Help us choose the games for 1994!

Please visit the Year Ahead post for 1994 to help us plan the upcoming games to be covered on the blog!

Wednesday 23 August 2023

Lost in Time - So Long, Astoria

Written by Michael
So far, this game hasn’t reached the level of childish and stupid, like school is.
My apologies for a long absence. Since my last post, I was rather sick for a week, and then had trouble regrouping and building momentum to keep going with this. Add to that the comment on the last post from SpanishCoktelVisionFanClub, “If I (and MorpheusKitami) recall correctly, you're now set for the last puzzle on the house, which is a bit hard, so buckle up! I'm curious about how you will describe the thing.”

Hard isn’t the right word for it, perhaps. At least one of the puzzles is pure moon logic, which makes sense because we gain a crescent-shaped item from it. But we’ll get there eventually.

Saturday 19 August 2023

Missed Classic: Plundered Hearts - Won!

Written by Joe Pranevich

Welcome back to Plundered Hearts and epic pirate romance! You read that title correctly and didn’t miss any posts: I won already! Even if it feels a bit shorter than most of the Infocom canon, it has been a ton of fun to play through. I’m not going to claim to have a new appreciation for romance fiction and I am not yet eager to buy books with Fabio on the cover, but I am glad that I experienced it. The game leans into Brigg’s fantastic “romance novel” prose and so I’ll do my best to share a bit more of that than usual in this post, to give you a better feel for what this adventure is like.  We will also have one more post after this for missed scenes, cut content, and the final rating.

Where we left off, we (the Lady Dimsford) had just escaped our pirate friends/captors on the Helena Louise and floated to shore in a barrel. We are now on the island of St. Sinistre with an invitation to a ball but nothing to wear. I’m expecting to explore the island to find Lafond’s mansion, buy a dress in a shop with the money we were given, and go and rescue my pirate boyfriend. I wasn’t completely wrong.

Saturday 12 August 2023

Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! (1993): Introduction

by Alex
Al Lowe.

Jim Walls.

Jim Walls.

Al Lowe.

Al Lowe

Jim Walls

Al Walls.

Jim . . . Lowe?

These two men and their games loom large in my time here as a blogger for The Adventurers Guild. Of the 11 titles I’ve reviewed since 2015— Leisure Suit Larry 1: Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (VGA Remake), Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patty Does A Little Undercover Work, Police Quest III: The Kindred, Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood, Robin of Sherwood: The Touchstones of Rhiannon, Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel (VGA Remake), Lure of the Temptress, L.A. Law: The Computer Game, Quest for Glory III: Wages of War, Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, and Blue Force—a whopping six, or 55 percent, have been designed by either Al Lowe (Larry 1, Larry 5, Freddy Pharkas) or Jim Walls (Police Quest 1, Police Quest 3, Blue Force). If my math is correct (dubious), that’s over half. Of the remaining five, two have been about Robin Hood, one has been a Quest for Glory game, and two have been garbage. Ah well. They can’t all be winners.

(I did get to interview Conquests of the Longbow designer and all-around legend Christy Marx, which was really cool, but interviews don’t count as reviews.)

The point is, with Larry 6, my total of Al Lowe or Jim Walls games reviewed for this site is up to 7 out of 12, bringing that total up to 58 percent. I swear, when I signed up for this blog, I did not expect to play cop games or immature sex games. It just . . . sort of happened.

Wednesday 2 August 2023

Lost in Time - Well, I’m on the Downeaster Alexa

Written by Michael
Parker is our suave but oddly-dressed game heroine, Jerry is our MacGuyver, and Mikey, well, all Mikes are cool to have around.
Synchronize swatches! We’re back home from a fancy meal and now it’s time to tackle some more puzzles in this game. I wonder, will we finally experience some of the danger from the man who “plotted to kill us before we were born?” Well, cheaters could skip down to the end of this post, but I hope you’ll stick along for the ride.

When last we wrote, I had just uncorked some cider in celebration of me finding the right items to click on the right other items. Let me step out of that basement crypt to the real world. Wait, if that’s a crypt, then how come all that’s in there is a treasure chest and some bottles of cider? It feels more like a messy garage than a place T. Charles Kingman would be in charge of.