Daily Linksplosion: Monday, August 02, 2010

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Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, February 17, 2010




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Feeling pretty good about my Detective Mosely disguise

My childhood bedroom’s door is broken, so that if it is shut all the way, it can only be opened from outside my room, in the hallway. “Well, you always wanted a lock on your door, remember?” Mom says. Ha, ha.

Recently I was locked in my own bedroom, and instead of making a racket, I made a phone call. Then I had to twitter about it: “Used cell phone to call people in other part of house to ask them to bust me out of my bedroom, which I was briefly locked inside of.”

Bob Mackey replied, “you just lived through an adventure game puzzle. congrats.”

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And I thought that was a very sweet thing to say. I like playing adventure games because maybe if you play enough adventure games, you become this amazing, heroically resourceful person in your everyday life. For instance, last week, my friend Conci daringly escaped a room using olive oil. Honey on the cat hair makes a mustache!

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Homey don’t make no fool of himself

I have been staring at the screen for several minutes, asking it, Now, how did that happen?

Mostly I am wondering how long Renaissance everyman Frank Cifaldi has been contributing to the Retronauts blog without my knowledge. But also I am wondering how, exactly, HOMEY D. CLOWN, the point-and-click adventure game, ever came to pass.

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More weirdness at the link below.

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Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, September 02, 2009

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Looking back at The Dig

What I remember most clearly about The Dig is my associated feelings of disappointment. The 2D point-and-click adventure game—released in 1995, soon after Myst—had beautiful, painterly, 1992-era graphics. That is to say, upon its release, The Dig was already dated as hell.

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I was 13 when I played it—The Dig had been in development since I was 7—and it was the first time I’d played an adventure game so “on rails,” so “cinematic,” so a series of narrative moments and cutscenes, each one waiting for your trigger. I remember consciously thinking, “This game doesn’t even need me! It can just play itself if it wants to!” I’d felt, at the time, that the game was, somehow, overly directed, somehow too controlling and too, too linear, and I’d wondered if that wasn’t maybe because Steven Spielberg (!!!) was too protective of The Dig’s storyline. I was frustrated.

What’s interesting, though, is how well the too-dated parts of the game have aged: the 2009 eye can’t tell the difference, I guess, between 1992 and 1995. And contrarily, as John Walker notes in his excellent Dig retrospective for Eurogamer, the 1995-era stuff—those little moments of then-impressive CGI—look comparatively cheesy next to the game’s painted backdrops and setpieces.

Perhaps other aspects of the game have withstood time, too. Maybe the game’s painstakingly planned moments of revelation, and all its meticulous exchanges of dialogue—which, in 1995, were irritating and aggravating for an old pro with her very set ideas of how an adventure game should play and feel—can be accepted and amended by a 2009 eye and ear as simply part-and-parcel of “the way adventure games were back then.” In his article, John Walker even applauds those moments for their capability at pushing a story forward.

It isn’t that I feel at odds with John Walker’s retrospective—I really don’t—but I do wish I hadn’t played The Dig in 1995. If I hadn’t, perhaps I could play it now with Mr. Walker’s fresh, wide eyes.

John Walker writes,

But [that’s] not what I’ve taken away. What I’m left with is the feeling of isolation, the ambient loneliness, and most of all, of a sense of the potential for gaming to slowly, carefully tell a story.

I will say this: I do remember that feeling of alienation, some intrinsic melancholy, in playing The Dig. I’m relieved that Mr. Walker felt that, too, because for years after, I had—perhaps narcissistically—misattributed those feelings to simply being a 13-year old girl, and to being the sort of 13-year old girl who sits all cooped up, hours at a time, with a CD-ROM spinning and spinning in front of her.

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Edit: Chris “Papapishu” Person left a really incredible, illuminating post about The Dig in the comments. I’ve never done this before, and I apologize: I edited his comment, albeit only slightly, and I’m linking to it here.

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Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, May 27, 2009

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Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, May 20, 2009

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Lost Crown: to buy or not to buy

So it’s 5:30 AM PST, and the movers get here at 9:00 AM PST, and instead of freaking the freak out, I am surfing Tumblr.

Recently, I hinted just as politely as I could that I loathe modern point-and-click PC adventure games. I heard those Nancy Drew ones are pretty good, but I am skeptical all the same. Still, my e-friend Mel—who shares my skepticism, it seems—has several kind words for The Lost Crown. Mel writes,

...[T]his is actually a 3rd person horror/mystery that plays more like Gabriel Knight meets Shivers. And, most impressively, it was all made primarily by one man, Jonathan Boakes, who … is probably the closest the genre currently has to a modern day Jane Jensen (although some would argue that Jane Jensen is the current Jane Jensen as she is working on her game Gray Matter which may or may not still exist).

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Did somebody say Shivers? Really? Are you messing with me? But the game’s own product description, the whole technology bent, makes it sound all AMBER: Journeys Beyond-ish instead. Uh, not to say that’s bad—a ton of people admire AMBER—but that TV show PSI Factor used to air on late-night network television about the same time the game came out, and… I just… ugh.

In short, I might download The Lost Crown to my MacBook’s better, XP half. But would the US$30 be better spent tipping the moving company? Is my trepidation founded? Has anyone played this game? Should I simply go read a review? Am I unbelievably cheap? Discuss.

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LTTP: Simon the Sorcerer 5?! And 4?! And 3???

WHO KNEW? Well, the fourth and fifth games, especially, although I’ve never played the third (Simon the Sorcerer 3-D) either. But I didn’t know this! Did you know this? I am in shock. Certainly, except for all the DS mysteries and fan remakes, I have avoided most newfangled adventure games, which are cheaply made, goofy, badly translated, and inexplicably huge in Germany.

Sorry, I am barely making sense. But, but, Simon the Sorcerer, you guys.

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And Simon the Sorcerer II.

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And the fifth one.

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I’m trying to decide whether to attempt the demo, which is, of course, in German.

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Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, April 22, 2009

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Daily Linksplosion: Monday, March 02, 2009

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Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, February 25, 2009

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Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers: the Novel

Here it is: my worn, well-loved copy of the Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers novelization (ROC, 1997).

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I like this cover. I especially like how a grainy still from the game’s FMV sequel has been superimposed onto it (Gabriel Knight II itself was filmed against a blue screen, so the cover art is an homage, I guess).

As for the book itself, I wouldn’t say it’s awful. For what it is—a novelization of a voodoo murder mystery PC game—it’s pretty good. It’s pulpy, a little hardboiled and over-the-top.

During the action, sure, it’s a real clunker: entire paragraphs play out procedurally, as if this were a strategy guide instead of fiction. The expository dialogue is pretty good, though.

Crash moaned louder, clenching his fist. “Fuck you! You didn’t see nothin’!”

“You know those binoculars across the park, Crash? Ever seen those?”

Apparently, Crash had. He began to weep, quietly and hopelessly. The tears that pressed between his fingers were pink.

”’S that the last straw, you think?” Gabriel asked quietly, when the boy would not stop.

The boy nodded inconsolably, his face still hidden in his hands.

“Not s’pose to let anyone see you do that, huh?”

The boy nodded again and hitched his breath, his crying raising a notch in sorrow.

Gabriel wanted to put a hand on the kid’s shoulder, but he was supposed to be playing the bad guy and for some reason, he was sure he had to. Besides, he didn’t want to get too intimate with whatever disease it was that was eating this kid alive.

Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within, the novel, was published the following year. You can find either book online for about a buck.

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Grim Fandango sugar cookies

Every time I re-blog one of Jocelyn’s spectacular game-related confections, I am seized with terrific guilt. Let’s face it: I am robbing this poor woman.

But seriously:

Love. Pure love. It’s my favorite cookie yet, and not just because Grim Fandango is a really neat computer game. Till now, I’d thought the cupcake renderings of 8- and 16- bit sprites were my favorites. After all, early game art—blocky pixel mosaics that represent more complicated imagery—is the nearest thing I can think of to painting in icing (cumbersome!).

But the stylized art of Grim Fandango, itself based on the stark iconography of the Day of the Dead, somehow suits these little pastries perfectly.

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