Heart of China - Tanks for the Menageries!

Written by Aperama

Like always, Jake's problems involve planes and flying money

It's probably fair to say that my experience with Heart of China is 'confused'. It's not that I'm not enjoying myself – no, the game is definitely fun in and of itself – there's a certain something about it that does make it fun. But boy, it is on the 'bizarre' side of things. We left off with the cutaway to Kate Lomax being dressed up as an Oriental who.. uhm.. lady of the night. The game immediately moves to the time-honoured 'Indiana Jones line' form of transport on a little map. I nearly thought that there was actually some degree of choice allowed here, but I was very wrong – no matter where you click, Lucky begins to make his Yankee Doodle fly away towards the fortress of Chengdu where Kate is being held hostage. Makes sense, I suppose. The little 'flying dollar bill' thing really felt like it belonged in, I don't know.. a different game of some sort? But I can handle it. Why the game then offers dozens of false landing points and only allows one, though, I am not too certain of – it may well be for remembering the lay of the land later in a tank chase. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Two Interviews With Teoman Irmak

Introduction by Joe Pranevich

This week, we have a special treat: not one, but two interviews with artist Teoman Irmak. I first stumbled onto Teoman’s work while reviewing the Questprobe games. You may recall that I didn’t quite understand why some systems had different graphics than others and I interpreted this to being due to Adventure International optimizing the art for each platform. Not so! As I learned later, the different art was because the two “Adventure Internationals”, the US and UK ones, were targeting different platforms (the common ones for their regions) and employed separate groups of artists to do so.

Teoman’s work is likely to be more familiar to European adventure game fans, but we’ve seen his art in the original Elvira game and Robin of Sherwood, as well as the UK editions of the Questprobe games. He also worked on many more including Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle, He-Man, Gremlins, Personal Nightmare, and others that I hope we will eventually cover as part of our Missed Classic series.

So why do we have two interviews? Teoman has been kind enough not only to answer a few questions for me, but also to provide us an unabridged interview that he did last year for Sam Dyer’s book, ZX Spectrum: A Visual Compendium. There’s a bit of overlap between the two interviews, but together they provide a fantastic glimpse at some of the processes that underscored early adventure gaming.

Missed Classic 24: The Islands of Beta (1984)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Time for an educational adventure?

As this blog and countless other can attest to, we live in an age where digital archeology allows us to replay and relive many our childhood software adventures. Thanks to commercial offerings from companies like GOG.com, as well as organizations like the Internet Archive, many classic games, once forgotten, have returned to us. Until I started writing here, I didn’t realize how many adventure games I was influenced by, most of which had completely disappeared from thought until I stumbled on them again while researching this or that. It’s a great time to be a so-called digital historian and I love the work that we (and others) are doing to keep those memories alive.

Heart of China - Immigration issues

Written by Aperama

Heart of China is already striking me as though it is a game that really, really wanted to do something amazing and unique, and probably found itself struggling a little with the effort of doing it 'all'. It's not that I'm not enjoying myself, but I've already found a few puzzles in the opening little area that have definitely made me shrug my head in spite of them being undeniably solvable. The game starts in Hong Kong, with Lucky Jake Masters (he insists that his name is simply Lucky, with several characters already having belittled him for that little idiosyncrasy in the little section I've played) having just freshly been told by Eugene Adolphus Lomax (E.A.) that he needs to go and rescue his daughter. Well, perhaps I come slightly ahead of myself here – the game actually starts with a little cinematic, and an incredibly long credits sequence over Lucky's flapping aviator's scarf blowing in the distance. The cinematic I feel is best summed up in a short GIF:

I particularly like the evil man's 'glint'..

Missed Classic 22: Robin Of Sherwood: The Touchstones of Rhiannon – Living the Legend

Written by Alex

A SPECIAL ADVENTURE GAMER BLOGGER-TYPE ANNOUNCEMENT FROM ALEX:

Friends, Romans, Adventure Gamers and fellow writers, lend me your eyeballs. You have all been exceedingly patient in waiting for me to get on with this game. The issue has not been finding time to write, but finding time to play. And since this is a blog about adventure games (hint: games are things you play), this is a problem.

Work/life issues are nothing you are interested in, nor that I feel like going into great detail about here, except to say that my family and I are fine, I didn’t lose my job, I’m not getting divorced, and nobody is dead, in jail, or both (don’t ask).

With that said, I’m eager to continue sharing my play-through of Robin of Sherwood: The Touchstones of Rhiannon with you. As I said in Post 1, published about one-thousand years ago (according to the carbon dating), this is my first non-DOS game for the blog, as well as my first text adventure.

So strap on your quiver, heft your quarterstaff, and sharpen your sword for more bad jokes, inappropriate comments, and hopefully a good old-fashioned longbowing or two!