I keep having 90's flashbacks..
Seek and Destroy
A military game where you pilot helicopters and tanks to complete missions. I remember my Dad joking, "If you blow up an enemy tent, then how do you find intact crates of ammo inside?" I also remember I wasn't literate yet, so when I heard my Dad pronounce the game's title I thought it was called "She can Destroy".
Math Rescue (Word Rescue, too)
This is edutainment done right. These actually helped a lot with spelling and basic arithmetic in first grade. It's just math and spelling practice disguised as platformers that don't even really test your reflexes at all. Since these had no digitized speech, the spelling quizzes involved showing you a picture of what you were supposed to spell, like a house or a cat. Although I seem to remember some pictures were hard to guess, like a picture of a woman, and I typed "woman" but the right answer was "wife" or something like that. Once I got more proficient at Word Rescue I wanted to crank up the difficulty, but that just spawned more enemies without actually giving me a more advanced lexicon of words. That was disappointing for me back then.
Adam: The Inside Story
Like Broderbund Home Designer Suite, I can hardly find anything about this edutainment title on the Internet in 2018. I unearthed this
website with a review, apparently untouched since 1998, but there's no play through videos of this on YouTube, and most Google searches lead to more modern, similarly-titled anatomy and physiology software for med students. This was more like A&P for kids. A voice actor and actress playing the roles of Adam and Eve would explain stuff like respiration, blood flow, and the skeleton through digitized audio files and goofy animations.
I actually remember this heimlech maneuver bit. It started off serious, then turned into a farcical cartoon like the animated bits from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with the heimlech-maneuveree above spitting out his food, then crazy objects like live animals and bicycles and so forth. Or something like that. I'm not sure if it actually happened that way, but I'd bet my life there was a similar sketch during the digestive system lesson where Adam's jaw unhinges like a paper craft stop motion puppet and he tries to eat a whole roast chicken, a cheeseburger, a steak, and a whole mountain of other food but it just gets stuck. Wacky music was playing during the whole ordeal.
X-Evil
Researching this was really weird. The creator's
website is still up. While the page's copyright date reads "2017", it looks like something hand-written in HTML in the late 90's. However, all the screenshots on his site look completely different from the X-Evil I remember playing in 1997 (the pic above is actually from a
2014 Neo GAF thread where the user "Blizzard" [since banned] posted it). Apparently I played version 1.5 of this game, then the creator later came out with version 2.0, overhauling the graphics so I can't even recognize them anymore.
I'm not sure how to describe this except as an 2D run and gun arena game. The playable characters and enemies were super eclectic, such as:
Ninja - equipped with shuriken by default, able to climb up walls and ceilings like spiderman
Alien - blatantly ripped off from the Ridley Scott and James Cameron movies; also able to climb like the ninja. He's lethal to the touch, but can't carry any weapons.
Chopper Boy - I always imagined this was a life-size plastic army man with helicopter blades on his head. He's really weak, but he's one of the few characters who can fly.
I think the other two guys in the screenshot are "soldier" (the guy in the leotard) and "cyborg" (the red, vaguely gorilla looking guy).
I remember a plethora of weapons to find and equip, like pistols, machine guns, flame throwers, and grenades. I'm sure there was more than that but I can't remember the specifics. The most exotic weapon was something called the "soul swapper". When you shot an enemy with this you would trade bodies with them. So eventually I developed the approach to find a soul swapper, shoot a crazy powerful enemy (like an alien), and then use my newfound powers to slaughter everyone. Although it was awkward when I traded bodies with the alien and he just shot me back with the soul swapper again.
There was one level with a staggeringly powerful enemy called a "fire demon". He was about eight or nine tiles tall, on fire, lethal to the touch, and aggressive. I used the soul swapper on him, became him, and went to the exit, spawning as a fire demon in the next level. I killed everyone around me with impunity, but when I tried exploring the rest of the stage, the fire demon was too big to fit in between the scenery, so I got stuck.