Windows 7 Game First Impressions

Posted on January 6, 2018 by ElbinoBunny

Treasure Adventure Game Title Screen

Treasure Adventure Game is an action adventure platformer released in 2011 for Windows PCs. It was developed by Stephen Orlando and published by Robit Studios. The music was composed by Robert Ellis.

An evil demon attempts to wipe out all magic from the world. A young apprentice called Huayin, who was training to become a wizard, gathered 12 enchanted items with which he used to face the demon. Though Huayin was ultimately successful in defeating evil, the battle between himself and the demon caused all the land of the world to break up into small islands scattered about the world.

Centuries later, an archaeologist by the name of Baggus, along with his friend Gagwin and his son, go on a quest to find all 12 lost enchanted items from the epic battle fought between Huayin and the demon with the intention of opening a museum to house the lost artifacts. Upon finding all of them, Baggus opts for them to retire with their treasures while Gagwin convinces Baggus to press on in order to find the temple that can only be accessed by the one who has possession of the 12 artifacts. Gameplay begins on the island supposed to have the location of the missing temple. The player takes control of Gagwin’s son. They enter a cave and then the player’s character wakes up to his grandmother in her home.

Grandma gave me a boat.

The player’s grandmother presents him with a boat and encourages him to seek his fortune as an adventurer. Traveling to the east, the player very quickly meets up with Baggus in his shiny new museum that is soon to be opened. Baggus vaguely recognizes the character but doesn’t give it much thought. He tasks the player with finding the three essential items all treasure hunters must have, a hat, a compass, and a sail. Once the player finds these items, he may return to Baggus for additional training.

Treasure Adventure Game plays a lot like Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. The game is quite clever and to its strength doesn’t take itself too seriously. That being said, I have seen this action adventure platformer formula in many sorts of games released for the PC spanning decades. There is nothing revolutionary here and not much new. If you enjoy this tried and true game formula however, you will have fun with Treasure Adventure Game.

Treasure Adventure Game Setup

Treasure Adventure Game serves up an extra bit of nostalgia in one way I never expected nor wished for. In order to change the game controls there is a companion Setup.exe file installed along with the game, like many of the DOS games from the late 80s and early 90s, instead of being an option in the game’s main menu for some unknown reason. This is also the tool that must be used to change the size the game graphics take up on the screen. When in game and you are told to press any key to continue, the game actually means it will only respond to any key currently configured on the virtual gamepad. Pressing any other key does nothing but increase the frustration of the player. Though I have been stubbornly playing Treasure Adventure Game using the keyboard, I would imagine it’s far more fun to play with a gamepad given its action platforming style.

Always save your progress. Save early, save often.

Treasure Adventure Game plays like a PC game that really wants to be a console game. There are extremely verbose scrolling text dialogs to convey the story everywhere throughout even where it doesn’t make sense to have them, much like what you would expect from a 16-bit title. The player may have at most three save files, which is pretty standard for many console titles. Perhaps most frustratingly, Treasure Adventure Game also implements save points. These save points are shiny blue orbs you will encounter in various places throughout the game. When they are used, the player’s progress is saved and health is restored. You will want to keep your eyes peeled for these and make use of them each and every time you see one. While playing, I would ignore one eager to move on to the next area only to be faced with creatures in the new area I could not quite handle. When you die you go back to the last save point and lose all of the progress made since the last save. To my knowledge there is no autosaving mechanic anywhere in Treasure Adventure Game.

Running with my parrot friend.

In the beginning of the game, it is important to look out for the jumping fish in the waters between islands. They will tax you one point of health any time they jump out of the water and touch you. This isn’t so bad when you are at full health, but when you’re trying to get back to another island to save and heal, it’s bad news. My strategy has been to move directly toward the fish until they jump, then pull back just enough where the arc of their jump falls short of my boat, then push forward quickly before they have a chance to jump again.

Outside the local 6-Fifteen. I’m assuming this is a play on 7-Eleven.

Treasure Adventure Game doesn’t seem all that original, but my brief encounter with it thus far as been enjoyable. While it’s not at the top of my gameplay list, I do want to continue further in it and keep playing. At the time of this article’s publication, Treasure Adventure Game was being offered for free on GOG.com in celebration of the release of its sequel, Treasure Adventure World. I would recommend picking up a copy; this is a cute game worth playing.