Blast from the past video game: Shadowgate (1989)

Many moons ago, when I was a hardcore Nintendo kid, Shadowgate was one of my favorites.  A point & click adventure that I seemed to be more suited to play than the rage inducing platformers and brawlers many of my peers seemed to excel at.  This was an era of what I affectionately call, "games that hated you".  Horrific, brutal, and genuinely malevolent games that beat you like a red-headed stepchild.  The sad thing is you always went back for more (even when your controller was held together with tape because you rage-spiked it into the 12" CRT during some bullshit Ninja Gaiden - p.s. fuck Ninja Gaiden).  I was also a big fan of fantasy and horror Choose Your Own Adventures when I was a kid so when I got my nerdly mitts on Shadowgate I nearly wet myself.

I loved Shadowgate (not as much as I love Shadowrun for the SNES) and whilst looking around youtube:

This game was madness and I blame it for several of my current RPG techniques. Torches would fizzle out and were a precious commodity. Any mistakes caused death after death after death. The thing was there was no gamefaqs.com, no IGN help guides to this bastard. Trial and error and intuition were all you had to rely on. Truth be told I don't know if I ever got to the end of the game even though I felt like I played it for a very long time and often (for some reason I have the memory of starting a new game every time I played).  I no longer own a NES but I might poke around the internet and see if I can find a ROM.  I kind of hope I can, just so I can do a review of it.