Category Archives: adventure games

IFComp, I Hardly Knew Ye

By Rubes | Published: November 19, 2009

Rovers Day OutAnd, there we go. Another IFComp come and gone, with the winners announced this past week. It sounds like the 15th Annual was on par with most, although there appeared to be significantly fewer games overall than in the past (24, compared with 35 last year, 43 in 2006, and 36 in 2005). An ominous sign? Not the way I see it. As others have pointed out elsewhere, this year could be considered an excellent year for IF — in particular, non-comp pieces. We saw quality, ambitious works such as Aaron Reed’s “Blue Lacuna” and Jimmy Maher’s “The King of Shreds and Patches”, not to mention Textfyre’s release of their first two commercial pieces, “Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter”, and the acclaimed [More...] Read the rest

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Anticipation II

By Rubes | Published: October 2, 2009

Back in February of this year, I wrote about an indie game that I was really looking forward to: The Path. The game has since been released, of course, and I would say it was well worth the wait. Not necessarily because it was a great game—as with their earlier piece, The Graveyard, it was less a game than an interactive narrative experience—but because it was a well-crafted work that encouraged and successfully produced a good deal of dialogue about its subject matter and about interactive narrative in general.

Another piece that has been on my radar for some time is Amanita Design’s Machinarium. They’ve been making the rounds for some time now with occasional blog pieces, early pre-order specials, [More...] Read the rest

Also posted in indie games | 1 Response

LucasArts classics on the iPhone?

By Rubes | Published: July 9, 2009

Not to just parrot another blog entry, but I thought this was interesting. I’m sure most of you are by now familiar with the news that LucasArts is in the process of reviving some of their classic point-and-clickers like Secret of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis for XBLA and PCs, which is beautiful news indeed.

In addition to this, though, is the report from Joystiq (via TAUW) that we might be seeing some of these classics on the iPhone someday soon. As reported:

…we did get a vague answer in the affirmative (from LucasArts): “On iPhone, you know Apple’s policy that we can’t talk about a release until it’s ready to release. But it would make sense

[More...] Read the rest
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Gaming on the iPhone: Natural Selection In Real-Time

By Rubes | Published: March 13, 2009

It all started with a link. It always does.

I can’t even remember now where I first saw the link, but I was easily drawn in by the shiny little object: “Mystery House”, the 1980 aventure game by Ken and Roberta Williams of On-Line Systems (later Sierra On-Line, later later Sierra), had been ported to the iPhone by Artsiness (Josef W. Wankerl), in all of its original white-on-black lineart glory. This is the game that GamePro tagged the 51st Most Important Video Game of All Time — nine spots after E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, although I guess that’s fair since it wasn’t the list of Best Video Games of All Time.

My first thought was, How cool. What a sweet idea, even if today’s [More...] Read the rest

Also posted in indie game business | 9 Responses

Making the Rounds: Machinarium

By Rubes | Published: February 5, 2009

This game has topped my list for Most Anticipated Seriously Beautiful Game for some time now. Amanita Design is a small group of indie game developers responsible for some very cool, short point-and-click Flash games in the past: Samorost1, Samorost2, and Questionaut, which was nominated for a British Academy Award. Hell, they’ve even made a short little adventure for a band I’ve enjoyed listening to in the past, The Polyphonic Spree, which includes some previously unreleased music. In each case, the recognizable artwork is beautiful, the gameplay is light and engaging, and the accompanying music and sound effects are charming.

For a while now they’ve been bringing this same style to a full-length adventure, Machinarium, which is an IGF finalist [More...] Read the rest

Also posted in games as art, indie games | 2 Responses