I am searching furiously for two games I remember as a kid but am missing their names entirely.
The first one I know was an MS-DOS game. It was a point-and-click adventure which used digitized photos. There was an Australian man on some sort of quest, and a third of the game took place in a landscape outside of an abandoned mine (you eventually had to go inside, but you had to get a certain item or you would get stuck), and there was a town to explore. You could die in this game, just like in a traditional adventure game, but what was unique was he had a health counter, so mistakes didn't end the game immediately but you could still screw up.
What I DO remember:
The beginning of the game was very frustrating to figure out; you start out flying a cargo plane until eventually an emu flies into the cockpit, and you have to escape and free-fall into the mountain.
The game-over sequence used to scare me as a little kid; upon dying, the narrator makes some kind of joke or hint about what killed you and how you could have avoided it, then a farewell dirge on a mortuary organ starts playing as the screen fades into a gravestone that says "R.I.P [I can't remember his name] [it said his birthday but i forgot it] - Today" as the narrator says "It looks like your time has come. I hope you like it down under... Dave... [I think that was his name]" The last part of that trails off, and the organ keeps playing until you quit or load a save file. Fun for the whole family!
In the town, there was a part where you had to go into someone's house, and there was a guy there laid up in bed....with two heads. A human person. Both heads spoke at the same time.
Every time you do something that increases your score, the guy makes some kind of Australian cheer like "rippa!" or "getty, mate!"
To get into the mine you had to cross a river and it was full of alligators. Wading into it too far to the left would cause a gator to jerk up and eat you, being an instant game-over. My cousin practically beat his face into the wall trying to figure out what to do to get across.
What a marvelous bird is the pelican.
For a game that ran pretty well, there was this utterly terrifying audio glitch that seemed to pop up at complete random; for no particular reason, certain voice clips or soundtracks would make a god-awful screeching noise and act like the damn computer was about to explode. The first time this happened to me as a kid, I shot like a bullet towards my room and didn't touch the computer for like four days.
The second game I'm looking for was not very well known, but I do remember it was a life simulator, and its advertisement slogan was "What if you could live your life over again?" I played it at a friends house. There were two versions, a "male" and "female" disk, I played the male version. So, you type in a first and last name, and you can choose what stage of life to start from, I chose "child". Oh yeah, it was possible to die, and when you die, your save file gets erased, I think.
There was a "tree" of icons whose meanings represented different times in your character's life; a heart meant you were on a date, a person's X-ray meant you were sick or something, a person in a hard hat meant you were working at your job, etc. I had played all the way up to old age, and I know that while the previous stages had like ten or fifteen icons, old age had like five or seven, because one of them was a sunset icon, meaning you were about to die of old age, but this stage was the hardest because you could actually die on any of the other icons; one of the causes at this part was that you could complain about your hands and fingers being cold all the time, and the doctor finds cancer in you, but it kills you before they can yank it out. Another in middle age has you snap your spine in half diving for a baseball at a senior's baseball game (why the heck are a bunch of arthritis patients playing baseball?!), and in one just before old age, you eat so much food and gain so many pounds that you die under your own weight; this one was actually kind of dark because it tells you what happens afterward, how many people in your family hear about it, and your wife actually dies from panicking about it! Yeesh.
I cannot for the life of me remember what these were called. Halp pls.
A wise man once said "Damn, that's one hell of a steak."
