Game Review: Dare to Dream Trilogy

Ah, shareware. Source of so much of my gaming in the 90s. It's how I played Castle of the Winds, Jill of the Jungle, Solar Winds, Aethra Chronicles, Doom, and a ton of other titles, a lot of which were forgettable. This one, for some reason, stuck with me. Maybe because unlike the other ones I mentioned, I never managed to beat it the first time around. I clearly remember winning Castle of the Winds 1 and spending hours grinding on the last level available before I convinced my father to send away for volume 2, which meant I was grossly overleveled for it when I finally played it and easily blew through the game, but with Dare to Dream 1 I couldn't beat it except on easy mode. As such, it remained in my memory, in the space I'm wasting by dedicating it to games I haven't beaten yet, and and so I sat down with schoolpsychnerd to play through it once I found that the whole trilogy was available online.

Abandonware is in a tricky place legally, but I don't care that much when it comes to Dare to Dream. Unlike a lot of the titles available on GOG, where it just takes some tinkering with DOSBox to get them working fine even on up-to-date systems, Dare to Dream is a Windows game. A Windows 3.1 game, and good luck getting that to run. On Windows 7 it's possible with a virtual machine, but now that I have Windows 10 I'd have to install Windows 3.1 through DOSBox, emulating an OS while I'm emulating an OS, and even then I'd have to get the files from somewhere because it's not for sale anywhere anymore. So browser gaming it is.

Just like real life.

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Darker than Black, Week 22: ki'Xocolatl Dark Chocolate with Lima Lime from Campeche and Almonds

schoolpsychnerd picked this because right now her stomach is hurting from accidentally eating some ranch-flavored pretzels.

A few weeks ago, we went to Xoco for lunch when I took the afternoon off. You order at the counter and then they bring your food to you, and because of that, they also sell cups and various paraphernalia up front. There's no way I'm buying a cup with the name of a restaurant on it, but they also had dark chocolate bars and so of course you knew what I thought. We picked one out and bought it, then put it in with the other bars in the queue for Darker than Black.
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