Jenn Frank ·
December 27, 2011
· Filed under Reviews
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.
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cronjob ·
January 31, 2011
· Filed under Linksplosions
- Touch Arcade – Sarien.net Is Back with Activision’s Approval
I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but all these properties have been terribly mishandled since like the late 1990s or whenever. Listen, you: we still really want to play these dumb old games. We consistently pay for the privilege. Sure, remakes and homages are a little squirrelly, but litigious smackdowns are some way to repay our love.
If the titles’ original developers had any complaint about any totally amazing project, that would be one thing, but honestly, we all know the franchise creators have been shorn away from their own work for at least a decade. It’s OK to wring the last drops of money out of whatever you have, but just don’t be obvious about it.
Oh my gosh, what am I trying to say? Just, like, try not to be dicks about stuff when we’re all looking directly at you, right? But yeah, thanks for the inch here, the inch there, OK, because we live for that. And oh, yeah! Sarien.net is coming back, sort of. Sorry I sound so annoyed about it; I’m really not.
- nettime.org – Games Modifications (2003)
"Hence, it is no coincidence that some (media) artists have begun working with computer games in recent years. The possibility of making modifications to computer games (‘mods’ for short) has inspired them to create their own versions of games that, in some cases, take the premises of the games further and think them through to their logical conclusion and, in others, explicitly contradict them. As such they differ from mods created by fans, as these generally make do with redecorating the existing game structures." (via
dinosaurparty)
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Jenn Frank ·
August 17, 2010
· Filed under Film
Get Lamp is a documentary about text adventure games. It has been in the works for a long time. You can order it on DVD. It comes with a coin. Filmmaker Jason Scott promises that the documentary is “spoiler-free.” The region-free, two-disc set includes featurettes on other subjects, too, including a history of Infocom. It is very dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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cronjob ·
July 14, 2010
· Filed under Linksplosions, Places and Events
- Indie City Games – The Indie City Games July 2010 Meeting
Because the inaugural meeting was such a success, the organizers of Indie City Games have arranged a tidy, half-day symposium for current and aspiring game developers based in the Midwestern United States. Among those scheduled to speak at the July 24 event:
Ben Collins-Sussman demystifies interactive fiction; Dai5ychain’s
Jake Elliott demonstrates the possibilities of Flixel; Puzzle Bots designer
Erin Robinson explains Adventure Game Studio.
- Game Journalists Are Incompetent Fuckwits – I think I’ve made my point, don’t you?
You know, there have been other blogs before this one that subscribed to exactly the same theme, and those made me laugh. (When I worked at Ziff, a coworker constantly refreshed one such blog out of grim paranoia, scanning the page for his own name, and that also made me laugh.) This Tumblog never made me laugh, though—in fact, it made me a little bit uncomfortable—so alarmingly serious seemed its author. Which is too bad, because vitriol can be hilarious, so long as it doesn’t get personal. And I’d rather laugh and squirm uncomfortably than never ever laugh, maybe.
In any case, author Ben Paddon now writes that he is closing up shop and hiatus-ing. I have strongly mixed feelings about it because, the truth is, I and a few friends have very actively followed Paddon’s ongoing catalogue of complaints, and as a reader, I’ll miss his blog. I suspect he’s exhausted himself by caring too much, though, and I do think the good games writing is more worth caring about than the bad.
Morning edit: without so much as a dramatic pause, Paddon keeps blogging
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