Missed Classic: Johnny Castaway (1992)

by a Random Reviewer

The other genres get all the credit, even though adventures have always been the superior genre.  So many action games have inspired movies, such as Doom, Tomb Raider, Need for Speed, and the Super Mario Brothers series.  Heck, they even got people to pay to see a movie that was really just an advertisement for Mario 3!  

But there’s very few adventure games that have succeeded in that way.  In fact, there’s only one.  (Rumor has it that Les Manley was copied to make a Steve Carell film, but I don’t buy that.)  

Enter today’s game, Johnny Castaway, a 1992 classic from the team at Sierra On-Line.  Dynamix lead Jeff Tunnel did much of the work, causing the game to be noticed by filmmaker Robert Zemeckis, taking a break from directing the smash hit Death Becomes Her. Tom Hanks didn't take much convincing to star in it. According to the press at the time, he took one look at the game and instantly signed on to the movie project.

Check out a new Kickstarter

By the TAG team

We rarely advertise new Kickstarters, but this time we just had to make an exception. How could we resist, when we are the inspiration! That’s right, you read it correctly, The Adventure Gamer will get its own adventure game.

The Adventure Gamer 3000 tells the story of Lilah the Lurker, who one day wakes up to the awful reality, in which her favourite adventure game blog has suddenly gone offline. Lilah begins a desperate globetrotting attempt to contact all the reviewers and admin of TAG, before they have all been erased from reality by the evil and maleficent Doctor Dastardious. Will she be able to save Trickster from a fate worse than death and convince him to make one more comeback?

You can access the whole world with this easy-to-use interface

Missed Classic: Impossible Mission

After we came up with Panthro's Law, allowing us to play non-traditional adventure games, it occurred to us that we missed a lot more classics than we'd thought. So to rectify that we're doing a Missed Classic of a game that's not considered a traditional adventure game, but has enough adventurey elements for us to go, “Meh... Close Enough.” I'm talking, of course, about Impossible Mission.

This cover makes me think of the movie Wargames

Enough preamble, on with the review...

Impossible Mission is known now as a Commodore 64 classic. It was amazing for its time, and like many games of the time, would be considered simple and repetitive if released today. But it, unlike many of its peers, still somehow manages to be compelling (to me at least) to this day.

Wait, wasn't that just another paragraph of preamble? Ignore me, I've never been quite sure when preamble ends and amble begins.

Some small changes to blog format

By the former admins of TAG

Salaam alaykum! We have great news!

For quite some time we have felt that taking care of the blog is far harder than we ever could have thought and consumes too much of our leisure time. Frankly, it has often been a real pain in nether regions to wake up some days and think of all the work, we have to do for blog maintenance. We found that we started spending hours just to make up excuses for avoiding blog editing shifts - Ilmari spent too much time washing his hair and TBD even signed up for a pottery class. Finally we admitted that we had to let the blog go. Still, we didn't want to leave our faithful readers completely without their weekly adventure game dose. We thus decided to find a new maintainer for our beloved blog – someone dedicated enough to do the work we had grew so tired of.

We had discrete discussions with some major gaming sites on the Web, and the amount of interest surprised us. IGN, Valve and Gamespot all made reasonable offers, but something was always lacking. We wanted our successor to continue the heritage of Trickster and this proved too much to many potential sponsors. Many offers would have meant selling the soul of the blog to faceless corporate game industry – running ads as fake reviews and praising new hit games for money just wasn't our way. We bravely decided to keep the integrity of the blog intact, rather than accept such terms.

Some suitors were really persistent. Adventure Gamers wanted to buy us off, just because our blog was taking away so much traffic from them. A guy called Bill bragged on and on about his multibillion corporation and kept telling us how the blog should concentrate on nothing but X-Box games. We were getting desperate, but then it clicked.

At first we thought that all the e-mails from Shaikh Haroun el Serenia from the small caliphate of Vrangor and a CEO of Trusted Arabian Gasoline Corp. (see, it rhymes with TAG!) were just very bad spam. After some actual transactions on our bank accounts we realised that the ridiculous name was just an alias of a benevolent and enlightened ruler of a Middle-Eastern country who wanted to remain anonymous, because adventure gaming is not really allowed in Quran.

No, it's not this guy.
This guy is dead, as far as we know.

We are not saying it's this guy.
We are also not denying it.

In retrospect, there was nothing amazing in all this, since TAG has a history of attracting wealthy sponsors from rich oil countries. Shaikh, as we are going to continue call him, is a dedicated fan of classic adventure games and has expressed his deepest wish to provide fully paid employees from his personal staff to keep the blog going on to distant future. The originator of the blog, Trickster, and the two co-admins, Ilmari and TBD, have been rewarded generously and will be shortly living in pleasant surroundings on a tropical island.

The admin will soon be spending their time here

What's the catch, you ask? There isn't any! The staff of Shaikh are eager to provide us with all sort of extra information on oil prizes and all new ways of using up gasoline, and especially interesting and reassuring tidbits about how the oil industry is not polluting the world.

We will have occasional articles of this sort on the blog

But rest assured, we haven't forgotten the games! A new exciting feature of TAG will be the ”Missed Arabics”, which will go through the history of the Arabic adventure game. Just think of all the oriental mystery! We will get to see such less-known gems like Al-Farabi: Mulla Sadra (translates roughly into Date Quest: The Mission for the Succulent Fruit), Ibn Gabirol (The Secret of the Camel Oasis) and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (Above a Sand Dune).

 

Just look at this picture from Date Quest!
Aren't you just dying to read more about it?

We will give 20 CAPs to the one getting best score on Secret of the Camel Oasis

Above a Sand Dune has plenty of cool minigames

Fans of Quest for the Glory -series will delight to find out that the blog will host a semiannual playthrough of the second game in the series. Also, you will see nothing else, but games with similar intriguing themes, like Prince of Persia (I know it's a bit stretch to call it adventure game, but we must obey the man who pays for the whole thing).

During the transition period, the Shaikh has hired a well-known commenter of the blog to deal with all the concerns and worries of regular readers.

The temporary assistant manager of the blog was rather enthusiastic to get the job

So, big changes are ahead of us! Oh yeah, you should probably all start to learn Arabic, because that will be the new language of the blog. But don't worry, I hear it's real easy!

Just start here!

Game 14: Shadowgate - Fool's Gold

Journal Entry 3: “After making such great progress towards my goal of defeating the Warlock Lord, I now find myself lost and with very little in the way of resources. I fear this will be my final entry before taking my life. The shame of failure is too much! I’m quite sure that I’m rapidly losing my mind anyway, as some of the things I’ve seen and heard in the past two days simply cannot be part of this reality and must be the projections of a subconsciousness besieged by frustration and failure. I constantly hear voices! What’s worse is that I’m quite certain whoever is speaking to me is trying to help me make progress, but I am unable to understand their bizarre dialect! “Gbqnl vf gur svefg bs ncevy. V'yy unir n erny cbfg fbba.” What does it mean?!?! Anyway, it turns out that all my previous success was an illusion. While I thought that damn wizard Lakmir had transported me to Castle Shadowgate, it turns out he missed the mark by some way, and I’ve been forced to travel many leagues in search of it. I’ve used many strange forms of transportation on the way, but I must have taken a wrong turn at some point. All that is left is to end this miserable existence. I cannot face a world where the Warlock Lord rules, knowing that my failure led to his success...”

All of a sudden the game starts talking about another land and portals

When I last posted, I’d just defeated the fire drake and was about to go through the door at the end of the bridge. I was feeling pretty good about myself too after having a fantastic game session where everything was coming together nicely. Little did I know that Shadowgate was about to pull the rug out from underneath me. As soon as you get across the bridge, the game starts jumping genres in the most unexpected way and I’ve had to pinch myself numerous times and check that I hadn’t accidentally started up the wrong game. I’m all for adventure games adding in little mini games that make use of other genre styles, but it’s important that the game at least stick to the tone it started with, and Tarantino-like shifts midway through are just not cool. After being informed that I was not actually in Castle Shadowgate at all, the game unbelievably switches to a top down view where you’re forced to wander around the landscape looking for clues that might lead you to the correct destination. Every now and then you come across cities, where you can buy resources and even hone your skills (what, is this an RPG now!?)

One of many cities you come across, all of which look the same

The warriors become progressively harder each time you win

As off-putting as this shift in gameplay and perspective was, what happened next is just unfathomably ridiculous! When departing cities, you get the chance to purchase forms of transportation; including the sort of technology that just doesn’t belong in what I originally thought was a swords and armour style adventure game. At first a selected a car, but as decent as the graphics were while driving around, the sameness of the landscape made knowing what direction I was going extremely difficult. With no minimap available in this mode, I figured I was just going to get lost really quickly, so I restored back to the last city and took the second option available, the submarine (you think I’m joking?)! At least the view from the submarine gave me directional bearings, so I was able to have a fair idea where I was going. Unfortunately, you can’t reach Castle Shadowgate by sea alone, and when I was informed at one of my port stops (you have to stop to refuel way too regularly) that the only way to reach the castle was by air (what is this? Howl’s Moving Castle?), I left the ocean and went in search of some sort of plane.

Driving is quite fun, but the landscape doesn't change much

If you'd told me I'd be in a submarine a couple of days back...

By this stage of the game, I was pretty much prepared for anything. But I still had to laugh when I uncovered a space ship in an uninhabited warehouse in the middle of nowhere. It’s here that some of the parchments I’d read earlier in the game started to make sense. “Five to find, three are one.” It’s clearly talking about the modes of transportation and the spaceship meets the description of “three are one” as it allows you to travel under water, along the ground, or even into space. Having already covered land and sea, I cranked up the engine and flew out into space, thinking that the developers at ICOM had clearly played Ultima at some point. It’s here that I finally got completely lost, and to be honest I no longer really care about finding the Warlock Lord. Shadowgate had finally won me over, despite all of my initial fears, and then it all just turned bizarre and I have to question the sanity of whoever decided any of this was a good idea. I actually found a way to kill myself in the game, so I decided that was the best way to end my session. It’s the first game on the list that I haven’t finished which is a shame, but I have better ways to spend my time.

The game should at least be remembered for being the first to allow suicide!