The Random Adventure Game News Thread

[Unkillable Cat]

Dafuq.avi

 

[Jackalope]

Dunno about the game itself, but someone really knows how to make pixel art and it shows.

 

[MRY]

Backed this on KSer a while ago. The developer, Jay Tholen, is a really nice guy, incidentally.

 

[Infinitron]

Richard Cobbett has a YouTube channel where, among other things, he tears apart various crappy old adventure games: https://www.youtube.com/user/richardperspective/videos

 

[SCO]

Holy shit mystery of the druids hobo puzzle and cannibalism

 

[LESS T_T]

Fran Bow is coming out for PC (Win/Mac/Linux via Steam and GOG) on AUGUST 27, 2015
We’ll also release the Official demo on the same day.

Fran Bow is a creepy adventure game that tells the story of Fran, a young girl struggling with a mental disorder and an unfair destiny.

After witnessing the gruesome and mysterious loss of her parents, found dismembered at their home, Fran rushes into the woods, together with her only friend, Mr. Midnight, a black cat that Fran had previously received as a present from her parents.

In the forest, Fran goes into shock over the loss of her parents and when she recovers, she’s at Oswald Asylum, an oppressive mental institution for children, and Mr. Midnight is nowhere to be found.

After having a dream about her beloved cat, Fran decides to escape from the mental institution to find him and go back home to Aunt Grace, her only living relative.

Features

• Story driven creepy psychological horror adventure game.
• Unique and peculiar hand drawn 2D Art-Style and 2D animation.
• Self administer medication to open the terrible hidden world that will help solve puzzles and find objects.
• A big variety of puzzles designed with different levels of difficulty and specifically based on the story.
• Three arcade inspired mini-games all with different art style to be part of the transitions in the story.
• Interactive and occasionally playable pet cat, Mr Midnight.
• 50+ interactive unique characters with unique personalities.
• Original Soundtrack.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/362680/

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Richard Cobbett has a YouTube channel where, among other things, he tears apart various crappy old adventure games: https://www.youtube.com/user/richardperspective/videos

I watched the Les Manley video, in which he does the inevitable comparison to Les Manley and Larry Laffer.

And completely forgets that Larry Laffer was no different.

Probably the best example is the cruise ship section in LSL2. LSL2 is arranged into chapters (neatly divided along the many disks it shipped on) and you can't go back to a previous section once completed. Except, unlike other games that use the same system, LSL2 doesn't bother to check if you have everything you need to progress. Without giving too much away, Larry is forced to abandon the cruise ship and survive on the open seas for an extended period of time before he can continue.

Except there's nothing that tells you this until you reach that section. Then you have to start gathering supplies to survive the trip. Any sany adventure game designer would therefore put all the supplies on board the cruise ship...but this is Al Lowe and the early days of Sierra.

The first thing you need is water for the trip. This is actually easy to solve...if your standard train of thought stops at "abstract". All you have to do is buy a soda at the store in the opening area. The problem is, as anyone that has played the game can tell you, the only cup size available is the size of a garbage can. There's no way you're gonna lug that around anywhere! But...you guessed it, you just TAKE CUP and Larry shoves the whole thing into his coat pocket, no problemo. It's bizarre enough that Sierra saw a reason to put this particular "puzzle" into the starting walkthrough section of the manual...right opposite the section where they give the Hint Line phone number and plug the Official LSL2 Hint Book.

The game just assumes that you had the sense to buy sunscreen at the drug store, so we'll leave that one alone. That won't be enough however, so a second item will be needed. Fortunately this won't be that hard to get and put to proper use.

Then you'll need something to eat. The answers to this one are actually found on the cruise ship itself, but if you just take all the items and then abandon ship, you'll die because one of the food items goes bad. You need to remove a part of that food first, which is something not everyone will think of doing...especially since I can't recall the game dropping you any hints that this might happen.

The worst part about the cruise ship section, however, is that Larry's cabin is next door to another cabin inhabited by a woman that has nefarious plans of Larry. So she needs to be avoided while a vital item needs to be recovered from her cabin. Cue the most random sequence in the entire game. If she's in there when you enter, you're dead. If you walk in certain parts of her cabin, you're dead. If you take too long, you're dead. No one has yet determined what exactly makes this puzzle work - the only solution is to save early and save often and hope for the best.

A large portion of LSL2's puzzles are Trial and Error, throwing Larry corpses at the problem until a solution is finally found. Les Manley may have some truly bizarre puzzle logic, but the competition wasn't exactly doing any better.

 

[kaizoku]

It has been quite a while since I went procrastinate to KS realm, but by chance I happened to found this little gem. In the worst case it will be a very rough obnoxious gem, but after seeing the video I don't think anybody can say that there wasn't serious love/effort put into it.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/589182047/charlottes-dream?ref=category


The fact that KS is kind of dead doesn't help at all, but the guy seems to be lacking on the PR department.
He also made a bad call in not releasing a demo IMO.

Anyway, maybe MRY and Blackthorne can take a peek at it and spread the word if they see fit.

Given the current state I doubt it will get funded but maybe it will motivate him to try again at some other time.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-08-09-broken-sword-and-25-years-of-revolution

Broken Sword and 25 years of Revolution
Adventure time.

By Simon Parkin Published 09/08/2015

In 1989 Charles Cecil's computer could often be found in a white Ford Fiesta XR2, speeding along the 200-mile stretch of English motorway that separates Hull and Reading. The PC, a custom-built 386, was so valuable that Cecil would insist it be wrapped in blankets and secured in the back of a car with a carefully arranged seat belt. Cecil, who was 27 at the time and working as head of development at Activison, had blown his savings on the machine, which he intended to use as a dedicated flight simulator. But when the US side of the company collapsed and took his office down with it, Cecil decided to set up his own game studio with a programmer friend, Tony Warriner, who lived in Hull. The pair began working on a demo together, which they intended to pitch to publishers, shuttling themselves and their newly employed PC between the two cities each week.

The day before the pair was due to show a demo of their first game to Mirrorsoft, the video game publisher owned by the late media tycoon Robert Maxwell, Warriner drove to Cecil's house with the computer safely swaddled and secured in the back. Warriner arrived in the early evening and parked outside the house. The pair rehearsed their presentation, drank a few glasses of wine and went to bed, hoping for a long night's sleep. The next morning Cecil went outside to find that Warriner's car window had been smashed. Dismay soon curdled into panic with the realisation that the pair had neglected to unload the PC the night before. Cecil ran to the car to find a splay of wires where the radio once sat. But in the backseat, unnoticed and untouched by the thief, sat the blank-faced computer. "Had they taken the PC, which was worth infinitely more than the car radio, that would have been the end of Revolution before it even really began," says Cecil. "There was no way we could have afforded a replacement."

The pitch was a success. But before the game, which later came to be known as Lure of the Temptress, launched the following year, Mirrosoft's duplicitous owner Maxwell died at sea. Cecil and Warriner, who had completed work on Lure of the Tempress and were deep into the development of their second title followed Sean Brennan, the man who had signed them, to Virgin where both Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky later launched to a considerable success. Brennan was ambitious. He told Cecil that Revolution's next game should have far higher production values to make the most of the emerging CD-Rom format (which could hold vastly more data than the floppy discs they had traditionally used) in order to "beat" the American rival adventure game publishers Sierra and LucasArts.

Revolution Software circa 1996.

Brennan offered more than a mere rallying cry for the project that would become Revolution's most celebrated and enduring game series, Broken Sword. He had recently read the Italian writer Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, and suggested to Cecil that this ingenious tale about historical conspiracy theories, clandestine societies and lost treasure might provide useful material for an adventure game. Cecil bought a copy of the book, read it, and wanted more. So he turned to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln's rip-roaring pseudo-historical investigation into a secret royal bloodline born of the biblical figure Mary Magdalene (the book that alongside, some would argue, Broken Sword, would also inspire Dan Brown's bestseller The Da Vinci Code). As Cecil continued his research, he began sketching out the premise of Broken Sword, the tale of George Stobbart, an American patent lawyer, and Nicole Collard, a French freelance journalist, who are drawn into a conspiracy relating to the Knights Templar. "Naively, the middle of the game was designed first, around the interesting things I discovered around the Templar," says Cecil. "It was later on that I designed the intro and the ending. The problem, of course, is that the middle supports the intro and defines the ending."

Cecil wanted to base his characters on real life persons and events. "All of the main characters come from on experiences I had," he says, offering the example of Albert, the snooty French concierge who proves a stumbling block to George and Nico's plans. "He was a character that my wife [Noirin Carmody, who co-founded Revolution] and I actually met in France while researching the game," he says. "We visited an area protected by a concierge, and arrived late one night. The concierge was perfectly pleasant until he realised that we were English, at which point he suddenly because terribly upset about the amount of noise we were making." On the same trip, Cecil and Carmody were stuck in traffic in a taxi en-route to the airport. "There was a policeman in the centre of a square trying to direct the traffic and everyone around him was hooting their horns at him," he says. "In the end he got up, walked off and ordered a glass of wine. Within a couple of minutes the traffic had cleared. We put him in the game. I find people like this far more interesting in fiction than people invented merely to provide a function in the story."

By now, Revolution was fully based in Hull, a Yorkshire city that in Cecil's words, "didn't have a name for games". Nevertheless, Cecil managed to assemble a team of talents "In those days there were people who were so excited by the video game medium but had no way to get in," he says. "You could pick up and find amazing artists and designers in the most extraordinary ways." Still, by the time that work completed on Beneath a Steel Sky, Revolution only consisted of six people. Cecil needed more staff, especially artists who would be able to create Broken Sword's larger and more ambitious scenery.

Charles Cecil working with Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons on Revolution's second game, Beneath a Steel Sky.

That month he read an advertisement in Edge magazine for the Dublin-based animation college, Ballyfermot. "I arranged to go and see them and was met by Eoghan Cahill, one of the tutors," says Cecil. "His layouts were mind-blowing." Cecil hired Cahill to create background layouts for Broken Sword. Cahill, who worked remotely from Dublin, also pushed the team to implement animation techniques in the game that hadn't been seen before, such as moving the player's point of view from a sideways to top-down perspective. "He'd talk and talk and drive us up the wall because, whenever we told him something couldn't be done, he would challenge us," Cecil recalls. "He'd never get off the phone if we simply tried to fob him off. His absolute determination revolutionised that side of the production."

So too did Dave Cummings, a writer who Cecil met while working at Activision in the late 1980s. At that time Cummings wrote test reports on Activision's forthcoming titles for Cecil to look over. "He was interesting because his test reports were so much better written than the adventure games he was reporting on," Cecil recalls. "It was surreal. He wrote so beautifully. When Activision collapsed I invited him up to Hull. He worked on all of those early titles. But he had some problems and fell ill for the second Broken Sword." Cummings left Revolution in the late 1990s and Cecil lost touch with him. In 2012 he discovered that the writer had died. "A lot of the credit for the wit in those original games goes to Dave," says Cecil. "He had a searing and a cutting humour which so clearly translated into the games themselves."

Cecil's decision to start writing the game's middle act before its first and final chapters proved troublesome as development continued. The game was late, although Virgin remained supportive, if a little unenthusiastic about what they saw as an anachronistic project in the dawning era of 3D games. "It wasn't really until three months or so before we completed work on the game that Virgin realised that they might have something special on their hands," he recalls. "I'd met the composer Barrington Pheloung about five years earlier when we'd played cricket together." Pheloung, best known for composing the theme and incidental music to the Inspector Morse television series, had recently moved to England from Australia. "I asked him to score the game and his music arrived just as the final animations and full colour backgrounds and voice recordings came together," Cecil recalls. "All of a sudden the game looked incredibly special, where prior to that it had been harder to see the potential."

Nico's Parisian apartment in the first Broken Sword.

Cecil attributes much of the game's commercial success to Virgin's support, but also the fact that he managed to place the game on Sony's emerging PlayStation console. "I kind of knew a couple of people at Sony and approached them," he recalls. "Virgin told me that the game wouldn't work on PlayStation at all because it was neither 3D nor fast moving. Sony weren't enormously excited either." Both companies were proven wrong. Broken Sword was a critical and commercial success, selling more than 650,000 copies, a "huge number" in those days. "It was memorable because it was so unexpected," says Cecil. "Not even Sony thought the game would perform in any way like that." Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror followed in 1997 and, with an improved structure and fewer technical issues (the first game included a bug that meant some players couldn't reach the final chapter) improved upon the first game's sales and reception. It would be six years before the third Broken Sword, which was known as 'The Sleeping Dragon', arrived (during which time Revolution released In Cold Blood, a more action-orientated adventure game that was less well-received). Broken Sword III dropped the fine 2D art of the first two games in favour of 3D assets and nearly brought about the collapse of the company. "We made a massive loss on that game because the recoupment model was so broken," says Cecil. "Publishers would pay seven per cent of the retail cost, but would offset all of the development costs, some of the localisation and some of the testing first." As a result, Revolution made a loss of several hundred thousand pounds, while the game's publisher, the now defunct THQ, made a profit of several million dollars on the game, according to Cecil.

Despite the precarious situation that the deal had left Revolution in, Cecil began talks with THQ about creating Broken Sword 4. "But the terms of the deal changed midway through and the relationship soured," he explains. The studio lost money on Broken Sword 4 too, the only game in the series to not come to console. "We were financially in a terribly weak position," says Cecil. "The company was essentially saved when Apple came to us with the iPhone and supported us, not with finances, but with encouragement, to write adventures and bring them to the Apple format." The studio had recently created a Nintendo DS version of Broken Sword: Director's Cut, which used a pioneering interface that was designed around a touchscreen. "As a result it was a fairly straightforward step from that to tablet," says Cecil. "We were racing with the Monkey Island team to get our game out first. They put all their efforts into upgrading the graphics and we out ours into upgrading the UI. It was the right decision. Our game performed a lot better."

Broken Sword 5's return to the 2D hand-drawn art style of the earlier games.

The iOS ports of Revolution's classic titles helped the studio recover, but the company wasn't yet in a strong enough position to fund a prototype for a new Broken Sword game, despite the obvious demand from fans. So Cecil decided to go to Kickstarter in order to appeal to the series' fan-base. "When we launched our campaign we were still in the crowd-funding honeymoon period," says Cecil. "None of these projects had gone wrong yet. Over the months, as some projects went sour, I think Kickstarter fatigue has developed with the audience." The success of the Kickstarter pitch provided enough funding to get going on Broken Sword 5, with the remainder of the money coming from HSBC and Funding Circle, a website where anyone can lend and invest money into small businesses. "I'm not anti-publisher at all," says Cecil. "In fact the relationship between developers and publishers has become far more balanced and equal in recent years. Certainly if the developer manages to fund the game, there's much more equity."

Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse launched in two parts, the first of which released in December 2013 for PC. Now, the full game is set to launch on PlayStation 4, for a mid-tier cost of £19.99. While Cecil feels optimistic about the current state of the adventure game, which, with the success of episodic series such as Telltale Games' The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, he sees as being "very vibrant", the challenges for studio remain substantial. "Adventure games are expensive to write and easy to pirate," he says. "They cost several million dollars to write. The fact is if people buy them from us, then we will write new adventure games. If they don't, then we may go out of business."

These pressures have created something of a blitz spirit among adventure game companies that might otherwise be rivals. "While there is a limited audience, that audience is incredibly loyal," says Cecil. "We work hard to identify people who have bought other adventure games and tell them about Broken Sword and vice versa. For example, Daedalic Entertainment in Germany is, on paper, a competitor of ours. But we see ourselves at staunch allies. When we get together we share as much knowledge as we can, rather than, say, in television, where indie companies get together and are at each others' throats."

For those who have travelled with George and Nico through the series across the years, Broken Sword holds many fond memories. These games are, for many players, uniquely collaborative; they can be played by a group of people in the same room without the need for multiple controllers. Everyone is able to offer their opinions and ideas on how to solve each arcane puzzle. "There was a fellow who told me about playing Broken Sword with his grandmother," says Cecil. "When we launched the Kickstarter, he said that it brought back memories of them playing the series, which was an important part of their relationship. She's passed away now, so it had become this valuable touch point in his memory if her. It's such a social game. We hear so many stories of people playing together. It's a shame we seem unable to communicate those incredibly important moments to the wider world."

 

[Tramboi]

Is "Why am I dead at sea ?" any good ?

 

[Infinitron]

Digital Antiquarian on Leisure Suit Larry: http://www.filfre.net/2015/08/leisure-suit-larry-in-the-land-of-the-lounge-lizards/

The question of to what extent and how quickly that controversy led to sales for Leisure Suit Larry is a more complicated tangle than one might expect. In his many interviews Al Lowe has long told of what a flop Leisure Suit Larry was on its initial release, nothing less than “the worst-selling game in the history of the company.” He attributes much of this initial failure to Sierra’s alleged ambivalence about the game, which led to an unwillingness to promote it and a seeming desire — Ken having presumably thought better of his initial enthusiasm — to just bury it quietly. Only slowly and largely through word of mouth, as Al tells it, did the game build momentum, and it didn’t start doing really big numbers until, depending on the interview, six months to a year after its June 1987 release.

It’s a tidy narrative, but there are a lot of reasons to question it. In the last of his articles forComputer Gaming World, John Williams claims that, far from falling on his face in typical Laffer style out of the starting gates, Larry has been “our second most successful product launch, second only to King’s Quest III.” A list of bestsellers for September and October of 1987 published in Sierra’s newsletter shows an only slightly more mixed picture, with Leisure Suit Larry nestled comfortably behind King’s Quest III and Space Quest, the third best-selling of Sierra’s adventure games. That performance is made more impressive when one remembers thatLeisure Suit Larry remained barred from Radio Shack, source of fully one-third of Sierra’s sales. The preponderance of the evidence would seem to indicate that Leisure Suit Larry was that rarest of all beasts: a game that was quite successful on its initial release but also turned into a grower, steadily building its momentum and continuing to sell well for years. Nor is there any evidence that Sierra was really all that scared by Leisure Suit Larry. While certainly aware that they had to avoid throwing it in the face of the likes of Radio Shack and other conservative retailers, they clearly conceived it from the beginning as a series, like all of their other adventure games; the finale explicitly (sorry!) promises a sequel which would indeed come in very short order (sorry!), within a year of the original. Nor were they shy about promoting it in their newsletters, or for that matter shy about writing major feature articles for Computer Gaming World heralding its arrival.

Whatever the precise timing, all are agreed that by the summer of 1988, the game’s one-year anniversary, Leisure Suit Larry had become the biggest game Sierra had ever released that wasn’t a King’s Quest, with the hapless Larry Laffer himself well on his way to becoming the most unlikely of videogame icons. The sequels poured out of Al Lowe for years, some strong, some not so strong, but taking more design risks than you might expect and always serving to maintain Leisure Suit Larry‘s place as Sierra’s second-biggest franchise, the perfect alternative to the family-friendly King’s Quest series. For a time there Hollywood was even seriously interested in doing a Leisure Suit Larry sitcom, going so far as to fly Al Lowe down for some meetings that ultimately never panned out. As so often happens in long-running series, Al took more and more pity on his perpetual victim as the series wore along, steadily filing down his sharper edges and finding unexpected seams of likeability. By the time of Leisure Suit Larry 7 in 1996 the little fellow was starting to become downright lovable, a far cry from the skeezy, crudely drawn weirdo of the first game.

While Leisure Suit Larry itself was a massive success, Ken William’s broader agenda of which it was a part, that of opening up the world of gaming to more diverse sorts of content, had much more mixed results. When other publishers saw how much money Sierra was making from the franchise and also saw that no one was burning down their offices because of it, Leisure Suit Larry was inevitably copied, sometimes so blatantly as to almost defy belief. Yet there seemed little desire from the industry at large to push beyond the occasional sniggering sex comedy into stories that were “adult” in more subtle ways. In the last of his Computer Gaming World articles, John Williams muses about the possibility of a movie-style rating system for games that could create havens for all sorts of new content: G-rated children’s software; PG-rated action games for the teens; R-rated interactive dramas telling realistic, topical tales; even X-rated games constituting the full-on pornography that Leisure Suit Larry, to so many teenagers’ disappointment, wasn’t. Putting their money where their mouths were, Sierra even had at the time another game in the pipeline that was “adult” in more subtle ways than Leisure Suit Larry:Police Quest, a gritty crime drama written by a veteran police officer. (Unfortunately, it would prove to suffer from most of the typical Sierra design flaws from which Leisure Suit Larry is so notably free.)

In 1988 Leisure Suit Larry won a Codie Award from the Software Publishers Association for “Best Adventure or Fantasy/Role-Playing Program.” Al Lowe remembers the mood on that night as Ken Williams, president of the SPA, gave the keynote address before an audience that included Robin Williams, Hollywood’s most noted games fan.

He [Ken] said that that he thought this was the first of many of these awards to come in the future, and that at some point the Academy Awards would be seen as merely the non-interactive video awards. The real awards would be for interactivity because once you’ve played interactive stories you won’t be content with sitting back and being passive, with watching stories. I thought that was a brilliant statement, and for five or ten years after I thought it was coming true.

This vision for games as a truly mainstream phenomenon like movies, games in a veritable smorgasbord of niches of which at least one or two were guaranteed to appeal to absolutely everyone on the planet, had been with Sierra almost from the beginning and would remain with them until the end. Ken, John, Roberta, and everyone else involved in steering Sierra fully believed that a new era of interactive entertainment was on the horizon. In some senses they would be proved right; games would indeed go mainstream in a big way. But in others they would be proved very, very wrong; games have still not challenged the critical respect or cultural relevancy of Hollywood. So, then, was Leisure Suit Larry a bold work that tried to break down barriers and redefine the sorts of fictions that games could deal in? Or was it just another example of an industry caught in an eternal adolescence, one unable to address sexuality except through farce or porn? Perhaps it was one or the other or neither; more likely it was both.

Interestingly, the consensus among many SJW game journalist types seems to be that the earlier Larry games were less sexist, my-soggy-knees, etc. Although it didn't stop them from trashing that recent remake.

 

[LESS T_T]

Demo released: http://killmondaygames.itch.io/fran-bow-official-demo

edit: also on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/393500/

 

[Unkillable Cat]

The most offensive moment in the game actually has nothing to do with sexism or even plain old sex, but is a blatant example of another nasty “-ism.” There’s a convenience store with a turbaned Indian or Middle Easterner behind the counter, a guy to whom even Larry is allowed to feel superior. This guy, who can sell you a condom amongst other things, has the “Engrish” problem of not being able to pronounce (or apparently write) his Rs: “There is a magazine rack near the front door, with a sign reading ‘This no library — no leeding.'”

I feel like making fun of another person for his accent has got to be amongst the lowest and cruelest forms of “humor” imaginable. Yet the most shocking thing is this scene’s sheer laziness. It’s not speakers of Indian or Middle Eastern languages who sometimes confuse the English “r” and “l” sounds, it’s speakers of Japanese and other East Asian languages. If you’re going to indulge in broad stereotyping, at least try to get your stereotypes vaguely right according to their own lights. Al Lowe has occasionally noted how he and the others at Sierra were essentially making games for each other. This scene shows that culturally monolithic echo chamber at its worst. When I see a guy like this one behind a counter, I see someone who’s left his home and everything he knows far behind, who’s struggling to learn a new language and make a better life for his family, who’s doing something far bolder and braver than anything that the sheltered nerdy white boys at Sierra who’ve decided it’s appropriate to make fun of him have ever even dreamed of doing. He doesn’t need their grief.

I think the scene in the convenience store might just help us get to the core of what really bothers me about Leisure Suit Larry‘s humor, to the reason that, while it might make me chuckle here and there, I’ll never consider it great comedy. It’s all about mean-spiritedly making fun of people who are - or who are perceived as - weaker and more pathetic than the people who made the game. Al Lowe is a clever guy and he comes up with some clever gags, but his game is at heart an exercise in bullying, looking down on safe targets from a position of privilege and letting fly. There’s no real warmth and little empathy, no sense of shared understanding between the player and the caricatures going about their business onscreen, and certainly not a trace of the bravery that would be required to go after targets in a position to actually defend themselves.

SJW spotted - but at least he makes it clear that this is all just his opinion. Makes me wonder though...is this him trying to get in more blows against Sierra, or just him being kinda full of himself?

There is no soil more fertile for jokes and comedy than cultural clashes. Like with most comedy, even that can become a field for jokes that serve no purpose than to belittle and humiliate others, but the example he cites is not even close to those levels of nasty or offensive. If you walk off-screen in LSL1, you're greeted with a dark alley and a mugger coming to get you. The mugger can really only be described with one word - nigger. Where's his condemning and condescending tone about that?

Al Lowe's humour is just like everyone else's - hit or miss.

 

[taxalot]

Okay.

I have a soft spot for Les Manley in Search for the King : it was my first PC game ever. I played it when I was 6 and I actually learnt my terrible english with that game. I do not get however, how the game is supposed to be a clone of Leisure Suit Larry. The main character is a nobody, there is a text parser, there are babes but they are irrelevant to the plot. That game is just a parser adventure set in a modern day environment with a lot of bad humor. Is that enough to call it a Larry ripoff ?

 

[LESS T_T]

Ron Gilbert's Monkey Island retrospective:

Happy Birthday Monkey Island
Sep 02, 2015

I guess Monkey Island turns 25 this month. It’s hard to tell.

Unlike today, you didn’t push a button and unleash your game to billions of people. It was a slow process of sending “gold master” floppies off to manufacturing, which was often overseas, then waiting for them to be shipped to stores and the first of the teaming masses to buy the game.

Of course, when that happened, you rarely heard about it. There was no Internet for players to jump onto and talk about the game.

There was CompuServe and Prodigy, but those catered to a very small group of very highly technical people.

Lucasfilm’s process for finalizing and shipping a game consisted of madly testing for several months while we fixed bugs, then 2 weeks before we were to send off the gold masters, the game would go into “lockdown testing”. If any bug was found, there was a discussion with the team and management about if it was worth fixing. “Worth Fixing” consisted of a lot of factors, including how difficult it was to fix and if the fix would likely introduce more bugs.

Also keep in mind that when I made a new build, I didn't just copy it to the network and let the testers at it, it had to be copied to four or five sets of floppy disk so it could be installed on each tester’s machine. It was a time consuming and dangerous process. It was not uncommon for problems to creep up when I made the masters and have to start the whole process again. It could take several hours to make a new set of five testing disks.

It’s why we didn’t take getting bumped from test lightly.

During the 2nd week of “lockdown testing”, if a bug was found we had to bump the release date. We required that each game had one full week of testing on the build that was going to be released. Bugs found during this last week had to be crazy bad to fix.

When the release candidate passed testing, it would be sent off to manufacturing. Sometimes this was a crazy process. The builds destined for Europe were going to be duplicated in Europe and we needed to get the gold master over there, and if anything slipped there wasn’t enough time to mail them. So, we’d drive down to the airport and find a flight headed to London, go to the gate and ask a passenger if they would mind carry the floppy disks for us and someone would meet them at the gate.

Can you imagine doing that these days? You can’t even get to the gate, let alone find a person that would take a strange package on a flight for you. Different world.

After the gold masters were made, I’d archive all the source code. There was no version control back then, or even network storage, so archiving the source meant copying it to a set of floppy disks.

I made these disk on Sept 2nd, 1990 so the gold masters were sent off within a few days of that. They have a 1.1 version due to Monkey Island being bumped from testing. I don’t remember if it was in the 1st or 2nd week of “lockdown”.

Twenty Five years. That’s a long time.

It amazes me that people still play and love Monkey Island. I never would have believed it back then.

It’s hard for me to understand what Monkey Island means to people. I am always asked why I think it’s been such an enduring and important game. My answer is always “I have no idea.”

I really don’t.

I was very fortunate to have an incredible team. From Dave and Tim to Steve Purcell, Mark Ferrari, an amazing testing department and everyone else who touched the game's creation. And also a company management structure that knew to leave creative people alone and let them build great things.

Monkey Island was never a big hit. It sold well, but not nearly as well and anything Sierra released. I started working on Monkey Island II about a month after Monkey Island I went to manufacturing with no idea if the first game was going to do well or completely bomb. I think that was part of my strategy: start working on it before anyone could say “it’s not worth it, let's go make Star Wars games”.

There are two things in my career that I’m most proud of. Monkey Island is one of them and Humongous Entertainment is the other. They have both touched and influenced a lot of people. People will tell me that they learned english or how to read from playing Monkey Island. People have had Monkey Island weddings. Two people have asked me if it was OK to name their new child Guybrush. One person told me that he and his father fought and never got along, except for when they played Monkey Island together.

It makes me extremely proud and is very humbling.

I don’t know if I will ever get to make another Monkey Island. I always envisioned the game as a trilogy and I really hope I do, but I don’t know if it will ever happen. Monkey Island is now owned by Disney and they haven't shown any desire to sell me the IP. I don’t know if I could make Monkey Island 3a without complete control over what I was making and the only way to do that is to own it. Disney: Call me.

Maybe someday. Please don’t suggest I do a Kickstarter to get the money, that’s not possible without Disney first agreeing to sell it and they haven’t done that.

Anyway…

Happy Birthday to Monkey Island and a huge thanks to everyone who helped make it great and to everyone who kept it alive for Twenty Five years.

I thought I'd celebrate the occasion by making another point & click adventure, with verbs.

 

[Crooked Bee]

I don’t know if I will ever get to make another Monkey Island. I always envisioned the game as a trilogy and I really hope I do, but I don’t know if it will ever happen.

Sorry Ron, but the Curse of Monkey Island is fantastic.

 

[Infinitron]

Digital Antiquarian on how the old Activision destroyed Infocom: http://www.filfre.net/2015/09/and-into-the-fire/

The first indication the average Infocom fan received that the times they were a-changing came when Infocom’s third and fourth games of 1987, Stationfall and The Lurking Horror, were released simultaneously in June. Replacing the classic gray-box packaging was something that looked almost the same at first glance but was… well, there’s no kinder way to put it: it looked, and was, much cheaper. Replacing the old bound-in “browsie” was a conventional manual dropped into a depressingly conventional shrink-wrapped box. Feelies to set the stage could still be found therein, but they were dramatically reduced in quantity and quality. The era of classy Infocom packaging was over just like that, one more piece of their identity stolen away.

Unsurprisingly, the change was the result of a Bruce Davis initiative. In the name of streamlining the operations of the parent company and all of its subsidiaries and taking advantage of economies of scale, he demanded that everyone use the same size and style of box and that all products be manufactured in the same plant. For Infocom, who had always been intimately involved with every detail of the packaging of their games and who had worked with the same local assembly company for years, the resulting compromises and loss of oversight felt positively emasculating. Nor did it save them any money. Mike Dornbrook claims that they were billed twice as much for each of the new cheap, flimsy packages, and that Activision’s packager, unused to assembling boxes full of so many little goodies, kept screwing up to boot, leaving out instruction manuals or dropping in the wrong disks.

But the cheaper packaging was only one consequence of being expected to conform to Activision’s company-wide distribution model, and quite possibly one of the less damaging at that. Something else was going on behind the scenes, less immediately obvious to the casual buyer but devastating to Infocom’s business model. Mike Dornbrook:

When Bruce Davis took over Activision, he told the sales force that the strategy was to clear the shelves: this is a hits-driven business, products have a two- or three-month shelf life. Get them out there, then get them off the shelves to make room for new product.

When he announced that, I made a point of saying to him that that wasn’t at all the business model that worked for us. What we’d been doing was putting out four to five really strong games per year, with the hope that one of them would become a really strong back-catalog title that would sell for years and years to come. When he came in in 1987, Zork I and some of the other early games were still selling well at retail. About half of our total yearly sales came from the back catalog. And most of the profits came from the back catalog. We invested a ton of money in the new games in the hope that one of them would become a back-catalog [perennial].

He threw that out. He threw out half of our sales and completely changed our financial model. When we told that he’d just thrown out half our sales, his response was to do twice as many games, do eight games per year instead of four. But the whole industry was going in the direction of investing more in each title. Games were becoming more elaborate. We couldn’t halve the amount of work we put into a game and stay competitive, halve the budget. But that’s what we were ordered to do.
​

Infocom had previously charged retailers and distributors a stiff 15 percent restocking fee on product which was returned to them, causing them to think twice before placing large orders on new titles but also creating a strong incentive to keep catalog titles on their shelves. Under Davis, Activision adopted exactly the opposite stance, trying to create a buzz for new releases by encouraging distributors and retailers to order massive quantities, which they could return for no penalty if necessary to clear space for the next big hit. Dave Lebling:

Activision bought into the “sell huge, accept returns” theory. That did not help Infocom because it meant that there was an easy choice for a distributor or a retail store when new stuff came in and they were short on shelf space: “Here’s this Infocom stuff. It sells, but it sells slowly. And here’s this new game that might be a huge hit! Let’s send the Infocom stuff back. Activision is accepting returns now.” That essentially destroyed the Infocom back list in one stroke.​

​

 

[Unkillable Cat]

To be honest, Infocom's days were numbered despite the acquisition by Activision, solely because of Infocom operating on a business model that would not be sustainable for much longer. Even if they had the money to operate past 1987 on their own they'd still have gone under.

While this artcicle is a nice bit of history and research, in the end it just feels like a "OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUD" article in a regional newspaper.

 

[Crooked Bee]

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter remade in Unreal Engine 4 -- free for all who own the original game:



http://www.theastronauts.com/2015/09/the-vanishing-of-ethan-carter-redux-out-now/

What is The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux?

It is The Vanishing of Ethan Carter PC remade from scratch in Unreal Engine 4. The original was made in Unreal Engine 3.

You buy just one game, called The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and you get two. The original, and this new remaster, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux (UE4).

If you already own the original, the Redux version is a free update and will appear in your Library as The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux next to the original The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

 

[ghostdog]

I hope they also remade the ultra-derp ending.

 

[toro]

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter remade in Unreal Engine 4 -- free for all who own the original game:



http://www.theastronauts.com/2015/09/the-vanishing-of-ethan-carter-redux-out-now/

I ignored this game on purpose. Is it any good?

 

[ghostdog]

I ignored this game on purpose. Is it any good?

Walking simulator with some minimal clue-finding gameplay. Nice atmosphere, awesome soundtrack and some of the best graphics I've seen, it should look even better now. Ok story and delivery, up until the end which was derpy. Worth a playthrough for the atmosphere and graphics. It's about 4-5h long IIRC. 10$ is an OK price to pay for the game.

 

[Venser]

"Some PC players found a section of the game too scary and/or too exhausting. We have tweaked a few things to make sure that it flows better – without compromising the original vision."

Haven't played the game but this sounds worrying. Scary is good.

 

[ghostdog]

"Some PC players found a section of the game too scary and/or too exhausting. We have tweaked a few things to make sure that it flows better – without compromising the original vision."

Haven't played the game but this sounds worrying. Scary is good.

I think it's about a section in the latter part of the game where you enter a maze-like underground complex and you were hunted by an immortal zombie or something. It wasn't really frightening, more like a bit frustrating and badly executed. It would be cool if the game had pursued this angle as a gameplay idea in general, but it was only there and poorly delivered. So I don't think that tweaking it is too worrying.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Albino Lullaby is a first person "psychological horror" adventure game. It looks interesting, but unfortunately it's episodic and "VR compatible" which might mean it's too gimmicky:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/355860/

Albino Lullaby is a horror adventure game that doesn't rely on jump scares or gore. A Lynchian psychological nightmare where you play as yourself. Escape from a dark and surreal Victorian town that clings to the precipices of underground cliffs. The gamespace dynamically twists and contorts around you in real time, as you unravel an equally twisted narrative. Discover the hidden spaces haunted by 'The Grandchildren' as you uncover clues to understanding just where and what you are. Albino Lullaby is set for initial release on the PC and will be fully VR compatible.