Kurt Pankau Dot Com

⛏️ They came with fire, they came with axes... Deep Rock Galactic  is a co-op first person shooter in which a team of up to four dwarves go on mining missions in the procedurally generated caves of Hoxxes IV. Released in 2020 by Coffee Stain Publishing, it was the first game developed by Danish studio Ghost Ship Games and draws heavily from Minecraft  and Left 4 Dead . How I Remember It... For this final installment of Memory Leaks , I want to talk about a game that I loved so much I had to let it go. Honestly, I'm not going to talk about the game that much. It's new, it's fun, it's inexpensive, it's got a very wry sense of humor and some inventive biome design. If you like co-op FPSs with rogue-like sensibilities and lots of customizations and collectibles, you should definitely check it out. The learning curve is a teensy bit steep, so play it with friends who can show you the ropes. I have a bit of an addictive personality. I don't want to just enjoy somethin...

💣 I Gotta Say That Mable... Super Bomberman  was the first title in the Bomberman  series released for the Super Nintendo. Published by Hudson in 1993, it continued the franchise's model of "maze + action" gameplay with upgraded graphics. You drop timed bombs that will explode in all (four) directions a set number of hexes and you use these to defeat enemies, clear paths, and collect power-ups to your character and/or your bombs. Hijinx ensue. How I Remember It... I don't remember how or when we acquired this game, but it definitely wasn't right after release. It was one of those franchises that I'd been vaguely aware of for most of my life (the first game was released in 1983) but had never been terribly drawn towards. And then we acquired it. And... It's kinda like a  Zelda  dungeon but with fewer puzzles and more explosives. I played it a ton  one summer between what would have to have been my junior and senior years of college and listening to Music ...

🛡️ Catch Me If You Can... In 1996 Game Freak released two games called Pokemon Red  and Pokemon Blue  for the Nintendo Game Boy. These were JRPGs aimed at 10-year-olds that used a simplified turn-based battle system and were built around a social gimmick. There are 150 creatures called Pokemon in the game and one of the goals is to catch every one of them, only can't do it alone. Red  and Blue  each had Pokemon that were exclusive to that title, so the only way to get everything was to make in-game trades with a friend who owned the other version. The games were tied into a multi-media franchise that included manga, a TV show, and a collectible trading card game. And it was a mega-hit, one of the most successful and influential intellectual properties of the 90s and it continues to this day. In 2019, Pokemon Sword  & Shield  were released, the eighth set of games in the mainline series and the first for a console system that wasn't handheld only. ...

🧟 In your head, in your head... Left 4 Dead 2  is a co-op 4-player first-person-shooter released for PC and consoles by Valve in 2009, a sequel to their 2008 game Left 4 Dead , and further proof that Valve can release timely sequels so long as they don't have the number "3" in them. How I Remember It... My friend group played a lot of Left 4 Dead . This was in the halcyon days of the late aughts when grim-and-gritty shooters were king and we as a culture weren't completely burned out on zombies yet. In that game you are one of four survivors of a zombie apocalypse fighting your way through the dynamically-populated city to try to get to safety. The aesthetic is "cheesy horror movie" as evidenced by the movie posters on the load screens and the ending credits after a campaign. There are always four protagonists in play--any not covered by players will be played by bots--and you have to work together to prevent being overrun. Left 4 Dead 2  is, honestly, not ...

🍌 Take Your Stinking Paws Off Me You Damned Dirty Ape... Donkey Kong Country  was a 2D platformer for the Super Nintendo released in 1994 by Rare. It served as a reboot of the Donkey Kong  franchise that had been languishing for a decade. It featured a new gameplay paradigm, a completely re-designed Kong, and the introduction of new characters like Diddy Kong and Funky Kong. How I Remember It... It's kind of bonkers how out-of-the-blue this game was. Just two years prior Super Mario Kart  had included Donkey Kong Jr as a driver, a character built on the old DK design in a first-party title. And then with DKC  not only is Junior out of the picture entirely, these apes have a brand new look. And not only was it good , it quickly became one of the must-haves for the system. The DNA of this game feels like it owes something to Super Mario Bros. , what with it's two-player semi-coop, it's mix of land and underwater levels, its enemies you defeat by jumping on them, and i...

🐦 Into the Light of a Dark Black Night... Monument Valley  is an indie puzzle game for phones and tablets published by Ustwo Games in 2014. You guide Princess Ida through a series of mazes and puzzles that use optical illusions and shifts in perspective to unlock new paths and solutions. If the perspective shifts so that two separate platforms appear to be next to each other, Ida can now move across them. How I Remember It... This game is a delight. It's atmospheric, mournful, and utterly charming, and on top of all of that it sports solid gameplay using a fairly original mechanic. Just like Portal  was able to take a simple unique gameplay conceit and spin it out into now two full games, Monument Valley  takes an Escher-inspired landscape and teases out a series of increasingly intricate puzzles for you to navigate. The game does a great job of balancing its elements. It knows when to lean on gameplay and when to streamline that in order to let the story have a moment t...

🏎️ He's Going the Distance, He's Going For Speed... Super MarioKart  was a 1992 kart-racing game released for the Super Nintendo. It was a spin-off of Nintendo's flagship Mario  franchise and would kick off its own series that is among the most popular on the platform-- MarioKart 8 Deluxe  is the highest-selling game for the Switch. The game was, amongst other things, a showcase for the Super Nintendo's Mode 7 chip that allowed for pseudo-3D rendering of flat maps. It is credited with creating the kart-racing genre of video games and regularly shows up on greatest-videogame-of-all-time lists, frequently taking the top spot. How I Remember It... We're now eight games deep in this franchise, and it's funny to look back and see just how much of the enduring core gameplay elements were present from its very first installment. Different-colored shells that behaved differently, question blocks, coins, jumps, shortcuts, unlockables, drifting, the rubber-band AI, the i...

🪙 They Wanna Get My Gold On The Ceiling... Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins  was the sequel to Super Mario Land , making it the second proper game in the Mario  franchise released for the Nintendo Game Boy. It directly followed Super Mario World  for the Super Nintendo and introduced the world to Wario, who would not only be an enduring villain for Nintendo, but a character who would have multiple franchises in his own right. How I Remember It... You ever wonder why the bundled title for Game Boy systems wasn't one of Nintendo's first-party games? Think about it. You own the IP for Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, and Metroid, and when you debut a handheld system, the thing you package with it is... Tetris . A puzzle game that tons of people already had on their computers, that was being simultaneously released for the Nintendo console. That's  what you bundle as the killer app for your new handheld system. Why would you do that? I'll tell you why. It's because Tet...

🦖 Oooh, baby, baby it's a wild world... Super Mario World  was released in November 1990 in Japan and August 1991 in North America as a launch title for the Super Nintendo. Coming out at the height of the Console Wars ™ , it is widely considered the best 2D game in the Mario franchise, and occasionally cited as the best video game ever made. It's the best-selling game on its platform--which is saying something as this is the same platform that gave us Nintendo's current best-selling franchise: Mario Kart . How I Remember It... My first exposure to Super Mario World  happened one summer during our church youth group's choir tour. The host family a group of us were staying with had a SNES and we ended up staying up all night playing it. We got as far as the Forest of Illusion before we got stuck. That's the area where the main exits in all of the levels lead you in a loop--the only way to escape that area on the overworld map is to find hidden exits in the levels. So...

🏰 Just the two of us building castles in the sky... The original Team Fortress  was a Quake  mod that pitted two teams against each other in first-person-shooter death-matches. The gimmick was that the player would choose one of nine classes that all played wildly differently: Solder, Scout, Spy, Sniper, Pyro, Heavy, Medic, Demoman, and Engineer. It was popular enough that Valve hired the team who developed it to port it to the GoldSrc engine in 1997 as Team Fortress Classic  to promote their software-development kit. In 2007, a sequel was made that preserved core gameplay but gave the game a visual overhaul. It was released as part of The Orange Box , alongside Portal  and a whole bunch of games with Half-Life 2  in their name. How I Remember It... Before Fortnite  or Overwatch , there was Team Fortress 2 , an online class-based shooter in which red and blue teams would compete to capture flags or control points or... whatever. I have spent an embarr...

📚 Just take a look, it's in a book... Myst  was a point-and-click puzzle/adventure game published in 1993 by Broderbund and developed for PC by Cyan. It was a surprise runaway hit, becoming the best-selling PC in the world and holding onto that title until 2002. Its success helped drive CD-ROM as a format for gaming and PC entertainment. In it, you explore an island whose various locations contain books that double as portals to other realms called "Ages". In each of these realms you collect blue and red pages that can be used to complete books in Myst's central library. These books appear to be holding people inside them, each one swearing that the other cannot be trusted. Which one should you free? How I Remember It... This felt like a game for smart people--especially when you compare it to the other runaway PC gaming success of 1993, which was Doom , the game the popularized first-person shooters. Myst  was a quieter and thinkier game that felt like it was delibe...

🕵️ But you can't touch them, no, 'cause they're all spies... GoldenEye 007  is a 1997 first-person-shooter developed by Rare for the Nintendo 64 console. It was based on the 1995 James Bond film of the same name and adheres loosely to the movie's narrative while fleshing out the environments and backstory. The overall gameplay and story mode were celebrated, however, the reason this game is so well-remembered is because of the multiplayer death-matches. Ironically, the death-match wasn't even intended to be part of the game--it was just something the devs screwed around with in their downtime, but it was so popular at Rare that they ended up including it. And lucky them. For many people, it was the  reason to own a Nintendo 64. How I Remember It... I was one of those people. I missed out on the 64 when it was new (my family eventually got one, but it stayed at home when I went to college). In high school I had a friend named Mikey and we'd get four of us togeth...

🐿️ Ship it... The Magic Circle  is a 2015 sandbox puzzle game for consoles and PC that takes place in a vaporware adventure game that's been trapped in development hell for nearly twenty years. You are a QA tester who gets abandoned in the game after a dismal playtest that mostly consists of watching the two developers bicker. A rogue... someone... reaches out to you for help from inside the game. He teaches you how to hack the game's creatures and access new parts of the world and start manipulating things--so just maybe you can turn this game into something shippable before the developers figure out what you're up to. How I Remember It... This is a delightfully weird meta-game that derives a lot of humor from poking fun at the culture of software development and video game development in particular. The game-within-the-game The Magic Circle  holds the record for getting the most rounds of crowd-funding for a single project without actually fulfilling it. The main write...

⚔️ And my axe... The  Lord of the Rings  movies hit theaters in December 2001 and were an unparalleled box office success. Naturally, there was a desire to capitalize on that success with tie-in video games, which started to arrive about a year later. The first few to hit the scene were about what you'd expect: over-the-shoulder hack-and-slash affairs that were just a little too dark and drab because that was the tone of serious video games, but then in 2004 we got something different: a campaign-style RTS that allowed you to play through the events of the movies as either good or evil. And it was The Lord of the Rings: the Battle for Middle-Earth . How I Remember It... As someone who was obsessed with The Lord of the Rings  in 2004, I think it's safe to say that I played most of the games that were attached to this IP. And I was mostly disappointed, because I don't care for hack-and-slash gameplay all that much. When BfME  came out, the big selling point on the...

🌌 She's out back counting stars... Super Mario Galaxy  was released in November 2007 just in time for the holidays. It was the first proper Mario title for the Nintendo Wii and the third 3D Mario  game, following the much-beloved Super Mario 64  and the much-reviled Super Mario Sunshine . It introduced a gravity mechanic, wherein Mario would travel between planets trying to find stars to power up a space ship that would take him to his dear kidnapped-again Princess Peach. The game was also built around the novel motion controls of the Wii and took full advantage of controller-waggling-as-gameplay. It was extremely well-received. It was the highest-rated video game on review-aggregator GameRankings right up until the site folded in 2019. How I Remember It... I was intrigued by this game from the get-go, but in 2007 our budget for video games was not so robust that we could just up and drop $50 on a triple-A new release. But the idea had its hooks in me. Interplaneta...

👨‍🦲 Go On Up, You Bald-Head... You Don't Know Jack  was a series of pop culture trivia CD-ROM games from JellyVision that first launched in 1995. The game took the form of a game show where up to three contestants would compete for cash prizes. In reality, the game was played by up to three people sitting around the same computer keyboard. 1995 was a trip, yo. The series was successful enough to have released something like sixteen titles, not counting re-titled games for different platforms. The format was simple: there would be 7 or 21 questions played out over a series of rounds followed by a "Jack Attack" final round. Whoever had the most money won. Volume 3 was released in October of 1997 and it was the last game in the series that kept to that formula. How I Remember It... I had a friend freshman year of college who collected trivia games. (He also had several different iterations of Trivial Pursuit  and playing them was a pretty common way to kill a weekday eveni...

🐗 It's a wild, wild life... The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild  simultaneously released for the Wii U and as a launch title for the Nintendo Switch on March 3, 2017. The game was a departure for the series, which had recently been telling linear stories rooted in the lore of the franchise. Breath of the Wild , by contrast, features very little lore, a fairly scant story, and a rich open world to explore with challenges that can be tackled in any order or skipped altogether. Link awakens in a post-apocalyptic land that has been devastated by Calamity Ganon, a magical maleficent force occupying Hyrule castle and locked in a century-long struggle with the Princess Zelda. But her power is failing, and she has called up on you to defeat Ganon and free Hyrule. The game was a tremendous hit. How I Remember It... On March 3, 2017, I decided to get a Nintendo Switch. Well, I'd made this decision some weeks before, but I'd missed the preorders, so I decided to try to get one on...

🐗 You could break my heart apart, I've got the power... The Legend of Zelda  is a top-down fantasy adventure game released by Nintendo in February of 1986 in Japan and over a year later in North America and Europe. It was inspired by designer Shigeru Miyamoto's childhood exploring the woods around his home in Kyoto, and is considered an important forerunner to the action-RPG genre of video games. The series is one of Nintendo's most enduring, having contributed launch titles to both the Wii and the Switch systems. Its protagonist, Link, is among the most popular and recognizable characters in Nintendo's roster, despite his being several different characters across the series. He's behind Mario in that department, but still... How I Remember It... I'm about 80% sure I received this game as a Christmas present in 1987. It was wildly  popular. It had been touted as "the best video game ever made" and that was undoubtedly true in 1987. At the time I got i...

 🚀 Waiting in the sky, he'd like to come to meet us... Starcraft  wasn't the first real-time strategy game, but it was the one that blew up the genre. Released in 1998 after three years of development, Blizzard gave us a story-driven, highly-asymmetrical, and thoroughly world-built game about the struggle between displaced, fractious Terrans, the rampaging insect-like Zerg, and the advanced psychic Protoss. This game was also a popular vehicle for esports, especially in South Korea, which dominated and in many ways pioneered the activity in the late 90s. How I Remember It... This was the game that everybody played in my house in college. I resisted it at first because I had gotten into the Command & Conquer  series in high school and the two had just-different-enough control schemes that it was difficult to switch back and forth. But I was eventually won over. We played a lot more multiplayer death-match than any of the actual campaign--although I did try my hand at ...

🏚️ Where the heart is... Gone Home  is a 2013 walking simulator from The Fullbright Company. You play as Katie, a college student returning from studying overseas to visit her parents and younger sister in Oregon in 1995. Since no one met you at the airport, you've had to take a cab, and when you arrive at your home, you find it empty and locked. Remembering a hidden key that will give you access to at least part  of the house, you set about trying to figure out what happened--be it sinister or supernatural--to your family. How I Remember It... There are games that you play over and over again and there are the games that you only need to play once. I played this when it was new-ish, loved it to pieces, and have never picked it up again. It took me about two hours to complete, and I spent the entire time on tenterhooks. After the first hour, I started to close it down so I could go to bed but realized that sleep would be futile, so I stayed up to finish it. Gone Home ...