Duffadash

Video Game Archivist

Your local towel-wearing game preservationist librarian at the Royal Danish Library and Danish Data Historical Society (DDHF). Header by Lonnie Brandt.


Zyrons Escape

Year: 1986
System: Commodore 64
Developer: Kele Line (Lars Hasselbalch, Nikolaj Pagh)
Players: Single
Genres: Platformer
Link: https://www.antstream.com/

Zyron has to be guided through the enormous maze to pick up all the different keys. Can you meet this challenge?

A traditional side-scrolling platformer wherein you are hunting through a maze looking for the 39 keys necessary to win the game. The game starts you out with three lives and has disappearing platforms, so you’re in for a pretty bad time. Lars and Nikolaj went on to make another Commodore 64 game by the name of Unitrax that I will cover at a later date.



Presenter Slides™

Year: 2022
System: Windows, Mac, Linux
Developer: brin žvan & Mathias Schifter
Players: Single
Genres: Adventure, Walking Simulator, ???
Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1989850/Presenter_Slides/?curator_clanid=40000720

The premier software choice for enterprise presentations. Visualize your milestones with state of the art patented bar-chart technology. Utilize a vast library of stock photos to showcase how hip your brand is. Report on the productivity of your coworkers with funky visualizations! Ethically developed by an experienced team of outsourced and unpaid interns!

An unconventional adventure into the corporate world of presentation software. Improve office productivity by 200% and impress your boss while doing it.

I can’t really explain this without getting into spoiler territory, so I’ll just mention that reviewers are comparing it to Pony Island, which should give you an idea of what to expect.



PataNoir

Year: 2011
System: Windows, Android, iOS, Gulx/Inform 7
Developer: Simon Cristiansen
Players: Single
Genres: Interactive Fiction, Text Adventure, Noir, Detective, Mystery
Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/449150/PataNoir/?curator_clanid=40000720 / http://www.sichris.com/Games/PataNoir / https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=si9s1jktywxj5vdk

"The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle."

PataNoir is a homage to the classic stories of hard-boiled private investigators with a knack for describing everything with complex similes and metaphors. In PataNoir, you solve problems by manipulating the hard-boiled metaphors used by the main character to make sense of the world in which he lives.

Whether or not you’re into playing games with a text parser, this one is something special. The game is written like an old noir detective pulp novel full of similes. These similes act as the main game mechanic. As you interact with and change the similes you also change the reality that they describe. The player may even enter strange new worlds through these similes, or combine them to solve puzzles. You can take a simile like an object and drop it somewhere else, so that the dark and brooding atmosphere turns a person dark and brooding instead. The author has released the source code into the public domain, and even provided a torrent for the game on his website. I recommend getting the Steam version though.



Max & the Magic Marker Year: 2010 System: Windows, Mac, Wii, PlayStation 3, DS, Windows Phone, iOS Developer: Press Play Players: Single Genres: 2D Platformer, Puzzle Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/50820/Max_and_the_Magic_Marker/?curator_clanid=40000720

Something incredible is happening in this unique adventure! Max just drew a terrifying monster with his new marker and now it's alive and wreaking havoc in his drawings! He doesn't have any choice but to stop the monster if he wants to save his pictures. In a new kind of gaming style, Max & the Magic Marker combines tried-and-tested 2D jump n run feel with the innovative option of directly influencing the level design. Here, Max is able to change every level with his magic marker so that all obstacles can be overcome, traps avoided and puzzles solved in order to send the monster back to where it came from.

Won the Best Children’s Game award at Nordic Game Awards 2010.

This, along with Limbo, marks the very beginning of the modern Danish indie scene. This game pre-dates easy porting to different platforms, which means that Press Play had to essentially remake most of the game for every single platform, as they tried and failed to get noticed on each one until they finally managed to get success on one of them. Max is a 2D platformer which adopted the very novel idea (at the time) of having the player draw objects on the screen to make them into real interactable objects that can help the player through the levels. Before Max only Crayon Physics Deluxe had such a mechanic. Max eventually got a significantly more successful sequel in Max: The Curse of Brotherhood, although I must admit that I find the first game more charming personally. These days Press Play is called FlashBulb and has two recent game releases: Rubber Bandits and Trailmakers that I highly recommend checking out.