For my next adventure in the scary part of the Internet Archive, I played Voodoo Island (1985, Angelsoft, Inc.).
Voodoo Island is an early text adventure from Angelsoft, Inc. Angelsoft was Infocom’s only serious competitor when it came to creating challenging and rewarding text adventures. Typically, both an Angelsoft and an Infocom game would require the player to solve puzzles and search for clues. What made Angelsoft unique was that the results of solving the puzzles were frequently randomized. You could solve a puzzle and still die, just due to the luck of the draw. That may be why Infocom outlasted Angelsoft by several years.
In Voodoo Island, you are the sole survivor of a shipwreck. You wake up on the beach, confused but with the feeling that someone has been watching you. The game’s introduction establishes Voodoo Island‘s tone early:
Spend enough time exploring the island and eventually, you will find a hotel. Exploring the hotel leads to scenes like this:
The first time I tried to play the game, it took me a while to make it to the top floor of the hotel. That is where I discovered not only Doctor Beauvais but also Sharleen, who the game describes as being “buxom” and “blonde.” Considering the target audience of this game, I assumed that buxom and blonde was going to be a good thing. I turned out to be wrong:
Your goal is to get off the island and avoid joining the living dead. It is not easy but I have discovered a few things that might help: examine everything, grab everything that you can, and remember that just because you don’t see something the first time you look, that doesn’t mean you won’t see something the second time.
Good luck!
This is another one that can be best described as being dumb. Just dumb.
A group of miners are sent into a dangerous environment by an evil corporation. When they explore an abandoned ship, they unknowingly bring a hostile creature onto their own vessel. One of the crewman is killed when the creature mutates inside of his body. The rest of the crew includes a scientist, one strong woman, one woman who cries, and a strong, silent captain.
Sybil Danning is top-billed in The Tomb but she only appears at the very start of the film. She lands an airplane on a landing strip in the middle of the Egyptian desert and then gets into a gunfight with two archeologists who have robbed a tomb and are now trying to sell off the artifacts. When one of the archeologists aims his handgun at the plane and pulls the trigger, the plane explodes. Though Sybil survives the gun fight, that’s it for her in this movie. Since whatever modern-day audience The Tomb may have is largely going to be made up of nostalgic Sybil Danning fanboys, most people will probably stop watching once it becomes obvious that she is never coming back.
Kim Basinger is Maggie, a nurse who has adopted her autistic niece, Cody. Her sister, Jenna (Angela Bettis), used to be a junkie but now she has cleaned up her act and married a former-child star-turned-cult leader, Eric Stark (Rufus Sewell). Because Jenna’s daughter has supernatural powers and Eric is a Satanist, they want the little girl back. Christina Ricci is Cheri, a junkie goth who used to be a member of the cult and who tries to warn Maggie before getting her head chopped off. Jimmy Smits is John Travis, the FBI agent who helps Maggie out when Jenna and Eric kidnap Cody. Mostly, though, he’s just Jimmy Smits, a TV actor who looks out of place whenever he appears in a movie.
Michael Bower (Edward Furlong) is a 15 year-old loser who walks with a limp and still has nightmares about the night his mother was killed in a car wreck. Brainscan is the new PC game that Michael makes the mistake of playing. In the game, Michael is encouraged by The Trickster (T. Ryder Smith) to kill both his friends and complete strangers. When Michael starts finding body parts around his house, he realizes that whenever he kills someone in the game, he kills them in real life too.
To quote a wise man named Forrest Gump, shit happens … especially if there is a clown nearby.
Through the Shattered Lens 