It was way harder than it sounded, and I’ll still remember the petulant roar of “more toppings!” that the lead bellend would emit whenever he was displeased, because I heard it so many times. I can’t remember what the rules were, but each of the wood-faced bastards would stipulate or forbid their own set of toppings, and you’d have to work out what pizza would please them all.
I think you needed to get around half the zoombinis to their new home to win, so when the puzzles got really tough and your attrition rate soared, it was actually pretty tense.Īnyway, the best puzzle was the encounter where you had to use a big machine (with disconcerting fleshy lips) to make pizzas, in order to satisfy three tree stumps who were complete dickheads. You’d lose some on the way, but once you’d dropped off the survivors, you’d start afresh with a new load, and the puzzles would be a bit harder, in a sort of game+ mode. You had a thousand-odd little blue fellows with different combinations of facial features, and you had to shepherd them, a few dozen at a time, across a landscape comprising ten or so screens, each of which was some sort of logic-based minigame. Zoombinis was way better than it had a right to be. Enter, then Logical Journey Of The Zoombinis. But the real bonanza, however, came during the school summer holidays, when mum (who was a teacher) would bring home a grab-bag assortment of janky educational titles for me to beast my way through over the break. So I played everything I could get my hands on.
It was, somehow, actually possible to run out of games. It wasn’t a great PC, and games were expensive, so I didn’t get new ones that often. A wilderness of sweets, as Milton oh-so-subversively described Eden. It’s a wonder beyond anything I could have dreamed of as a kid, but it’s also a wonder I might not have wished for.
If I’ve heard of a game, the odds are I can have it on my PC in as little as a couple of minutes. But only since the advent of digital distribution, have their numbers so wildly and obviously exceeded my capacity to get through them all. Well, there were always too many games to play. There are, these days, far too many games to play. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time. Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives.