There was a game that I played as a child on our old Tandy 1000 that I’ve wanted to look up for about the last 20 years or so. A relative had sent us a copy, but no one really could read it since the instructions were in Japanese. The 5 1/4″ diskette however, worked just fine.
One of those problems with being a kid, even if I can remember things from way back in more details than I probably should, is that memory is more visual than auditory for me. My best recollection of the name was something like ‘Wib barn,” but hey I was like 5 when I played the game! It’s not like I could spell yet! Literally, I was using MS-DOS before I could read…lol.
Needless to say, trying to find the game on this side of the floppy diskette era has been largely fruitless whenever I’ve tried.
Well, last night I was watching a video on 80s game development, and noticed that the clip of Thexder was Really, Really similar to what I remember but definitely not the same game. Sadly, doing some research into the game also showed that its sequel wasn’t it. Also, I’m pretty sure that I never encountered the Firehawk games personally.
Attempting to find similar games led me to the similar games tab on Giant Bomb, which began as mostly another exercise in futility. I’ve tried to look up the game in the past, always without success. Like seriously, how many late 80s side scrollers were there where you can transform between a robot, and a jet, and a car while exploring pseudo 3D dungeons reminiscent of the Windows 95 Maze? Yeah, you’d think that’s easy, but a lot of old stuff on old video games never made a big impact on the Internet. There were more than a few such ‘robot’ games, but I don’t think any that combined all three modes.
Then in scrolling through the list, I come across one word and it’s like “Holy shit, I remembered the name right,” and lo’ and behold: their page on Wibarm even matches my childhood memory to a tee on the screenshots. It’s without a doubt the same game, and it checks all the boxes: the three modes, the side scroll and 3D like dungeon, and the almost RPG like battles when you encounter the mobs.
So now, after many years, I finally know what that game was, and that my childhood memories are even more accurate than I expected.