Legacy - Way-oh Way-oh

Written by Morpheus Kitami

Despite my relative success on this new floor I feel as though unfinished business on the 1st floor is a bad thing to have. The only question is, where is that damn painting? As I walk back to the stairs, I notice that the mouth-thing I assumed was an elderitch squirrel is actually guarding the stairs up. Hopefully something will be able to blanket kill all these things.

Feeling old yet? All the people on this tape are dead now

So I desperately comb over the parts of the 1st floor I haven't already checked. At this point I'm just savescumming. Forcing a door hurts me. I've got an axe, apparently that doesn't work. Who knew that the leading cause of death among firefighters is killing themselves breaking open a door. One thing good does come of this, as I trap a daemon inside an empty room. A locked empty room. I hurt myself on that door for nothing. This means...dun dun dun...I can see the VHS tape. Except there's still another daemon there, but by the time I notice him I'm already inside...again. Also the tentacle float is angry at me, but its too late to savescum again.

So, finally seeing this tape reveals that Ellen killed the rest of her family. Robert is also surprisingly calm and collected for someone who's killed a TON of people. But there's more to this than that. Think about this for a second, Ellen stopped recording the tape, took the tape out, put it in a safe on the ground floor, locked said safe, put the key on the other side of the floor. Further, Ellen has been inside this mansion for months, a year, and nobody noticed. These furniture movers never noticed her, which makes my jokes about the quality of their services even more poignant.

You know, I keep mocking the estate agent and the furniture movers, but apparently I misread that, the PC is supposed to have suggested auctioning off furniture. I'm clearly as smart as the PC.

Missed Classic: Labyrinth - And I Walk Along Darkened Corridors

Written by Joe Pranevich

If you love old genre TV shows such as Doctor Who or Star Trek, you have a pretty good idea what a gravel quarry looks like. These shows are often equally famous for their corridor scenes, short segments of hallway that can be tweaked to look like whatever part of the ship they need to show. Using and reusing set pieces like these helped ensure that episodes could be shot quickly at a minimum of cost. While Labyrinth the film takes great pains to make every scene unique, Labyrinth the game seems to have been made with this type of cost-cutting in mind. Over and over again, I had to explore long segments of nearly-identical corridors to make sure I wasn’t missing an item or an event. (Spoiler: I missed one.) While the environments became more dynamic as I neared the end, the vast majority of the playtime in this game is just running down halls and checking doors, mentally marking off distances and landmarks to distinguish one near-identical segment from the other. While computer games do not have to pay for sets, it costs money to design interesting environments. It’s a shame this game didn’t make that investment. To augment the somewhat boring screenshots, I will augment my coverage this time out with pictures from the film. Labyrinth is beautiful and beyond what the 8-bit graphics of the Commodore 64 could manage.

Last time, we started our exploration by solving a simple text adventure before getting sucked into the “movie”. We have only thirteen hours to find the center of the maze before we become David Bowie’s slave forever. I can think of worse things than being circa-1986 David Bowie’s personal slave, but the game takes it as a given that it is a Bad Thing. Once in the labyrinth, we discovered (but did nothing with) Hoggle the dwarf and solved the first puzzle by walking through graffiti spelling out the word “door”. What type of mysteries will the game throw at us today? Let’s play!

Lost Secret of the Rainforest - Determined

Written by Reiko

Adam’s Journal #4: "I’m not going to be able to meet the shaman until I’ve helped everyone, am I? But the shaman is the only one who can help me. So I still have to get this poultice made for the poor baby, and then Sinchi wants a butterfly. I hope I can do everything. I’ve got to keep trying!"

I totally didn't notice this pool initially.

Last time, I had ended up quite stuck, but thanks to Leo Velles, I was able to get back on track. Apparently I had completely overlooked the existence of a pool inside the tree where I'd found the bark cup. I had no idea there was anything else useful in the tree, since I had acquired one object each time I had entered one of the three entrances. This pool contained sap, which I could use to fill the cup [5]. Then when I took the cup back over to the shaman's hut and placed it on the bench [1], Sinchi says he'll ask the shaman to make the poultice, since that's everything that's needed for it.

Legacy - Is That You, Ellen?

Written by Morpheus Kitami

By now it was clear that wherever the painting was, looking in the south was now completely impossible. At least for my current abilities. That left most of north, and a bit of east. So, I go down one of the big hallways I haven't gone down yet.

Now this is what I call a media room

The hallways surrounded one room, drawing attention to it. Inside, a room worth pre-rendering, because this one actually is full of interesting furniture. Screw your shafts of light, give me a room that has stuff I can screw around with a little. I immediately know what to do with this room. I just have to go downstairs and grab that VHS...

Discussion Point: Inventories

We are NOT talking about warehousing

If you’ve been reading comments for Freddy Pharkas, you might have noticed discussion about inventories. And inventories are worthy of serious discussion, since they seem so essential part of adventure gaming experience. Could a game without even inventory even be a true adventure game?