Friday 18 May 2007

>Take Cow Creamer. OK. >Go East. OK. You are in the Drawing Room. There is an Aunt here. >_

You know if you'd told me as a kid that I'd spend a fair bit of my spare time as an adult as a white wolf, fighting demons in a mythical Japan, you'd have been quite remarkably prescient.

The PS2 game Okami joins Ratchet and Clank and Psychonauts at the top of my "Best things to do with your thumbs in front of the telly" list. It has an incredibly slow start and some exceptionally long cut-scenes during which you begin to suspect you'll never do any actual playing of the game again, but it's really great fun in the end and very nearly a proper adventure game.

Meanwhile, sitting on the PC are the last 4 of the 6 new Sam and Max games, waiting for us to have time enough to play them. They're nearly a proper adventure too, just a bit short and with a few too few objects and places to interact with, making you long for something a touch fiddlier like some of Lucas Arts' greatest graphic adventures (Maaaaaaaaaanny!), or even Riven (the most pleasing of the Myst games I've played).

To be honest, I wish people were still producing text based adventures like the best of the Level 9, Infocom and (here, this really dates me) Acornsoft ones, but it seems reading and writing is officially over, though there may well be a thriving amateur scene for all I know.

A while back someone sent me the link to a version of Hamlet someone had done in the old text adventure style, and I had a little play on that. I thought it was excellent, because, in what I played, the puzzles were well thought through, the play's situations were being well used and the the prose was both well written and funny. 'Course then I got busy and forgot about it. Must search it out again some time.

What I'd really like of course would be a PG Wodehouse text adventure- tight plotting, clear problems with tortuous but remorselessly logical solutions, and just drop dead funny writing every now again. Please someone make one, I don't want to have to do it myself after all, it seems far too hard.

In casting news, our bit of a cult may be double-booked which is a real shame, but that's cults for you, people will join then. I suspect the identity of person three may now be a mystery to me for a few weeks. Bah, just when I was getting excited too.

2 comments:

Robin Johnson said...

There is a somewhat thriving amateur scene for text adventures (rebranded "interactive fiction"), although unfortunately it doesn't have much of a web presence. http://www.ifarchive.org/ is as good as it gets for a place to start.

Thanks for the plugs!

IZP said...

Bless you and save you, sir! I'm going to formalise my plugging by linking to you in m' little sidebar thing actually, because I reckon the rhymes alone make your diaries perusal-worthy.

Here, have a diary rhyme back-

Prior Knowledge

Once I had a secret love,
That I entered in my diary.
My mother pried my entry out
And my love entered a priory.