Monuments of Mars

K. Fields
2016-08-09T20:02:20-04:00
Baseball, Video Games

The 2015 NALB season is currently on a hiatus. OOTP Baseball 17’s latest patch, version 17.10.65, caused some problems. Minor league rosters of a few teams were adversely affected. Unfortunately, my organization was hit by the bug. Inexplicably, several dozen players on my single-A club were released, including some promising prospects. That left the team with only four players, far fewer than required to field a team.

While I wait for a fix to OOTP, I decided to play another classic Apogee game. I recently enjoyed Pharaoh’s Tomb and Arctic Adventure, so I chose a similar puzzle platform game. The game was Monuments of Mars from 1990. It had a similar structure to the previous two Apogee games with four parts of 20 levels each. The setting was futuristic but the game mechanics were familiar—jumping, flipping switches, activating items, and shooting. The CGA graphics, which took some getting used to when first playing Pharaoh’s Tomb, were now familiar and no distraction at all. I ripped through it more quickly than the other games, completing all 80 levels in five hours or so. It was a fun little diversion from my baseball league’s woes. Although very dated by today’s standards you can’t argue with the price (free from 3D Realms).