The Random Adventure Game News Thread

[Jaesun]

http://jonathanboakes.blogspot.com/2013/04/dark-fall-fourth-instalment-in-ghostly.html

It's been 13 years since my first game.​

With all the current interest in that game, Dark Fall, I thought it would be fun to drop a few hints about where I am going with the next instalment. Rather than a 'Dark Fall 4', I've been looking forward to taking the series in a new direction, down old wooden boards and out to sea...​

​

Some new info on the 4th Dark Fall game.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Dark Fall: The Journal was pretty good.

 

[Cool name]

The first Dark Fall game was pretty neat indeed. The second one and the third one were kind of disappointing though. The first one was a creepy as bleep Myst: The story was not about you but about the place, the spirits that do haunt it, and the uncomprehensible eldritch thingie that did cause it all. You were just the Ageless-Faceless-Gender-Neutral-Culturally-Ambiguous-Adventure-Person. He did abandon all of that for the sequels and instead went with stupid characters with stupid backgrounds and whatever, blah blah, supermeh stuffies I could not care less about. Meh. Way to ruin a perfectly fine adventure game.

I hope he does go back to the first game's style.

 

[Wolfus]

Lost Souls has some good creepy moments, but Journal is the best.

 

[Jaesun]

http://www.spacequest.net/index.php/topic/615-space-questers-on-twitter/

This was interesting, it is a rather large list of Adventure Game related people (and others) on Twitter and their accounts. For those of you that have embraced the Twitter DECLINE.

 

[Jaesun]

http://grumpygamer.com/5777333

If I Made Another Monkey Island...​

Apr 15, 2013 five past eleven am​

Yeah, I know, that sounds like the title of the O.J. Simpson book. I realized that after I typed it, but I'm not going to change it.​

So, before I get into this fanciful post, I want to make one thing perfectly clear... actually, I'm just going to make it my first point. It's probably the most important one. Actually, I'll make it the first two points.​

One - I am not making another Monkey Island. I have no plans to make another Monkey Island. I am not formulating plans to make another Monkey Island.​

Two - Let me say that again. There is no new Monkey Island in works and I have no plans to make one. I'm just thinking and dreaming and inviting you come along with me. Please your keep your hands inside the boat at all times. No standing or you might get wet.​

But, If I made another Monkey Island...​

Three - It would be a retro game that harkened back to Monkey Island 1 and 2. I'd do it as "enhanced low-res". Nice crisp retro art, but augmented by the hardware we have today: parallaxing, depth of field, warm glows, etc. All the stuff we wanted to do back in 1990 but couldn't. Monkey Island deserves that. It's authentic. It doesn't need 3D. Yes, I've seen the video, it's very cool, but Monkey Island wants to be what it is. I would want the game to be how we all remember Monkey Island.​

 

[Aeschylus]

Reading that post made me gradually grow more and more depressed as I realized that all these awesome things are ultimately impossible because of point 11. Stupid Disney.

 

[evdk]

So, why doesn't he make a brand new adventure game along these tenets? Because let's face it, The Cave is shit.

 

[PlanHex]

Some puzzles will be hard, but all the puzzles will be fair.

Fuck you with a monkey wrench, Ron.

 

[kaizoku]

What a cock pussy tease!

Maybe he can't do a MI3, but he sure can do a retro PnC adventure.
Quest for Infamy, Resonance, Primordia, Mage's Initiation... they are doing it!
(Stasis too, even though it's not pixel art it still looks beautiful)

It might not be very fair to say this, since he wasn't driving the car, but he did have the chance to push this idea for DFA.

Sixteen - If I used Kickstarter, there would be no fancy videos of me trying to look charming (as if I could). No concept art or lofty promises or crazy stretch goals or ridiculous reward tiers. It would be raw and honest. It would be free of hype and distractions that keep me from making the best game I could. True, I wouldn't raise huge sums of money or break any records, but that's not what I want to do. I want to make a game.

still


Ron, if you built it, we will come.

 

[Jaesun]

I agree. If he still has the passion and talent he could do a new IP. And do whatever the hell he wants with it.

 

[abnaxus]

There's really a Loom 2 Kickstarter missing.

 

[Jaesun]

Disney owns the IP to that though.

 

[Jaesun]

Guys From Andromeda ‏@AndromedaGuys4m
Check out these entire game #SpaceQuest walkthrough screenshots that @thechrispope did back in 2006. http://bit.ly/XTmOUf

 

[Koplin]

Why the fuck do these guys have to wait around for Kickstarter to create these things? Adventure Games are one type of game that can be made by a very small team (Or shit, in the case of Gemeni Rue and Stasis ONE PERSON).

And sorry-but there have been sequels to MI. Sure, they haven't been good, but what he would be making is the equivalent of a fan game. Of the Star Wars prequels. Just let it GO, and MAKE SOMETHING NEW. Something he will own, and not use the 'oh, I cant do it because I don't have the rights' excuse. For shits sake, these were the guys that were at the absolute pinnacle of their creative game a few years ago-is he really that creatively drained that he cant come up with something fresh and exciting?

Pirates build a rickety submarine to go after the lost treasure of a sunken Spanish galleon. You play the roll of the ships chef, Edward 'Potato' Cumquat, who, when the submarine gets stuck underwater, have to use your know how (which is nothing), your pot, ladle and your trusty pet salamander to try and rescue your crew from the crushing depths of the ocean.

There-new game. Make it.

 

[Jaesun]

WhatInTheFuckAmIReading.jpg

 

[JudasIscariot]

I'm still in shock that Activision is actually planning on doing something with King's Quest

I mean it just doesn't seem like their style and all since the series is a wee bit dead and it's not packed with ACTION! AWESUM!! EXPLOSIONSS!!

 

[tuluse]

Why the fuck isn't Ron working on the DFA, why isn't the DFA building the platform that he could make an adventure game on, motherfucker

 

[Redlands]

I'm still in shock that Activision is actually planning on doing something with King's Quest

I mean it just doesn't seem like their style and all since the series is a wee bit dead and it's not packed with ACTION! AWESUM!! EXPLOSIONSS!!

I wonder if they actually are, or whether they're worried that now that Telltale have become a gaming public darling (with the weird success of The Walking Dead, I still don't understand how it's - in principle - any different from Heavy Rain or Jurassic Park) that they won't be able to pressure them as much as they had been planning on doing so.

It does seem a bit odd, from Activision's perspective, to dump the benefit of having "successful" Telltale make the game and so able to leech off of both the nostalgia crowd AND The Walking Dead fans.

Then again, King's Quest is not really Telltale's style either. LucasArts and Sierra had very different styles of adventures, and Telltale's pretty much ex-LA people (if memory serves, and things haven't changed too much.)

 

[Jaesun]

http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/24424

Robyn Miller took the stage at GDC in a baseball cap and hoodie, looking a bit like a celebrity who didn’t want to be recognized. “I never would have expected that twenty years ago, when we made Myst, anybody would be interested in it twenty years later,” he started. “This is pretty incredible.” A few slides into his talk, he realized he hadn’t introduced himself: “I should say—Rand Miller, my brother, and I’m Robyn Miller—we were the guys who made Myst.” He seemed surprised when the audience broke out in cheers.​

Part of GDC’s ongoing Classic Game Postmortem series, Miller’s talk detailed the creation of Cyan Worlds’ 1993 sensation. The story began about five years earlier, when Rand suggested they team up to create an interactive storybook using Hypercard. At first, Robyn wasn’t really interested—in fact, he didn’t even have a computer.​

Around 1990, after releasing five products for children, they wanted to make one of these worlds for adults. They came up with an idea for a “goal-oriented fantasy adventure” named The Grey Summons, a “totally textless environment” that would convey information via the player’s natural senses. It would have real-time animation, digitized sound and dialogue, and “no mindless ‘shoot and kill’; this world must be navigated by cleverness and tact.” They pitched it to Activision, who told them to stick to children’s games. “We were not doing very well at that point in time. I’m not exaggerating, we were eating rice and beans and government cheese, and that was our diet. We were probably very healthy,” Robyn joked, “but this was potentially the end of our career in gaming.” Soon after this, their luck changed when a Japanese publisher, Sunsoft, approached the Millers about making a game for an older audience that Sunsoft would bring to consoles, and Cyan could release for computers. “It blew our minds,” Robyn said. “We were on board totally, we just had no idea what to do.”​

An interesting read for those of us Myst fags.

 

[PlanHex]

This looks interesting:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/995134339/the-realm-game

I've never heard of any of these guys, the "Projects that the Team have worked on" section looks like a load of boring shit-games and the video has way too many worthless gaming industry buzzwords, but nevertheless the art is pretty and the tiny glimpse of gameplay seems interesting.
Namedropping Machinarium also helps dispel the horrors brought to mind by shit like this quote: "We’re re-imagining the point and click adventure, bringing it up to date so that it can be played just as easily on touch screen devices as with a mouse. We've taken out complicated inventory screens and obscure puzzles and replaced them with the streamlined interactivity and intuitive design now expected of modern games."

 

[Crooked Bee]

Reposting this from the Indie Bundle thread:

The mystery titles in the Catnip bundle on www.bundlestars.com have been unlocked: Scratches - Director's Cut and Chrome: SpecForce.

10 games in total - 9 on Steam.

Worth it for Pushcat and Nikopol alone.

Only 4 days left to buy.

Nikopol looks interesting enough and I'm thinking of buying the bundle for it alone. Anyone here played it?

 

[Jaesun]

Nikopol looks interesting enough and I'm thinking of buying the bundle for it alone. Anyone here played it?

http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/18197

http://www.gameboomers.com/reviews/Nn/Nikopol/Nikopolbynickie.htm

Here are a couple of reviews from sites I find OK for their Reviews. It is not sounding too promising (and it has timed puzzles which just makes me RAGE).

 

[Jaesun]

Darkling Room Studios (Lost Crown - Dark Fall) and Shadow Tor Studios (Barrow Hill) are pleased announce a new paranormal investigation game.

http://www.darklingroom.co.uk/ghost-watch/#about



When?

Soon. The Ghost Watch experiment will be coming to iOS in three distinct releases via the App Store. The Ghost Watch experiment will be available for both iPhone and iPad.

This will be followed by a full PC and Mac port, for download to your home or work computer.

 

[abnaxus]

Nikopol looks interesting enough and I'm thinking of buying the bundle for it alone. Anyone here played it?

I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't familiar with the comics.