You may have noticed that I have a fondness for adventure games. This is because adventure games [and sometimes role playing games, too] have a very strong focus on things like narrative, character and world building. There’s nothing quite like the feel of playing a game, spending time with a
Continue readingTorin’s Passage Review: When Al Lowe Met Roberta Williams
By and large, when Al Lowe wasn’t making Larry games, he was doing interesting things with user interfaces in different games. In Black Cauldron, he did the “Lucasarts Interface” before there was such a thing by binding “often used” adventure commands to the f-keys. In Troll’s Tale, he wanted to
Continue readingPhantasmagoria Review: What man hath wrought, let Roberta Williams tear asunder
First some facts: The screenplay for Phantasmagoria was 550 pages long. 200 people worked on the game. It came on SEVEN disks. It was delayed numerous times. They started with a budget of $800,000. It ended up costing $4.5 million to make. In 1995, it eventually shipped and sold like
Continue readingGone Home Review: Here Is The House
Let’s dispense of one formality immediately: If you’re looking for a “gamey game,” that is, a game that has complex systems and difficult rules, then you’ve come to the wrong place. Gone Home is not that sort of beast at all. There are no puzzles, no levels, no high score
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