"Apogee means the highest point of something" didn't have quite the same ring to it.

If JDR was trying to make games today, people would be tripping over themselves to defend her.

Definitely remember spending some time playing the shareware version of this. This clip doesn't show the funny intro sequence, which sets up why you're releasing demons from blocks.

I wonder if she thought Wreck-It Ralph was ripping her off. The plot is that what TVTropes calls a Moral Guardian kidnapped all the bad guys from every video game ever, making their games boring.

"I'm bad, and that's good. I'll never be good, and that's not bad. There's no-one I'd rather be than me."

I played the shit out of this game way back when. I don't think I payed for it (at the time I was co-admin of a local BBS that specialized in piracy..I know...mea culpa), but it was a great, fun puzzle games. Years later when I discovered that *the* JDR was behind it I felt kinda weird that this game I loved was made by someone so thoroughly horrible.

(and for the record, my comment has nothing to do with JDR's gender issues or any of that, but for just being an awful person outside of that and for whining about running out of money when the ungodly sum she was paid for Happy Puppy was basically spent on anime)

So other than the characters blowing their brains out when you run out of lives, is there anything really adult about this game?

These might be dumb questions, but

a) what was so "adult" about this game?
b) what was "artistic" about this game? and
c) just how much of this game was made by JDR, and how much was made by Stephen?

Maybe the levels that look like shit are meant to be artsy? I don't know. Knowing JDR, there was probably some convoluted, long-winded story about why this was super-grown-up and bursting with artistic merit, a story involving dead dogs and rift fairies and Stephen being an asshole.

What's going on with the music? Was it really that discordant and awful, or is this one of those situations where the music was written for custom Soundblaster voices but plays back with the default B16 GM sound set under emulation? Not that music this bad would have been at all outside of the mainstream of shareware PC games at the time.

I remember playing this game as a kid and thinking, "I don't like this but I'm not sure why". It's a pretty charmless hybrid of that Memphis Group-inspired aesthetic we saw in games like ZOOP and some kind of edgy underground comics thing.

After reading that overly portentous intro screen, it does seem really pompous and self-impressed, like the response to every bad level design choice was "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND MY GENIUS!"