There's an article in MacWorld, "The Game Room: It's a Wrap" by Christopher Breen, in which he lists the "Top 10 Mac Gaming Thingies of the Millennium". This brings back old memories, and I want to go over this list to reflect on the games I've played.

The first item is Infocom, a great company formed from an MIT research group. I've only really played Zork, although I've seen people play a couple of other games. These games broke ground in natural language processing and storytelling. The coolest one of the series in my mind is "A Mind Forever Voyaging" in which you're a guy who's mind has been put into a computer that runs a complex. It's way in the future, some catastrophe has occurred and most of your systems are down. You still have control of six utility robots which are specialized, so have different characteristics. The objective is to find out what went wrong and fix it.

Another item on the list is Dark Castle. I played this on my room- mates Mac Plus, and the Mac SE/30. Great little black and white action game, not quite a side-scroller. I could never get the mouse movements correctly as I'm rather poor in my mouse-eye coordination. A mouse is too refined for controlling all-around movement so I tend to go off one way then the next. I might have finished the easy level, but it was a long time ago. My friend finished the easy and medium levels, but not the hard level. Delta Tao bought the rights and recoded it in color, so now it looks great and plays almost exactly the same.

"The Colony" is one of the scariest games. It's a first person perspective, once again written in the black and white Mac era. You are in charge of a colony ship that gets sucked into a black hole. The ship crashlands on a planet, and you set out exploring in your one-man personal vehicle. There's an alien complex to explore, as you fight the aliens and try to find out what their role is and what's really going on. It's a hard game, there are control panels that are of an alien design and non-intuitive. Supposedly very few people have ever finished it.

Casady & Greene published some commercial version of popular share- ware favorites like Crystal Quest and Glider. Crystal Quest is a cool and original game that is not a shootem-up violence filled fight-fest. You go around (using the mouse) picking up crystals, avoiding the monsters, with some crystals giving you special powers. I did pretty well in that game. In Glider you're a paper airplane trying to fly from room to room, using air conditioners and heaters to get updrafts and trying to avoid animals and light fixtures.

Both are good games and some of the early shareware is real good. Solarian II which is a Galaxian-type game in color. Got all the way to the final level in that one, although I still didn't beat it. Diamonds, a sort of breakout like game, also color. My sister liked that one; me, not so much. Dungeon of Doom, which is a Rogue type of dungeon crawl.

Balance of Power was a game I heard about but never played. A game of geopolitics on a black and white Mac, it was reputed to be quite good and challenging. "Deja Vu: A Nightmare Come True" is a game I hadn't heard about until now.

The last few items on the list are all newer so I won't go over them much. Myst was fun, id Software I don't care much about, Bungie is one of the great Mac game companies, and The Internet is a curious pick to me.