Myst – Won!

Written by Vetinari

We still have a final age to go, but will there be any other surprises or will this truly be the end of the game?

Yes, it will, you can see it right there in the title of the post.

Channelwood is an interesting locale, different from the other ages in that it is not an island, but instead something more akin to a swamp, or a mangrove forest, or something like that.

Discussion Point - Best Sequels

 Written by The TAG Team

No, this movie is NOT better than the original.  But the image was a good match for this blog post.

We all have our favorite games, out favorite designers, and favorite series.  But, sometimes they don't start out strong.  Which adventure game sequel came out that was remarkably better than the original?

Tough, right?  Usually they mess things up in sequels.  In movies, for example: Back to the Future 2.  But sometimes they get it right, taking something good and rolling with it.  For example, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit took the idea of role-reversal and make the game so much better by letting you be the cop instead.

Thoughts?

Missed Classic Spreadsheet, Rarities and Unplayables

Written by the TAG Team

We need more games to play.

Since we included a spreadsheet for readers to put in your suggestions for missed classics, we've gotten a rather modest 20 titles over the years, not including games that have been covered and removed, like Zombi or The Hound of Shadow; It's been a great resource, but recent events have suggested it could be a lot better.

There's not really a place for people to discuss these, and to some of us it seemed better that this be in a central place than randomly thrown about other entries. To this end we will occasionally asking for help, like Ilmari asking for the Peruvian version of Emanuelle (It completely changes everything!) or Morpheus asking if anyone knows how to get an Oric game running. (He's learning that Franscois!)

We've also made a few adjustments to the spreadsheet format, which ties into another ask. We ask that you be careful with links to where we can find the game. Generally speaking, we don't care if it's outright free, but abandonware is tricky. If you can't find it by searching for it on most search engines or if it's tricky to find on a search engine, add it, because we'll probably be asking about that anyway. We don't need, say, links to EA games or some major company even if they don't sell it. We can find them easily and when the Franchise Wars start up, we don't need to be among the first marked for an EA death squad.

But more importantly, we're adding two categories, time added, and sub-genre. You don't need to get into too much detail in the first, just month and year, so we know how long something's been there, we also ask that in the future people don't add their names, just to ensure we aren't biased by certain suggestions.

The second, sub-genre is where the ask comes in. Here, we'd like to know about graphic adventures that we've missed. 1992 and earlier. Not text adventures with pictures, graphic adventures, as it can be hard to find information on harder to find games. It's not like text adventures or VNs, which have their own dedicated sites, or ADV (Japanese-style adventures) which you can easily figure out about. Oddities are also appreciated.

This is also a great place for you to discover new games yourself, and if you feel up to the challenge, play a little and try writing a post of your own for the blog.  Some of us enjoy reading about the conquests of others, and some like sharing the details themselves.  

This post is going to be linked in the sidebar of the page, where the spreadsheet link previously was.  It'll be an easy resource to find and discuss these overlooked and truly Missed Classics.

Myst – Our Ancestors

Written by Vetinari

In this installment of the Adventurers' Guild Myst playthrough, we will be visiting our third age, the Stoneship age.

Nice flyover of the island as usual.

We find ourselves at the aft of the sailing ship, which is correlated with the location of the book on Myst island. Strangely enough, however, the room where the book was is now completely submerged by seawater.

Veil of Darkness - A Weight Lifted (Won! and Final Rating)

Written by Zenic Reverie

Hindsight is often referred to as 20/20, but looking back on the last hurdle I needed to cross to complete Veil of Darkness has soured the experience just a touch because as far as can I tell there's no indication I needed to do this.

Thanks to Agrivar for the assist, I instantly realized this is a hole and not the tree's shadow.

Agrivar indicated it was indeed an item I hadn't used, and I should look to use it where I found it. I thought maybe I'd lasso the plane and pull a section out of the swamp. As soon as I loaded the screen though, I looked at this tree and tied the rope. The main problem I have with this type of solution to a puzzle is there's no way to examine the environment to know that shadow was a hole. Sure, I can't walk over it, but there's plenty of other fiddly bits of terrain that block progress that I didn't think much about not being able to walk under a tree. If there was an NPC that mentioned holes in the swamp, then I missed it, but as dialog is the main way the game gives descriptions I would have hoped for some hint about them or the mushrooms growing below.

Myst - Invisible Cities

Written by Vetinari

So, for this post we are going to explore the spaceship age.

Actually the real name is Selenitic age, you know.

As already seen in the Mechanical age, we arrive in a place which is an exact correspondence of the one that we have just left (in this case the interior of the spaceship) but our surroundings are completely different.

Stepping out on a brand new world.

I expected this place to be a volcanic wasteland, based on Atrus's journal description of it, but instead we are just on another island, with some geothermal vents as the only feature giving away the idea of underground volcanic activity.

Pepper's Adventures in Time – What's the Worst That Could Happen?

Written by Will Moczarski

When we left Pepper last time she was just getting ready to mosey around the small settlement of Philadelphia in the year of 1764. There’s a man called poor Richard (after Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack) clapped into wooden stocks who tells me all about Benjamin Franklin’s strange transformation of late. The once wise man has now turned towards foolishness and frivolity, and Richard wonders why. Poor Richard has a very dry mouth and asks Pepper for her help. Naturally, I pick up a dipper conveniently placed nearby, fill it up, and help Richard to some water. I then free him from his conundrum and Richard is very thankful, although he suspiciously states that he must now hurry back to “B--, er, back to my family.” Does he mean Britain? Ben? Did I help the wrong guy?

We're talking about Boston, right?

Because the game is targeted at kids the inventory is very streamlined. Pepper decides that she has no use for the dipper anymore and puts it right back. A soldier then comes along and accuses me of helping a criminal to flee. Pepper tells the man to "chill out" but he won’t have any of it. He cockily informs me that he’s the King’s own watchman and proceeds to grab Pepper and handles her quite violently, especially considering she’s a child. Our trusty dog Lockjaw decides to get in there and bites the watchman but in the end we both end up trapped inside a wooden building. The watchman is walking to and fro outside and we can’t do anything without him telling us to stop, prompting humorous and snide remarks from Pepper. 

Myst – The Castle of Crossed Destinies

Written by Vetinari

Last time we were finally ready, after solving most if not all of the puzzles on Myst island, to embark on a journey to a different age.

I've decided to tackle the four tomes in the order that we discovered it, so the first one is the book which was hidden inside the cogwheels.

The flyover animation of the island is very nice.

After the usual sound effect of entering a new book (the same as when we load the game, incidentally) we find ourselves in a very similar environment to what we left, i.e. some opened cogwheels, but with the book gone.

Cosmic Spacehead - Dreadful Warnings

Written by Morpheus Kitami

Because of the password system, I have to start from scratch until the game decides I deserve a code. So I pick up everything I can in the starting area, joke book, 1 gold coin and a teleport key. As I go through one of the platformer screens, I realize that Mr. Spacehead looks like the Kool-aid Man's shifty cousin, who can get you stuff if you don't ask too many questions.

This is supposed to be a pun on "lucky day", but I kept mentally thinking it as "luke e day".

Cape Carnival. That there's a slot machine. 99.9% payout, it says. I would suspect that Cosmic is the 0.1%, but it turns out he gets 50 lino dollars from it. I feel as though, in giving me no difficulty whatsoever in getting more money, it has cheated us both. I have done nothing for what I have, and it has no reason to be played. Nearby, there's both an advertisement for bumper cars, and an all expenses paid trip to a car factory. "That's the trip of a lifetime!"

Unfortunately, to get the trip to Detroitica, Cosmic needs a driver's license, because he is probably 5, but the attendant gives him a balloon as a consolation. I try to go to the left, but that's the bumper car race and I can't go in without speaking to him. I accidentally end up talking to him again, and in trying to get out of the dialog, I press escape. This quits the game.

Discussion Point: How Would You Change The Game?

By The TAG Team

Here’s a tough game of “what-if”:

We’ve all played games at times and said, “if only they had done this instead of that.”  Or maybe just thinking of a new twist on something to breathe more life into it.

For example:  What if they remade Police Quest 1, but from the point of view of Jesse Bains?  Like, perhaps, an adventure game version of Grand Theft Auto.  There’s probably not too many adventure games that make you sell drugs to win, right?

Or, how about the other direction?  After all, they already made a card game version of The Oregon Trail, how about a tabletop role-playing game of The Secret of Monkey Island?  A roll of the dice determines how many bananas you’ll need to make a monkey wrench...

Yeah, this is a tough one -- but we’re sure you have some ideas.