90s PC Gaming Poll, Episode I: A Question of Vengeance (1990-1994) - NOMINATIONS thread - deadline Nov 15

the console poll series' sloppier shadow!

this is PART ONE of ILX's poll of the decade that took us from commander keen to quake iii arena. planning to interleave these with will m's terrific console generations polls, so the 1995-99 sequel won't run until after the next one of those, and of course after you have sent me a check or money order for $29.95.

nominations will continue for about a month, assuming our civilization persists. this is a huge field, covering all games originally released between jan 1990 and dec 1994 for DOS, Windows 3.x, Apple IIe, C64, Amiga, Macintosh, OS/2, Linux, whatever.

half a decade is, of course, an arbitrary division of an arbitrary division, but if you prefer your world to make sense, some things to think about:

1990 saw the introduction of windows 3, the discontinuation of the ZX Spectrum, the first mouse-driven ultima (VI), the first VGA king's quest (V), and the first wing commander (I). it was the first year since 1980 not to see the release of an infocom text adventure. the period of this poll covers the ascension of VGA, the birth of sprite-scaling 3D (wing commander, ultima underworld, wolfenstein), the beginning of the CD-ROM era, DOOM, myst: the surrealistic adventure that will become your world, high lucasarts, 829579324892 apogee games, etc.

cross-platform games will be nominated only once, except in specific cases (can think of none offhand at 1 AM HST) where significant differences exist between versions.

expansions, level packs, etc., will be combined with their parent games.

socialists, feminists, and justice warriors/mages/rogues of every description are enthusiastically invited to occupy and hopefully annex the poll. we are not the PC master race we are the PC rainbow coalition. this virtual machine kills fascists.

nominate away! view-only spreadsheet here which i will try to keep current. going to bed now tho.

superhero league of hoboken

Ah yeah! I'm down with this.

also, how are we doing release dates? cosmology of kyoto was released in japan in '93, in the us for mac in '94, and for windows in '95.

original country / earliest date, so CoK (great game -- well great something) is '93. this will cause anomalies around the cutoff -- i def didnt play CoK until at least 1996 -- but o well.

fuck yeah, these are my gaming coming-of-age years

as i think i said somewhere else on here recently, the pace of invention in these years was really staggering

MARATHON

Just makes the cutoff — 21st December '94.

oh fuck yeahhhhh, this is gonna rule big time.

now typing up a list of major obvious heavy-hitters (for me anyway)

Any other Amstrad CPC 6128 owner here? For now everything that comes to mind seems to be from the late 80's.

as a spectrum owner i enjoyed a bitter rivalry with my best friend over his amstrad ownership

Betrayal at Krondor (aka Raymond E. Feist's etc) (1993)
Civilization (1991)
Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood (1991)
Commander Keen VI (aka Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter) (1991)
The Dagger of Amon Ra (1992)
DikuMUD and derivatives (1991)
DOOM (1993)
King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (1992)
Lemmings (1991)
Master of Magic (1994)
Minesweeper (Microsoft version) (1990)
Quest For Glory II: Trial By Fire (1990)
The Secret of Monkey Island (1990)
SimCity 2000 (1994)
Star Control II (1992) aka The Ur-Quan Masters (1993 port)
UFO: Enemy Unknown aka X-COM: UFO Defense (1994)
Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (1992)
Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992)
WarCraft: Orcs & Humans (1994)
Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi (1991)
Wolfenstein 3D (1992)

Oh, and

Alien Carnage aka Halloween Harry (1993)
Beneath a Steel Sky (1994)
Hexxagon (1993)
Loom (1990)
Raptor: Call of the Shadows (1994)
Scorched Earth (The Mother of All Games) (1991)

Turrican
Rick Dangerous 2
Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O'Fun
Pang
Shadow of the beast
The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants
Strider II
Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles

great list, doc - i'd have picked a lot of those myself

here's a few more:

cannon fodder (1993)
the chaos engine (1993)
sensible world of soccer (1994)
beneath a steel sky (1994)
dune ii (1992)
syndicate (1993)
indiana jones and the fate of atlantis (1992)
monkey island ii (1991)
skidmarks (1993)
super stardust (1994)
pga tour golf (1991)

Doctor Casino's post above already contains most of the games I enjoyed during this period. I guess I can add:

Eye of the Beholder (1992)
Might & Magic: World of Xeen (1994) <- possibly cheating, but I never actually played Might & Magic 4 and 5 individually so this is all I know
Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos (1993)

I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of stuff

Kinda surprised how many things I think of as early 90s games actually squeaked in in '89. Populous and Prince of Persia especially feel like they belong with the above.

Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993)

Day of the Tentacle (1993)

d'oh, of course those should both be on the list

Championship Manager '93 (1993)

Alien Breed (1991)

Cadaver (1990)

never seen 'cadaver' before. looking at youtube, i would have been all over this in the early 90s.

it was a delight. i know it has been discussed at decent length somewhere on ilx

fucking hell, i forgot all about cadaver!

Legend aka The Four Crystals of Trazere (1992)

I think all my predictable Lucasfilm favourites are already listed, so, please may I have:

Speedball 2 (1990)

(and yes re 1989/90 confusion, was going to nom Xenon 2 but that was 1989)

I'll be back later, probably to nominate some of those 829579324892 Apogee games, some other platform games that were probably not even very good examples of the art, a text adventure that nobody else on ILX has ever played, etc

I really liked the Cadaver demo but then PC Format said it was the worst Bitmap Bros game yet and I was at the age where I believed all reviews to be 100% true so I've never played the full thing

I almost nominated Gods but then I realised it was kinda boring and I only liked the music (the theme song which John Foxx was something tenuously to do with)

Speedball 2 (1990)

a thousand times yes to this one

the 'ice cream!' sample from this still swims unbidden into my consciousness every now and again

Spaceward Ho! (1990)
SimAnt (1991)
Spectre (1991)
Chuck Yeager's Air Combat (1991)
Hellcats Over the Pacific (1991)
Panzer General (1994)
Star Wars: TIE Fighter (1994)
System's Twilight (1994)

Probably doesn't deserve votes but I would feel like a traitor to my family if I did not name:

Return to Zork (1993)

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (1993)

Worlds of Ultima 2: Martian Dreams (1991)

Another World (1991)
Myst (1993)
Curses (1993)
The Incredible Machine (1993)

Been waiting for this poll to come round.

Master of Orion (1994)
Railroad Tycoon (1990)
Star Wars: X-Wing (1993)

Nahlakh (1994)
Ancient Domains Of Mystery (1994)
One Must Fall: 2097 (1994)
Thexder 2 (1990)
System Shock (1994)
Castles (1991)
Druglord (1991)
Jones In The Fast Lane (1990) (this was an enormously underrated multiplayer game)

Never cared for Duke Nukem or Kroz but they had titles in this period
Origin really was MVP of this era, huh, Sierra kind of blew it

was going to nom Xenon 2 but that was 1989

I guess you have to draw the line somewhere, but damn. Wonder how many of my early period Amiga faves will miss the cutoff.

Is there a previous era poll I either missed or have forgotten about?

not yet but i am planning to double back! wanted to do this period first out of selfishness and to more or less align with the console poll. but '89 favorites will get their turn. there aren't a lot of clean ways to do this unfortunately.

compiling platform info for everyone's noms so far, will actually put stuff in sheet later today. v exciting response thanks yall!

Simon the Sorcerer (1993)
SkyRoads (1993)

This is sort of Sierra's New Jersey period. All those VGA-era, mouse-driven games were stunners at the time, but have mostly not aged well as games. As many observed at the time, the mouse interface takes away a lot of the mental energy one could expend on these...as frustrating as the text parsers could be, you certainly felt more like you were doing something when you worked out the solution to a puzzle... versus "click on the tree and the game decides for you that what you're doing is climbing the tree to look under the nest to find a key." The VGA remakes of a couple of earlier titles in particular laid bare the problem.

Anyway, very few of them seem as robust as the immediately preceding generation of late-80s, late-EGA games (QFG1, Conquest of Camelot, Colonel's Bequest, even King's Quest IV is pretty good IMO). Some are basically as tolerable as their predecessors (which is to say that Police Quest III sucked about as much as Police Quest I-II). I didn't even bother nominating KQV, it's really a poor entry in the genre in terms of puzzle design, character, the much-vaunted "story," everything. It's essentially a remake of KQ II, which was already the flimsiest and most seams-showing entry in the series. Also noteworthy how poor the world-building was - KQV's just makes no sense at all with this big town, some wilderness with miscellaneous unrelated obstacles each screen, then desert. KQVI just does the lazy thing of "five different, disconnected and arbitrarily themed islands." I will say that besides the bugs and some dull stretches, the third and fourth Quest for Glory games do manage to have a little bit more going on, and despite its serious flaws I am all about Dagger of Amon Ra. LucasArts games are much, much more tonally consistent and absorbing even if the veneer of Gen X ironic distance sort of flattens out the differences between characters (and games, to an extent). They're pretty much all great.

Original Duke Nukem shareware is pretty dull key-finding platformer stuff imho. It's fine but not really better or worse than Secret Agent, etc. Figured I'd either vote for original Commander Keen (which basically nails down the genre after the promising but not really fun Captain Comic of '88) or the best of those Apogee titles, which I think is probably Keen VI.

Are there any other worthwhile FPSes from this period, besides Wolf and DOOM? I'm not going to be the one to nominate Heretic or Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold (god what a title).

Under a Killing Moon (1994)

Are there any other worthwhile FPSes from this period, besides Wolf and DOOM? I'm not going to be the one to nominate Heretic or Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold (god what a title).

Rise of the Triad? I don't know, I didn't really play it much, I remember some people liking it. For me, nothing came close to DOOM and DOOM 2 and I didn't really waste much time playing other FPSes up until Duke Nukem 3D was released.

I remember ROTT being just kinda ugly and flavorless, and maybe also having a movement/control feel that just didn't feel right after DOOM. Can't remember if you moved too fast or too slow or what. Agreed though, I mostly goofed around with shareware of all the DOOM clones and then just fell deeply, deeply in love with Duke 3D (one for the next poll).

Also now wondering if should have nommed DOOM II instead of DOOM - I think the sequel is the more complete experience, with the full range of monsters and the Super Shotgun adding to the fun. Also the soundtrack just completely rules, and the level design is (mostly) more interesting and memorable. OTOH I'd hate to see vote-splitting between them, and the first one has both the sense of being a watershed smash 'event' in gaming, and most of the great OMG moments and set-pieces, especially the unveiling of the big bosses.

ROTT was awful, and I remember my friends making such a big deal about it but it was a Wolf engine in the year of Doom iirc

Marathon I'm told is the best FPS of this era but I've only played a few levels

Doom and Doom 2 single-player were so obliterated by their successors (Hexen and Dark Forces were infinitely superior imo (both 1995)), I wonder if I could vote for Doom 2-multiplayer although at the time it really required nerds hauling towers for LAN parties to actually create an experience that could compete with so many other games of this era

i had considered combining doom and doom 2, because nowadays i think we'd call doom 2 an expansion pack, and because the new netcode and LAN support in 2 was also retroactively applied to 1 (tho not the super shotgun). open to this if enough doom voters would prefer it this way.

that leaves final doom as the "no i really like THESE maps" 95-99 vote.

otoh doom is going to have lots of votes and maybe splitting would teach it some humility

Btw re: Jones in the Fast Lane - I sort of mocked this a minute ago but it's worth at least playing once or twice. A decidedly odd twist on Game of Life themes, and not exactly the most thrilling, otherworldly gaming experience... but the basic mechanics, given a totally different skin, could probably be a moderate hit web game in 2016. Maybe you're a pirate or space captain or something. Basically you're balancing limited moves per turn with a longer list of things you want to do - very trusty bones for a game there. Of course, it's multiplayer solitaire, but that could be fixed too.

it's weird there were 2 dolphin related franchises called echo/ecco coming out at the same time

Jagged Alliance
Warlords (1990) (link at bottom)
Tank Wars
Scorched Earth

i'm sure i'll think of more :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlords_(game_series)

not sure if these count but...

Trade Wars 2002 (1991)
MajorMUD (1994)
Planets: The Exploration of Space (1992)
The Pit (1990)
PimpWars (1990)

(LORD apparently came out in 1989.)

for the honest and the sick-of-torrents, the following are on GOG sale this weekend for $1.49 each:

master of orion 1+2 bundle (1 eligible; 2 not)
sid meier's colonization
darklands

and two nobody's nominated (i've never played them so these are not nominations):
f-117a nighthawk stealth fighter 2.0
sid meier's covert action (this looks kinda cool)

also $4.99 for every falcon game, but i believe only 3.0/Gold is eligible.

never played QfG but in general I think dialogue is where I missed text input least of all. So much typing "say bandits" "ask mayor about bandit" and then it turns out an hour later that you actually needed "tell mayor about brigands"

by the time i was old enough to buy games myself all these VGA remasters were out and i was really into the art. QfG3 was like reading a fantasy comic or something, all these cool ancient Egypt-inspired temples and marketplaces, populated with talking lions (maybe a nod to Wing Commander?), and the savannah, which was very vast and dangerous. i loved the demo for Quest for Glory 3, i saw it and once i saw the jungle waterfalls instantly decided to get the game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t2_OPi3BQ4

that came with Space Quest V. that game was a fucking riot, just a non-stop Monty Python style parody of sci fi culture. it came with a jokey manual parodying supermaket Bat Boy-style tabloids. this was also the year i discovered Weird Al which had a song pretty much about the same thing called "Midnight Star".

Warlords had a decent Macintosh port too. Even on the hardest setting the AI was thoroughly predictable and beatable, I think?

I also remember using ResEdit to mod the hell out of it into a weird sci-fi thing. My adolescent pixel art skills left a lot to be desired. Mostly ended up as a really labor-intensive palette swap.

If I close my eyes I can almost smell the generic gray retail carpet, shelving, and off-gassing computer plastic and packaging

For me it's the smell of a new mousepad. Nothing else smells like that. It's 1990s computer gaming in its purest indoor pollution form.

the soul of a new mousepad

Fuck it, I'm nominating ResEdit (199X) - last stable release was 1994, I think 2.x was/were the versions I used the most?

ResEdit added a lot of life to any number of games I played on the Mac during this period. Icons, sprites, strings, sounds, etc. You could futz with all that stuff and make any application your own, and this was before packageable mods were even close to mainstream.

will allow that and will also nominate QBasic (1991), which to me was game platform and programming tutor in one, but i feel the slope slipping and don't want to go too utility-crazy.

I just remembered I changed almost all the sound effects in SimAnt. You know where Maxis really fucked up with that game? Not enough flange.

ResEdit was indispensable. I remember spending hours poking around looking for easter eggs, but for me it's most closely associated with modding Escape Velocity. Sad to find that it wasn't released until 1996, ineligible for this poll.

EV is going to own the next one, though

yeah like others in thread my own peak years are in the second half of the decade and EV was def the juggernaut for my mac friends, a point of lunchroom pride for its exclusivity.

I was first thrilled but ultimately dismayed by the parameters of this poll. One of my most active gaming phases was on the C64 but I'd wager that very few of the games I played obsessively came out as late as the '90s. I'm sure I can find a handful of stuff to nominate and vote for but I would've had several dozen if this covered the '80s, as well.

Red Baron (1990) also dynamix >>>> sierra

The '90s were truly the golden age of flight sims.

did anyone ever get into the real serious microsoft flight simulators? i think i got one but after a few weeks of boringly failing at taking off and dramatically failing at landing i gave up on it

there was a story several years ago, maybe somewhere else on the internet, maybe somewhere here, about some guy who liked to do real time transatlantic flights, dressed up like an airline pilot, built his own mini cockpit iirc

Lode Runner: the Legend Returns (1994)
Incredible Machine 2 (1994)
ZZT (1991)
Squarez (1992)
Jetpack (1993)
Traders (1991)

Had no idea Master of Orion was 1994, that game felt ahead of its time

xp I used to build a spaceship around me to play Elite so I guess that guy's not much different. Saying that, I was about 7 though.

I'm definitely super stoked for the 80s poll whenever it comes around. Both C64 and all the games are still in the attic back home. But this one is also a big gaming era for me and I'm kinda glad to not have to make brutal ballot choices between them...

A friend of mine (an RAF techie) likes serious flight sims. Spends hours and hours doing routine flights, days downloading maps and textures etc.

A couple of borderline non-game nominations, for things that I basically used as games during this period:

Dr Sbaitso (1992) (DUH!!!!)
Wired For Sound Pro (ca. 1992)

Dr. Sbaitso you surely know. Wired For Sound was an apparently obscure Windows 3.x utility that let you do some things with .wavs (or maybe .pcms), I think probably reverse them and speed up/slow down (though I may be mixing this up with taking them into Sound Recorder and fucking with them. The main idea though was that you could link things up with system functions, in a way that IIRC was not built into the operating system until Win 95 (though again I could be misremembering). It came with a bunch of miscellaneous and predictable sounds - doors slamming, sirens for error messages, a woman breathily saying "goodbye" for when you close down Windows, etc.... all of which my sister assuredly still has tucked away on her machine though not in regular use.

Popular sounds in our household, still quoted during holiday gatherings, include "Pick one o' these things!" and a duck-quack sound that once hilariously interrupted a camcorder sketch we were trying to shoot. Also permanently burned into my brain is a goofy-voiced guy saying "Have you registered your copy of Wired For Sound Pro yet?" Like icon-editing programs (e.g. IconDoIt!) this was endless, endless entertainment in the days of the otherwise fairly blah Windows interface.

^^^^^ we did this! I think all our system noises were bits of dialogue from young guns where they all get high (did you guys see the size of that chicken?!?!, etc)

Marathon I'm told is the best FPS of this era but I've only played a few levels

― fgti, Thursday, October 13, 2016 4:46 PM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Marathon 2 was my favorite

That's the best FPS of the next era (jk but it's definitely second).

I remember two great Windows themes of my youth. There was an MST3K one (sounds only) where the error sound was "Mitchell!" and the dialogue box was a long, irritating, "It's that THING again! WHY!? WHAT DOES IT MEEEEEEAN!" - - an odd choice tbh, can't even remember what episode that's from.

The other wasn't til Win95, and it was the Guardian, from Ultima VII. Sounds, cursor, colors, wallpaper, the whole deal. When you shut down the computer it was his booming "NO! YOU CANNOT DO THAT! YOU MUST NOT!!!!" Ahhh, 90s PC humor.

James Pond II Codename Robocod (1991 Amiga)

Battle Isle (1991 Amiga)
E-motion (1990 Amiga)
Lemmings 2 The Tribes (1993 Amiga)
Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge (1990 Amiga)
Nitro (1990 Amiga)
Paradroid 90 (1990 Amiga)

that reminds me, i am fascinated to hear Mordy's logic in favor of Codename: Iceman. but big ups for nomming Star Trek: 25th Anniversary. dlh is right, this is the most trek-feeling game i've ever come across, despite its occasional or maybe frequent adventure-game dumbness. just kirk, spock and bones, poking around dealing with weird problems, on dinky planets that consist of just a few sets apiece. i can't really remember if any of the puzzles were all that good, but, man, great sprite work - looks almost as good as lucasarts games - and apparently the CD-ROM had the actual original cast providing the line-readings!

never played the sequel but it looks very similar.

xpost

holy shit i played so much Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge

Checkpoint! (there are probably a million games that said 'checkpoint!' when you reached a checkpoint but I think the one burned into my memory is from lotus esprit turbo challenge.)

at the time i originally played it my only comments in favor of iceman were that it was kinda unique and i remembered it enough to vote for it. i've since tho enjoyed the RPG addict (and Adventure Gamer) play through it - though iirc they both felt the gameplay was lacking in fairly significant ways. http://advgamer.blogspot.com/search/label/Codename%3A%20ICEMAN?updated-max=2012-10-24T17:01:00%2B11:00&max-results=20&start=8&by-date=false

shit, hadn't thought of lotus esprit turbo challenge in years and didn't even recognise the name, but the word 'checkpoint' brought it all back

Ooooh just thought of a couple of space shooters, in the spirit of Raptor:

Major Stryker (1993)
Galactix (1992)

Stryker is EGA, very much an Apogee house-style take on a Xevious-type shooter, with parallax scrolling and by the general standards of the early 90s, very fast, nearly console-speed action on the PC. It was probably a little bit dated-looking by 1993 to be honest, but maybe Apogee had a sense that their market was people who weren't looking to shell out for consoles, who hadn't shelled out for a 486 (let alone this new "Pentium" thing coming down the pipe) - they just wanted to have some good fun on the machine where they did their word-processing.

Galactix is a VGA Galaga clone, with very satisfying explosions and the sense that enemy ships are really taking damage. It also has an indelible intro, with voices, one assumes, by the programmers themselves. In today's news, Brazilian lumberjacks cut down the last tree in the rainforest. A spokesman for the Acme Toothpick Company said, "Gee. That's too bad."

Damocles, Mercenary II 1990 Amiga
Air Warrior 1990 Amiga
Circuit's Edge 1990 PC
Lost Adventures of Kroz 1990 PC
Islands of Danger 1990 PC
Cruise for a Corpse 1991 PC Amiga
Elf 1991 Amiga
Legends of Murder II: Grey Haven 1991 PC
SWIV 1991 Amiga
Frederik Pohl's Gateway 1992 PC
Nethack 1992 PC
Pacific Islands 1992 PC Amiga
Pinball Dreams 1992 Amiga
Capture the Flag 1993 PC

Wasn't sure Nethack was a legit nom

Yeah feel free to pull it if not, I was just frantically going through the abandonware site list this afternoon.

Nethack's chronology is fascinatingly old-school. I'm definitely NOT an expert but I think the 'core' releases are all late 80s? Although, CRPGAddict gives us this fascinating summary:

... it was under continuous development from 1987 to 2003. As reader Ryan ("Pipecleaner Creations") put it in early 2011: "To play NetHack 3.4 is to play a 2003 game, not a 1987 game." Thus, I decided to follow the lead of the NetHack wiki and regard the game as occurring in six "versions": early NetHack (culminating in 2.3e), the 3.0 series, the 3.1 series, the 3.2 series, the 3.3 series and the 3.4 series. These were released between two and six years apart between 1987 and 2002...

... and then he plays a 1990 build of the 3.0 series. But, I don't get the impression that really huge, major changes were made at that point, and I kinda think it makes a lot more sense as an 80s game than 90s. More a case of incremental versions or upgrades than sequels, in other words. OTOH, I nominated DikuMUD which I think is an original 90s engine but obviously very closely indebted to an evolving scene and sharing of code that I think really has its roots in the 80s, even as its explosion depends on the proliferation of 9600 and 14.4 modems in the early 90s.

Would've definitely nominated it, I just thought it was too old. Nethack came to be in 1987, but that version was basically the same as Hack, which was born in 1985. I played this in 1986 on a Xenix Sun machine.

I'd still make a case for allowing it, as the pc version falls in the 90-94 window, allowing it to spread way further.

(Thoroughly disagree with playing nethack = playing the 2003 version tbh)

A few things with the caveat that most of them I haven't played since the 90s:

Little Big Adventure aka Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure (1994)
The Lost Vikings (1992)
Dreamweb (1994)
Darkseed (1992)
Chip's Challenge (1990) (Lynx version was 1989 but PC/Amiga/etc all 1990 + Windows 1991)

And uh here is the "text adventure probably nobody else has played" I mentioned earlier. The author is not very Googleable but appears to have died; RIP Dennis M. Cunningham, thank you for:

T-Zero (1991) - standalone DOS game, not Z-Machine etc

ah was going to say Dreamweb too.

regarding "T-Zero"

It understands even sophisticated verbs not commonly seen in IF, such as FIND, WHERE, and IMAGINE, the latter which allows you to visualize objects and locations you have not encountered.

insane.

You unlock the more exotic verbs through puzzles later on in the game and tbh I don't remember them bringing a lot to the game - I think "imagine" in particular was quite frustrating.

But other quirks work better (the time mechanism is neat) and the descriptions are all v evocative, some fun wordplay though maybe a little corny for some. It's playable on archive.org but I'd recommend downloading it and playing it in DOSBox so you can save games and come back to it.

(iirc it doesn't let you die very often but I think there are a couple of places, and I did encounter an irreversible way to lose an item I didn't know I still needed*, so saving occasionally is still good)

* probably a bug as the game seems quite fair about that kind of thing in general, but I got such a fitting-seeming response to the action that I thought something productive must have been achieved somehow, somewhere by putting the <thing> in the <thing it wouldn't come out of>

The road to the South
is IM-passable.
Absolutely impossible to pass!
Impassable.

Canuck? Brilliant engineer. Genius with Illuminite. He made the whole thing work.

you're not as bad as you smell
well you're not as dumb as you look

We seem to be working at cross purposes. I must relieve you of your belongings... until you learn.