By Alec Meer on May 5th, 2009 at 6:00 pm.
Lovers of mid-90s point and click adventures that were rather more far flung from Lucasarts’ safe frontiers may be interested/delighted/appalled to hear that Gobliiins 4, a new sequel to Coktel’s olden comedy puzzlers, is now doing the rounds. The use x on x/room escape formula remains roughly the same, and the three inept lead characters from the original Gobliiins also return (though I always preferred Gobliins 2′s warring pair). And there is also a demo. Yes, a demo!
…the exact contents I cannot share with you because I have no intention of going anywhere near it. I had a nose at the full game a little while back, and was so appalled by the first couple of screens of illogical, arbitrary puzzles, gratingly kiddie humour, pehistoric character models and ludicrous, password-based save system that I made an executive decision to walk away and thus not further tarnish my fond if possibly fallacious memories of the original trilogy. I am given to understand that the puzzling grows a little more interesting later in the game, but no. Not this sucker, suckers.
You may well disagree, or at least contemptously dismiss my foolish nostaliga – and the only way to do that is by playing the unwise thing yourself. The demo is approximately four Plants versus Zombies in filesize.
Alternatively, here’s a trailer:
What is compooder
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Woo!
We just did a podcast on graphic adventures, using an old stack of game boxes and jewel cases for inspiration. And guess what’s the first game we had to play once we were finished?
Not Space Quest, not Gabriel Knight — good ol’ Gobliiins. They’re such unique games. I’m happy the series is making a comeback.
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Whatever happened to taking one for the team?
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You very nearly caused a heart attack. I instantly remembered playing a version of Gobliiins (probably ii, actually) back when i was… four? Five?
Man.
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Wow, I guess that’s a screenshot from Gobliiiins. Eek.
A password-based save system is just awesome though. Wow. If I try hard I might be able to come up with the password for Mike Tyson….
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Wowza. Somewhere out there are a group of unemployed computer graphics students crying themselves to sleep.
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The demo is approximately four Plants versus Zombies in filesize.
I see what you did there.
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Since everybody else is being way to polite, I’ll be the first to say it: It looks god damn ugly.
I thought we were long past the “replace beautiful 2D with awfully hideous 3D” phase?
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Roooobot hoooooooouse!
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It looks worse than damn ugly. This woudln´t have been lovely even during the infant stages of 3D graphics.
I saw some video some days ago and there is no charm at all in the gameplay, the attempts at being humorous and cute are… kinda clumsy.
Way to set an example on how not to revive a license.
(and totally Alec, “gobliins: The Prince Bufoon” was the best of the trilogy :)
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I believe the game is saving your progress, so you can just use continue from the menu and never need to type in a password. I think the passwords are there so people can look them up on gamefaqs, skip to the last level, read the solution, and then complain the game was too easy and short.
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I can feel how my childhood is raped and stabbed to death. Oh, my poor childhood.
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It looks like ‘Limbo of the Lost’ had higher production values
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I liked the old Goblins games mostly for the animations and that quirky art style that the Coctel Vision dude had. Shame this looks extremely ugly for a modern game. It’s really discouraging when a game running at 320×200 native resolution at 256 colors on screen drawn all pixel by pixel in Deluxe Paint looks better than something that comes out in 2009 with the benefits of modern technology.
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@Theoban: Reminding me of Limbo of the Lost wins you 10 man points.
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This game looks a decade out of date.
I am not exaggerating. I know this because last night, I was playing Startopia, a game released eight years ago. It still looks good to this day, and far better than this mess.
How in the hell did this even get developed? The original three games (and Woodruff spinoff) were excellent!
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Well, apparently, Adventure gamers liked it. http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,1009/
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I really, honestly, just cannot find the words to express my deeply mixed feelings about this… -.-
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@noom: Poignantly ambivalent?
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Wait, the official title is Gobliiins 4 with only three i’s?? They can’t even get the naming convention joke right???
edit: It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m the idiot here. The original game was called Gobliiins, with three i’s for the three goblins. I thought they kept adding i’s as they went. Oh well.
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It would be Goblivns, though, wouldn’t it?
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I don’t know what demo you guys played, cause i saw very smooth and detailed graphics. Very good animations, really well scripted and no bugs at all so far.
The puzzle was also pretty well construed
The video quality is REALLY lousy, the game is not like that at all.
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Actually, they subtracted i’s. So if they got the joke, this would have been Goblns 4.
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Most of demos I’ve seen posted on RPS so far has received a serious dressing down.
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There is hope for this world, yet.
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@Nezz: Of course, in this case the game should feature no playable goblins at all. Which could only have improved the quality of the character models…
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Incidentally, you guys realise you can play the Gobliiins games on ScummVM, don’t you?
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@Ginger
We do but cheers anyway.
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Goblivns would be a prequel.
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I will endure any badgame hardship to whet my thirst for more Gobliiins. I will play through it entirely and I will convince myself I liked it.
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