Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure

Also known as: N/A

Developer: Synergistic Software

Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure combines elements of Dungeon Campaign and Wilderness Campaign and winds up creating a pretty decent overall game in the process. What separates Odyssey from some other games of the time, though, is that the story and gameplay of the game is broken up into three different parts, making this feel like a much larger adventure. The first part of the game starts you out on an island where your goal is to search the island for castles, temples, and ruins in an attempt to gain treasures and valuable items. As you explore, you'll be battling monsters and you'll occasionally bump into other adventurers, who you can be friendly towards (which sometimes results in you being able to recruit them to your party) or attack them….or ignore them, I suppose, but who wants to be a snob like that? You'll also come across towns where you can purchase items like weapons, armor, and food and huts where you can purchase magical items. You may also stumble across a caravan that'll trade with you, which can be handy if you're a long way from the nearest town. The ultimate goal of this portion of the game is to navigate the island and collect enough gold to purchase a ship at Port Karre, the town on the northwest tip of the island, behind the mountains. Once you leave the island, you're now on a sea expedition, with you navigating a ship between islands in the sea. It plays largely the same as the previous part of the game, except you are at the mercy of wind and currents, so you can't navigate directly to where you want to go. You need to set sails in different directions to catch the wind and use your anchor to stop when needed. The goal in this part of the game is to obtain a magical orb and then take it to Caliph's Island in the top left corner of the map. Once there, the game is in its third and final stage. On the island, it looks like it would be similar to the first part of the game, but with a giant castle in it. On this island, there is no option for free travel, you can only choose to approach certain areas, and go get past those areas, you need to make use of the items that you collected throughout your adventure getting to this island. Once you make it to the castle door, you've successfully completed the adventure. While I wasn't really a fan of Dungeon Campaign or Wilderness Campaign, I did like Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure - you can see improvement and growth of the developer from game to game. While Odyssey may not be for everyone, it's a solid RPG for the time and well worth checking out if you'd like to see one of the bigger, early RPGs available.

Review added: 12/12/2025

Oregon

Also known as: N/A

Developer: MECC

Children that went to grade school in the mid-to-late 1980's tend to have fond memories of some of the educational video games that they played in school. The most popular one always seems to be Oregon Trail. What a lot of folks don't realize, including myself until I stumbled across this game, is that Oregon Trail is actually an updated version of Oregon, a mostly text-based game with the same basic goal. Honestly, it sounds like it was originally called "The Oregon Trail" when it was originally developed way back in 1971. But when it was released on the Apple II in years later, it was simply named "Oregon." While Oregon is still mostly text-based like the original 1971 game was, it does introduce the visual of a map, with your position on it, between rounds. It also adds graphics to the hunting minigame…which is a fairly frustrating game of often waiting for the deer to almost be off the screen before you shoot your slow-as-a-snail bullets, so that by the time the deer loops around and is back in front of you, it runs right into your shot. Aside from those two areas with some visuals added in, though, Oregon is purely text-based…but still just as fun as the Oregon Trail that many of us fondly remember. Oregon Trail takes this formula and adds to it and tweaks it to make the game that many of us know and love, but if you don't mind a lot of text and very little in the way of visuals, Oregon can be just as fun as the prettier version of the game that would come out roughly half of a decade later.

Review added: 12/13/2025