The Incredible Machine 2

The Short


Pros
- Over 150 puzzles of the Rube Goldberg variety
- Two-player head-to-head puzzles
- Allows you infinite customization to create your own puzzles, backgrounds, etc.
- Soundtrack is surprisingly good, with mp3 quality tracks
- Balances well between being very difficult and very easy
- Has a great deal of style throughout

Cons
- Will not work on modern machines, even in DOS-Box, due to a memory detection bug
- The "sequel," The Incredible Machine 3.0, works in Windows but strips out every UI element that made the game charming
- Some of the puzzles can be borderline mind-bending in their obscure solutions

Pictured: My childhood.

The Long

We weren't allowed any video game consoles growing up. My mother never saw the point of owning something that only had the singular purpose of playing video games, so she never allowed them in the house. Because of that, we'd have to do with computer games for the majority of my childhood, though I do remember the fateful day when we discovered emulators. My first owned console was a Nintendo Gamecube in college, so everything past the PS1 era was experienced after 2004. 

That being said, I was lucky, because I was growing up pretty much during the golden age of Sierra-On-Line. Looking back I can think of many games that sucked away most of my time: Lords of the Realm 2, Missionforce: Cyberstorm, King's Quest VI, Warcraft III, and the Dr. Brain games. But there is one game that both my brother and I spent nearly every waking second playing. A game that was part creative tool and part actual game, one that was never outmatched for "Nathan's Life Wasted" time until Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne came along with DOTA. Yes, it's The Incredible Machine 2. 

I love this game. 

I still remember it well. I wanted this game for my...oh crap, was it my eighth birthday? [Insert quick fact-check here], ok it was my ninth birthday, because it came out in 1994. Anyway, I really, really wanted this game for some reason, but this was before Amazon.com provided internet convenience to every home, so my mother drove me something like two hours to a small video game store in Santa Barbara (Software Etc? Maybe?) just to buy me this game. It was in a mall, we stood in line for a really long time (I was born in December, so it was probably a Christmas line), but in the end I got my prize: The Incredible Machine 2. And thus my childhood was burned away.

The Incredible Machine 2 is a simple concept, and you've probably played a game like this at some point, since they keep trying to re-release it with different titles but never quite grasp the charm of this original game. Essentially, it's a game based on the Rube Goldberg devices, those overly complex steps involving random objects to do simple tasks (like turn on a light). The game gives you anything from 1/2 to a 1/4 of the puzzle, and then gives you limited objects to solve it. It's a simple idea, but due to the massive number of objects and multiple things you can do with each of them, puzzles can become complex quickly.

Something like this

It's a simple concept, but a good enough one for both kids and adults to be entertained. Despite having an overly-long tutorial (for kids, I guess, but also unskippable) the game gets hard fast, with some of the "Very Hard" batch being downright devious. There's over 150 puzzles, and finishing them all took my poor, only-allowed-to-play-videogames-on-Saturdays 9-year-old self several years to complete.

The amount of stuff you could edit was nuts. Also, all these screenshots look better when you click on them; shrinking them is making them look like crap for some reason. 

But the best part about this game is the puzzle creator. Back in the days before the internet was a big deal (we didn't have internet until 1998), The Incredible Machine 2 allowed for you to create your own puzzles and share with friends via...floppy discs? I guess that works. It had two forms of this: a tutorial that walked you through every step of the process, and a sandbox where it just sort of threw you into the creator and said "GO NUTS!" 

There's an art to creating puzzles. You have to determine what objects you have "locked" in, and which you "unlock" (which the player then has to decide where they go). You can also throw red herring objects (Can Openers were our favorite, since they could double as inclines) to try and screw up your friends. And, after you were finished, you could color the backgrounds with a variety of images to add a personal flavor to your puzzle. You could even mess with gravity and air pressure! How nuts is that?

Even the menus radiate charm

Between my brother and I, we made probably over 300 puzzles, including several that were part of a "Series" that had a sort of disjointed storyline going on. We figured out how to manipulate the puzzle systems to create fake cutscenes, got really good at using the backgrounds (which don't interact with the actual objects) to provide hints for the puzzles, and more. We have about half of them still saved on a floppy disc somewhere back home (unfortunately the other half were on our 486-66...never to be seen again), a testament to this game's amazing systems. We entered contests hosted by Sierra-On-Line (and didn't win, though it involved mailing them a floppy disc with your puzzle on it), competed to out-puzzle each other, and more. It was nuts. But we never did get our friends to play them (none of them owned the game), so I suppose it was a "party-of-one" thing. Oh well.

It has a VS mode, where the cat faces off with Professor Tim. Protip: Cat always wins. 

One of my favorite parts about this game was it had style. From the objects to the menus, everything worked together to have a pleasing GUI and really just add to the style. It also had a surprisingly great soundtrack, using MP3 quality music (something Nintendo wouldn't figure out until last year's Zelda, hur hur hur) that could be played off the disc in a CD player! Yeah, like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, only not as good! Whatever, I loved these songs. They aped the style of nearly every genre you could think of (except maybe Rap), except if they had lyrics they'd be singing about puzzles and inclines and can openers. Freaking hilarious.

"Don't drop a hog in the parts bin, you'll be forever trying to find it."

It's unfortunate that the "sequel," The Incredible Machine 3.0, took everything I loved about the game and then sucked it up hardcore. It was essentially the exact same batch of puzzles, except made for Windows 3.1. Which sounds fine, except they made the UI look like Windows 3.1 instead of their own custom thing, which looked like a bunch of gray boxes. Great. Also, the version on Good Old Games is apparently the floppy disc version rather than the CD version (were you seriously trying to save space, GoG?), which means all the music is garbage Midi rather than the awesome CD version. Massive disappointment. Added bonus that the package they sell it in says it has The Incredible Machine 2, but they are lying, and if you email them to tell them it they'll give you a snippy remark about how everybody knows they are the same game.

LISTEN YOU JERK, THIS WAS MY CHILDHOOD. I THINK I WOULD KNOW WHEN YOU DID IT WRONG. URK. 

(Rant over)

Seriously, this looks like ass compared to the original. Thanks, GoG. Thanks for lying. 

It's really too bad, because I still own my original The Incredible Machine 2 disc, but it won't run. Since our dangfangled modern machines have more than 8 MB (yes MB) of RAM, the installer can't detect that high and it decides that since it can't detect it you must not have enough, and therefore aborts the installer before you can even start. I tried messing with its brain in DOSBox, but the installer was too smart (?) for me and still wouldn't work. So I either have to buy a 486-66 again or just play the crappy Incredible Machine 3.0. Sad, sad day. 

Ah, much better. I love you, Incredible Machine 2. 

I love this game. Even playing the gimped 3.0 version, I remembered how much I love it. It's a fun game for both kids and adults, and they've tried over and over to "reboot" it (with The Incredible Machine Contraptions, and the modern, oddly named I <3 Geeks [Seriously, that's the name of the DS game]) but none has ever grabbed the charm of the original DOS version. I really wish I could get my copy to work again, but for now I'll just have to run of nostalgia fumes until I find some ancient computer that will run it at the Goodwill or something. 

You can get the Incredible Machine Mega Pack off GoG for $10, and I now see they changed the product description because of my complaining to say The Incredible Machine 2 is no longer included. So I guess that's good they aren't lying anymore, and the rest of the games in the pack are pretty good (though it doesn't have The Incredible Toon Machine), but I'd only suggest it if you don't mind the ugly version. As it stands, 3.0 doesn't get me my fix, but...whatever. I love this game. 

I need to find my floppy disc. 

Five out of five stars. 

And my disc still plays on my old Walkman! Ha ha ha, 90s!