LGR - After Dark Games
I’ve always been quite fond of Berkeley Systems’s “After Dark” screen savers. I mean, they were just screen savers, but they were charming and colorful and had flying toasters and toast. But today I wanna talk about one of its spin-offs that I find quite fascinating.
And that is... After Dark Games! Developed by Berkeley Systems and published by Sierra On-Line in 1998 for Windows and Macintosh computers. “After Dark - it’s not just a screen saver anymore!” Truth be told, by 1998 After Dark had long since become more than just a screen saver, with a broad range of merchandise, apparel, books, and even a short-lived TV show.
But sure, After Dark was indeed widely known for its initial existence as a premium screen saver package, including such classics as Flying Toasters, Bad Dog, Hula Twins, and Mowin’ Man. Screen savers: they were big business and Berkeley Systems was keen to cash in.
And After Dark Games was the series’s first foray into gaming, at least in a dedicated product. There were interactive portions packed into certain AD screen saver modules already, but this was the first time fans were able to take direct control of such characters as Hula Girl and the Flying Toasters themselves.
And while the gatefold big box it came packaged inside is enjoyably glossy and colorful, the inside is far less appealing, with a basic cardboard box liner and the game CD-ROM nestled inside a jewel case. There is at least an instruction booklet in here too, touching on each of the eleven included mini-games alongside the expected installation and troubleshooting tips.
Not needed, but always appreciated. Following in the footsteps of countless other desktop mini-game compilations of the time, After Dark Games plays in a window and lets you fully explore its content of your own volition. Oh and there’s obnoxious music playing all the time, ya gotta have that.
Along the bottom of the window you get a string of eleven games to choose from. We’re gonna go from left to right here since that’s what I’m feeling at the moment, which means we begin with Hula Girl. This is a vertically-scrolling platform survival game, quite similar to any number of free online games and mobile titles you may have seen over the years.
But instead up jumping upward as many others do, here you’re dropping and floating around from platform to platform. You play one of the Hula Twins and it’s your goal to stay on the screen while you hula your life away. Head off any side of the screen and you lose a hoop.
You also have that green Yuckometer at the bottom-left, which is affected by objects on each platform. So yucky objects like frogs, spiders, broccoli and your twin sister will eat away at the Yuckometer, with you losing a hoop if it’s depleted. And yummy stuff like cupcakes, bowls of ice cream, and sodas will increase it again.
About the only other thing going are the various types of platforms, with things like make you slip, slide, bounce, and drop on contact. And yeah, that’s about it, just try not to die and survive as long as you can. Next up is Fish Schtick, probably one of the least-engaging games on offer in my opinion.
It reminds me of one of those mini-games cobbled together for a typing tutor program, where you’re presented with a timer counting down and a group of letters floating by and you have to descramble and type in the word. Longer words get you more points and yeah, that’s it.
The fact that the letters are slapped onto the sides of fish does little to increase its appeal. Roof Rats is far more enjoyable by comparison. This is a tile-matching puzzle game where the goal is to match two or more rooms of the same color and help each character down from their respective rooftop.
Apparently these type things are known as “SameGames,” and I’ve seen a crapload of these games included on everything from Pocket PCs, to Linux distributions, to shareware compilation discs. The gimmick with Roof Rats are the uh, I guess the roof rats, or the characters you have to save, in addition to just trying to clear as many rooms as you can for a high score.
Each character will jump off the roof at a different height so there’s a welcome bit of additional strategy involved. For instance, the body-builder dude will jump off at five stories, but the rat has to be down to one story to be saved. So yeah, it’s simple but addictive, exactly the kind of thing you look for in a desktop game like this.
Likewise with Solitaire. Which, it’s solitaire, of the Klondike variety, so if you’re a human being with access to a computer in the 21st century then you already know what this is. It can be played in Vegas or Standard styles, you can draw one or three cards at a time, and there are a variety of card aesthetics to choose from, all with After Dark themes, because of course.
Yep. Solitaire. Mmhmm. Next is Rodger Dodger, a grid-based puzzle game where you play a pulsating orb thing that has to collect all the green things and avoid all the red things. Once you’ve collected everything it’s onto the gateway and the next level, where difficulty inevitably increases and the speed at which you must avoid hazards rises alongside.
Yeah it’s fine I guess. It’s not as complex as something like Chip’s Challenge since the levels are so small and there are relatively few objects to deal with, and personally I find it positively hideous in terms of visuals. But you know, it’s here. Golf clap for effort.
Zapper is a straight-up quiz game, with a timer ticking down while you’re presented with a barrage of yes or no questions to answer. Many of them take the form of common misconceptions, and the fact that each of them are worded in such a way that they can only be answered as ‘yes’ or ‘no’ makes otherwise innocuous questions somewhat tricky.
But yeah, it’s just a gameshow kind of thing without much show. Or game, really. Rather forgettable. Then we have Mowin’ Maniac, which is an absolute breath of fresh air compared to some of the other drab stuff on offer. It’s more or less Pac-Man, but you play the mower from the Mowin’ Man screen saver.
And as I’ve talked about before on LGR, I have an odd fondness for games with lawn mowing, despite having less than an enthusiastic point of view when it comes to mowing actual lawns. There’s something about the idea when it comes to mowing lawns in games that just amuses me, and Mowin’ Maniac hits the spot.
Especially since you can plow through just about everything. Fences, bushes, flowers, groundhogs, doesn’t matter! And while you should still beware the angry enemies, they are not "stole your fuel" this time around. In fact, you’re the one grabbing fuel here and every time you do it’s like a power pellet, letting you mow down the enemies in gratuitous fashion.
Nice. Bad Dog 911 is the inevitable Bad Dog game, tying into the classic screen saver that was seen running on monitors in every dentist office and public library in the ‘90s. The game though, ah, it’s pretty weak I think. It’s just another word descrambling kind of game, where a clock cleaner is being terrorized by the titular Bad Dog and it’s up to you to get the platform up to him by typing in words.
That jumble of letters up at the top can be used to form anywhere from 10 to 20 words. Enter enough of them and the dude is saved for that level, and after that you can continue typing in more for a higher score. Eh. I always wanted to play the dog himself, like, chasing down cars or tearing up computer desktops or whatever.
Oh well. At least Toaster Run fulfills a similar fantasy, letting you take direct control of one of the famous Flying Toasters. This plays a bit like the Macintosh classic Glider, but instead of a paper airplane flying through a residential environment, you’re a chrome toaster with wings.
Screen by screen you’ll explore a house and surrounding areas, with a variety of pickups, hazards, and obstacles in your path. You have three lives and once those are up, that’s it: game over toast. But ahh, as simple as this is I can’t help but enjoy it.
Airborne bread-heating appliances are endlessly endearing, and being able to fly one back and forth through a suburban landscape is my kinda fun. Unfortunately we’ve gotta move on to Foggy Boxes, which is just the game Dots. You know, the kinda thing you might’ve played on a scrap of paper at your grandparent’s house back in the day, or in the back of a car on a long road trip after the batteries on your Tiger Electronic Baseball game ran out.
The object is to draw lines between each dot, forming a grid along the way. If you happen to be the one to draw in a line that forms a square, you get to stick your mark inside it, in this case either an X or an O. And that’s it. Whoever has the most of their mark by the end wins.
And playing against the computer is cheap and not very fun, because binary logic. It’s kind of what computers do. Finally we have MooShu, another game that can be described as moderately adequate. This is a classic game of mahjong solitaire, where you’re given a pile of tiles that must be matched and removed one by one.
You get some nice tile sets featuring both After Dark properties and traditional mahjong tiles, and the music changes to fit each one. But I mean, again, there’s a million other games that do this, free and paid, and just about every single one I’m experienced with does it better.
Are you really gonna go out of your way to play this one? Probably not. And that’s After Dark Games, a pile of particularly predictable yet pleasant programs. It is by no means a bona-fide gaming classic, unless of course you remember it from childhood or have an unnatural fondness for Berkeley Software’s screen savers.
And well, I fall into both camps so I think it’s great. Okay, maybe not like, objectively great, but on a surface level of nostalgia-ridden silliness, After Dark Games offers up a good time. Er, good enough. And hey look, it even came with an After Dark Games screen saver to go along with it! Eh?! Ehh yeah whatever, I’m gonna go run over groundhogs and fly toasters through a bathroom.
