Caves of Thor

 There's been some games that annoy me. Some are new, some are old, but they usually have one thing in common, and that's me saying "I'm never playing this game again". Caves of Thor, though, man, it's on a whole different level of that phrase. Caves of Thor is like, almost the meaning of it. The epitome of my catchphrase, "I'm never playing this game again". It makes you think that if you ever went back to 1990, all there would be is Caves of Thor and we'd all be playing horrible PC games, but luckily that's not the case. This game was invented by Todd Replogle, who later became one of Duke Nukem 3D's lead programmers, and this is also the first title Apogee picked up that wasn't created by one of them. Let me explain this abomination a little bit more.

 Sound: 0/10

The first thing you will do is press the S key to turn off the sound, unless you were like me (who didn't see that to begin with) and just sat there listening to the worst-ever PC speaker orchestra. I'm serious, something is wrong with this game's music, it's absolutely nervewracking. All the points, gone.

Graphics: 1/10

Some miserable attempt at anything that resembles a crap is what you get with this one. You're going to need to decypher the games cryptic code of ASCII objects that are supposed to either be items, enemies, or doorways. There's a lot of nothing spectacular, -9 fat ones.

Gameplay: 1/10

The controls can be summed up to the equivalent of running a marathon in molasses. They're just that sticky. The screen can't even catch up with your smiley warrior when he's moving. Make sure that you're aiming in the correct direction, then press space to attack enemies with your exploding spear or something. If you try to throw more than one, your current one will disappear in mid-flight, so don't do that. You're going to need to find shields, potions, and keys to get to the next area. I got extremely frustrated in what I guess was a river, trying to fight my way against the current because I couldn't see anywhere else to go. -9 and don't whine.

Overall: 1/10

Basically, this game gets one point overall because it's a game. Other than that, it's a pretty horrible creation that probably should have never seen the light of day. Some people may like it, and my rebuttal is this: PLAY ZZT INSTEAD if you're looking for ASCII graphics and top-down gameplay. When I was playing this game, I noticed that you say "Oops" if you shoot a wall. This leads me to believe that, possibly, this is where Duke Nukem's "Where is it?" was created. It's even more credible when you consider who made the game. I could probably ramble on and on about how bad this game is, maybe so that you don't have to play it, or maybe so that we can learn from some of the fatal flaws of gaming. Give it a shot, it's free, but in the menu it says the source code is available for $199.

http://www.classicdosgames.com/game/Caves_of_Thor.html