By John Walker on April 16th, 2012.
And still they come. Jane Jensen’s Kickstarter has been going for over a week now, and is steadily bringing in the cash. She’s after $300,000, and has almost reached $173,000 with a month to go. It seems pretty likely she’ll hit it, but what is it going to be? Well, a cannily released email has finally made me take notice by saying it’s a “spiritual successor” to Gabriel Knight, and it’s called Moebius.
By John Walker on April 16th, 2012.
You heard it here first, and now it’s definitely happening. Space Quest developers Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy have announced they will be working on a new project, and there’s a video to go with it. It’s a peculiar one. A very peculiar one, seemingly recorded by Skype and animated from photographs. And most surprisingly, Mark Crowe is involved, having previously ruled himself out. Replay Games had talked about trying to restart the franchise, by combining Scott Murphy with Space Quest VI developer Josh Mandel, already working at the studio. However, there’s no immediate implication that this is to do with Replay, rather being announced as a project by the Two Guys From Andromeda. Oh, and most strange of all? So far there’s no mention of a KickStarter.
I Don't Mean To Bug You
By John Walker on April 11th, 2012.
We’ve seen inside the strange head of Jay “Zeebarf” Ziebarth before, with The Visitor, and its follow-up, Massacre At Camp Happy. Along with Steve “EntropicOrder” Castro (who needs a nickname when you’ve got “Castro”?), they are ClickShake Games, and they’ve just put out the first commercial episode of their Reemus series, The Ballads Of Reemus: When The Bed Bites. It’s rather good. Here’s Wot I Think.
"Adventure game interface weird"
By Richard Cobbett on April 6th, 2012.
Being an adventure fan isn’t always easy. Only the other week, I had to endure Pendulo Studios’ Yesterday – a game of dark mystery and devilry whose general quality is probably best summed up by this tweet. Luckily, for every low, there’s a high, and while I’ve only played the opening act of Wadjet Eye/xii’s upcoming Resonance, it’s more than washed the bad taste out of my mouth. Here’s a few reasons for your mouse finger to look forward to it…
Sooner or later, everybody clicks
By Adam Smith on April 5th, 2012.
My wrestling credentials are top notch. I may not be able to fight my way out of a paper bag or open a bag of crisps, but given that my every relationship relies on the keeping of kayfabe, I’m more in tune with the mental processes of the mountainous men who grapple in the squared circle than an onlooker might think. Given that I also have an aptitude for both pointing and clicking, I am the perfect man to tell you wot I think of Da New Guys: Day of the Jackass.
By Alec Meer on April 2nd, 2012.
We’ve got the wacky, surrealistic end of the 90s point’n'click adventure game spectrum covered all over again, but what about the horror side of things? Back when we were laughing at monkeys or sending hamsters through time, we could also opt for a real downer with the likes of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, Gabriel Knight, Sanitarium and Darkseed. STASIS is a new take on this old darkness, a 2D, isometric sci-fi horror adventure (horenture?) with impressively lavish graphics and suitably scary noises. It really does look rather good, in a frightening sort of way.
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By Adam Smith on March 26th, 2012.
Have you spent the entire weekend asking everyone you’ve met the two same questions over and over? These questions? “Why does The Walking Dead game not tell Rick’s story again? Reading it and watching it wasn’t enough.” “Could you show me some actual video footage of a person playing The Walking Dead game?”
Unless you happened to be talking to comic book writer person Robert Kirkman or you work at Telltale, you probably didn’t receive a satisfactory response. In fact, people probably became uncomfortable after the second time of asking and have now blocked your number in an effort to erase you from their lives. You should have just asked this video.
By Adam Smith on March 22nd, 2012.
Yesterday, from Pendulo the creators of the Runaway series and The Next Big Thing, is now out. It’s £19.99 direct from the publisher and there’s a trailer below. Of the few companies plugging away at the point and click genre, Pendulo are the one I’m least acquainted with. I’ve seen videos aplenty and even played the first hour or so of the first Runaway but I never felt inspired to continue, let alone to plough through a trilogy. Yesterday has killings, cults, conspiracies and an amnesiac lead character, ideas which haven’t quite managed to send me cartwheeling around the room. In fact, I’ve actually nestled deeper into my chair and begun to grimace slightly. Trailer follows.
By Craig Pearson on March 13th, 2012.
I wonder how Kickstarter will deliver the money that’s been pledged to Double Fine to make their game? The magic number of three million dollars has just been crossed with 11 hours still to go, so the Double Fine Adventure is go. It was “go” a few hours after it launched, so now I’ve rendered the term meaningless. Please strike it from your dictionaries. But back to the question at hand: Kickstarter will have at least three million dollars for Tim Schafer by the end of today’s countdown, and they need to give it to him to make an old school adventure. I hope he’s asked to a creepy mansion and has to perform a series of baffling tasks to get to a treasure chest, and in that chest is a thing, like a giant diamond, and in that diamond is, like, a cheque. That would be pretty sweet. They’ve released the blooper reel from the first video, which is your reward for backing RPS. With your eyes.
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By Adam Smith on February 28th, 2012.
J.U.L.I.A. is an adventure game set in a distant solar system, as well as the name of an AI in that game. There’s a giant bipedal machine in it called Mobot, which is probably my favourite thing about the demo that I just played. The plot is about humankind’s search for extra terrestrial life, for which purpose a crew have been dispatched to the backend of nowhere and, wouldn’t you know it, when they arrived things went terribly wrong. As the last survivor of the mission, astrobiologist Rachel Manners must travel to various planets to discover the (probably) awful truth. She’ll also have to play a lot of minigames.
Adventures In The Unknown
By John Walker on February 27th, 2012.
Industry legend Tim “Industry Legend” Schafer has been at the front of gaming news for the last couple of weeks. After the twitterstorm that followed Notch’s somewhat speculative offer to fund Psychonauts 2 came the record-breaking Kickstarter project, that saw Schafer’s company, Double Fine, raise over $2 million in a fortnight. I spoke to him over the weekend to find out how the process has been, what the intentions are for a new 2D adventure, to reflect on the classic adventures of the 90s, and to see if there were any other dream projects he has left. In the first part of this two-part interview we discuss the reactions to the Kickstarter, the role dads play in playing adventures, and where things are with Psychonauts 2. Tomorrow we’ll go into the lessons learned from Schafer’s previous adventures, memories of Day Of The Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango, and how that will affect design today.
