The Random Adventure Game News Thread

[Star Citizen]

shame this package contains the game itself, one of the least enjoyable adventures I've ever had the chance to play

Yeah. It seems to nail everything but the fail states make this a chore for me and that comes from someone who likes the King's Quest games. I'll give it another shot sometime though.

 

[Jenkem]

that's kind of the point.

 

[Venser]

Agreed, I'll go with the original box for $100

Looks like they removed this option, I had it bookmarked and now it says 404. It's not listed in the store anymore. Now I have to pay $100 extra for all of that shit

 

[Venser]

PC version sold out in half a second, I had it in the cart and when I clicked it was already gone. Mac is still available

 

[Infinitron]

The Digital Antiquarian on Gabriel Knight 2: https://www.filfre.net/2021/08/the-beast-within-a-gabriel-knight-mystery/

The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery shipped on six CDs just in time for the 1995 Christmas buying season, about five months after Phantasmagoria had been greeted with huge sales and much mainstream-press attention. Everything about this latest release reflected the current ebullient mood at Sierra, where everyone was convinced they were about to truly hit the big time, with a vastly expanded customer base. For example, the box was careful not to say that this was “Gabriel Knight 2,” for fear of scaring away that new generation of buyers, who might not be keen on starting a series in the middle and might be even less keen on playing an “old-fashioned” game like Sins of the Fathers.

Indeed, even Sierra’s new fictional genre of choice reflected the new focus on the mainstream. Horror was a less stereotypically nerdy ghetto than fantasy or science fiction, yet one that was still fairly well-suited to adventure-game modes of interaction. So, after never touching the genre for the first decade and change of their existence, Sierra was now all over it. Three of the five domestically-developed adventures they released in 1995 were horror games. (The third companion to Phantasmagoria and The Beast Within in this respect was the lower-profile Shivers, a solitary Myst-style first-person puzzler created by a breakaway team at Bright Star, Sierra’s educational-software subsidiary.)

In comparison to the adventure-lite Phantasmagoria, The Beast Within was perhaps a wolf in sheep’s clothing: it was, as we’ve seen, a game that evinced a full measure of respect for its audience’s collective intelligence, with challenging puzzles and complex present-day and historical mysteries to tease out. Still, there’s little reason to believe it was because of this that it failed to sell anywhere near as well as its predecessor. The mainstream magazines and newspapers that had covered the older game as a curiosity showed little interest in the newer one; ditto the many people who had bought Phantasmagoria strictly to show off their new multimedia computer systems. That left only the traditional adventure market, the same people who had bought Sins of the Fathers. It seemed that Sierra was suddenly back to square one.

This state of affairs was, to say the least, deeply disconcerting to everyone there, as they all found themselves having to adjust their paradigm of gaming’s necessary future at lightning speed. Sierra programmer Greg Tomko-Pavia expressed the collective confusion in a contemporary online interview whose frankness presumably wouldn’t have endeared it to his managers:

I must say that I’m surprised Phantasmagoria has done so well. Presently, we’ve sold over 700,000 copies — more than any other Sierra game. I can’t account for it. In my opinion, Phantasmagoria suffered from weak writing, acting, and direction. I don’t understand why Gabriel Knight 2, to my mind superior in every detail, isn’t doing nearly so well. What do I know? I just write code!​

At the time of The Beast Within‘s release, Sierra was already filming their third big interactive horror film on their Oakhurst sound stage, a sequel-in-name-only to Phantasmagoria subtitled A Puzzle of Flesh. Its garish grindhouse aesthetic made its two boundary-pushing predecessors look downright prudish — which was, one supposes, further progress of a sort. But it would prove the last production of its type. Once it too had disappointed in the marketplace, its feverish courting of controversy having largely come up dry, the facility Sierra had built with such pride and at such expense would be used only occasionally, for 3D motion captures and the like. It was now clear that gaming writ large was going in a different direction entirely, leaving the sound stage a fork in a world of soup.

As for Gabriel and Grace: against all the odds, they would return for one final game, but that would be a more constrained production than this one, using one of the 3D engines that were taking over the industry. There’s a world-weariness about that game — a sense of existential despair on the part of its creators that’s almost palpable when playing it — that you won’t find in this one, which was created by a team who saw only limitless potential everywhere they looked. The Beast Within is the product of a rare moment when the creative and the commercial impulse seemed united as one. For all its frustrating infelicities, it positively soars with its makers’ enthusiasm, with their bracing willingness to just try. Neither Jane Jensen nor any of the rest of them realized how lucky they were to be given the time and money to do so.

Six months after the release of The Beast Within, Roberta Williams, who was always the bellwether of the current creative direction of Sierra, gave a new verdict on the current state of adventure games that contradicted everything Sierra had been saying and doing for the past couple of years:

I believe adventure games have now gotten too plot-heavy. Not just ours, but also a lot of our competitors’ games. I think game designers need to get back to the game and forget all this wanna-be-writer-and-director stuff. They don’t realize people just want to play a game. They want to have control over what happens. Video clips are fine — if they’re very short, to the point, concise, and then… get out of there.​

The times, they were still a-changing.

 

[rohand]

Leisure Suit Larry 2 free on IndieGala
https://freebies.indiegala.com/leisure-suit-larry-2-looking-for-love-in-several-wrong-places

 

[Boleskine]

The smoldering attraction between Gabriel and Van Glower is remarkable in the context of its time. Mass-market computer games just didn’t go to these places in 1995. If the beats of the plot can be read as allegorical in a thoroughly retrograde way — Gabriel must overcome the temptation of lycanthropy, which in turn becomes accidentally or purposefully associated with homosexuality in the script, in order to return to the good girl Grace — what we see on the screen never feels as judgmental as that formulation would imply. (It is perhaps not completely inappropriate to mention at this juncture that Jane Jensen has become a successful writer of gay romance fiction in recent years.)

Oh my.

Context

Found a recent article on what Jane's been up to lately...

https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article...jensens-successful-second-act-erotic-novelist

 

[rohand]

Leisure Suit Larry 2 free on IndieGala
https://freebies.indiegala.com/leisure-suit-larry-2-looking-for-love-in-several-wrong-places

Apparently so is the first one.

 

[rohand]

Leisure Suit Larry 2 free on IndieGala
https://freebies.indiegala.com/leisure-suit-larry-2-looking-for-love-in-several-wrong-places

Apparently so is the first one.

Now the third, so I guess from now on keep your eyes out for the next ones there.

And remember there was never a LSL4 :D
https://allowe.com/games/larry/inside-stories/wheres-lsl4.html

 

[jfrisby]

https://www.cggpodcast.com/e/richard-aronson

Interview with Richard Aronson, programmer, writer, actor (Conquests of the Longbow, etc.)
Episode 130: Our guest this week is Richard Aronson, programmer for Sierra On-Line, voice of Cedric (King's Quest 5), and writer of Eric and the Dread Gazebo. Come listen to him explain the impact he has had on the computer game industry, and his experiences with being a resident voice actor for Sierra.

 

[supervoid]

This is tagged as an adventure game (but devs describe it as an interactive fiction). Might be worth $9 for playing with relaxing interactive graphic. Story is probably disappointing. Demo aviable on Steam.

 

[Jenkem]

This is tagged as an adventure game (but devs describe it as an interactive fiction). Might be worth $9 for playing with relaxing interactive graphic. Story is probably disappointing. Demo aviable on Steam.

reviews say it's "a great way to spend an hour and a half" and indicates it's a mobile port.

 

[WallaceChambers]

Out today:

 

[LESS T_T]

Beyond The Edge Of Owlsgard is an old-school point & click adventure game that is reminiscent of the animated movies and Saturday morning cartoons of decades gone by. While it is obviously inspired by the LucasArts and Sierra classics, it also strives to create its own style and identity by returning to the original “adventure” aspect of the genre. Aside from solving the obligatory inventory-based puzzles, this means a heavy focus on exploring mysterious lands, uncovering secrets and dealing with all kinds of dangers.

Strange things are happening in the animal kingdom of Velehill. Unknown shadows of large appearance are seen roaming through the forests and making the ground shake with every step of their steel feet. Houses and trees are destroyed and one animal after the other seems to disappear mysteriously.

Finn, a young roebuck, soon finds out about the disappearance of his family as well. Without hesitation, he goes on a journey to find them, not knowing he and his new friend Gwen the owl will soon uncover a dark secret that should have been kept hidden for all eternity...

• An immersive story told through hand-drawn landscapes and countless animations!
• A return to the “adventure” aspect of the genre – a big focus on exploring whimsical places, uncovering secrets, and dealing with tense and dangerous situations
• Cinematic cutscenes, reminiscent of hand-drawn animated movies, mixed with a pixel art aesthetic
• Atmospheric soundtrack, inspired by the old midi classics everyone knows and loves
• 6-8 hours of gameplay

 

[Baron Dupek]

https://www.2point21.com/

 

[Viata]

Wish I could get hyped by that.

 

[Zann]

They have Chanfray & Raynal on board but still have a job opening for "Game Director / Creative Director" for the project ? Dubious.
The writer chick that makes up the other half of the "creative board" also spells doom & despair from a mile away, from a cursory look at her website/resume.

Still, I want to believe and all that. First LBA is still one of my handful of desert island games.

 

[WallaceChambers]

ABOUT THIS GAME

The Rewinder is a 2D puzzle adventure game inspired by traditional Chinese folklore.

The game uses pixel art to mimic the aesthetics of Chinese ink paintings. Players will get to meet mythological figures such as the Spirit Wardens, the Ox-head and Horse-face Guardians of the Beyond, and the Tudi Gong (Keeper of the Land).

The player takes on the role of Yun, a "rewinder" who has the ability to enter people's memories and influence their actions. By utilizing "senses" and swaying others' "intentions", he can change history.

At the request of the Spirit Wardens, Yun goes to a small village to investigate why a spirit couldn't be reincarnated. The once thriving village has been deserted and filled with resentful spirits, leaving one woman alone in the teahouse. Who's she waiting for? Where did all the other villagers go? What really happened seven years ago?

 

[V_K]

1,2k Steam reviews within 5 days of release for a pixel art adventure game? Wow.

 

[Infinitron]

The Digital Antiquarian on the making of Legend Entertainment's Shannara, the Coles' forgotten game: https://www.filfre.net/2021/09/shannara-or-bookware-mark-2/

The problems began to crop up on several separate fronts soon after the new year of 1995. Heitman could be abrasive; Corey liked to say that “some people do not suffer fools gladly, but Bob Heitman doesn’t suffer them at all.” Bob Bates, whom Heitman may or may not have considered a fool, was unimpressed with his counterpart’s shoot-from-the-hip way of running his development studio. Following a visit to Oakhurst in February, his assessment of Triton’s performance was not good:

1) No one is really taking charge of project management.

2) The animation requirement is up to 60 man-weeks, and they haven’t been able to hire any artists yet.

3) One background artist we supplied simply isn’t producing.

4) They’re not segmenting text from code, so there’s a big localization problem coming.

5) Internal personality problems are plaguing the team.​

Bob Bates was also worried that Triton might use the software technology Legend was sharing with them in other companies’ projects, and almost equally worried that other companies’ code might sneak into Shannara with potential legal repercussions, given the chaos that reigned in their offices.

With tempers flaring, the Coles stepped in to try to calm the waters. They formed their own company, which they called FAR Productions, after Flying Aardvark Ranch, their nickname for their house in Oakhurst. Officially, FAR took over responsibility for the project, but the arrangement was something of a polite fiction in reality: FAR leased office space from Triton and continued to work with largely the same team of people. Nevertheless, the arrangement did serve to paper over the worst of the conflicts.

Meanwhile Bob Bates had other issues with the Coles themselves — issues which had less to do with questions of competence or even personality and more to do with design philosophy. The Coles had enjoyed near-complete freedom to make the Quest for Glory games exactly as they wanted them, and were unused to working from someone else’s brief. They wanted to make their Shannara game an heir to their previous series in the sense of including a smattering of CRPG elements, including a combat engine. Bob Bates, a self-described “adventure-game purist,” saw little need for them, but, perhaps unwisely, never put his foot down to absolutely reject their inclusion. Instead they remained provisionally included — included “for now,” as Bob wrote in February — as the weeks continued to roll by. In July, with the ship date just a few months away, combat was still incomplete and thus untested on even the most superficial level. “This would have been a good time to drop it,” admits Bob, “but we did not.”

While the one source of tension arose from a feature that the Coles dearly wanted and Bob Bates found fairly pointless, the other was to some extent the opposite story. From the very beginning, Bob had wanted the game to include an “emotion-laden scene” near the climax that would force the player to make a truly difficult ethical decision, of the sort with no clear-cut right or wrong answer. The Coles had agreed, but without a great deal of enthusiasm on the part of Lori, the primary writer of the pair. Considering Bob’s cherished ethical dilemma little more than a dubious attempt to be “edgy,” she proved slow to follow through. This caused Bob to nag the Coles incessantly about the subject, until Lori finally wrote a scene in which the player must decide the fate of Shella, the daughter of another character from the first novel and a companion in Jak’s adventures. (We’ll return to the details and impact of that scene shortly.)

But the ironic source of the biggest single schedule killer was, as Corey Cole puts it, having too few constraints rather than too many: “A mentor once told me that the hardest thing [to do] is to come up with an idea, or build something, with no constraints.” Asked by Bob Bates what they might be able to do to make the game even better if they had an extra $50,000 to hand, the Coles, after scratching their heads for a bit, suggested adding some pre-rendered 3D cut scenes. “If I had known then what I found out by the end of the project,” says Corey, “I’d have said, ‘No, thanks, we’ll finish what we started.’ I ended up sleeping at the office, since each render required hand-tweaking and took about four hours.”

Still more problems arose as the months went by. The father of the art director had a heart attack, and his son was forced to cut his working hours in order to care for him. Another artist — the same one who “simply isn’t producing” in the memo extract above — finally confessed to having terminal cancer; he wished to continue working, and no one involved was heartless enough not to honor that request, but his productivity was inevitably affected.

Legend had agreed to handle quality control themselves from the East Coast. But in these days before broadband Internet, testing a game of 500 MB or more from such a distance wasn’t easy. Bob Bates:

All development work had to cease while a CD was being burnt. Then it was Fed-Exed across the country, and then we would boot it. Sometimes it just didn’t work, or if it did work, there would be a fatal bug early in the program. The turnaround cycle on testing was greatly reducing our efficiency. By the time testers reported bugs, the developers believed they had already fixed them. Sometimes this was true, sometimes it wasn’t.​

On October 2, 1995, about five weeks before the game absolutely, positively needed to be finished if it was to reach store shelves in time for Christmas, Bob Bates delivered another damning verdict after his latest trip to Oakhurst:

* There is no doc for the rest of the handling in the game. [This cryptic shorthand refers to “object-on-object handling,” a constant bone of contention. Bob perpetually felt like the game wasn’t interactive enough, and didn’t do enough to acknowledge the player’s actions when she tried reasonable but incorrect or unnecessary things. Lori Ann Cole, says Corey, “felt that would distract players from the meaningful interactions; she refused to do that work as a waste of her time, and potentially harmful to her vision of the game.”]

* The final game section is not coded.

* Combat is not done.

* Lots of screen flashes and pops.

* Adventurer’s Journal is not done.

* Too many long sequences of non-interaction.

* Too many places where author’s intent is not clear.

* Map events (major transitions) are not done.

* Combat art is blurred.

* Final music hasn’t arrived from composer.​

As Bob saw it, there was only one alternative. He flew Corey Cole and one other Oakhurst-based programmer to Virginia and started them on a “death march” alongside whatever Legend personnel he could spare. Legend was struggling to finish up Mission Critical at the same time, meaning they were suddenly crunching two games simultaneously. “The fall of 1995 was really enjoyable at Legend,” Bob says wryly. “We coded like hell until the thirteenth of November. We hand-flew the master to the duplicators and the game came out Thanksgiving week. Irreparable damage [was done] to the team. We have not worked together since.” The final cost of the game wound up being $528,000.

The scale of Legend’s great Problem Project is commensurable with the company’s size and industry footprint. The development history of Shannara isn’t an epic that stretches on for years and years, like LucasArts’s The Dig; still less is it a tale of over-the-top excess, like Ion Storm’s Daikatana. Shannara didn’t even ship notably late by typical industry standards. Still, everything is relative: as a small company struggling to survive in an industry dominated more and more by a handful of big entities, Legend simply couldn’t afford to let a project drag on for years and years. In their position, every delay represented an existential threat, and outright cancellation of a project into which they’d invested significant money was unthinkable. For those inside Legend, the drama surrounding Shannara was all too real.

But the Shannara story does have an uncommon ending for tales of this stripe: the game that resulted is… not so bad at all, actually.

 

[LESS T_T]

 

[Rahdulan]

The Bookwalker demo is out now. I have to wonder just how necessary those first-person apartment parts are, though. Seems like a lightweight P&C adventure game otherwise that could be interesting depending on how much they capitalize on having varied worlds your characters jump into via books. Combat with resource management appears to be a very token addition I had no problems with because the game showers you with curatives.

 

[WallaceChambers]

It’s the 80s and the Christmas is coming, Vinny, Nick and Tony are young and their new cable signal descrambler just arrived. That same night while trying to decrypt a pay per view adult channel, they pick up the distress signal of an alien spaceship crash-landing in the woods near their town… Things only get weirder as they realize that the towering alien is killing very specific members of their community!

Explore the world oozing with nostalgia, check the Video Buster Store for clues, challenge other kids at the Laser Llamas Arcades, go learn a new trick at The Emerald Sword comic store, try to get along with the punk looking Lost Boys at their hideout or even dare to ask THE BULL, the quintessential 80s Action hero, for some help!

Follow the story that pays tribute to 80s classics like The Goonies, The Explorers, Monster Squad, The Lost Boys, They Live, Terminator, and Aliens among others and a gameplay that combines mechanics of Point and Clicks masterpieces like Full Throttle with its own unique twist and more.

Your decisions do matter, and the way you make these three friends interact with each other increasingly affects their friendship and the whole story, changing the way they solve the game puzzles, the locations they visit, the answers they find, the story, everything.

Uncover the truth hidden behind the alien invasion… well sort of. Why here? Why is it killing locals? How can the boys stop it? Will they tune in the adult channel after all? The answers to these and other questions… in Unusual Findings.

• Follow the Sci-Fi coming-of-age story. Three friends fighting together against the unknown… things (maybe against some known things too).
  
  
  
  
• See, Grab and Talk action tokens, an inventory to use and combine items and your wits it’s all you need to play.
  
• Stylized Pixel Art. All the charm of pixel art of the past with more colors and the new effects of the future. Some pixels look so real they can almost jump out of the screen*
  
  
  
  
• Go back to a simpler time where mix tapes where a thing, Commodore 64 was a king, kids could play outside late at night and the only thing to worry about was THE GIANT KILLER ALIEN TRYING TO GET YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS.
  
  
  
  
• The decisions you make affect the relations between characters and thus the puzzles, the game progression and the story.
  
• The most radical music a synthesizer can play. Cool popular Synthwave Music alongside catchy tunes made exclusively for the game to power up the 80s vibes.

*The pixels do not actually jump out of the screen, In case you actually see a pixel jumping out the screen please visit an ophthalmologist... or/and look for psychological help.

 

[V_K]

Unusual Findings of Stranger Things.

 

[Infinitron]

Antiquarian's article about Mission Critical is basically just a big interview with Legend co-founder Mike Verdu: https://www.filfre.net/2021/10/mission-critical/

Legend Entertainment fought something of a rear-guard action through the first half of the 1990s. In an industry that had embraced the movies as its aesthetic example, their works remained throwbacks to older ideas about interactive books: “We had the editorial sensibilities of a book publisher rather than a movie company,” says Legend co-founder Mike Verdu. Their games were wordy, and even after the migration to CD-ROM the player was expected to read many of those words for herself rather than have them read aloud to her; they sported illustrations that were carefully composed and lovely to look at, but that were also static in a motion-obsessed gaming milieu, and thus were better suited to stand up well a quarter-century later than they were to wow the masses in their own day. Enough players were intrigued by Legend’s low-key, literary approach to buy 30,000 to 60,000 copies of each new game, but those consistent numbers translated to a steady erosion of Legend’s market share in a fast-expanding industry; by mid-decade, many new games were selling over 100,000 copies each year, and blockbuster million-sellers were appearing at a clip of three or four per annum. Verdu and his partner Bob Bates felt serious pressure to up Legend’s sales and keep pace with their peers.

But, you might say, surely market share isn’t everything. Why couldn’t Legend be content within the niche they had built for themselves? The answer comes down not to hubris but to the harsh realities of game distribution in the 1990s. Games of the type that Legend made still needed to exist as physical products at that time. (Although there was a thriving shareware scene taking advantage of digital distribution, the dial-up online access that was the universal norm could support only small, multimedia-light titles — not the assets-heavy, CD-filling monstrosities of Legend.) Physical products required physical warehousing, physical distribution, and, most critically of all, precious physical shelf space inside brick-and-mortar stores. Here was the real rub. A niche product like a Legend adventure game was a hard sell to a retail purchasing manager who could instead fill the space it would occupy with the likes of a 7th Guest, Myst, DOOM, or Wing Commander III. In short, Legend’s modest product line was in danger of drowning in the flood of flashier, better-advertised games. All of the quality in the world would avail them nothing if they could no longer get their games into the hands of their fans.

So, after the book publisher Random House was inspired by Legend’s literary bona fides to invest $2.5 million in the company in the summer of 1994, Verdu and Bates decided to use a substantial chunk of that money to make a play for the big time. They would make a game set in a node-based, 3D-modelled environment much like that of Myst, and hire a name actor beloved by science-fiction fandom to star in filmed “full-motion-video” sequences, just like Wing Commander III had done. But, because they were Legend, they would invest all of this trend-chasing with meticulous attention to detail in terms of world-building, plot, and puzzle design, and would respect their player’s intelligence and time in a way that too few of their superficially similar peers were doing. What else could Legend do? They were just made that way.

Mike Verdu wrote and designed the game in question, which went by the name of Mission Critical, and shepherded it through every phase of its development. I recently talked with him at some length about the project, and I’ve elected to present this article to a large extent as his own oral history of it. This seemed to me the most appropriate approach, given that he’s more than articulate enough in his own right, and given how his recollections provide such a fascinating picture of how the nuts and bolts of a game came together during the much-ballyhooed era of Siliwood — that semi-mythical convergence of Silicon Valley and Hollywood.