Pathways Into Nostalgia
Apr. 16th, 2013 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerOne little item among other pieces of up-to-the-minute computer news keyed straight into the certain amount of interest I have in "old computer games." Quite a while ago, when reading through a "best games of the year" article, I noticed a description of a game called "Pathways Into Darkness" that made me think of "Wolfenstein 3D" but happened to be for the Macintosh. A year later, the people who had made that game made a more elaborate one called "Marathon," and that time they pulled me in. In shooting my way through the futuristic corridors of the starship Marathon I did get back to the playable demo of Pathways Into Darkness, and some years later I managed to buy a bundle of Bungie Software games that included the earlier game. Changing systems left it behind, though, but now people had managed to get back to the original source and make it available for modern computers.
One of my first thoughts was to contrast this release for the iPhone and iPad releases of old games, which do have to take programs that once used physical keyboards and try to adapt them for touchscreens. Then, I remembered there are a good number of modernized game engines out there, but which can seem a bit more complicated to get running than the easy-to-install "App Store" release of Pathways Into Darkness. Of course, the game itself has its own challenges. It does seem a bit more deliberate than something like Wolfenstein, and keeps up the trappings of a "role-playing game" with their elaborate inventories. Still, there's something memorably creepy about the shadowed Central American pyramid (with its vast, "game-appropriate" internal spaces) and the outlined monsters emerging from the dark.
One of my first thoughts was to contrast this release for the iPhone and iPad releases of old games, which do have to take programs that once used physical keyboards and try to adapt them for touchscreens. Then, I remembered there are a good number of modernized game engines out there, but which can seem a bit more complicated to get running than the easy-to-install "App Store" release of Pathways Into Darkness. Of course, the game itself has its own challenges. It does seem a bit more deliberate than something like Wolfenstein, and keeps up the trappings of a "role-playing game" with their elaborate inventories. Still, there's something memorably creepy about the shadowed Central American pyramid (with its vast, "game-appropriate" internal spaces) and the outlined monsters emerging from the dark.