A long time ago, in the BBS days when I had a 2400 baud modem, I ran into various little bits of shareware and freeware on BBS download doors etc. Muddling my way through strange terms like “protocol” and discovering the speed, resume and glory of the z-modem protocol, somehow I found a demo of an unknown name.

Continuum / Alpha Waves

It was a strange vector graphics game where you would jump with a polygon ship around a room. It wasn’t even in English, it looked like Swedish (iirc — which I didn’t). You bounced your little triangular ship onto platforms (you always bounced, there was no jump or “not bouncing”) and eventually you made your way into an exit (usually high above you). The game was revolutionary for me because of the height of the exits in the very simple 3d room, the bouncing was cool because up until then there was only “grounded” games like Wolfenstein and Doom.

Many years passed, I forgot about the game and I didn’t even mention it to even my closest friends because it’s so obscure that I would never find it again. Satan would be throwing snowballs before I find a game about a bouncing triangle in a 3d room that ran on DOS. Well, hell just froze over.

The game is called Continuum (aka: Alpha Waves) and it was written in French originally.

An excellent action game similar in graphics style to Virus but much more unique in gameplay, Alpha Waves is hard to describe– the physical objective of the game is to maneuver a polygon craft toward the exit on each level, but in “Emotion” play, all the levels are put in the context of different areas of a human brain. Very innovative and difficult on later levels.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. I totally missed out on the human brain theme. I guess it was my lack of French skills in 1990/1991.

Dungeon Explorer

In addition to this crown jewel of mysteries in my mind … there have been some others. First, a game that Tim and I beat on the TG-16 called Dungeon Explorer. It was 2 player co-op (which is great fun) and it’s like a much better gauntlet essentially.

There are some really nice open areas and sprite graphics. I haven’t played it since whenever we first did, I remember the graphics being very plasticy and rounded. The dithering was something very new that the TG-16 did.

I think the game had an unlimited number of continues if I remember. It just took a weekend to beat and was quite fun. I think Tim’s TG-16 is long gone. Sad day for TV Sports Football and all those other … um … were there other titles?

Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic

Next comes an old DOS game that I hardly played (but watched) called Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic. I only found the title of this after I posted a lengthy description on usenet. Someone happily responded.

It was a bit of a space rpg. The cool part (in my mind) was when you landed in a space dock you got this top-down super-imposed map as you walked down the hallway. Your party would follow you around and you could shop, run into people, talk and do all kinds of things. Most of the time I didn’t understand what the hell was going on. RPGs were not my thing back then. I was playing Rad Racer and Gradius on NES. Not exactly complicated games.

One of my most favorite sci-fi RPGs ever, Sentinel Worlds is one of the very best “hard” sci-fi games ever made, despite disappointing sales figures. Your task as is to command a crew of 5 Federation officers as they embark on an epic quest to combat raiders that are plaguing the Caldorre System in the far-future year of 2995, learn where the raiders’ base is, and terminate the problem once and for all.

They definitely has the Aliens and Terminator ripoffs in there. Ha, I guess the lawyers hadn’t gotten all hyper in the gaming biz. Or maybe, the dollar figures weren’t what they are today.

Certainly a EGA NPC named “nude woman” is a bit tasteless by today’s standards. I guess the nerd factor was (is still?) on full blast. You didn’t have the ESRB ratings and the mass market appeal. I don’t dare question were those pixelated perverts shuffled off to, perhaps some corner of geekery I haven’t yet uncovered. Thankfully I’m disgusted even with our better tomatoes like Laura Croft, something I don’t understand.

Sentinel Worlds is apparently a favorite of lots of peeps on the Interweb. You can download it legally at Home of the Underdogs, it’s 327KB and people say it runs in DosBox just fine.

Home of the Underdogs has some wicked popups, but nothing that is too offensive (as far as I know).

Going to have to try the whole DosBox thing … maybe after the wedding.

Strike Force

Then there was another mystery that got answered on usenet. It was a Defender type game. It was a coin-op arcade title back around 1991 etc. The neat bit about this shooter was, if you played cooperative (double the quarters), you could hit a button and transform your ship into a gun. Then you could attach your gun to the other person’s ship and become a turret.

It was pretty simple. Blow up the aliens and save the humans. Quarters disappeared and you made your way around the galaxy killing stuff. Very simple gameplay but the quality was far beyond anything my PC or NES could do.