Ben X

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Everything posted by Ben X

  1. Walking around the planet is more effective. The in-engine art is a lot more attractive, even if it's not as striking as a DOTT or a BASS, and the game effectively conveys the mix of excitement and trepidation as you wander round yanking at everything you can while rat creatures scurry past, holograms crackle to life and your team-mates rumble mutinously. On the other hand, it's (intentionally) aimless, with the only goal being 'get home' and nowhere to start, and my inventory is already filling up with unidentifiable alien doodads. Also, if you're going to have a two-verb system, at least make sure your examine dialogue is full-bodied, not just copied from the interact response or a generic "Hmmm."
  2. I started on The Dig. The opening is actually not as strong as I remembered it! The FMV cutscenes are high-budget but are aiming for realism which unfortunately means they're hidden behind a dense layer of artefacting, and the relatively clean character close-ups are blandly designed to the point of ugliness. Into the game, you start off placing nuclear explosives on a giant asteroid, which should be a tense, exciting start but is dragged down by player/character dissonance, where I'm having to work out stuff the character already knows, by examining and using everything in sight, and a lot of busywork. I think it's supposed to be grounded and deliberate, but instead it's just a bit frustrating. Anyway, after doing two bomb-placings, two radio calls, five diggings, three panel-pushings and a ridiculously easy alien jigsaw puzzle, we're off to the alien planet! A couple more notes: the dialogue is clunky DTV crap (co-written by Orson Scott Card, apparently, who helped with the Monkey Island insults, and also is a massive bigot); the interface is an early example of the stripped down examine/use two-verb approach.
  3. The next section was a mostly humourless temple section that gave me unpleasant flashbacks to FoA, though it wasn't half as irritating. I'm well-versed enough in Lucasarts games that I instantly figured out the pulley puzzle and the 'follow a guide three times to get through a maze' puzzle. It then chucked me back into the jungle section, and I couldn't be bothered to walk round the whole thing again just to check if anything had changed, so I used a guide. It's a good thing I did, as nothing had changed and all I needed to do was make an utterly random guess that there was a safe was hidden behind a cabinet. After that there were a couple of incredibly easy puzzles and the game abruptly ended. Overall it was fine. It had some charm, but the irritations (like multiple music tracks having a high-pitched chime every few seconds) and lack of polish (like every area having fullscreen graphics that only fully revealed themselves when the UI changed to make way for a transparent dialogue tree, and certain rooms having a bug where the talk animations went on for ages after the dialogue had stopped playing) really brought it down, and there was nothing about it that particularly stood out. It was pretty cool to hear Penelope Keith doing VO though. Next game is... oh. Oh no. It's The Dig! I might play this with liberal guide usage so I can enjoy the production values while bypassing all the 'it's alien tech, of course it doesn't make any sense!' puzzles.
  4. [RELEASE] Blue Hag Christmas

    I was digging through my hard drive and found the completed dev commentary video for this! I don't know why I didn't upload it, probably because the audio was awful and I was considering redoing it. Well nuts to that, I've uploaded it, put some proper subtitles on and even made an (intentionally) awful thumbnail. I genuinely do not recommend this, it's very boring and has shockingly low production values.
  5. I've got to the next section. It's all okay, it's just a little unimaginative - the story's bare pastiche and the puzzles are all very basic (the only places I've got stuck have been due to not realising that some dialogue option three levels deep had appeared, or that an item had regenerated in some far-off dead-end of the map). The humour continues to be of the 'these sexy amazon women have captured us to have sex with us, and we don't want to leave!' variety. There's a joke with a long muzak-backed elevator ride, and that elevator goes down a long shaft to a secret underground lair, so I guess we were making more clever adventure game references in BTDT and LOTCG than we realised! (Our versions are better, obvs.) Besides, there's also a grim reaper type ferryman, so if we get accused of ripping this game off, we're taking Curse Of Monkey Island down with us.
  6. So yeah, giving up on Gabriel Knight 2. Have now started Flight Of The Amazon Queen. I've been wanting to play this since it got released as freeware, I guess mainly because it got released as freeware, plus it looked like goofy fun and it had the SCUMMVM Seal Of Approvalᵀᴹ. I played through the opening 'escape a room' puzzle and into the main jungle hub. So far, the game most reminds me of Duke Nukem Forever - there's lots of energy and stuff going on, lots of custom animations etc, and the production values are fair, but also the art direction is a little disjointed, everything's a bit clunky, and it's a 90s game pastiching 50s B-movies so there's some slightly thoughtless stuff in there (nothing awful yet, but the lead character is the type to get himself in trouble by romancing mobsters' girlfriends, and two of the initial puzzles are waiting for a showgirl to take a shower so you can hand her a towel - at least you look away - and dressing up in drag to get past some goons). It feels like Beneath A Steel Sky but without the ambition. As for the humour - on the one hand, the lead character is called Joe King, most of the jokes are breast and penis related, and there's already been an anachronistic Terminator quote complete with Arnie impression, but on the other hand I did just get past a gorilla by pointing out to him that he shouldn't even be in an Amazonian jungle thereby making him disappear in a puff of logic. So I'll continue through the very Monkey Island-esque jungle for now...
  7. Bleck, this is dreadful. I doubt I'll continue with this. The challenge is mostly struggling with the UI, and pixel-hunts (which are worse than most thanks to the UI), but the other puzzle I got stuck on was an incredibly fiddly tape-splicing system where the recorded conversations, which in the previous game was purely a review mechanic to check for missed clues, can be taken apart word by word and rearranged. This is never tutorialised, requires you to assume a character is suddenly going to leave a room as soon as you've created the right fake voice recording of them, and is only used once in the entire game. The whole thing feels like an excuse for Jane Jensen to take a paid holiday, justifying it with a few photos of statues and some hastily copied encyclopedia entries. I am absolutely staggered that these games are so well thought of.
  8. Hooooly shit, this is awful. BASS may have been rough around the edges but this is clunky as fuck. It continues the weird menu set-up from the first one where you have to click on a separate menu button to get the opening cutscene, then start a new game to get the second opening cutscene. The FMV here, by the way, is painfully bad. Cheap and ugly as sin, with some rotten acting (they do have Kay E. Kuter in there, though); it feels like a Hammer Horror pastiche someone shot in their backyard. The UI is terrible, too - it's ugly, it takes up most of the screen, and every action requires at least double the clicks it would in any half-competent adventure game. Standout moment so far: a ten-second cutscene of a pixely man writing a letter then addressing the envelope then licking the envelope then sealing the envelope then putting the envelope on the table then getting up and walking back to the centre of the room.
  9. Well, the difference in production values here are a pretty notable step up from Sam & Max, as Lucasarts' first CD-only adventure game (no floppy version this time round), but coming straight after BASS is a strong reminder of how staggering this was back in the day. Proper full-length licensed songs on the soundtrack, really impressive cutscenes, action, loads of 3D modelling, big fluid 2D animations. I still vividly remember seeing a clip of it on Gamesmaster, where Ben picks a lock and then throws the padlock on the ground, and drooling over it. It's not really fair to compare the two on terms of budget alone, but even outside of the gorgeous art, music, and voice-acting, the levels of polish and presentation here are miles ahead. None of the rough edges in the writing or the UI. Okay, so it's a bit short and easy, but these days that's not so much of an issue. Next game on the list is Discworld, but I've played that fairly recently and also I'm only a few books into my first ever DW readthrough (I finished Mort a while back, just need to get clear my backlog of 8 or so individual novels then I'll get back into it), so it makes sense to leave this one at least until after I've got past the series entries it's loosely based on (mainly Colour Of Magic and Guards! Guards! apparently), then give it a replay. I remember thinking it was pretty good, it captured the feeling of the books well, and the graphics were cute. It could probably be re-released now with very little done to it, outside of getting the voice actors back in to record a few new bits of dialogue here and there to help signpost the more egregiously nonsensical puzzles... Which means that I'm onto... ulp... Gabriel Knight 2. I didn't get on with the first game at all, so I'm immediately disinclined to give this one much of a chance, but we'll see. If nothing else, it had really cool box art.
  10. Okay, I finally came back to this and finished it off. It really is a very rough diamond - it's full of character, with a strong British feel, loads of cool ideas, some lovely (if hampered) art, and an effective dystopian atmosphere full of death and body horror and small-mindedness, but it often fails to overcome its low production values, a fair few puzzles range from fiddly and confusing to straight-up unfair, and the story is very rushed. Onto Full Throttle! I've played this umpfty times before, but it's been a few years, I think, so I'll be happy to play it again. I'll be playing from the original CD-ROM via SCUMMVM.
  11. Alright, one last bump for this (hey, there are enough new accounts spamming up the place, why shouldn't I?!): orders close forever at midnight Sunday, ET (14 hours from the time of this post), so grab it while you can! https://limitedrungames.com/collections/lair-of-the-clockwork-god
  12. Announcing the latest Dan And Ben game: Lair Of The Clockwork God, out now on Windows, Linux, Mac (Steam & GOG), Switch, XBox One, and PS4/5! “A brilliant, joyous, clever and generous experience.” 4.5/5 – ThumbSticks “This is a gag delivery device with a seriously good hit rate” 83% – PC Gamer “Great mash-up of indie platforming and classic adventuring.” 8/10 – TheSixthAxis On Steam On GOG On Steam bundled with the first two Dan & Ben games at an overall discount Nintendo Switch XBox One Comes with FREE visual novel prequel, Devil's Kiss! Please wishlist/buy/review/promote!
  13. Lair Of The Clockwork God is getting a Limited Run physical release for Switch and PS4! A grail-diary-style journal full of lore and jokes and lovely art; posters, postcards and a pin with a bunch of exclusive art; physical copy of the amazing soundtrack; physical edition of the game in a trendy modern (reversible) cover and with a stupidly overwritten manual; all bundled up in a nice retro Big Box! We put a ridiculous amount of work into this, I'm really hoping it does well. Check it out here (and please share)! https://limitedrungames.com/collections/lair-of-the-clockwork-god
  14. Life

    Hi Zeus! Outside of the 3MA board, it's mostly me occasionally posting on my adventure game playthrough and a bunch of spammers/shillers on here these days. Lots of people are on the Slack and on Nick's Discord, though...
  15. Marvel movies

    A place to talk about all the movies derived from Marvel comic properties. So, MCU, X-Men, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, what have you. There's a thread for the Netflix shows here. I don't think there is anywhere in particular for non-Netflix Marvel shows (e.g. SHIELD, Legion, Inhumans). We started talking about Marvel movies in the Star Wars ep 8 thread. I said,: brkl Kolzig: I really enjoyed First Class and although it obviously hits a lot of the same notes as the previous films, being about mutants, it also has a different tone - 60s spy thriller vs near-future sci-fi - it switches up character relationships and makes the whole thing feel more character-driven (DOFP takes this further by hinging the entire plot on whether a single character will make a redemptive moral choice). I agree Apocalypse was pretty bad - that was the first X-Men film that really felt like 'the same old stuff' to me, but through a horrible 90s comics cartoony filter. Logan (forum thread) has its issues but is overall really good. I just did an X-Men marathon with my partner, but we only watched X1, X2, First Class and DOFP - that selection worked so well, and we didn't have the heart to end with such a downer by watching Logan!
  16. Got a little way in. I played BASS a few years ago, enjoyed it and got very close to the end but then got stuck and never went back to it for some reason, I think. Anyway, I'm still liking this. It looks great even though the pixel art is a little smeary in places. The opening intro, a motion comic with art by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame, is full of artefacting too. It's kind of disappointing at this stage to not get an animated intro regardless, though. Gabriel Knight used still comic-panel-style art for some of its cutscenes too, and it always feels cheap. Even Revolution's own Lure Of The Temptress found a way to have an animated intro on a budget. (The remastered iOS version of BASS redid it with all the same source art at a high res, and doing a better job with the animation and camera moves, which all makes it feel a little more high-value.) Anyway, the game overall looks good, and there's a fair amount of Gibbons' character in there. The voice acting is cheap and cheerful, with a lot of regional Brit accents in there, giving it a Monty Python or Aardman feel. The writing is great so far - a pulpy dystopian setting that draws on a bunch of influences from 1984 to Mad Max, some gory deaths, lots of British slang, and a robot sidekick who constantly slags you off and complains about you transferring his circuit board to a vacuum cleaner. The puzzles are fine so far, nothing too ridiculous and they make use of the setting well. And I very rarely bump into any of the Virtual Theatre issues that plagued Lure Of The Temptress. I'm now stuck - I think my prime goal is to get the elevator working, and I've managed to distract a worker elsewhere so I can flip a switch, but that doesn't seem to have affected anything. So either it's a puzzle I don't need to solve yet, or I've missed something. I'm sure I solved most of this game without a walkthrough last time, so I'd really like to manage it again! I'll take a break and see if something clicks when I come back to it...
  17. Ugh, so the solution to finding the crime scene was to go to the park, walk past a mime so he'll follow you, then, hoping the mime doesn't get distracted by an NPC and head back to his starting point, walk three screens over to the motorbike cop so he gets annoyed by the mime and chases him off. If you then listen to the police radio (which you've been able to hear anyway) you overhear a conversation about where the crime scene is. This is bullshit. But that gets me somewhere. Later, I ask my detective chum for some photos, he says to ask Officer Franks. When I do that, she tells me she doesn't have time to talk. The solution? Use the second 'talk to' verb on her. This usually just leads to a quip, but here it's what you have to use to open up a dialogue tree instead of the regular 'talk to' verb that normally does this. This is bullshit. Another issue with the Day system is that you can potentially solve a bunch of puzzles before you have any idea why you want to. This means that a lot of walkthroughs just have you do stuff as soon as possible, so it's tough to work out the one thing you need to get you moving past your current obstacle. Even the Universal Hints System site isn't great with this game. So far the best thing I've found is this walkthrough/fan-novelisation hybrid that puts everything in the order you should be doing it logically: https://lparchive.org/Gabriel-Knight-Sins-of-the-Fathers/ Thanks to that , I now know that there's one puzzle I can solve now, even though I don't need to until a few 'days' later. 'Clues' for it will be dripfed over the next few days, but I will never have any logical reason for following them. Apparently the player's thinking should be: Gabriel's paintings and sketches have groups of three snakes in them. Gabriel has a dream where three snakes transform out of a knife. If you randomly look at a book on snakes, Grace mentions that old stories of dragons were actually about snakes. So maybe 'three snakes' can mean 'three dragons'??? Gabriel gets calls from Wolfgang Ritter, who claims to be family. If you look on Gabriel's bookshelves for no reason, eventually you'll find a poem, by Heinz Ritter, called "Drei Drakhen," (which, if you find a German to English dictionary by clicking on other shelves, and click on it a few dozen times, you'll learn means 'three dragons'). So if Wolfgang is telling the truth and Gabriel is related to the Ritters and therefore a family member wrote a poem that refers to three dragons. So taking all this into account, the 'three dragons' motif seems important to Gabriel's family. He should therefore go to his grandmother's attic, look at a little clock, turn the hands to three o clock, and rotate the paintings round the face so that the dragon is at twelve o'clock (??), turn the key, and this will open a hidden drawer. This, my friends, is bullshit. I think I'd pretty much be using a walkthrough constantly to get through this game, and due to all the technical issues, design issues, merely adequate visuals and rather shoddy writing, that's not something I fancy doing. So I'm giving up on this one. I can't find much in the way of ancillary reading materials, except this amazing video from the CD release@ And with that, on to Beneath A Steel Sky.
  18. I've got a very small way into this, but this is a really frustrating game to play. There are NINE cursor verbs and no keyboard shortcuts, so you have to either cycle through them or go to the top menu every time you want to use them. You can't cycle through while dialogue is playing, to save time, and dialogue keeps getting interrupted or delayed by incidental events like NPCs talking to each other or walking in and out. Story-wise, all I have to go on is that I'm researching voodoo for a novel I'm writing, and there happen to be some voodoo-themed murders happening in my neighbourhood. So I'm reduced to wandering around randomly looking at stuff and talking to people, picking up all the loose crap I can find. Every conversation has ten or so general topics that I have no reason to ask about, and look at dialogue is mostly there to show off the research the writers did, but I have to go through it all in case it opens up a new location. Like, the furthest I've got so far in any one direction is asking my assistant three times about my messages, getting told that my grandmother left one, which opens up her house on the map, so I go there, ask her randomly to tell me about my mother, and that opens up the cemetery on the map. So far, this is a worse detective game than Sam & Max Hit The Road. There's also a Day system in place where, presumably, once I've achieved enough things the game moves onto Day 2 and certain new characters show up or whatever. So I'm not sure what I should be interested in now, and what I just need to wait for. Am I supposed to find the latest crime scene, or wait to read about it in tomorrow's paper? And if not, what the hell am I supposed to do? To the walkthrough! (There is one helpful UI element: the tape recorder that lets you play back your conversations, in case you forgot or missed a bit of information.) Side-note: it originally came bundled with a short graphic novel. It's not included with the Steam release, though the manual is, so I had to track it down online. It's a nicely illustrated flashback story about a voodoo-related slave revolt in the 17th century, which seems to tie in with the nightmares Gabriel is having. Also, seems like a descendant of the witch-hunter in it has been trying to call me! So that's pretty cool, though it doesn't help me progress right now. This game is reminding me of Loom, in that they're trying very hard to conjure up a certain atmosphere, and at least partly succeeding, but the clunky gameplay is getting in the way.
  19. On the one hand, I'm looking forward to this as the second game so far that I've not played any of (the first being Loom). However, I'm also a little trepidatious because I suspect even the lesser Lucasarts games have given me high general expectations that most other adventures will fail to live up to. This game was too buggy on ScummVM, surprisingly, so I'm playing directly via Steam, which plays it through DOSBox. The speech audio has a fair amount of pop and crackle on it, unfortunately, but apart from that everything else runs smoothly. Fun voice cast, though, including Tim Curry, Mark Hamill and Michael Dorn. I've played about two minutes of it so far. It starts off very abruptly, with you waking up at your bookstore on a regular day and not given any even short-term goals. Also, I didn't realise there was a narrator at first, because she doesn't say anything until you start looking at certain objects, so for a short time I thought that Grace was breaking the fourth wall and mocking Gabriel's item descriptions and accent! It's atmospheric and it looks nice enough, though the sprites for some of the interactive objects are jarringly sharper than the rest of the art. There's already some awful pixel-hunting just perusing the bookstore (e.g. the tiny hair-thin tweezers) and your cursor doesn't change when it's over a hotspot, so I expect to be checking walkthroughs a lot on this one, to be honest.
  20. Finished it! There are a few quibbles - the anarchic nature is a bit of a double-edged sword, collapsing into randomness by the end when new locations are opened up because you happen to see a leaflet, or the final puzzle being a fetch quest for four random items; although it's tricky for me to judge the difficulty having completed the game so many times over the years, some of the puzzles are bizarre and sometimes lack the signposting to make them truly fair; there are a few iffy exit hotspots. Overall, though, the shagginess does fit the Sam & Max style, and the game is so wild and funny and stuffed with character that it's not dampened much by these issues. It's nice how it acts as a sister game to DOTT, too, in a similar way that Monkey Island did to Loom - just as Max cameos in DOTT, Bernard cameos (three times, in various terrible disguises!) as a Stuckey's employee, some easy-listening musak and sound effects are shared, and there's a bunch of other stuff like the founding fathers' appearances that make them feel of a piece. MixNMojoRetro: https://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-History-9-Sam-and-Max-Hit-the-Road Short making of: https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/the-making-of-sam-max-hit-the-road/ Laserschwert's (he of the Lucasarts poster fan-remasters) excellent work-in-progress arrangement of the game's music with HD samples (almost makes me want a HtR remaster!): https://soundcloud.com/laserschwert/sets/sam-max-hit-the-road Now onto the first game in a while that I haven't played before: Gabriel Knight.
  21. Ahhh, Hit The Road. Ostensibly very similar game to DOTT, but it's got the fullscreen (albeit 4:3) graphics, a more wry humour and an anarchic hyperactivity. It's packed full of pointless diversions like feeding Max's cockroaches, brutalising a convenience store robber, having one-sided conversations with carny freaks or even just listening to weird answerphone messages, and the animations are surprisingly detailed and fluid. If DOTT is Chuck Jones cartoons, then HTR is Ren & Stimpy or Duckman. It's nice as well that in this run of games - DOTT, HTR and Full Throttle - that the gameplay matches the story and tone. In DOTT, the Chuck Jones cartoon, you're endless running through the same space performing variations on actions, setting up contraptions and falling from heights, swapping objects for similar objects and pulling pranks. In Hit The Road, the detective story, you're finding clues and interrogating people to open up new locations. In Full Throttle, the biker action story, there's no inventory-combining and you're performing basic actions, mostly to demolish stuff.
  22. Obviously I've played this a million times, but it's been a while. I'd forgotten how low-res the sprites are and I'd never noticed the hissing on some of the voice clips, but that stopped registering after a couple of minutes. It still looks gorgeous, though, with its chunky cartoon graphics and fantastic animation, and the music is perfect. It starts out so energetically, too, with a long, lavish Chuck Jonesy cutscene that blows all the previous games' openings out of the water. Then there's a quick easy single-room puzzle to ease you in, before BAM the time-travel concept comes out of nowhere and within moments you're hurtling through a time-tunnel in another big cutscene. But at the same time it doesn't overwhelm you - you're given a simple find quest to let you get acquainted with the (easily navigable) modern-day map before you get given your modern-day main objective and access to the past map (which closely echoes the modern day one so again it's quickly memorisable). It's expert pacing, wrapped up in gorgeous presentation. And already it's very funny, with broad cartoon humour alongside clever wordplay and even the occasional sly political dig like the Ronald Reagan pic that mentions an EPA grant. I'd also forgotten how detailed it is, there's still dialogue in there that I'm discovering now. Reading the boring book and squirting disappearing ink on every single character turns up some great responses! The puzzles are all really clever (only a couple of tough ones where the signposting could be a bit better), and it has your major tasks outlined from the start and visibly present throughout, so there's a massive feeling of achievement when you complete one of them. The ending is fantastic as well, lots more cutscenes mixed with some bitesize puzzles and a killer final gag. A good oral history (with a couple more linked articles): https://www.usgamer.net/articles/day-of-the-tentacle-the-oral-history The MixNMojo retrospective: https://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-History-8-Day-of-the-Tentacle Idle Thumbs Forum thread for the remaster: https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/9813-day-of-the-tentacle-special-edition/ Making of vid for the remaster: Onto Sam And Max Hit The Road!
  23. Right, giving up on this game. The next sub-quest given to me in my attempt to enter the town hall was to use a lockpick to get into the alchemist's house. So you consult your handdrawn map and make your way over there, trying not to get trapped in a looping shuffle of politeness by wandering NPCs. You try the lockpick on the door. It doesn't work. You then realise there's a two-pixel lock. You try the lockpick on that. It doesn't work. You have no way to know this, but the solution is to get Ratpouch to do it for you. He's got stuck in a loop entering and exiting a door elsewhere and stopped following you, so you go find him, try to click on him at just the right microsecond to break him out of the loop, and take him back to the house. You give him the lockpick, which is a chore because despite him being about five steps away from you with no obstacles, you keep getting stuck in pathfinding loops and then once you start interacting with him an NPC bumps into him and they get stuck saying sorry to each other. Anyway, you finally get him to unlock the door. You try to walk through it but you get stuck behind an NPC for a few seconds, during which time an orc appears and locks the door. Finally, you get Ratpouch to pick the lock again, you go open the door, walk in and close it behind you. There's nothing there but science equipment. There's no way you could possibly know this, but the next steps are: randomly ask a pub customer about the alchemist's house and she'll give you his diary. This lets you know that the equipment needs heat to make a potion that will make you look like the villain. That should get you in the town hall! So now go through the rigmarole of unlocking the house again, look at the equipment again and you'll unlock a (very difficult to find) hotspot for the oil burner. You need heat, so go to the blacksmith's forge and pixel-hunt until you find a tiny tinderbox on the ground. Go unlock the house again, use the tinderbox on the equipment. Now you need something to hold the potion in. So randomly speak to one particular NPC to get a quest to give an item to the shopkeeper, who will in return give you a blue jewel. If you happen to look at one of the pub signs you'll see that it has a blue jewel on it, so give the jewel to the innkeep and she'll give you a flask. But it's full! There is no verb for emptying it onto the ground, and you can't drink it yourself because it's too nasty. So offer it to everyone you meet until finally you find the one person who will drink it (the blacksmith). You can now struggle your way past NPCs, struggle your way back into the house and get the potion. I guessed about half of this, but the other half is utterly random and stupid, and even when you know exactly what to do it's teeth-grindingly fiddly. Perhaps getting it to run on modern computers has caused or exacerbated the issues, but this game is too broken to play. Making of: https://www.pressreader.com/uk/retro-gamer/20200903/283815741005743 And now onto my favourite game of all time, Day Of The Tentacle!
  24. The intro is short but with an early-cinema charm, with lots of rotoscoped silhouettes against plain-coloured backgrounds. Once you're in the game, though, the graphics are rather tawdry and bland and the sound is almost non-existent. I put it on mute and played the Hawk The Slayer soundtrack instead. You start off with a simple escape-the-cell puzzle, then rescue Ratpouch, a jester who becomes your sidekick. You can give him a series of complex orders and he'll trot off to perform them. After telling him to open a secret passage for me, I get out to the town and I'm given a series of 'find this person and ask them about this' quests. Now, in theory, the idea that all the NPCs are living their own lives and you have to track them down, get to know people etc is intriguing. But the execution of it here renders the entire game incredibly frustrating. The NPCs' routines are given equal priority to your own actions and the pathfinding is horrendous, so you spend 90% of your time caught in little dances with them, or waiting for idle background chatter to play out so your own conversation can continue. If you're unlucky enough to be in a room with two or three other NPCs, there's a good chance you'll get stuck in an infinite loop of everyone bumping into each other and saying "Excuse me" and have to go back to an old savegame. I cannot understand how they playtested this for more than two minutes without deciding to make it so characters can just pass through each other. Plus, the village is laid out in an anonymous grid with plenty of empty interlinking passages, meaning I had to spend ages mapping the whole thing out and noting down every street name in case I was directed there by one of the quests. The setting is bland high fantasy, and while the dialogue has some Brit comedy charm, it's hard to appreciate when it's delivered in so frustrating a package. It's easy to see why the polish and invention of the Lucasarts games stood out back then.
  25. Got through it, heavily using a walkthrough. Mostly more pixel hunting and another maze (this time a case of choosing what door to go through completely at random) and a dialogue puzzle where you die unless you patiently choose the refusal option over and over. There were some nice destruction and death animations, but by the end this game really squandered any goodwill it had built up. MixNMojo retrospective: https://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-History-7-Indiana-Jones-and-the-Fate-of-Atlantis Onto Lure Of The Temptress. I think I've tried to play this a couple of times before and got stuck very early on. If I recall correctly, it uses Revolution's "Virtual Theatre" system to extreme effect, with puzzle-dependent NPCs wandering all over the place, and the need to send sidekicks off with complex instruction lists...