Microsoft’s got a pretty stellar track record of terrible Windows infomercials. Some for the consumer, some internal, all pretty rough. This 1988 video showcases Windows/386, a fairly impressive upgrade to Windows that introduced multitasking among other features. The impressiveness of the upgrade does not come through in this video. What begins as a dry-but-corny corporate…
Freddy Krueger’s always been his own best pitchman, both in his filmic universe and in ours. He’s got this unflagging confidence that only breaks – at most – thirty seconds before he’s defeated, and that confidence rings as clear as a bell as he breaks the fourth wall to sell his movies to the real…
The idea seems like a 7-year-old’s fever dream: strap trampolines to your feet and then you can get trampoline-air anywhere you go for the rest of your life. That’s the promise of Moon Shoes, the brightly colored ankle-breakers of the ’90s. To be clear, the shoes are a terrible idea; apart from the aforementioned risk…
Most VHS games come off as less than they intend to be, but watching this VHS presentation of 1992’s “Nightmare” I can’t help but catch a chill. Nightmare’s a 3-to-6 player board game fueled by the Gatekeeper, your host on the VHS tape. Unlike other VHS board games where you fast forward and rewind to…
Most VHS games come off as less than they intend to be, but watching this VHS presentation of 1992’s “Nightmare” I can’t help but catch a chill.
Nightmare’s a 3-to-6 player board game fueled by the Gatekeeper, your host on the VHS tape. Unlike other VHS board games where you fast forward and rewind to certain parts of the game, Nightmare plays straight through as a one-hour experience. Players race around the board to collect 6 keys and make it to the center. If none succeed by the end of the tape, the Gatekeeper wins.
The Gatekeeper interjects every so often to shake things up a bit, changing the rules and impacting the player whose turn it happens to be when he appears. It’s genuinely startling when he appears, a simple scare that works over and over again.
He also deteriorates as the game progresses, turning from human into monster. If you make it to the end of the tape, where the Gatekeeper wins, your eternal punishment is….an ad for Nightmare II. That’s the horror industry in a nutshell, isn’t it?
Enjoy!
-ds
