Exterminator

Exterminator from 1990 — one of those games you can't play without an emulator. I'm not sure why, but I keep coming back to the fact that it was about some kind of office building crawling with cockroaches. Not just a few, but in such numbers they're pouring out of the walls.

It's a simple arcade game where your character wanders around trying to exterminate them. In the field of catastrophic pest control, you're not alone — occasionally other characters appear running around the scene with you. The goal? Get through the levels and neutralize everything that moves on six legs. Each level has the flavor of the building you have to hack your way through.

It plays like a shooter without shooting — more like an aggressive collecting walk. You have a weapon you can swing around you — not a rocket launcher, more like a sword or club. Movement is key, projectiles are almost non-existent, but taking down enemies is direct and physical. The graphics alternate between dark environments and pixelated roughness you could describe as deterministic brutality. Sounds? Nothing that'll particularly impress you.

It aged hard. Not that the game was properly bad, more that it was already worn out in the nineties. DOS arcade games appeared by the dozen back then, and this wasn't even close to the best or most original. It's more like average work for a fan who's just curious what people played on computers back when TV was running shows about hunting paranormal phenomena.

Today you can play it in your browser through a web emulator. You won't lose track of time, but if you're collecting experiences from the days when computers still knew their limits, and want to see what once passed for entertainment, Exterminator will show you.