Category Archives: adventure games

“Get Lamp” Discount Deadline Approaches

By Rubes | Published: December 29, 2009

A gentle reminder for those interested enough in text adventures to be eagerly awaiting the arrival of Jason Scott’s sure-to-be-singular documentary on the matter, GET LAMP: the pre-order discount ends on January 1st.

According to Scott, the documentary will be priced at $40 for a 2-DVD set that will reportedly include additonal “wrap-ins” in the package, although no word yet as to what those are. It’s set to be released in March 2010, around the same time as the PAX East convention, where the movie will be premiered alongside (hopefully) a host of other interactive fiction-related panels and presentations, which is pretty neat.

But if you know you’re going to buy the documentary, you can pre-order it now for 25% off, or $30 (plus shipping).

Ordering now is helpful for Scott because, as he says, it “helps build up the money to do a [More...]

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IFComp, I Hardly Knew Ye

By Rubes | Published: November 19, 2009

Rovers Day OutAnd, there we go. Another IFComp come and gone, with the winners announced this past week. It sounds like the 15th Annual was on par with most, although there appeared to be significantly fewer games overall than in the past (24, compared with 35 last year, 43 in 2006, and 36 in 2005). An ominous sign? Not the way I see it. As others have pointed out elsewhere, this year could be considered an excellent year for IF — in particular, non-comp pieces. We saw quality, ambitious works such as Aaron Reed’s “Blue Lacuna” and Jimmy Maher’s “The King of Shreds and Patches”, not to mention Textfyre’s release of their first two commercial pieces, “Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter”, and the acclaimed “The Shadow in the Cathedral”. So there was certainly no shortage of good IF this year.

This year’s Comp had one relatively clear-cut [More...]

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Anticipation II

By Rubes | Published: October 2, 2009

Back in February of this year, I wrote about an indie game that I was really looking forward to: The Path. The game has since been released, of course, and I would say it was well worth the wait. Not necessarily because it was a great game—as with their earlier piece, The Graveyard, it was less a game than an interactive narrative experience—but because it was a well-crafted work that encouraged and successfully produced a good deal of dialogue about its subject matter and about interactive narrative in general.

Another piece that has been on my radar for some time is Amanita Design’s Machinarium. They’ve been making the rounds for some time now with occasional blog pieces, early pre-order specials, and rare teaser trailers. They even provided those who pre-ordered the game with a special “pre-order pack” consisting of hi-res screenshots and soundtrack previews. So they’ve done a [More...]

Also posted in indie games | 1 Comment

LucasArts classics on the iPhone?

By Rubes | Published: July 9, 2009

Not to just parrot another blog entry, but I thought this was interesting. I’m sure most of you are by now familiar with the news that LucasArts is in the process of reviving some of their classic point-and-clickers like Secret of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis for XBLA and PCs, which is beautiful news indeed.

In addition to this, though, is the report from Joystiq (via TAUW) that we might be seeing some of these classics on the iPhone someday soon. As reported:

…we did get a vague answer in the affirmative (from LucasArts): “On iPhone, you know Apple’s policy that we can’t talk about a release until it’s ready to release. But it would make sense that we would do something like that if we were to go in that direction … wink wink, nod, nod.”

It certainly makes sense, [More...]

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Gaming on the iPhone: Natural Selection In Real-Time

By Rubes | Published: March 13, 2009

It all started with a link. It always does.

I can’t even remember now where I first saw the link, but I was easily drawn in by the shiny little object: “Mystery House”, the 1980 aventure game by Ken and Roberta Williams of On-Line Systems (later Sierra On-Line, later later Sierra), had been ported to the iPhone by Artsiness (Josef W. Wankerl), in all of its original white-on-black lineart glory. This is the game that GamePro tagged the 51st Most Important Video Game of All Time — nine spots after E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, although I guess that’s fair since it wasn’t the list of Best Video Games of All Time.

My first thought was, How cool. What a sweet idea, even if today’s iPhone casual gamers barely give it notice, or even scoff at the concept.

Then, I saw that the game was being sold in [More...]

Also posted in indie game business | 9 Comments

Making the Rounds: Machinarium

By Rubes | Published: February 5, 2009

This game has topped my list for Most Anticipated Seriously Beautiful Game for some time now. Amanita Design is a small group of indie game developers responsible for some very cool, short point-and-click Flash games in the past: Samorost1, Samorost2, and Questionaut, which was nominated for a British Academy Award. Hell, they’ve even made a short little adventure for a band I’ve enjoyed listening to in the past, The Polyphonic Spree, which includes some previously unreleased music. In each case, the recognizable artwork is beautiful, the gameplay is light and engaging, and the accompanying music and sound effects are charming.

For a while now they’ve been bringing this same style to a full-length adventure, Machinarium, which is an IGF finalist this year for Excellence in Visual Art. I’ve been following along from afar, and every small snippet I’ve caught has been raising my [More...]

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Text Adventuring, MMO-Style

By Rubes | Published: January 15, 2009

Coyote and Scorpia beat me to it, but apparently a group is interested in bringing the Zork universe into the MMO realm, as reported on Ars Technica. It’s to be called Legends of Zork and published by Jolt Online Gaming, a group headquartered in Dublin. There isn’t a whole lot of information available yet, though.

From the press release:

“LegendsofZork.com will provide online gamers with a persistent online adventure, playable from any Internet browser. Players take up the role of a recently laid-off salesman and part-time loot-gatherer, as he explores the Great Underground Empire. Designed to provide gamers with a casual MMO game they can play on their laptop, desktop or Apple iPhone (in school, work or on the bus), there’s nothing to download, just go to www.legendsofzork.com.”

I have to say I’m not completely surprised, given some of the recent advances in browser-based IF and [More...]

Also posted in interactive fiction | 3 Comments

2008′s Top (Mostly Windows-Only) Games

By Rubes | Published: January 7, 2009

As many folks in the blogosphere have duly pointed out, the end of one year and the start of another is usually accompanied by a proliferation of lists. Best of this, Top Ten of that, and so on. A couple of these that have particular interest to me are Game Tunnel’s Top Ten Indie Games of 2008 and GameSetWatch’s 20 Best Freeware Adventure Games of 2008.

Throughout the year I generally try to keep track of which games are making news in the indie gaming world, but it’s still interesting to see GameTunnel’s list to find out just how closely I’ve been paying attention. As it turns out, I’ve only even heard of 7 of their top 10 — I hadn’t seen or read anything about Noitu Love 2, Battle of Tiles, or New Star Soccer 4 — and some, such as Zombie Shooter, [More...]

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A Treasure of LucasArts and Sierra Oddities

By Rubes | Published: September 27, 2008


I caught this one from GameSetWatch, through Unseen64.net. A website by ATMachine that showcases a pretty impressive amount of info on some of the old LucasArts and Sierra adventure games, much of which was probably unseen. Not sure why or how it came to attention at this point in time, considering the site appears to have been around for a few years, but I’m glad it did since I hadn’t noticed it before.

There’s a wealth of cool stuff there. Development and design images from games, early (WIP) screenshots, alternate art and GUI interfaces that were never used, comparisons of the same games on different platforms, comparisons of demos and full releases, and other oddities. Some of the games featured include LucasArts’ Monkey Island 1 and 2, some of the many Indiana Jones adventures, Loom (which I never played), Dark Forces (ah, the memories of that one), [More...]

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Playing the Protagonist Part, Partly

By Rubes | Published: August 27, 2008

A blog entry and discussion over at Corvus Elrod’s Man Bytes Blog about character and plot got me thinking about that tricky relationship between the player and protagonist, and the expectations (and allowances) game authors often place on their players.

In some games — typically non-first person games — the player is asked to play the role of a particular character. In Dreamfall, the player starts out playing the role of Zoe; in Tomb Raider, Lara Croft; in Deus Ex, J.C. Denton. In many interactive fiction games, the same applies, such as the Abbot in Vespers. In many instances, the protagonist has a history, and in some cases a personality, but inserting the player into that role can produce a frustrating conflict when player behavior does not necessarily match what might be expected from the established character.

To a certain extent, authors expect players to perform at least a [More...]

Also posted in game design, story in games | 1 Comment