AGttA: The Dark Crystal (1983)

[pauraque_bk]

Title: The Dark Crystal (aka High-Res Adventure #6)
Year: 1983
Developer: Sierra On-Line
Availability: Abandonware.

Rejoining our old friends On-Line Systems, who are now officially Sierra On-Line, we're up to six high-res adventures. This is the last one.

What struck me immediately is that this the earliest adventure game I've played with graphics that aren't first-person POV. You can see Jen in every screen, and there's even a time or two where you can change his depiction with your actions (e.g. you SIT ROCK and the screen is redrawn to show him sitting down). We're nudging a little closer here to the introduction of direct character movement to this genre.



Another thing I noticed is that this game is extremely mappable. I get a special joy out of mapping these games on graph paper, and this one makes it easy for you. Someone cared whether the rooms all lined up in a perfect grid or not.

There are quite a few rooms where there's nothing to do except read the nicely-written descriptions and check out the graphics, which, by 1983 standards, are pretty. One thing that annoyed me was that the nice descriptions only appear the first time you enter a room, and thereafter you get generic "Jen is in a forest" text. Each room does have a unique picture, but a unique name would have helped too. God forbid you walk away from the computer and forget where you were on the map.



Despite the game not being very long, it came on two double-sided floppies, plus a separate save disk. I guess that's the price you pay for eye candy. I was playing it on an Apple II emulator, so exploration involved a lot of stopping to virtually insert and turn over disks.

The game itself... well, it's pretty. I can't give it credit for the plot or the worldbuilding, which came straight from the movie. And the puzzles are a little obvious, I think. Movies don't always make the best adventure games (we'll talk more about that when we get to Indy 1).

The following year Sierra did something interesting with this game -- they rewrote it with a simpler plot that followed the movie more closely. They reused many of the graphics from The Dark Crystal, but it's really a different game, released as... wait for it...



I wish games were still named like this. I want to play Physics Puzzle Challenge and Subscription Fee Journey.)

Anyway, this version is interesting because it uses a multiple choice menu instead of the text parser.



This is clearly aimed at younger children, and would probably be extremely easy if you've seen the movie, but you still have to make the right choices or the game will cheerfully inform you that you've failed to save the world, and evil will now reign forever. Oops!

The programming on Gelfling Adventure was done by Al Lowe (better known these days for Leisure Suit Larry), and I'm told he used parts of the then-unfinished AGI engine, later used for King's Quest and the other Sierra adventures of the 80s.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_hannelore/]

Those shadows are pretty damn epic! That is pretty advanced for character movement though, I'm impressed they were doing that in the early 80s.

[pauraque]

Direct character movement existed on home computers at this time, but they were only doing it with action games. For example, Alley Cat came out in 1984, and that's one of the twitchiest PC platformers I've ever played. What was missing was the *idea* of moving the player character in an adventure game, not so much the technical ability.

[gorious.livejournal.com]

Someone cared whether the rooms all lined up in a perfect grid or not.
Hahah, good for them! It used to drive me nuts when a games' layout didn't make sense, probably because it fed into my phobia of Escheresque architecture.

Subscription Fee Journey
I'm dying at this because it's true.

[pauraque]

I bet someone has already made an Escher-themed adventure game. *shudder*