Comments on: Gaming Made Me, #4: John Walkthrough

By: bonuswavepilot

bonuswavepilot — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 14:46:41 +0000

Oh man, already weighed in with a comment on one of the earlier ones, but forgot about DM! I spent some serious hours in that dungeon. Pirated it as a kid, and no-one had a manual, I remember trial-and-erroring my way through the spell glyphs recording which ones didn’t give me the “…mumbles a meaningless spell” message. These have been a great series, btw.
FUL IR FTW!

By: Rei Onryou

Rei Onryou — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:38:42 +0000

The amount of time I’ve spent in Guildford over the past four years at University and all I’ve had on the second floor of the White Lion Walk is a bloody Next. That Ultima store would’ve been a dream come true.

At least I can now say I’ve visited the birthplace of the famous John Walker. Happy days.

By: Shadowcat

Shadowcat — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:27:18 +0000

I first acquired a bunch of Lucasarts adventure games in an old compilation they released (which came in a pretty stupid box, but a box that clearly had nothing on the insanity of DOTT’s original packaging).

Anyhow, ludicrously, my copy of DOTT languished unplayed until about 5 years ago. I do have a lot of still-unplayed games in my collection, so I only knew it was ludicrous in retrospect after having finally experienced it first-hand, but DOTT turned out to be one of the funniest games I’ve played.

And thanks to ScummVM it still looked great when I played it, so DOTT was definitely well worth the (pointless, self-imposed) wait :)

By: LlamaFarmer

LlamaFarmer — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:23:20 +0000

Very nice article, The Longest Journey write-up especially brought tears to my eyes. One of my most important games and certainly the one that’s had the greatest emotional impact on me. Games CAN have good stories and characters!

By: Diogo Ribeiro

Diogo Ribeiro — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:04:43 +0000

Awesome write-up on TLJ :D You warm my heart, Mr. Walker. Not like that other Walker who just warms my gut.

By: Owen

Owen — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:55:04 +0000

Bigredrock said: “her conversations with each of the other characters were played out ‘face to face’ ”

Very interesting, I never knew that but it certainly makes sense. Nice one.

By: bigredrock

bigredrock — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:29:05 +0000

Thanks to John and to everyone else for an excellent series of articles. It’s weird to find out that some of my intensely personal formative experiences were shared by loads of other folk. At the same time.

Longest Journey was wonderful. One of the few games that has moved me. The two things that stick in my mind: it was the first game that treated homosexuality in a grown-up and matter-of-fact way; and the voice acting was by far the best I had ever heard. Not sure it’s been bested since.

The actor who played April was present for ALL of the recording sessions, so her conversations with each of the other characters were played out “face to face”, rather than each actor doing their lines in isolation. And it really shows – the delivery of the lines, the tone, the emotion is just perfect.

By: warhawk

warhawk — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 07:45:28 +0000

dungeon keeper rules!

By: Gpig

Gpig — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:54:56 +0000

I just now realized that Helm from the comments is the person that did those wonderful zx bot comics. I feel stupid.

To the two people that said DotT feels too American. Can you expand on that a little bit?

By: hydra9

hydra9 — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:18:31 +0000

Serondal:
Actually, I’ve owned Hardwar for years but *still* haven’t got around to playing it. But I can open my desk drawer right now and the CD is there on top of the pile – Meaning I might even play it sometime this year ;)

By: tapanister

tapanister — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:59:46 +0000

Man, DOTT. It was a great game and everything, and I know “gameplay over graphics” is, or should be considered a mantra to developers, but the art direction of DOTT was just so great.

I would play the game (my English wasn’t all that good back then so I couldn’t get the full effect of the humor in the game) just to gawk at those awesome pixelated chunks of, uh awesomeness.

tl/fwi: I freaking loved the graphics in DOTT, and they still look just as good.

By: Serondal

Serondal — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:33:02 +0000

Hydra9 have you ever played Hardwar? If not I highly suggest it. I had some very good times in this game reminded me a lot of Elite but in a much smaller world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardwar