The Usotsuki

I thought Vans were a late 90s thing.

ESCP on a laser printer? O_o I've seen it on Canon and Star ink-jets but never on a laser printer.

Re Joust, I have the carts with the SNES and Genesis ports which are pretty good, and I play the Apple ][ version now and then (a file crack that I did). I don't really have any one favorite game. But I remember the GB version of Mortal Kombat 3 was a flaming pile, which was disappointing after the port of Mortal Kombat II was actually pretty good for what it was. Had they given it a bit more ROM space they prolly could've rammed the whole game into that little cart.

Those have more in common with modern games than with most other games of their time. Unfortunately. That said, I'm not gonna fault the early experiments in FMV/QTE gaming. They were revolutionary in their time. They're just not as good as games. (Hell, I've talked for years about trying to create an engine to drive them so I could recreate "Cliff Hanger" using 1080p footage.)

Yeah. When I play a game, I want to PLAY A GAME, not watch a glorified movie with a few interactive bits.

Pentium/133 286/10

Not to mention the Apple IIgs.

Pong in Mortal Kombat II, does that count?

Well, the first one I used was ProDOS-16, but that's not really anything special, because it's more or less just a 65816 MacOS.

The 1970s Columbia Pictures jingle woman?

I used to basically have the tower version of that, a Celeron/700 model.

Didn't some versions of AppleWorks boot from the back?

And that was so for a long time. The first two Mortal Kombats were distributed for home systems by Acclaim - only with MK3 did they (through the Williams brand) start distributing it themselves.

That was more a C64 thing than an Apple thing. In fact, from what I can see, trainers were relatively rare on the Apple ][ (though they did exist), and said load screens were relatively limited.

Packing and crunching wasn't very common BITD, but more recent cracks do use them. Some years ago I introduced Exomizer from the C64 world to the Apple ][ world. qkumba uses a cruncher on his cracks too.