Do you remember a classic Mac game with midgets on a canyon floor?
July 20, 2006 12:23 PM   Subscribe

Can you identify this classic Mac game?

The game I'm thinking of was a black-and-white Mac game where you had to rescue a bunch of strange little people from the bottom of a canyon. You controlled some kind of weird zeppelin or flying machine that moved back and forth across the top of the screen, and you could drop little elevators for them to use. The idea seemed to be that to rescue the people you could stack the elevators all the way up and out of the canyon. There were also eggs on the canyon floor, and every so often these eggs would crack and vibrate and eventually hatch, and maybe monsters would come out of them, or something. Not sure. And the people would say "I'm hungry!" every once in a while. You may have been able to throw apples to them to shut them up. Anybody?
posted by Succa to Computers & Internet (11 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 


I remember playing Choplifter on the Apple ][+, but that had tanks, rather than monsters or eggs. The game you're thinking might've been a shareware variant, or a restyled bootleg, courtesy of a cracking crew.
posted by Smart Dalek at 12:53 PM on July 20, 2006


While searching online, I found a game called Eggs-it; it's on the Apple2 Collection website as a downloadable image, but no description's given.

Virtual Apple also has it, but angain, no description, and I couldn't get it to run. Sorry.
posted by Smart Dalek at 1:23 PM on July 20, 2006


Response by poster: You got it, nightwood. Boy, I remembered that one in a weird way. The screenshots don't show the elevators (they were three 'units' high, and looked like the long Tetris piece with one less square), but the rest of it looks familiar. It could be that I'm conflating more than one game. Was the "I'm hungry!" stuff from another game?

Also, I never figured out how to actually play this game with any degree of competency.
posted by Succa at 1:29 PM on July 20, 2006


Googling for this, I also found this (only available in google cache) which says "The cute little guys you had to rescue would get tired and squeak, "I'm hungry!" You had to feed them apples to get them moving again"

It seems that this was written by Glenn Wichman who was one of the writers of the classic unix game rogue

He has a link to download Toxic Ravine, but it is password protected.

It all looks vaguely familiar to me, but I don't really remember how the game worked.
posted by nightwood at 1:36 PM on July 20, 2006


nightwood's link above is especially useful if you're aware that "Télécharger" means "Download" in whatever that moon language is.
posted by majick at 2:05 PM on July 20, 2006


Mon Dieu, c'est vrai!
posted by nightwood at 2:35 PM on July 20, 2006


That's langue lunaire to you, magick.

The page you're referring to says the following:
This game, whose exact title is "Orlando Poon's Toxic Ravine Cleanup and Rescue Service", is at least original; your mission, should you choose to accept it, consists of cleaning out the place of all the mess that has piled up there. [I think — I don't know what "amonceler" means.] To do this, you fly over the place at the helm of a dirigible and use a robot equipped with a magnet who can bring a certain number of pieces of trash on board; for others, you also have some bombs at your disposal. Obviously, it's important to organize the clean-up in the most efficent way possible.

Toxic Ravine is controlled entirely with the mouse using a panel on the left. It's a bit disconcerting to begin with, but you get used to it. Also, the graphics, for a game of that era, are good.
posted by Johnny Assay at 2:39 PM on July 20, 2006


Response by poster: Ahh, c'est ce que je cherchais! Didn't catch the télécharger link down there. Gonna try it right now.

*downloads*

Ahh, crap, doesn't seem to work on the Intel Mac at the moment. Hopefully there's a workaround out there. Thanks everybody.
posted by Succa at 3:47 PM on July 20, 2006


Try the Mac Plus emulator vMac.
posted by brianogilvie at 6:11 PM on July 20, 2006


This game sounds like some kind of bastard daughter of Beer Run, Lode Runner, Apple Panic, and Dino Eggs. I'm kind of looking forward to trying it.
posted by ikkyu2 at 6:54 PM on July 20, 2006


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