Catacomb

John Carmack, the amazing programmer and lead in games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, and many others, released this for the Apple II in 1989. Later on, it was ported to MS-DOS, and given features like EGA graphics. You're a magician looking for treasure in the demon infested 10-level Catacomb. This shouldn't be confused with Catacomb: The Abyss, which came out some time later and was first-person. Here's the first Catacomb, a 2-D action/adventure title.

Gameplay: 6/10
I could just imagine plugging the 5½'' floppy into the drive and hearing the loading sequences. It looks, plays, and sounds exactly like you'd expect a game like this to. We've all heard of Gauntlet, and this is the first game that comes to mind when I play this. You gotta fight through the level, get the key to open the door to the mirror to the next one. The levels are fairly small, not too intricate, but always have some messed up trick about them. When I first started playing, I accidentally hit Enter, which cast fireballs in all directions, found a secret warp area, went to level 9, and got killed. I thought that was just a little bit funny. Eventually I picked up the strategy to the game and just started slayin' demons. I like that you can charge while you walk, plus points, the special attacks are super useful, plus points, but I hate how you can't walk diagonally. -4 points.

Graphics: 4/10
EGA graphics can support something like 16 colors. Now that we know that, it's fair to say they could have atleast changed the color scheme to the levels. You're looking at the same purple walls, green floors, and red demons the whole game. Your guy walks around in a hilarious fashion, sort of shuffling along. Just for fun, I tried it in CGA mode, and the former is a giant improvement, but still not enough for me to give points. -6 points for the ridiculous color scheme that never leaves you alone.

Sound: 7/10
I really enjoy the effort that went into the sound. It's constantly rocking these arpeggio boops and blips, sounds very similar to Commander Keen, everything has a sound and it's just a lot of fun to hear. No music though. -3 points.

Overall: 7/10
It's so easy to see how Catacomb Abyss was created using this as a backbone. The play style is inadvertently similar to its predecessors. I know one thing, I wish that I had this game back then rather than all the other crap I used to play. The Catacomb series is pretty badass, and there's quite a few games in it, but just how do they stack up? You'll have to wait and see. Snatch this game from the link below!
http://www.myabandonware.com/game/catacomb-27y#download

Ken's Labyrinth

Remember all those games where you'd wander around aimlessly in first person, killing a few enemies and then taking a few hours to find out where to go? Welcome to Ken's Labyrinth, a game designed by Ken Silverman and published by Epic Megagames in 1993. There's some aliens that are using unintelligent lifeforms to make jelly, and for some reason, they stole your dog, and you have to go in Ken's Labyrinth to find it. Ken is an extremely evil superalien that finds it entertaining when you put a bunch of weird lifeforms in the same place and see what happens. So hey, what are you waiting for? Enter...

Gameplay: 5/10
In these years, first-person gaming was no joke. There were already games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Blake Stone, and the Catacomb series, except this one is missing something; Violence. Ken's Labyrinth is some odd blend of all the aforementioned games, and I even see some things happening here that you didn't see until Ken's future games, like Duke Nukem 3D. Early on in the title we discover we can throw some sort of blob at the enemies, serving as your primary attack for most of the game. The opponents you face are a collection of aliens and other races, and they're about the stupidest fools you've ever seen. The best strategy is to just open a door, back up, let them all funnel in, and use your dumb blob thing. Eventually the levels get more intricate and the enemies more abundant, but you're still just running around looking for keys into the next room so you can go up the stairs to the next level to look for the keys to the next room so you can blah blah blah blah blah. -5 points for not too much different going on.

Graphics: 5/10
To compare it to something, let's use Doom, which came out in 1993 as well. The first thing I notice is the lack of floor and ceiling textures. There's also no "vertical" gameplay, everything is on a one-floor plane. The enemies are lame looking and don't have much visual pizzazz. Same with the items. There's walls that say "Shoot this wall" or "walk through this wall", and I feel like I'm in a weird little kids nightmare. -5 points for almost everything looking the same.

Sound: 5/10
There's some digitized sound effects that do the job, including the typical "Oh." and "Aah." that slips from your mouth whenever you eat an apple or something. The music was pretty cool, a couple songs I liked, a lot more I didn't, but it just doesn't fit the game. -5 points for not being very atmospheric.

Overall: 5/10
It blows my mind to think that this guy programmed Duke Nukem 3D and all those other great games that I mentioned in this post earlier. For real though, does anybody want to chug their way through a freakin' ugly maze trying to find the way out? Probably not. Do you want to have some lame weapons and items to use? Nope. Do the enemies make the game more fun? Not at all. It's still a classic game though, showing progression in the genre while keeping it very much the same. That's why I give this game a five.
http://www.advsys.net/ken/klab.htm

Sqrxz

My girlfriend said "I used to play this game when I was a kid, Squiddx or something" some time ago. Since I'd never heard of it personally and she didn't get the game name right, I wasn't able to find anything about it. Today though, today is different. After plugging in an old hard drive and scouring files dating back to 1998, we spotted it, in all of its MS-DOS glory. "What the hell, give me that so I can review it!"

First look: It's a sidescroller. I'm some sort of bug lookin' thing, possibly an alien, and I'm on a go-right rampage. There's some blobs coming to get me so I jump on them in classic sidescrolling fashion, which works well and gives me a little more air than before. I can also press down while I move to crawl when precision becomes necessary. The graphics aren't that great, extremely pixelated and a little weird, I wonder if it's just a rendering glitch or if it was made that way? Come to think of it, I didn't have any sound either, so I went to do a little more research. Rather than fix the problem I decided to play the Windows version when my DOS version was acting up. I've uploaded the DOS version to the link below, because I couldn't find it anywhere else on the world wide internet.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=N8ADOQRS <<< DOS version of Sqrzx

Gameplay: 5/10
Now that we have a well working version, its noticeable that I'm frustrated with this game. The controls are awkwardly stiff and require a certain precision that just isn't easy to comprehend. You die, a lot. The water levels are relentless. Was there something I was missing? After checking http://sqrxz.de for a while, I learned that this game was supposed to be intentionally frustrating. It is in my beliefs that this is a coverup for the game actually being pretty shitty and gives little to no insight on the challenges that lie ahead. I'm really on the fence about this, because on one hand, it's like a puzzle game requiring patience and accuracy, but on the other hand it's a horrible sidescroller with bad controls. -5 points for the stiffness.

Graphics: 4/10
Well, they certainly updated the game in the Windows version, everything runs smoother, it has more color, and better resolution. This doesn't do anything for the game as a whole, though, because it still is just a bunch of tiles spread around using a level generator or something. Seriously, with these kinds of games, you should release your level-making engine, just in case you want people to think the game is awesome and spend hours playing it. All of this just isn't appealing to me, I had to -6 points for the lack of variety.

Sound: 6/10
Some cute little Megaman sounding bumpin' tracks are going on and just about everything makes a noise. Be prepared to hear the dying sound a lot though. -4 points for the low quality sounds.

Overall: 5/10
The game isn't that bad to play until you get so mad you want to take whatever is to the left of your computer screen, take a big bite out of it, and swallow hard. It's cute and quirky but is just missing a lot of things that would come standard to a game like this. The challenge in this game lies within the games physics itself, and how patient/fast you can be. Alternatively, I played the Deluxe version of the game that is also included with the Windows port, and it seems much more up to date. You're a rabbit looking thing running around in the same style world but there's some key gameplay changes that almost make the game a new experience. It ain't bad, and it probably fits quite well into my "top 50 half-ass games of all time" list.
http://sqrxz.de