Missed Classic: The Kristal - Lost and Final Rating

 Written by Morpheus Kitami

How I'm feeling right about now

Before I talk about the last parts of The Kristal, I'm going to talk about the part I glossed over, the stage play. At least, what allegedly exists of the stage play. All I know for certain is what Mike Sutin has said about it. I cannot confirm that what he has said is true or not, because as far as I know, no one named Mike Sutin has ever done anything in the world of theater. Nor has his co-author, Rodney Wyatt, ever done anything either. I do know that Wyatt is American though. I know nothing of theater or searching for topics relating to the theater and Sutin claims to be a stage manager, which isn't something that seems to be mentioned in American productions, let alone the kind Sutin was working on.

The play, under the title The Kristal of Konos was originally a comedy musical, which I jokingly guessed correctly. Sutin thought up this play while touring with the original productions of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar in Spain, 1975/76. Sutin, who was a stage manager and did backdrops for Pink Floyd. It was never produced, nor did any of the soundtrack ever get released. Which, according to Sutin in two different articles, either was the full soundtrack containing Elaine Page [sic] and the entire cast of Hair, or some with Elaine Page [sic] and the cast and musicians of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Two members of the team are famous in their work outside of game design, namely, the astronomer Patrick Moore who narrated the opening movie; And artist David A. Hardy, credited without his initial doing the backgrounds.

I do not lean towards it being true, but it's weird enough to lie about that at least some parts are based in truth. TV or movies it would make sense to lie about, but theatre? Nobody in video games cares about theatre. Sutin was probably a stage manager and the play probably exists. There is no recording, and if it is, it's in Spanish, with the Spanish cast of Jesus Christ Superstar and it sounds like this. I'm pretty sure musicals don't really tour like musicians do, especially in 1976. And there is no chance Elaine Paige is on it, because she was nobody in 1976 and she was also doing some play called The Boyfriend.

Missed Classic: The Kristal - Slowly We Rot

Written by Sir Morpheus Kitami, Gru of Horror and Nimrod from the planet Terra, 17th Regulus in The Adventurers Guild of the United Hold of Planets

When I first started this entry, I felt like I had gotten off the wrong foot with The Kristal. Throwing a bunch of stuff the player doesn't understand all in the first 5 minutes is a surefire recipe to create a bad impression. I didn't get very far, I'm still within those first 5 minutes. The text-based dialog input could just be one mistake a very ambitious game made. But as I played more and more I realized that first impression was far nicer than it would end up being. Because it was so much worse.

Just.

So.

Much.

Worse.

Missed Classic 105 - The Kristal (1989) - Introduction

Written by Morpheus Kitami 

Some time ago, I think after Legacy's reign of terror, I noticed that there were a couple of mainline games that had yet to be claimed, Cosmic Spacehead and Innocent Until Caught, so I asked Ilmari if I could claim those, and he said sure. I thought I'd just get all those titles these companies did beforehand now, rather than when they come up on the games list. They are admittedly still a few games away. 

Cosmic Spacehead was published by Codemasters, known at this point for Micro Machines, the Dizzy games and trash. None of the games they published were really adventure games. Dizzy sort of approaches that, but its comfortably far enough away to not be a concern. I feel like the games from the next company have far more validity to the adventure label and I'm not really about to play those now either. Or at least that's what I thought. I must have missed one title on my first passthrough, Necris Dome. However, Necris Dome is a case I don't really think fits too well with Codemasters, since the author, one Charles A. Sharp, did about 13 text adventures in the 1986-88 period, of which only one was published by Codemasters. I might dip into his titles, but not anytime soon. 

On the other hand Innocent Until Caught was published by Psygnosis, who were kind of a big deal. While the company responsible for Innocent did nothing of importance here beforehand, Psygnosis...kind of did? Psygnosis, if you don't know, back during the days of the Amiga and Atari ST, was a game publisher with high production values. A combination of having staff artists who knew their way around the systems, having Roger Dean, best known for his album covers, do the cover art. From their founding up until around 1993 they were the company to beat if you wanted to have an impressive audio-visual experience with your game. Now, the part they sometimes missed was that they didn't always have the best gameplay to go along with that. 

Ultimately, its not really a secret as to why Psygnosis hasn't been covered before, since they primarily dealt in action games. Some of these I understand have adventure elements, but they're not straight adventure games, its not that important. They did translate the French adventure game series Explora into English as Chrono Quest, but they missed the last game in the series and it kind of doesn't feel like Psygnosis in that regard. 

Our hero doesn't look like he's winning here, he's also missing a mustache