Infinite Lives

Scapeghost

AKA Spook
Level 9 · text adventure · text parser · 1989
Platform · Amiga · Amstrad CPC · Atari 8-bit · Atari ST · C64 · DOS · ZX Spectrum
Download · DOS · Spectrum

There is only one reason I would ever deign to tell you about some boring old text adventure, and here it is: Scapeghost is awesome.

For one thing, the game is well-written—we hardly get to applaud computer games for good writing anymore!—and for another, it is authentically creepy.

A lot of the creep factor is indebted to the atmospheric artwork that accompanies each new location’s block of text. (One 1990 review calls the VGA art “photorealistic,” which, no, but all the versions really are very good.) You can’t interact with the pictures—that’s the sort of thing you’d find in Déjà Vu, a super-duper-early Macintosh point-and-click adventure game—but each backdrop goes a long way in establishing the setting’s grim moodiness.

You were Alan Chance. You were a good cop; now you’re a dead cop. You were trying to bust a dirty drug deal and now, in death, everyone assumes the worst about you. You wake up at your own funeral. You can practically taste the mist.

From the get-go, this adventure is slim on real mystery. If you already know to follow the one especially-suspicious dude, he basically confesses to your murder under his breath. God, why do murderers always talk to themselves? I ask you.

So you already know the identity of the two-timing detective who offed you. All that’s left is to vindicate your own death… FROM BEYOND THE GRAAAAAAVE.

Happy birthday, Tim Curry! The English character actor, acclaimed on stage and screen, is 65 years old today. Let’s pause for a moment to silently celebrate his myriad voice-over and FMV contributions to the world of computer games.

Here he is, hamming it up with both class and gusto in 2008’s Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3:

Update: Aww! I really like Luke Plunkett’s commemoration of Tim Curry’s Special Day over at Kotaku! A lot of fun clippy-clips there (and none of them are Gabriel Knight which, beloved as that work may be, is really too obvious a go-to, IMO). As my mom always writes in her emails, “Smiley face!” I love these clips! Go see!

I have a Mystery House ROM for my Apple II emulator, and I’m going to be truthful, Mr. Jake Elliott: your A House in California did not exactly resemble it as advertised.

Oh, sure, A House in California, recently named a nominee for the IGF’s coveted Nuovo Award, is all stark white flixels against a black backdrop, in the style of some early 1980s graphic adventure game. It is point-and-click interactive fiction, terribly sparse, with all possible parser commands weighting the bottom of the screen.

But the commands are strange—“Remember”? “Forget”? “Befriend”?—and sometimes, depending on what I accomplish in the game, the commands change. That is disturbing. But also, inexplicably satisfying, to see that I am somehow changing things with my actions?

I now totally get why House in California was included in this year’s Learn to Play gallery exhibit: the game uses a lot of “dream logic” and “guess-what-the-designer-wants-you-to-do,” and as you explore and progress, you find yourself making real sense of the game’s mediations. Like other good games that toy with their chosen genres, this game demands that the player learn its secret language.

Woodruff and the Schnibble—the box art specifies The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, but the title screen touts Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth—was lovingly localized and published in 1995 as YASA.

Oh, I like that acronym! I just made it up: Yet Another Sierra Adventure. I can’t be the first person to think of YASA, but let’s keep using it.

Woodruff looks like a Gobliiins game because—unofficially, anyway—it really is a Gobliiins game. Like the rest of the Gobliiins series, Woodruff was designed by the mad geniuses at French developer Coktel Vision, where artist Pierre Gilhodes first developed the series and its distinctive style.

I was looking something up online when I fell upon these really excellent gameplay videos by Bruno de Figueiredo (AKA “dieubussy,” AKA the Eastern Mind guy).

And I was really gladdened to see the videos because, not only do they illustrate PC games that are harder to obtain and get running, but these games are also absolutely essential non-games. All three titles are contemplative by anyone’s standards, but they feel especially slow now.

I saw this posted to Twitter eight gajillion times yesterday, and I never even got to play it until only just now, because I was on my goddamn iPhone, far from a laptop computer with all its Flash capabilities. But! The story is this. The Behemoth’s Tom Fulp (Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers) has created a playable version of The Room for Newgrounds, and it is so amazing.

I watched Tommy Wiseau’s cinematic masterpiece The Room last month, and for weeks it was all I could think or talk about (and sorry for the protracted absence, but, The Room, people). The movie, though: it is incredible. My friend Robyn’s DVD player is all messed up, so we had to watch the movie with subtitles. Believe me, you should watch with subtitles. The disc even subtitles all the R&B songs that play during the lovemaking scenes! And there are myriad lovemaking scenes, so. Subtitles!

From its very introduction, the point-and-click adventure game establishes a number of familiar themes you’ll likely remember from the film: Johnny’s martyrdom; the implausible San Francisco vista; the music. As you play on, you’ll discover that the flower shoppe is meticulously recreated, as is Johnny’s apartment’s rooftop and spiral staircase and bowl-full-of-apples table centerpiece, and the dialogue. If you’ve never seen The Room, you might think the game dialogue’s utter lack of punctuation isn’t deliberate, but you’d be wrong. Perhaps the game reproduces the film almost to a fault—as a fairly straightforward adaptation, it does bill itself as a “tribute”—and yet there are other creative licenses taken. For instance, the interior of Denny’s apartment, heretofore unseen, rings sociopathically true. Other cinematic plotholes, like whatever happened to Chris the Thug, are kindly cemented in by Mr. Fulp (“Thanks Johnny, you’re our favorite citizen!”). And most impressively, within the adventure game’s limited narrative framework, the characters and their intentions make a lot more sense here than they do in the movie version. Which is weird.

The game is, by most standards, NSFW, as it includes cartoon nudity, as well as—true to its source material!—cartoon sex. In the end, The Room The Game is a labor of love by a guy who has seen the movie far too many times, and who absolutely gets it. The adaptation of The Room, absurdly, works better as a game than it ever did as a movie, if only for Mr. Fulp’s competence as a designer.

• Newgrounds – The Room Tribute via everyone (with screenshot via)

I have never played 1996’s PC full-motion video nightmare Ripper, but I totally would have, had I only known Scott Cohen from the “10th Kingdom” television miniseries stars in the game! (Also: Karen Allen and John Rhys-Davies, Christopher Walken, the late Ossie Davis, Burgess Meredith in his final fucking role, serial creep David Patrick Kelly, and of course, Paul Giamatti. What?)

Speaking of Toonstruck—I know we actually weren’t, I’m just changing the subject—I love that, beginning in 1993, Tim Curry and Mark Hamill apparently both decided to each try outdoing the other at Being in the Most Video Games Ever.

Anyway. Rumor has it Ripper is pretty OK, and God knows I love Gabriel Knight II, along with everybody. So now I am trying to think of other suspense/horror FMV PC games. There’s Tim Curry’s Frankenstein, the Phantasmagoria games (the sequel is supposedly SO AMAZING and trashy), and… And… How many games am I forgetting?

• Kindertrauma – Traumafessions :: Kinderpal Walt on “Ripper: When the PC Game Replaced B-movies”

My childhood bedroom’s door is broken, so that if it is shut all the way, it can only be opened from outside my room, in the hallway. “Well, you always wanted a lock on your door, remember?” Mom says. Ha, ha.

Recently I was locked in my own bedroom, and instead of making a racket, I made a phone call. Then I had to twitter about it: “Used cell phone to call people in other part of house to ask them to bust me out of my bedroom, which I was briefly locked inside of.”

Bob Mackey replied, “you just lived through an adventure game puzzle. congrats.”

And I thought that was a very sweet thing to say. I like playing adventure games because maybe if you play enough adventure games, you become this amazing, heroically resourceful person in your everyday life. For instance, last week, my friend Conci daringly escaped a room using olive oil. Honey on the cat hair makes a mustache!

• Sprite Stitch – Gabriel Knight Adventure Game Stitching
• 4 color rebellion – Image (Craft?) of the Day – Adventure Games!

I have been staring at the screen for several minutes, asking it, Now, how did that happen?

Mostly I am wondering how long Renaissance everyman Frank Cifaldi has been contributing to the Retronauts blog without my knowledge. But also I am wondering how, exactly, HOMEY D. CLOWN, the point-and-click adventure game, ever came to pass.

More weirdness at the link below.

• Retronauts, 1UP’s Retro Gaming Blog – Licensing Disasters: Homey D. Clown