I’ve never been big on RPG games. Part of the problem, I think, is that I got born into a world where RPG games meant very strict min-maxing. If I go back and think about my time with the gold box games, it boiled down to you having to roll
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King’s Quest One: Quest for the Crown Review: Type “Greywolfe” backward three times
Playing King’s Quest 1 in the modern age is supremely weird. The game presents in 160×200, a resolution that would seem crazy in this day and age, but which was revolutionary at the time. It sports sixteen colours, moving sprites, PC speaker music and a fairly non-linear quest. For an
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
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