• Strike Force
• Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic
• Dungeon Explorer
• Continuum (aka: Alpha Waves)
• Legacy of the Wizard

It’s bound to happen with movies. Back in the 90s, I saw some really weird movie on TV. There was a scene that for some reason stands out in my memory. I posted the question on yahoo answers:

I hate asking questions like this but I’ve asked my friends and searched the net for about a year. Here’s what I know. Movie is from the 80s. Main character is in hell (or something like it, another dimension that looks like a barrens desert). He runs into a room and finds a normal bedroom with a bed and a full length freestanding mirror.

There is a beautiful woman on the bed, she isn’t saying anything. It’s obvious as the viewer that it’s a trap. He looks in the mirror and suddenly he sees her as a demon (she looks like she’s been burned). Then the demon woman goes crazy and he’s on the run again. I don’t know the actor or what happens next.

Hope someone knows.

Someone did. And they posted the answer Highway to Hell (1991) starring Chad Lowe, Kristy Swanson. Sure enough, I pulled these images from the trailer which is the exact scene I was talking about. The amazing part is the speed that someone could be monitoring the question threads. Her username is MystMoonstruck and she nailed the answer. I sent her a thank you note since this has been haunting me whenever I thought of horror films. I thought for sure it was hellraiser, pumpkinhead or one of those “mainstream” ones.

The idea that I had about it being nearly in hell is oddly accurate. Also I do remember his motivation being of kind of linear adventure which the plot synopsis seems to back up.

Freaky movie. I don’t remember a goddamn thing but these stills really bring it back. Yeah, I’m going to watch this one somehow. They don’t even have it on DVD anywhere! Youtube seems to have it though in 10 parts.

Ben Stiller is in it. Hitler does a musical number or something like that (Gilbert Godfrey?). I didn’t watch any of those parts originally. I haven’t seen most of the movie and thusly, why I wanted to add context to this strange bedroom scene.

A similar type of mystery mission happened a long time ago. It was quickly resolved by my good bud Tom (who is a movie database himself). I remember some weird scene where some guys are pushing a wall down a hallway and a floating head is chasing them. It was an extremely odd scene and there was little hope of me remembering anything about it since I saw it when I was 7 living in Houston. I had wandered into some teenager’s room at a dinner that my folks were having at someone else’s house. If you have a “fuzziest memory”, it’s similar to that. No chance to remember what a title of a movie was when it happened in the first 10% of your life.

So what movie has people pushing a wall down a hallway with a floating head? Time Bandits.

I mentioned it to Tom and he instantly got it. The hallway scene kinda made it easy to get. Of course when I watched it, I hardly recognized it. But that is the nature of the mystery category. It’s just to find the name.

1. you were young
2. you only remember bits of the game
3. the game didn’t make sense
4. you didn’t understand the game on a deep level

Just like an old movie that you saw when you don’t understand common themes, genres and things only learned by experience. “Oh, it’s a side scroller rpg with blah blah elements”. Those things you can only recall in hindsight. And so the people on the forums of WWTG seem to suffer from severe piecemeal description hell. “I was young, I don’t remember much of it … but it went something like this”. It’s a challenge.

Casually, CameoEX mentioned another lost game and started yet another mystery:

CameoEX: there was another one that i am trying to remember…was like a family including the pet that you played as…
Me: that rings a bell…
Me: each member had certain powers?
CameoEX: i just remember that there was a house…and each family member had different abbilities…yeah
CameoEX: the pet was like a puffy looking thing or something
Me: yeah, and you could go back and switch out..
CameoEX: yeah
Me: crap! I remember that one.

We couldn’t even remember the platform. We thought it looked pretty advanced so we guess TG-16. Slowly, we gathered some more clues, like was it a platformer, what were the characters like. I could remember bits and pieces but we weren’t getting very far. So I searched on moby games for “family pet” in the advanced search, just searching game descriptions and BAM! someone happened to write this for the description:

Legacy of the Wizard

This is an action game with role-playing elements. In it, the player controls members of a family (including two parents, two children and a weird pet) as they delve into a large dungeon. The object of the game is to collect a variety of items and use them to defeat several bosses. Each character has different jumping and fighting abilities and is able to equip different items, so using multiple characters is essential to success. Defeating the final boss, a dragon named Keela, ends the game.

Yep! That’s it! Hilarious. Another mystery uncovered. And, very much so, since I haven’t seen this one in almost 19 years … I remember it looking better.

I hadn’t even thought of this game until CameoEX mentioned it. It was passively lost. In fact, I think I remember the feel, animation, the enemy sprites as different games. The chibi look was weird and unique. The house/home concept was really cool. I remember you could burn off ice tiles with the fire mage. I remember dying a lot as the magey types (although I didn’t understand why). It was beyond me.

FF7 turned a lot of people’s perception upside-down. Whether it was just timely or perfect, FF7 is the reference to which I would have compared any of the early NES RPG games. Titles like Zelda and this one (Legacy of the Wizard) were accessible hybrids, although I didn’t know that at the time. When Cameo played, I didn’t understand the HP/MP bars. Years later, when playing FF7, I found it neat that I could spend time leveling and then have more of this mysterious “HP/MP”. If I had been in that frame of mind, I probably would have played FF1 on the NES, but I didn’t. So gameplay elements were lost on me which made searching for this even harder.

For sure, I’m going back and beating this thing. I don’t know if it’s going to be the same. Cameo mentioned that it was about as long as Zelda, I remember him beating the end boss. I bet it’s not that long really, I don’t think you even need to keep all of your family alive when you beat it.

Also, it will be interesting to see how scary the end boss is. I remember the sprite being very large and I was amazed that we weren’t dying.

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.