Hello, and welcome to The Infinite Playlist.
I’m your host Lostwolfe and together, we will be playing games played by other people on different blogs around the internet.
My History With Games
I started playing video games in the very early 80’s. The very first few games I ever encountered in the wild were Pac-Man, Frogger, Asteroids and Space Invaders.
Most of these were in arcades or little corner stores, where for a little while and a couple of cents, I could lose myself in the rhythmic shuffle of the invaders, or I could outsmart Pinky and the gang, or I could have the zen experience of trying to dodge asteroids.
In the long run, though, none of these games held a lasting appeal for me. My hand-eye co-ordination was never really great to begin with and these games were very much just testing those skills.
What I didn’t know I wanted was an actual COMPUTER game.
I didn’t know that I was looking for a kind of game that was slower and that didn’t so much depend on me hitting the fire button at the right time while I was in the right place for things to work out.
This notion of a slower game only ocurred to me one summer in 1986, when I visited a friend and they showed me both King’s Quest III and Space Quest I.
![An image showing a pair of old Sierra games. The top half of the image is devoted to King's Quest 3, in it, the hero Gwydion is walking down a treacherous pathway to a valley where he might find items to aid his quest. In the bottom half of the image, we have Roger Wilco, the protagonist of Space Quest, battling against a Spider Droid [which explodes on impact] and an Orat, a strange, rather violent creature that lives on the planet Kerona.](https://lostwolfeslair.com/TIP/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/01_02_sierra_games.png)
After that, all bets were off. I had an old machine that was in the process of dying [my trustworthy, but ill-fated Spectravideo computer] and I traded that in for a regular old PC.
That PC was solid as a rock and lasted me almost right until 1991, where I had to buy a whole new machine.
During that time, I finally got my hands on and played Space Quest I and King’s Quest III, which then opened other vistas: The Secret of Monkey Island, occasional dalliances with the Gold Box games. An aborted attempt [with a bad disk] at playing Hunt for Red October.
I’ll readily admit that none of these games /looked/ as good the games in the arcades at the time, and I desperately wanted some developer to create something is beautiful as Toki, but in the end, my patience won out.
![This is a screenshot of the game Toki, in which a man gets turned into an ape and must save his girlfriend from the clutches of evil. It's a proto-typical [though very difficult] platformer. Here, Toki must ascend a vine and shoot a mid-level boss to proceed.](https://lostwolfeslair.com/TIP/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/01_03_toki.png)
VGA and Soundblaster both ushered in something of a golden age of gaming and I was there for it.
But times change. At this late juncture, I can no longer enjoy the AAA half of the industry. It’s too greedy, too cynical and too mired in Live Service nonsense for me to give it much of my time.
So, I have branched off into indie games, but also back tracking some, to where things all started. Which leads us to here.
The Infinite Playlist
As of late, I’ve been reading blogs by other people and been thinking about back tracking – playing – and sometimes re-playing – old games for pleasure and documenting the act.
At first, I wasn’t sure how to tackle this idea, but then I hit on two concepts I really liked. One was the written Let’s Play and the other was appreciating other people’s accounts of their time with these older games.
I figured I could do a little bit of both of these things.
So, this blog will be devoted to:
- highlighting other blogs that have covered these games
- playing them through for my own enjoyment.
First up, we’re going to tackle Below The Root.
