word mining central
Monster Bash, Stern. The original Williams make was from 1998 but they decided to make more of them in 2018. The concept (conceit? Plot?) behind the game is that you activate each of the monsters and then they play musical instruments in a “monster bash”.
So we’ve got Frankenstein as the DJ, Bride of Frankenstein singing, Mummy on base guitar, Werewold on drums, Creature (presumably from the black lagoon) on saxophone and Dracula on guitar. Very loose drawing style. I like it.
Medieval Madness, Williams, 1997.
This is one of my favorite games. Great sounds, great play, great toys.
An evil king holding a snake above his head in his right hand and a falcon perched on his left arm stands on the drawbridge of his castle.
Two trolls (each coming up to his knees, which, I mean, mini-trolls maybe?) stand beside him. One looks smug. The other is menacing the camera with a pike.
The castle is on fire and under siege.
To the left a wizard stands on a parapet. A woman hangs incredibly long hair out the window below him.
To the right a dragon is wrapped around the other parapet. A dragon hangs from his tail.
Someone is graffitiing “House of Payne” and “The King Is A Queen” on the right wall. A cannonball flies past the wall on the left.
Lethal Weapon 3, Data East, 1992. Licensed from the movie, the backglass is a bunch of illustrated scenes. I’d tell you more but I haven’t seen the movie so “guy and other guy stand together looking menacing, and then do so again, and this time one has a gun drawn” probably doesn’t cut it.
Jack-bot, Williams, 1995. In a just world I would be doing Pinbot, Bride of Pinbot, and *then* Jackbot, because I believe that’s the order they came out in.
Jackbot is casino-themed, and the backglass features the Pinbot character holding the Bride of Pinbot character like a man carrying a bride over the threshold.
Bride is kicking off a shoe (robots need shoes?! Oh well they’ve got breasts too so…) and looking as coquette-ish as a Ray Bradbury Era robot could.
Pinbot is, in addition to their bride, carrying a hand of cards, possibly Keno, possibly Poker. Pinbot has what appears to be triple 7s on their casino chest. A planet is up in the top right corner and a space station to the left.
Funhouse, Williams, 1990. This game is so evil I wrote a short story about it.
The conceit is a funhouse at a carnival. There’s a hot dog cart and a mirror maze and a trap door, but the primary feature is a giant ventriloquist dummy head named Rudy that talks to you throughout the game.
He’s creepy normally especially if you’ve watched the ventriloquist episode of Twilight Zone, but at one location I play at his eye is upside-down and he goes from creepy to cursed.
The backglass is… a thing. Rudy as a giant head with giant hands nearby holding doorways into the funhouse looks like he’s sitting on the stage of a 1940s dance stage. A large crowd is in the foreground surrounding the stage. Some scary posters are to the left. Beyond the first horizon in both directions are circus tents, balloons, etc.
The building behind the creepy head has lots of people riding slides around building edges as if the funhouse was also a water floom.
In the right foreground, Rudy stands with a very large clock slung around him, and the sign for a ticket booth declares that the funhouse closes at 12 (an integral part of the game play).