[MIDI music]
[typing]
There was a short time from 2001 to 2004 or so
that I didn't own a decent desktop PC.
I had a piece of crap Compaq Presario 5000US
with those stupid, swappable color faceplates
that were trying to cash in on the current craze of multicolored iMacs and cell phone faceplates.
With an 8 MB TNT2 video card
and 700 MHz Duron CPU,
there wasn't much gaming to be had.
But still, it was a working computer
and I would rather have that than nothing.
So programs like Real Arcade were awesome,
simply because there were tons of new games to play
that weren't hard to run and were only a few megabytes at most.
One of those was Lawn Mower,
released in 2001 by Terminal Studio.
It was developed by a small Russian team based in Moscow,
with lead design by Egor Dioukarev.
Now the weird thing is there are few activities
that I hate more than mowing lawns.
It can be fun if it's cool out and you have a fast riding mower,
but when you have to use a push mower during a midsummer Piedmont heat wave,
there's nothing even remotely fun about it.
But somehow, Lawn Mower appealed to me as soon as I saw it.
Maybe it was because there really aren't too many lawn mower games, period.
Maybe it was the game's description from the developers,
which I can't help but imagine being read by an ex-KGB officer.
They are?
Well, dang! Those freakin' angry enemies of this unusual arcade will surely be wared!
Lawn Mower is shareware
and is pretty much full-featured as-is,
but if you paid something like $15, you got access to all 50 levels
and a password feature to let you continue where you left off.
Once you start it up from the launcher window,
you're greeted with the main menu.
The main menu itself is in itself a menu, mainly.
And it's got some cheery music
which sets you up for the cheery and relaxing tone of the rest of the game.
The main thing you'll wanna check here is the help screen,
which provides an outline of the bizarre pickups and enemies
that "are" stole your fuel.
Start the game and the grand grass gradation gets going immediately.
The controls are about as simple as you can get.
Move left, right, or forward.
Your mower doesn't stop unless it hits an obstacle head-on,
so pressing forward makes it go faster.
The goal is to mow the lawn.
And... that's it!
Make sure you hit 100% and it's on to the next level.
Yeah, at one point, you're told to make sure the lawn is cut nice and neat,
but it doesn't matter if it looks like it was cut by Helen Keller on PCP,
as long as you reach that percentage.
Along the way, you'll come across some truly strange enemies and pickups,
and if you don't read the help screen, you're really not able to tell what's what.
I mean, why do chairs and toilets give you points,
but cowboy boots take your life?
Are cowboy boots a natural enemy of Russians
and toilets some kind of after- dinner snack I'm not aware of?
Yeah, lots of stuff here is really weird when you think about it.
Like, bananas... are bad
because they stop you from being able to mow,
yet Coke cans are good because they give you points.
Yeah, stupid fruit!
Gimme the caustic sugar water instead.
Then there's this blue pencil-looking thing that enlarges your blades
so you can cut wider paths.
Why this frick is it a blue pencil thing?
Why not, oh I don't know, a BLADE?
And this is one of those games that really tests my obsessive-compulsive tendencies
since you can never actually mow 100% of the grass,
even though it says you do.
It's more like 94, 95%
as you'll always have little patches left over.
Especially annoying to me are those corners. Ugh!
You cannot physically get in there to cut them,
so you end up with a yard with rounded corners.
Ew, I can hear Apple's lawsuit glands salivating already.
And that's really it for Lawn Mower.
You either get hit by enemies that "are stole your fuel" enough times,
or run out of fuel on your own and it's game over.
Enter a high score, play again.
There is also a two-player mode, but it's exactly the same as single-player,
except that you're competing for points and amount of grass mowed.
Oddly, it doesn't keep track of how many toilets and beer bottles you ingest,
like any good Russian game should, if you ask me.
But I can forgive such shortcomings
because Lawn Mower is relaxing as heck.
You just wander around,
cutting circles into the grass,
avoiding the occasional unrecognizable, twisted enemy thing.
And try to ignore the OCD klaxons going off in your brain
due to all the uneven sections of grass that are left.
The music is happy, the controls are easy,
and the objective couldn't be simpler.
Lawn Mower is one of those games
that really takes me back to a simpler time
where even if you had a piece of junk machine
and a lame 28K dial-up connection,
you could still download some fun if you looked for it.
Even if it "are" stole your fuel.