Lo-Fi Let's Play: Life & Death

As a child, I dreamed of becoming a surgeon, thanks to 1988's Life & Death — before Surgeon Simulator or Trauma Center, this awkward, deathly-serious medical game gave me the idea that I should volunteer to practice appendectomies on the other third-graders.

Come along on a video revisitation of this ancient, formative experience — it's the latest episode of my long-running vintage Let's Play series (do catch up if you've missed it!).

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"Let's Play" video formats on YouTube are one of the most popular ways people learn about and share games with one another. But while young men shouting over cutting-edge works are de rigeur, I like to talk softly over nice, strange old games. I'll be sharing some of these videos with you on Offworld every so often.

Lots of old, strange design forms, many now obsolete, still have a lot to teach us about design, and a lot to offer us in terms of sweet surprises, rough-edged and lovable graphics, and the voices of hundreds of offbeat old aunts & uncles cracking jokes at us from the cursor-blinking depths of the early 1980s.

Subscribe to the Lo-Fi Let's Play YouTube channel to go on smooth vintage cruises with me. As a bonus, people often tell me the soft speaking and keyboard tapping gives them ASMR responses, too.