Bye Bye, Winter Break!
January 4th, 2006In a few hours, I will be back at school again, meaning that this is the end of my winter break. I have therefore decided to write up a little summary of all the adventure games - amateur and commercial - that I have played during said winter break, followed by my comments on each.[1]
The Adventures of Fatman: I actually wanted to buy this one when it was being sold commercially, then was bewildered when it became abandonware. It looked like it would be awesome. Then, I finally got my hands on a copy (with the voices, too!) and it was exactly as awesome as it looked. Only thing is, though, some of the puzzles were a bit pixel-hunty, which ended up making me walkthrough-dependent. Overall, though, it felt like a lot of time and effort was put into it. Would it have been worth the fifteen dollars or so it was selling for, though? Who knows?[2]
Cirque de Zale: Every reviewer I read found this game to be extremely funny, clever, and sarcastic. I will not disagree with them. What’s more is that it was made by a girl around my age, proving once again that games made by twentysomething females are awesome. 
Project Joe demo: It’s beautiful and extremely well-polished. If the team actually found a source of funding and finished the game, it could very well be a perfect example of scratchware. Maybe Manifesto Games could publish it.
Richard Longhurst and the Box That Ate Time: I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Brilliant.
Grim Fandango: Magnificent, wonderful, blah blah blah. I already wrote a whole entry on it.
No-Action Jackson: Great graphics reminiscent of DOTT, and honestly, what’s there not to like about a plot involving D&D nerds? Again, I was walkthrough-dependent throughout this one, though.
Discworld Noir: When I tried to install this game back on my old Windows 98 computer, it would always crash, and the intro video wouldn’t run properly. A couple of days ago, I installed it on my Windows XP laptop, and the above ran smoothly with no problems whatsoever. “Awesome,” I said.
Then, the game crashed when I clicked on the notebook while talking to Captain Jenkins. And also when I went back and tried to resume a game at the intro screen.
Truly, this game would be as excellent as Grim Fandango if only it weren’t so buggy. Eventually, I worked around these bugs and finished the game; however, my hand was constantly poised next to the F1 key to save after doing anything significant.
That’s all, folks!
- I’ve said on many occasions that I never have time to play games these days because I’ve been at school/working/creating a game of my own. However, not having to do the first two things has ended up freeing a large chunk of my time, and playing games actually has the remarkable effect of speeding up the development of the third thing. ↩
- After playing it and similar quality games for free, I somewhat doubt it. However, if I had bought it, I probably would have thought it to be worth it, since psychologically, after we buy something, we are more likely to see it as worth the money we paid for it than we did before we bought it. See, kids, that’s called cognitive dissonance. ↩
January 4th, 2006 at 9:11 am
Haar. Look out for my game, coming soon
January 9th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
The writing (and music, especially the music!) in Discworld Noir sure was enjoyable, but I disliked the animations a LOT. It was also too difficult and obscure for me…
January 10th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
I agree, Wormsie. The way Lewton kept jittering about while talking annoyed me…
I like how many of the puzzles were very detective-esque (which I found interesting and innovative), but many of them were pretty difficult, and ended up being practically married to UHS. Yes, even after having completed the game before.