The Color and the Shade

Since I had some available time this week, I went on a lark and visited the AGS forums to see what’s cooking. One link led to another, which led me to their Pick of the Month for May 2009: Fading Shades. The blurb for the POTM also reminded me of another first-person game I’ve always meant to finish – Unbound.

HotU will be back…soon

I just found out earlier that the Home of the Underdogs site has been down for several weeks now because their webhosting company has filed for bankruptcy. (No wonder there’s a separate Reality-on-the-Norm forum over at the AGS forums…and they have a new site, too.)

Too bad it’s been slowly degrading over the last 3 years. I used to have fun downloading stuff from over there just to see how it looked like back then. Funny thing is, that’s also where my fascination for IF started and grew. Where else do you see an entire section devoted to interactive fiction games and reviews? Now you have sites like Jay Is Games, Play This Thing, even JustAdventure.com now featuring IF games. Back then, there were very few sites that offered reviews and features for IF games like Home of the Underdogs – most were either nostalgic reminiscences of Infocom games or abandonware sites.

Happily, discussions have begun on reviving the HotU website. Sarinee herself has talked about it on Fringer, and has handed over the reins to her “successor” Dan Pinchbeck. She said she will be joining the discussions over at Google Groups and help wherever she can.

Good thing is, she’s still playing games, especially the indie stuff (she’s playing Opera Omnia, too )

I hope everything goes well with the project and its volunteers. If I have enough time, I’ll contribute there as well.

UPDATE: HotU is back! Apparently, there are several groups interested in reviving HotU. The “official” one is here in all its Joomla goodness, the one with the original looks is also here, and there’s a more simplistic version here.  [All links from Nick Montfort's Post Position]

The Silliness of it all

I don’t know what to make of The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge (henceforth referred to as “Desert Bridge”). After playing through nearly all of Kyratzes’s games, with all of their grim and determined stance against war and its effects, here comes Desert Bridge – an amusing, whimsical, colorful, and serious game.

In a sense, it’s a lot more fun.

One of Desert Bridge’s main qualities is the game. There’s more game in here than the author’s previous works – there’s a lot more puzzles to solve, and also a lot more “interaction.” You can see his efforts especially in giving practically each mouse hotspot in each room its own description, and there’s a lot of objects to tinker with, though most of the time what I did get were menus for the tinkering instead. Being a Kyratzes game, there’s still some “codes” one will need to break, but it’s more about where to find these codes, and using the right device or recipe to make it useful, so to speak.

References to other adventure games also abound: the shovel in the Larder room refers to the underwater scene in Photopia, for instance.

Portokalopsarius’s Psychedelic Bath

The best thing about Desert Bridge, I think, is the splash of color. Remember how lead male characters in movies such as Ghost Rider and Rambo used to be told about them needing a woman’s touch? Verena Huber’s hand-drawn crayon strokes and Helen Trevillion’s music add a lot to the game’s humor and atmosphere, and is a refreshing change to the author’s usual Terragen-generated monochrome stills and sombre music. After showing Desert Bridge to a couple of my cousin’s kids, they were ecstatic, and they are still playing the game.

A couple of things I’d like to bring to Jonas’s attention, though: the use of menus, or more specifically, the use of a menu within a menu. When the game was first released, it was described as a “transdimensional portal” to the Land of Dreams. Fine, sure, but I’d rather the game tell me I can press certain keys to restore or save my game, or even quit, rather than go through hoops for that. There’s got to be some way I can switch a “portal” off when I need to.

Second (and this is probably nitpicking already), stop using Comic Sans. There are better fonts out there, for free.

Other than those, it can be said Desert Bridge has everything: colorful art, easy puzzles, lots of humor, and more importantly, a big heart. And, of course, an important lesson to learn. It’s the perfect game to play for the holidays, whether you’re a kid or a kid-at-heart.

New Jonas Kyratzes Game Released

Here’s a new title off Jonas Kyratzes’s drawing board: The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge, released just 2 days ago.

Desert Bridge opening screen

The game features music by composer Helen Trevillion and colorful hand-drawn art by artist Verena Huber. I still haven’t started playing the game yet, but the screenshots on Jonas’s site look pretty promising.

And the winners are

The 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Comp is finally over! A huge applause to the winners of this year’s competition: Violet by Jeremy Freese, Nightfall by Eric Eve, and Everybody Dies by Jim Munroe. These games were also chosen as winners of the Miss Congeniality award in this year’s comp.

The rest of the entries and their rankings could be viewed here as well.

Congratulations to all the entrants! I hope to see these names (and more, too) again in next year’s annual comp.