This Saturday, Interplay veteran Rebecca Heineman was the guest on Shane Plays, the weekly radio show hosted by the Codex's own sstacks. As usual, Burger Becky had interesting stories to tell and grievances to air. The interview starts out with the entertaining tale of how she won a national Space Invaders tournament in 1980, allegedly the first of its kind. In the second half, she talks about her Dragons of the Rip project and her work on remastering the Bard's Tale trilogy for inXile. Shane uploaded the interview to his YouTube channel yesterday:


The video may seem long, but Becky doesn't actually spend a whole lot of time talking about the games. Dragons of the Rip (which never did get Kickstarted) is being developed on a strictly part-time basis, and it doesn't sound like it'll be done anytime soon. The game will be a "node-based" blobber (which means something akin to the movement in the original Myst) set in a "modern" fantasy world where amenities such as ATMs function using magic. Becky says it won't be a story-centric game, but that hasn't stopped her from writing several novels' worth of story material for it, as well as comic books.

As for the Bard's Tale trilogy remaster, Becky doesn't go into the level of technical detail about it that she did in her Matt Chat interview, but she does list three major changes from the original games. First, bug fixes. Second, the ability to actually transport your party between the three games, effectively turning the trilogy into one huge game. Third, the addition of many pieces of "playful" flavor text throughout the game. I hope that's not as silly as it sounds, but it may take a while to find out, because while a beta of the remaster has been available from inXile since March, Becky has apparently not been able to finalize it on account of her not getting paid by them. I had a feeling something like that would happen.