My Fav. Dave

This is a tribute piece, to the game that got me into gaming in the first place. This game is the most awesome game ever, and I could play it over and over again… though unfortunately, I never got beyond the fifth stage, of ten in the game, which kind of brings my ‘gaming’ credentials into doubt… but I assure you, I have improved substantially since then. Or I think I have.

The game in question is Dave… an old school MSDos, pre-pentium, 8mb ram game, without video card requirements, and irritating system error message sound effects for the jump, gun, and jet pack sounds. It was so Awesome, though as I said I never managed to beat it, largely because I used to play it at school, during computer lab class… when the teacher wasn’t looking, we’d exit whatever we were supposed to be doing, Logo programming usually, and start up Dave.

The game was just so awesomely simple, by the time I got to the end of it, I could play the first 2 stages with my eyes closed ( I mean literally). The Third stage was a little harder, because of these flying spider thingies, that you had shoot down. The fourth stage as a pain! cause you had to cross the whole thing twice. And there was another spider thingy in the middle of the stage, that you literally couldn’t get around.

In one of his more benevolent moments, after school, our computer teacher showed me how to beat it my actually bumping into it, and that cleared the stage, so that it was relatively easy there after.

One thing pretty cool about Dave was that it taught one not to be greedy. Very often these awesome jewels would be left lying around, in places you’d imagine you could get to with the jet pack, or by careful jumping. And equally often you realized, that the jet pack would have been better utilized getting to the door… and every then you’d be stuck perpetually in the same stage, not dead, but totally unmoving. A little like Dracula in the day time!

So there you have it, a fortune cookie of a game, that was Dave.