10/14/20 Pipe Dreams (1989)

Pipe Dreams (1989) by The Assembly Line and pulished by LucasArts (RIP) for Amiga, DOS, Apple II, Arcades, Commodore 64, Windows, and many, many more. Also known as Pipe Mania, this is a good, simple puzzler where the aim is to place pipes for the “flooz” to flow through until the target distance is met. I don’t what it is, but there’s something really satisfying about setting up a path of pipes and watching the goo run through it. Pipes themselves are given to you at random with a Tetris-style sidebar to show you what’s coming up, this alone is enough to give the game a nice layer of strategy and planning. You only have so much time before the flooz starts flowing, and you need to make sure that you’re staying ahead of it, even if it means feverishly replacing pieces on a tile until you get the right one. The game is pretty sparse graphically and sound-wise, but that’s fine, as the gameplay is the core of the fun. Later levels begin introducing impassable barriers and other obstacles to spice things up, and I think that, while not being much, Pipe Dreams hits exactly what it needs to to be a fun, time-waster sort of game whose concept has been worthy of imitation by many a flash game.