Shareware Saturday: The Hugo Series

At the time, these games were the staple of family-friendly gaming, and to this day, everybody knows of them. We're talking Hugo and his stupid little house of horrors, which had four games altogether; Hugo's House of Horrors, Hugo 2: Whodunit?, Hugo III: Jungle of Doom, and the ever-fabled Nitemare 3D. The first three are graphical text adventures, you walk around typing stuff like "open door" or "take candle". It's not exactly that easy, though, as the games force you to do stuff like "give steak to dog" or whatever. Nitemare though, it's in a whole different element, in the exact same story line. It's a first-person shooter/puzzle sort of thing similar to Wolfenstein 3D or Ken's Labyrinth. Let's get down to business. 

Hugo's House of Horrors
This game features Hugo, but it's not really his house. You see, his girlfriend got jacked, so he's going to inspect every freaking corner of this haunted-ass house to find her. While inside, he gets experimented on by a mad scientist with a retarded monster assistant, interrupts a dinner between vampires, mummies, and werewolves, and steals everything in sight. The puzzles in this game are pretty stiff and sometimes random, so a walkthrough is essential, unless you like grinding your gearbox brain sitting at 256 colors with some beeps emitting from your PC every now and then. Hugo has a tendency to walk in the same direction, so you have to get used to that. You can't always rely on the graphics to tell you what to do, you'll have to use "look around" quite often to discover clues. The game itself is fairly small, which means you'll end up in the same area often, trying to figure out what in the hell you're supposed to be doing. That's the game. Never got very far.


Hugo II: Whodunit?
In this one, Hugo and his girlfriend are staying at a relatives house, whereupon Hugo discovers a secret door and disappears. Then, Penelope (Hugo's woman) sees her uncle get murdered. You control Penelope, since Hugo got his dumb ass stolen, and you have to wander around this place and figure stuff out. It's basically the same thing as the first game, only more frustrating, because it's more spread out. Some of the best parts of these games are getting instantly killed, a lot. You're forced to really do things right, or else it's going to have some dire consequences. Nobody wants to have to restart the game, so make sure you're saving before you do practically everything. There's some pretty good graphical scenes in this game, and some others that look like a child drew them. Either or, it didn't spark my attention enough, so I gave the hell up.

Hugo III: Jungle of Doom
While Penelope and Hugo were flying over a jungle, they crashed their plane and somehow avoided dying, even though everything else in the world kills them. When they go look for assistance, Penelope gets bitten by a poisonous spider, which causes her to be paralyzed until Hugo can get some antidote. Commence Hugo's adventure in the Jungle of Doom. Seemingly crawling through the jungle, Hugo meets a ghost, an elephant, and a bunch of black people that probably want to cook and eat his ass.
This game seems to have more death traps than the others, making it both fun and extremely frustrating. On top of that, everything is boards apart, and Hugo's got a lot of trecking to do. This game has nice graphics and everything is pretty easy to understand, just avoid this dickass witch doctor, he's going to lock you up in a cage and experiment on you. I know, it seems to be some strange fantasies within the creator of this game, but lets not get in to that. David P. Gray also released a first person shooter version of these games.


Nitemare 3-D
First person shooters can be a blast, if they're done right. When they're done wrong, however, you wind up grinding your teeth for an hour as you try to redeye your way through a game like this. Nitemare 3-D is indeed, a nightmare of a game. First thing you do is grab a gun and wander your way through what looks like a movie theater, only funeral tunes are playing. Mummies and zombies and shit will grunt at you from around corners, or skeletons and bats will come and take you out. Oh, wait, what's the backstory to this game? After going in to the menu to answer my own question, I discovered that Penelope was jacked and Hugo needs to save her. Again. I think Hugo needs to get a new woman that's going to stop running around on him, giving him a bad groove and shit. This game was entirely too tedious for me and I stopped playing within 10 minutes. There's lots of secret areas I found out, but what I didn't discover is what anything did, or where the hell I was going.


What is boils down to is this; These games are still shareware, meaning you're going to need to pay for the full versions. The final game was released in 1994, and it's still being sold to this moment by the author, Dave Gray. After all of the wonderful free games I've posted, the ones with the least sentimental value and charm continue to be the absolute worst games on the list. David P. Gray, you should consider going freeware so everyone can experience the magic that is Hugo. Let's not forget to mention that he calls these games "for the whole family", and the second one features Uncle getting killed. Thanks. It's also going to cost you $22 if you want to play the full version of these games. Not like it matters, nobody is going to play it if it's free or not.
http://www.dgray.com/retro.htm

The Elder Scrolls Chapter One: Arena

 The first of the Elder Scrolls series, developed in 1994 by everybody's favorite, Bethesda Softworks, Arena is an open-world first-person RPG similar to it's early predecessor, Ultima Underworld, only much more immense. This game still strikes me as one of the most difficult of all time, mainly due to it's overwhelming capacity and lack of navigation. It's still not bad, and it is very similar to a more recent game, Skyrim.

Getting the game to work/Understanding it: 4/10

Simply put, this game runs like crap under the default settings in DOSBox. The user is going to need to press CTRL+F12 a bunch until they reach about 20000 cycles. Once you've found your speed niche, it becomes much more playable. You're going to start off in a moist dungeon filled with rats and goblins. Move around with the arrow keys, or by clicking the direction with your mouse. You can find your inventory by clicking your face and hitting next. Later, this becomes a giant pain in the ass, but for right now you should just equip your weapon. Press the swords button to draw your weapon, then hold right-click and move your mouse around to attack. One more thing, you're going to be asked some questions from the manual in true oldgame anti-piracy fashion, so here's the list to those. Now, we can begin.

Gameplay: 7½/10

The first dungeon might prove to be too hard for many beginning players, especially with the awkward scheme they've implemented. Moving around is pretty tough, and you are prone to being attacked from behind quite often. You'll have to rest and save frequently, because dying is taken quite literally. Once you get the hang of things, the game becomes a lot of fun as you move around the world, gathering information and doing jobs and the like. Still, you have to listen very carefully some times, as the journal doesn't provide you with much of anything, and the map you have to tag all by yourself. Sometimes you'll get attacked at random in a town, so always be prepared. At this point, you can see that it is definitely the first Elder Scrolls game, but where in the hell does the title "Arena" come in? I'll get back to that, for now, -2½ points for not telling me what to do very well.

Graphics: 6/10

Understandably, this game is very large, and it's only 1994, so it's not going to exactly "excel" in the graphics department. While it's perfectly playable as a game, it's almost impossible to tell where you're going sometimes, as there's a thick fog covering anything within 20 feet of you. There's a multitude of 2D sprites like trees, fountains and people, never changing their plane of existence, always stuck in their limited dimension. However, the cutscenes are pretty good, the textures are pretty nice, and there's a lot of other things that strike my interest like how it changes from day to night. Pretty cool stuff. -4 points overall, though.

Sound: 7/10

Very atmospheric, the game really helps get you along with nice music and lots of sound effects. I wish that sometimes there was some talking though, -3 points for me being dissatisfied.

Overall: 7¼/10 

 Why is this game called Arena, anyway, I haven't come across any sort of gladiator-fighting or coliseums or nothing. Oh, it's because they rebuilt this game from an old project, adding in RPG elements and the like, only to scrap the original Arena gameplay, and still to leave the title. That doesn't make any sense. Either way, if you're a Skyrim fan, you should be checking this out, Bethesda graciously gives it out for free from their website. You'll probably spend a good moment on it, and experience gaming history as it once was.





Links:
http://www.elderscrolls.com/arena - Download Elder Scrolls Chapter One: Arena
http://www.svatopluk.com/arena/manual/ - Arena Player's Guide

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