A fair bit of what I have been playing are classics, truly pre-modern-era games that are no less entertaining today then when they were released some 10 odd years ago? Case in point, the first thing that I've finished, a little-known Sierra On-Line gem released in 1991, The Castle of Dr. Brain.
It stretches to 640x480 in DosBox, and really doesn't look too bad with 2xsai interpolation.
In this little puzzler gem, you pretty much play as a student who's attempting to audition for the job of a mad scientist's lab assistant (the afore-mentioned Dr. Brain), but to do this, you have to go through a castle filled with a whole series of tasks and puzzles, ranging from logic and memory puzzles to word games to magic squares to simple programming to astronomy puzzles.
A cipher puzzle. Can you decode it?
Some of the puzzles are rather easy, but there are also some that would seriously stretch your brain to the maximum, even for adults. Don't automatically reach for a walkthrough or go for Google for some of the general knowledge questions and it'll be even more challenging. The writing is also fairly clever with lame jokes and typical Sierra humour abounding (try examining every object). For a decent challenge though, play on Expert difficulty.
The Astronomy Room. How good are you at finding constellations?
Now, with all that in mind, on to the bad points. It doesn't take more then a few hours to burn through this game, even on Expert difficulty. At least with the assumption that most of my readers are intelligent and suave individuals like myself. Also, the puzzles aren't randomized, i.e. they don't change between plays, so there's really not much replay value once you've completed the game once.
A simple programming puzzle in the Robot Room.
Still, it's really quite an enjoyable puzzle game for the small amount of time spent. It runs smooth as butter on the MSI Wind using the DosBox emulator. Plus, you'll feel smart just for beating it, so what's the harm in that? =D
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