Everyone's seen Life, except for the new kids who haven't, of course. What very few now alive have seen is the original, hand doodled version on graph paper! Which makes sense, of course, because Life is both addicting and maddening to generate by hand, which made it one of the very first pencil-and-graph-paper games to be computerized. Life is well-named, since the doodles in motion uncannily resemble the odd two-dimensional creatures of Flatland. What Golly brings to the table, besides the cool retro feel, is a collection of some of the largest and hardest to set up of this whimsical beasties ... including some of the very counterintuitive guns, puffers and breeders.

I give this high marks as a sterling museum piece, a kind of diorama on the inner worlds of the first computer programmers of the 20th century.