Children need supervision. Left alone, they wander down dark streets or into the backs of purported candy vans. This game is a powerful argument that ideas need supervision, too. Sometimes they wander off drawing boards and into game stores.

I have never known what to make of Forbes: Corporate Warrior. It hardly seems to exist, and sometimes I think I dreamed up the whole thing.

It’s a financed themed first-person shooter from 1997, depicting a world where Wall Street cuts the crap and just has corporations literally battle each other in a virtual reality environment. As a start-up entrepreneur, you must jack in to the simulation, fight your way to the top, and make money. When targeting an “enemy” (a rival business you wish insolvency upon) you hurt them by stealing their customers away. This requires a bit of thought rather than just blasting away. For example, if your opponent is selling boutique products but his customers want cheap goods, Price Slicer missiles will do massive damage.

You’ll be bored of Forbes: Corporate Warrior in five minutes. Buy an egg timer or something.

This isn’t much of a game. You just go up to enemies, bankrupt them, move on, and repeat the process until the game just…ends. Movement feels clunky and slow. Despite the barrage of finance buzzwords and the horribly overcomplicated UI, there’s not much skill to playing Forbes: Corporate Warrior. “Strategy” is moronically simple: you’re either strong enough to beat an enemy or you’re not.

Although the concept art between levels is nice, the actual in-game graphics have all the aesthetic appeal of a Windows 95 era CAD modelling program. This game looks like shit, there’s no way around, past, or through it. Levels resemble poorly-textured chessboards, with hideous backgrounds and animation. The enemies are crappy geometric shapes.

I regard Forbes: Corporate Warrior like I regard Bible Adventures: a real novelty game – not really playable but it definitely possesses kitsch value. I guess this is what they call poor execution of a great idea. Or great execution of a terrible idea.

One of the spawn from Nintendo’s ill-fated deal with Philips Electronics, Hotel Mario frequently holds court on “Worst Games Ever” lists. I played it expecting it to be a huge parking lot full of dinosaur shit. Instead, I found a tolerable, slightly below average game.

The cutscenes are hilarious. I can’t get enough of them. I think they outsourced the animation to a head injury ward in Djibouti. Mario and Luigi have been invited by Princess Peach to a dick-lick (maybe it was “picnic” in the script but I’ll be damned if that isn’t what Mario’s voice actor says), only to discover she’s been kidnapped by Bowser. Mario and Gay Luigi (or maybe it’s “Hey, Luigi!”…the dubious voice actor strikes again) journey to Bowser’s hotels to rescue the princess and ensure that there will be further Princess-enabled picnics/dick-licks in the Mushroom Kingdom.

Hotel Mario is simple to play. Each of the seven hotels contains 10 stages. To clear a stage, you have to shut all the doors. You can use elevators to ride from one floor to the next, and also to avoid enemies. All of Mario’s usual bête noires – Goombas, Koopas, and so forth – are out in force, and they can be fought either by jumping on them or by killing them with fireballs. Mario titles are usually platformers but this one verges on being an outright puzzle game at times.

The backgrounds (designed by Trici Venola) are colorful and fun, and drive home the visual theme for each hotel. The animation works well for this sort of game, and there’s enough of it to make the levels seem “alive” instead of just a collection of tile graphics (a common fault in these games). The final boss fight is fun. If they’d kept up that level of imagination and intensity throughout the entire game, we might have really had something (where “something” is defined as Claw, Gruntz, or Jazz Jackrabbit, to be precise).

The downside? The controls suck, the music sucks, the level design is repetitive, gameplay is not so hot, and I don’t understand how shutting doors in a hotel helps you rescue the Princess.

Seriously, what the fuck is up with those fucking cutscenes? Who signed off on them, and why didn’t he bring his seeing-eye dog into work? They look horrible. It’s like someone inked them with a projectile vomiting toddler instead of a brush.

I wonder if Nintendo’s bad experiences with the Philips CD-i is the reason they shied away from CD-based platforms in the mid 90s. It’s an interesting thought. This tiny obscure game might be the reason why you spent your early teens blowing on N64 cartridges like a retard.

Then again, that might be too interesting a backstory for this very uninteresting game.

Yume Nikki is so strange…and so familiar! It is everything games used to be but no longer are.

When I say it’s like a classic adventure game, I don’t mean it’s like Escape from Monkey Island. It’s more like the odd and dissolute wave of adventure games that came out during the CD-rom revolution. In the early to mid 90s, publishers were hungry for CD-based games and released (in addition to a deluge of crappy knockoffs) quite a few experimental and anticommercial titles like Bad Mojo and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream that normally would never have made it to store shelves.

Yume Nikki (made in RPGMaker 2003 by Kikiyama), is basic and minimal. You play as a reclusive girl who has dreams and then writes the dreams down in a diary. You have a small house to explore, and a bed to dream in. You access dreams via a central nexus point with twelve doors. Each of the doors takes you to a world so strange and so huge that you might never find your way back.

There’s no dialogue, and no obvious story. The game is free-flowing and open, and mostly consists of exploring strange and confusing lands beyond the veil of sleep. You can wake yourself up at any time by pinching your face. In the dream worlds there are items that can be collected, although many of them seem useless. The NPCs aren’t much help, either. Ultimately, you’re on your own, and you have to discover what purpose Yume Nikki has…or if it even has one.

You can see what creative well Kikiyama was drawing from here. The rudimentary graphics, soothing music, and “do whatever you want” gameplay synthesises into a game with a powerful and spellbinding atmosphere. Any deficiencies in content are remedied by your own brain. Needless to say, you can find numerous fan theories online “explaining” every little thing from the theories of Freud and Jung.

The game’s ending (if you’re able to find it) is surprising. I’ve only played one game that ends the way Yume Nikki does (Creative Reality’s 1994 game DreamWeb), although Yume Nikki colours the darkness with a bit of mystery. There is a small detail about the environment, easy to miss, that will cause you to rethink the ending and its implications.

But even the fact that it has an ending seems unimportant. It might have just kept on going forever. This isn’t a game you play, complete, and check off your Gamer’s Literary Card. It’s more of an interactive digital experience that has value only equal to the effort you put into it. Either way, it should be played. Yume Nikki a unique and eerie time capsule into gaming’s darkening past.