Posted by John Walker on July 16th, 2009.
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I have been enjoying Ben Chandler’s indie adventures so far. Shifter’s Box was a smart collection of puzzles with a neat dimension-shifting mechanic, while Annie Android offered a cute mini-story to play through. His latest, Heed, is by far the more peculiar, and certainly the most interesting.
Posted by John Walker on March 4th, 2009.
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Browsing the lovely pages at AGS I found this recent adventure release, Shifter’s Box, by Ben Chandler, creator of the cute Annie Android. It’s the story of a young lady, Sally, who discovers a mysterious box in the park. Prising it open, she finds herself dragged through into a series of other worlds.
Posted by John Walker on August 26th, 2008.
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Quest For Glory II: Trial By Fire, first came out in 1781. Ever since then (well, really for the last eight years), AGD Interactive have been working for free to update it to the, er, mid 90s, and realise the game in VGA. This may sound like a special kind of madness, but it is in fact just special. You see, Sierra Online remade QFG I in 1992 to match parts III through V in 256 technicolour glory, but somehow part II never escaped its icky, 16 colour, EGA prison. And if you’re incredibly old like me, you’ll remember that it was a fabby game, that entirely deserves prettying up. (Go to the bottom of the post for a compare and contrast).
Using the wonderful AGS system, AGD have completely redrawn and reanimated the entire adventure-cum-RPG in painstaking detail. But more than that, hugely more, they’ve rewritten it to be a point-and-click game, requiring no parser interface. And it’s free! From here!
Posted by John Walker on July 17th, 2008.
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Looking at you, I’d say what you need just now is an adventure game to play. Too many E3 videos and arguing in comments threads about things that ultimately just don’t matter has left you gaunt and frightened. It’s okay. It’s oooookay. Get yourself some Ben There, Dan That. (I can’t bear that they put an exclamation mark at the end of the title, so I’m pretending they didn’t – Dan, you’re a writer for heaven’s sake).
Created by Dan Marshall and his best friend Ben Ward (Zombie Cow Studios), it’s an AGS adventure which features some stand-out writing. And some pretty nifty 2D old-timey animation too. The game features, well, Dan Marshall and his best friend Ben Ward, the two of them stuck on an alien vessel after a botched attempt to fix the television to watch Magnum PI.
Posted by John Walker on May 11th, 2008.
Share ·The best adventure game I’ve played in a long time? A freeware AGS adventure called Charlie Foxtrot & The Galaxy of Tomorrow, the current Pick of the Month on the AGS site.
This could be taken (accurately) as an indictment of the state of commercial adventures, but I think that would do an injustice to a very capable and entertaining game. From Hatter’s Guild Productions, and more specifically Alex V.D.Wijst, it’s a mid-period Sierra-style adventure (rotating mouse cursor, all point and click, text dialogue) telling the story of a cloned human attempting to escape from the boundaries of conformity.
Posted by John Walker on October 3rd, 2007.
Share ·While Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw is currently rolling around in fame with his superb Zero Punctuation Flash reviews on The Escapist, there’s an even better reason to know his name: his AGS adventure games. And best of these are the Trilby games – a series of stories spanning hundreds of years, following the recurring evil ghost of a murdered son, from his initial death all the way to a futuristic cult’s base. So it’s with glee that I discover the first of these, 5 Days A Stranger, is being remade in something called “3D”.
While it’s not Yahtzee’s project, he’s involved behind the scenes. And that’ll do. It’s still early days, but the project appears to be running with some enthusiasm. They’re using the Source engine, which is rapidly becoming the engine of choice for indie adventure development, and will certainly give it a more modern look than the original’s gloriously retro stylings. There’s a dev blog and forum on the new site, and a recruitment page, so hey, get involved.
Posted by John Walker on September 19th, 2007.
Share ·What should you be playing today? Well, it’s Knytt Stories, obviously. But let’s say you’ve finished that, what next? Easy:
(Shurely TF2? – Ed)
Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy!, downloadalised from here.
Made by Alasdair Beckett, it’s a completely free point and click adventure, created for his girlfriend. Awww. She’s a lucky person, as there’s clearly a vast amount of love gone into the couple of hours here, and certainly a significant amount more than goes into the majority of commercial adventure games.
To avoid scurvy and other cliches, click below.
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