Thursday 20 August 2009

Rack 'Em

I've recently started making Wikipedia better by submitting pages for computer/video games I own, since the world tends to hate classics such as CrimeWave, Electro Man and Grid Runner. How dare those Wikipedians make me have to visit multiple sites! Unfortunately my works just missed "the three millionth English article" award, but at least I know they represent about 0.00016% of Wikipedia's list of topics.

One page I'm particularly proud of is my Rack 'Em page, which just a few days ago was bound for deletion as it wasn't "noteworthy" enough (though Accolade's other reasonably obscure title Mean 18 was!). Who'd have thought a couple of American newspapers would save the day?

Rack 'Em sat on my DOS computer for decades and is still probably the best pool/snooker game I've played, even if it was made twenty years ago... and its only competition is Lunar Pool for the NES and Jimmy White's 2: Cueball for Windows which I barely remember... and it lacks sound... and it's graphics are hit-and-miss. There's not much point in rambling about specific details since I've just linked to Wikipedia, but since I'm allowed to be biased on my blog I can say it's great and even though there's no chance in hell that I'm going to be able to get anyone to play a 1988 game based around snooker, this is probably the most attention the game's had in a decade, and I have an unhealthy obsession with my old DOS games.

There was also a Commodore 64 version which has some music, just in case anyone has a lust for coloured stripes and load errors. With Accolade being bought out by Infogrames (now operating under the Atari license) chances are you won't see this game re-released so it's not too difficult to find them on abandonware sites. The fun thing is Accolade was founded by two former Atari employees (who also helped form Activision), so it all goes full circle and they can all enjoy net incomes of -€103.1 millon.

To give Infogrames some credit though, they did a fine job publishing Pen Pen TriIcelon for the Dreamcast!

1 comment:

  1. Dude, I used to play the hell out of this game on a Tandy 1000 back in the early 90's. To this day I still think it's one of the best pool games made.

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