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.
Jess Ragan has become one of my favorite retro-writers. Five pages in length, this particular retrospective is pretty in-depth for a 1UP piece, but you should probably read it.
I remember the day the Virtual Boy launched—August 14, 1995—because it was my 13th birthday! I almost bought a Virtual Boy, and I had waited and waited for the day to arrive, and I ended up spending the money on a leather jacket instead. I still have that jacket, though!
FINALLY! Phantasmagoria AND PHANTASMAGORIA II YOU GUYS PHANTASMAGORIA II sold together for the low, low price of US$11.18! WHAT THE—but only until Monday, August 16. Hey! It’s almost as if gog.com knew my birthday is this Saturday! Happy birthday to me!
Decades-long poster campaign exhorts train passengers—often in clever or surprising ways!—to use their best manners. At least one poster alludes to a video game. Enjoy!
“My dream manifested in the murk of split-pea monochrome—your dream might have been in color, though, if you had an NES, and if you are able to dream in color.”
You guys, I am so excited. I always wondered what, exactly, the link was between the Adventure Island series and Takahashi no Bugutte Honey was, and today I found out!
"Just to clarify, the premise for the game is sick, there’s no doubt about that. The furor that continually crops over it each time a country ‘discovers’ it however is bizarre, as are the subsequent attempts to scrub it from the Internet. Rapelay is definitely a uniter, in that it has virtually zero backers (other than Penn Jillette perhaps), making it the ultimate safe target for attack."
