[Voyageur]

Originally Posted by Crapstorm

I was alerted to BS long before quantum mechanics was mentioned.

It's this kind of suspicious attitude and non-willingness to explore that keeps tired old games old.

[Jazhara7]

Originally Posted by Simo Sakari Aaltonen

The plot of The Longest Journey is straight from Michael Ende's novel The Neverending Story. Many would prefer to gloss over this because The Longest Journey was a good adventure game. This is sweeping things under the carpet.

Actually, Bastian doesn't travel between the worlds until the exact half of the book. He just reads the progress of Atreju (who is a greenskin from Phantásien to start with. His skin colour is something they didn't put into the movie, by the way, because the green colour made the actor look as if he was covered by mold or something. ) through Phantásien. The book he is reading is "The Neverending Story" itself.

At about half way through the book, Bastian finds his way into Phantásien, only it's no longer there. He has to recreate it with his wishes (starting with the Nightwood, which turns into the Desert of Colours during the day), and with each step, forgets more of who he really is. It's kind of scary. At that point he is travelling through Phantásien, but not any earlier. And he's not knowingly trying to rescue any world (Phantásien had not been really rescued at all. It had been recreated from Bastian's wishes, with the help of teh Childlike Empress, and all that was left of the old Phantásien - A tiny seed.)


I know the Neverending Story like no one else on these forums, and I know and love both the Neverending Story and The Longest Story. I would have noticed if there was any intentional copying.

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[Simo Sakari Aaltonen]

Jazhara7 wrote:

I know the Neverending Story like no one else on these forums, and I know and love both the Neverending Story and The Longest Story.

You will get no argument from me.

How similar the two stories seem probably depends on the resolution of one's vantage point. Or the distance. Right now I see them from the middle distance, from which they seem very much the same story.

Go closer, and you can see how the details are different. And getting further away, not enough detail would be visible to make out the similarity.

* * *

This made me think of something regarding adventure games in general.

Adventure games usually maintain the distance between player and action fairly constant over the course of a game. This has been a consequence of either the player controlling a single character, or multiple protagonists each remaining about the same distance from the action. This is the familiar adventure gaming world where the protagonist is about the only agent of change.

One thing that makes reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars so invigorating is that the distance between reader and events varies effectively. Sometimes the events happen right under the reader's nose, sometimes in the middle distance, and sometimes they are only hinted at. And this relationship is not in direct proportion to the event's importance.

Many adventure games have manipulated this distance effectively by having things happen off-screen (Loom), giving Non-Player Characters a life of their own (Gabriel Knight 3), having multiple protagonists (Post Mortem), having the protagonists at a changing distance from the action (The Watchmaker), or generally keeping the game world alive in all sorts of ways (Outcast).

These are arbitrary examples, as most adventure games do at least one of these things. But I would love to see more done with the idea.

Simo Sakari Aaltonen
(simoadventurecompanion.com)

www.adventurecompanion.com