where his civilizations, including our own

As some of you know, I'm a long-time World of Warcraft player. And one of the things I do in WoW is collect mounts — horses, dragons, dinosaurs, elephants, motorcycles, and all the dozens of other things you can ride in the game. I would call myself a semi-serious collector. Players who don't collect consider me obsessive and eccentric, yet hardcore collectors don't see me as one of them. I have 223 mounts, plus a few that don't "count" because of the idiosyncratic way the game tallies them, but folks in the big leagues have cleared the 300 mark.


[Frostwolf Howler - My first rare mount (rare at the time, not so much anymore), obtained in 2005 through player-vs-player combat.]

( This is admittedly a very arbitrary hobby-within-a-hobby... )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment wherever you're comfortable.

Bee sting update: I put ice and neosporin on it and it got better. I appreciate the advice. ♥ I have a doctor's appointment coming up soon anyway, so if it gets worse again I should still be good.

Anyway! Last weekend was the free promotional period for The Secret World, an MMO that came out last month, so hannelore and I checked it out. A friend of ours has been playing it since beta, so he was able to get us up to speed and answer more questions than we probably could have worked out on our own in three days.

It's a modern-day, real-world setting, which is a nice change right off the bat. The premise seems to be that you're a regular person who is granted mystical powers by a swarm of magic bees(?) and then you get recruited into a secret society that sends you on missions to fight paranormal evildoers around the world.

The questing experience is very different from most MMOs I've played. Some quests present puzzles and mysteries to solve, providing a few cryptic hints and leaving you mostly to explore the world and try to guess the answer. I found some of these clever and engaging, though a few left us with a King's Quest-like feeling of 'man, that was illogical' even after we figured them out. I definitely applaud the concept, though. The game's community seems pretty into it, too. My friend said he got yelled at for giving someone a hint about a quest in public chat. "No spoilers!" they said. :P

There are also stealth quests where you have to figure out how to avoid security systems and such, rather than just blasting your way through. And of course you also get the standard kill-collect quests, though even those can make you think. You may be able to see the thing you're supposed to get on the roof of a building, but still have to figure out a way to get up there.

( Cut for length )

Anyway, it's an interesting game that I'll be keeping an eye on. If you liked King's Quest even when it drove you crazy, check it out. It's not just WoW with a different coat of paint.

This entry was originally posted at http://pauraque.dreamwidth.org/24254.html. Comment here or there.

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.

( JEN IS IN A FOREST )

First: By popular demand (two people?), here is the twitter-mentioned King's Quest wank I found, starting at post 65 and ebbing and flowing for several pages thereafter. The general idea is that there's a popular KQ fan game called The Silver Lining (TSL), and this fact makes somebody ANGREE. I don't know these people, I'm merely amused by their antics.

Moving on...



Title: The Hobbit (aka Hobbit Software Adventure)
Year: 1982
Developer: Beam Software
Availability: Freeware. (At least the publisher says it's freeware, though as some have pointed out, the Tolkien estate may have rights over it as well.)

Though apparently a huge success in Europe, this one is more obscure in the US, where it was released as Hobbit Software Adventure. (In the 80s the word "software" was exciting enough to put in a name. A bunch of these early games also advertised on the box that they were "100% machine language!")

Anyway, I could see instantly why this game was popular, beyond being based on a classic novel that every geek in the world has read except me. (No rotten fruit please.) The gameplay is truly innovative and a pleasant surprise.

( SOFTWARE! Excited yet? )

I sincerely attempted to play High-Res Adventure #2 (Wizard and the Princess/Adventure in Serenia), which introduced color graphics to adventure games. I understand there are many people who love this game and consider it a classic. But it is a game that opens with a maze of near-identical desert-with-cactus-and-rock screens, every one of which contained a scorpion that instantly killed me whenever I did something, so I decided to invest my time elsewhere. (The graphics are a step up from Mystery House, though.)

( high-res cactus ACTION )

So I moved on to the third entry in the series, also in glorious Apple II color...


Title: Cranston Manor (aka High-Res Adventure #3)
Year: 1981
Developer: On-Line Systems
Availability: Abandonware. (Not a legal term, just refers to games that are no longer made, sold, or supported, but the copyright holder hasn't officially released them as freeware.) You can play it in your browser.

Ken Williams' design partner on Cranston Manor was Harold DeWitz, who doesn't seem to have done any game development since then, which is too bad, because this is quite a nice, charming, medium-difficulty game. No murder mystery in this mansion; instead you're just here for some good old fasioned looting. You break in and find a bunch of treasures, and if you find them all and make it out, you win. Unlike Wizard and the Princess, the focus is more on exploration and puzzles than on things that randomly kill you. I only found two ways to die, and no ways to arrive at a point where you can't continue.

It does suffer a little from the Mystery House issue of confusing graphics, but Cranston Manor is more diligent about telling you when you are not facing north, which makes a big difference. The graphics themselves are simple, but competently drawn. At this point graphics have definitely reached a point where they add to the game rather than detract from it.

( In which On-Line Systems hires an artist who has heard of vanishing points )

Here is a thing about me: I love adventure games. I love adventure games like Debbie loves cats. Recently I got lost in a Wikipedia hole, as you do, and realized how many adventure games there are that I have never played, some because they came out before I was old enough to play them, others because there was a period of time in the 90s when a LOT of adventure games came out, and I was like 10 years old and had no money. There are also a lot that I played and forgot about.

So I'm going to play through some of these and post my take on them. For extra fun, let's do them in chronological order and see how the genre developed over time. I have a very long list of games I'd like to play/blab about, but it's going to depend on the availability of the games, and my attention span.



Title: Mystery House (aka High-Res Adventure #1)
Year: 1980
Developer: On-Line Systems (precursor to Sierra On-Line)
Current availability: Freeware since 1987. Free download with emulators, iPad/iPod/iPhone port ($5.99).

Developed by Ken & Roberta Williams of King's Quest fame, this is the first game that can be somewhat generously called a graphical adventure. Really it's the first text adventure with pictures. The images look like they were drawn with a mouse by someone who kind of sucked at drawing to start with, which makes for a funny juxtaposition with the grim murder-mystery plot of the game. You discover dead bodies, and they are stick figures with big goose-egg bumps on their heads. It is unintentionally hilarious.

( POST PICTURE i don't understand POST IMAGE with what? POST IMAGE WITH HTML i don't understand )

Telltale announces development deal for games based on Jurassic Park and Back to the Future

idc about Jurassic Park, but the BTTF movies are serious childhood favorites, amg. I really want this game to be good. No info yet on what kind of game it will be, but Telltale is known for adventure-puzzle games, and the plot of BTTF already has the structure of an adventure-puzzle game anyway, so one has to assume...

Someone linked this on the forums, on the topic of whether the original actors might lend their voices. Pretty cute:

The new year has been failing so far; first I was sick, then I got better for like five seconds, then I got sick again. I blame all the frolicking in the snow.

Anyway, bowdlerized reminded me I was going to post my thoughts on (yaoi?) no, a game I played recently.

( Tales of Monkey Island )