Thus far, I have been basically picking PC games from 486 and Pentium PCs which I  personally and loosely like to call the DOS era or “golden age” of PC games. The truth is, I had been enjoying video games as a child on personal home computers well before then. So, this time around, its an episode of PatMan plays VERY retro PC classics. Im going way back this time, so far back that I may lose most of you with both the personal computer and the game. The game is Parsec and it was for the Ti994a home computer which, more or less, was about as powerful as the latest Texas Instruments calculator that is now on the market. But, for its time it was cool, and the games were great fun and had some of the best visuals and audio around when compared to the games of that time. Parsec was one such game, it was a great space shooter with, for its time, very nice visuals and sounds. And with the speech synthesizer it even had muffled speech capabilities. The game consists of wave after wave of different alien enemy craft, some coming down from the top while others snook up on you from behind. After defeating the various waves of enemies you then encountered an asteroid field which you had to navigate and blast your way out of. Sounds pretty simple, and really it was, but as a kid that didn’t matter after all thats how games were  back then. They were simple and fun. And believe me as the levels progressed, it may have looked simple, but it got more and more difficult. One issue players had to deal with was the lasers overheating on your space craft. And for me, the most challenging part of the game came in the refueling stages where gamers had to make their way in a very tight and unforgiving tunnel in order to fuel up. You did have the option to skip the tunnel, if you thought you had enough fuel and skill to make it to the next one. However, If the player runs out of gas they will crash and die so sooner or later you were forced to go into them. At first I always died in the tight tunnels, but this was due to not knowing that you could manually change the amount your ship would move up and down by pressing on the number keys. Once I figured out how to make very slight movements in those tight tunnels, I could fuel up and enjoy this game for many levels. I will return to the DOS era of retro PC games next week. However for now enjoy a game that helped pave the road to that classic era.

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