The Dam Busters (1984)
Hi there, reader(s?), me again with (yet) another quick review of a shitty flying video game. Back with an ancient, moldy Commodore 64 game for this one, a near-death octogenarian who has long ago collapsed on the beach of heatstroke and self-aware obsolescence and is just waiting for that handsome, sun-kissed lifeguard named DosBox to come running up and breathe life back into its crusty old, ported-from-a-floppy-disk lungs so that I can play it and make fun of it. And, yes, I know, making fun of a video game from the early '80s is like kicking a two-legged puppy, but I'm the mean sort.
So, in The Dam Busters you attempt to bust some dams by flying your big, bulging bomber deeeeep into Nazi Germany in the 1940s, fighting off waves of enemy defenders to reach the target and do your part for King and Country. You play as the whole crew of the plane, switching like mad between the pilot, gunners, navigator, bombardier, and engineer as you attempt to survive the Luftwaffe and the game's broke-ass user interface. You will crash often, both your plane and your computer, because this piece of poorly-coded crap is as unstable as my ex-girlfriend Heather.
I played this game for about five hours over a few days and not one single time, even on Easy settings, was I able to successfully hit the damn dam with a damn bomb. In fact, except for one time that the heavens smiled upon me and my limping bomber, I never even got anywhere near the dam's location, always being shot down long before then. For whatever reason this game is insanely difficult and to master it would surely require many more hours of tedious concentration than I'm willing to give it. I'm sure that 1984Nate would have had the time and patience, because he was lonely and friendless, but 2016Nate gots to go to work in an hour and the kids keep hounding me for a PB&J. All that said, however, it was some old-school arcade fun at times and I don't feel like I wasted my time and efforts at all. I've done a lot worse things (like my ex Heather).
If you want to play this game (and what the hell is wrong with you?) then do yourself a favor and run it in the smallest window DosBox will allow and be prepared to CTL+ALT+DEL a lot when it freezes up. As a favor to you, I'll put up some annotated desktop screencaps of my last playing experience so you can get the feel of the game. Hint: it feels like a moist dead octopus wrapped in your mom's underwear. Do yourself a favor and avoid this game, it will only cause you pain and wrinkles and nobody likes wrinkles.
Probably a good place to end it here, I got stuff to do, man.
The End.
Written in August 2016 by Nathan Decker.
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that's between you and the vengeful wrath of your personal god...