I adored this, but I’m gonna dunk on it because I desire more out of Digital Eclipse’s interactive documentaries in the future. Also, this form of interactive documentaries mixed with video game museums are absolutely the future and I hope there’s hundreds of them years from now.
So yeah, Llamasoft’s history is over forty-two years long, but this thing spends 95% of its documentation efforts in those first seven years. Then, right as things start getting challenging and difficult for Jeff, we get a last flash of light in 91 as Jeff finds a life raft with shareware. Then another highlight in 1994 with his Tempest update on the Atari Jaguar. And by then it’s like Digital Eclipse ran out of runway on this whole story.
Then we see a video introducing Llamasoft’s second team member before the whole last thirty years are flown-through like nothing important happened in that time. There’s some brief callouts, but as a whole documentary, this thing eludes the dramatic tension; then drops the dang ball.
I bought this in tandem with Llamasoft’s newest game, Akka Ahrr, thinking this doc would give me the full context leading up to the studio’s latest. Instead, it felt like I got an appetizer — and desert — with no entre. I still don't know exactly how Akka Ahrr fits in the history exactly, but I guess that's what Wikipedia is for.
,
It’s clear that most of the games in this collection feel rather displaced by the span of thirty plus years , but it still feels like a treasure trove of discoveries as I worked my way through them all. It’s magical and delightful and also a little insanely unstructured. I recommend it and I’ll be hopping into Digital Eclipse’s prior releases soon!
So yeah, Llamasoft’s history is over forty-two years long, but this thing spends 95% of its documentation efforts in those first seven years. Then, right as things start getting challenging and difficult for Jeff, we get a last flash of light in 91 as Jeff finds a life raft with shareware. Then another highlight in 1994 with his Tempest update on the Atari Jaguar. And by then it’s like Digital Eclipse ran out of runway on this whole story.
Then we see a video introducing Llamasoft’s second team member before the whole last thirty years are flown-through like nothing important happened in that time. There’s some brief callouts, but as a whole documentary, this thing eludes the dramatic tension; then drops the dang ball.
I bought this in tandem with Llamasoft’s newest game, Akka Ahrr, thinking this doc would give me the full context leading up to the studio’s latest. Instead, it felt like I got an appetizer — and desert — with no entre. I still don't know exactly how Akka Ahrr fits in the history exactly, but I guess that's what Wikipedia is for.
,
It’s clear that most of the games in this collection feel rather displaced by the span of thirty plus years , but it still feels like a treasure trove of discoveries as I worked my way through them all. It’s magical and delightful and also a little insanely unstructured. I recommend it and I’ll be hopping into Digital Eclipse’s prior releases soon!