Three New Games and Progress on Phoenix Wright

Velentine's Day brought forth a small bonanza of new games for me to play. By new, of course, I mean new to me.

The first new game I bought for myself - on eBay. And it's not exactly new, but rather a quarter of a century old. It's called Sword of Fargoal, and it's my February addition to my Commodore 64 collection. I plan on getting one old game a month for the C64. Sword of Fargoal was originally released for the Commodore VIC20, then remade for the C64, from the legendary software house Epyx.

Sword of Fargoal is a difficult 20-level dungeon crawler where the player seeks out the namesake sword, which lies somewhere between levels 15 and 20. Once the sword is acquired, though, a 33 minute timer starts and the player must exit with the sword. Each level takes up one screen, with an overhead view and the characters and walls being very tiny.

Oh, and there's no save feature. I will write more on this game later, I think, as I have yet to make a serious sit-down-for-awhile effort to beat this game.

And while I told my fiancee' that we need to limit our spending for Valentine's Day to one gift each, she gave me two Nintendo DS games that I wanted - Hotel Dusk, a detective thriller, and Contact, a quirky adventure game. I spent a little time playing Contact, and so far, it's pretty good. There's a lot to learn there, though.

And this morning, we took her car into the shop and decided to wait while it was being worked on. I took along Phoenix Wright : Ace Attorney, a game I've been working on for over a year now, and made a breakthrough on what I hope is the final day of the case. I got through questioning Chief of Police Gant and now have Lana herself on the stand, but so far she's not cracking. I really, really want to finish this game so I can start on the sequel.

So I've got a Commodore 64 classic to play, a DS game I'm hopefully almost done with, and three DS games waiting in the wings. On top of that, with my fiancee' getting a new car, the last obstacle other than availability to getting myself a Nintendo Wii has been cleared. It's good to have options.