Just a shout out for the great Gametap piece.
Nice article Emily, thanks for it.
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I was let down by Gametap. I really love the games, but after a patch it started randomly hanging on my machine when starting/stopping any emulator. Their tech support department finally gave up and told me I should just cancel my account.
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Adventures in GameTap
Interesting article, fov. I'm leery of subscription services in general, and I play computer games so sporadically that it wouldn't make sense for me anyway. But I'm happy to see that older games are being revived commercially. It's kind of like when TV studios realized they could make money by putting out their back catalogue on DVD, suddenly all these great TV shows were available again (Twin Peaks, Profit, My So-Called Life, ...).
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Or am I reading you wrong? |
By the way, you refer to "a weird little maze game from 1980" not being the adventure game Adventure. The adventure game was actually called Colossal Cave Adventure, although it's often shortened to Adventure or Colossal Cave.
I have encountered the maze game before myself, whilst looking for the IF game :) |
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(Although I did play Police Quest 1 and 2 on a PC in 1990 or so, and don't remember having to do anything particularly drastic to it. I played directly off the disk... the computer didn't have a hard drive.) |
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As for the Adventure "maze game," that would be the Atari 2600 game, and it did launch the adventure genre. The other adventure genre, that is; the one we tend to call "action-adventure" for the sake of clarity. The Atari Adventure eventually led to Zelda, and from Zelda and Prince of Persia all action-adventures follow. But we've discussed this before, at length. |
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Well, trust me. Some people may find DOSBox a little bit tricky, but it's much easier to get most DOS games to run now than it ever was when they were released. |
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In any case, I didn't get very far with it. :crazy: |
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(Incidentally, I actually agree that there is a second viable console-centric branch of "adventure" genre terminology.) |
Beside this very minor point, which actually is insignificant, it was a very interesting article and one that saved me (for the time being) quite a lot of money... I guess I'll have to wait 'till GameTap matures...
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I'd be happy to take out that word, if it makes a big difference in meaning. |
Oh, I don't think it does. Like the gnome says, it's really insignificant.
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An excellent, and true, article. I actually like Gametap so far (I'm in the middle of the two week free trial), but its adventure offerings are less than pleasant. The big problme may be that they have much of the Myst series, which I unfortunately own already, and the DOS games run a bit choppily on my laptop. Fortunately, they're advertising Quest for Glory II, one of my favorite adventure games of all time.
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As I understand it, the Atari 2600 Adventure game was actually based on Colossal Cave, at least conceptually. Between the memory limitations and lack of a keyboard, it's probably as close as you could get to it on that machine.
The 2600 game is quite famous, most notably for being the first game to ever feature an easter egg. The story, as I understand it, is that Atari's policy forbade game progammers to receive personal credit in the game or packaging. So, when Warren Robinett wrote the cartridge for Atari, he hid a single invisible pixel as an object (the source of the name "easter egg") which allowed the player to pass into a hidden room with his personal credit written inside. It's not a bad game, and worth playing through. Level 1 is easy, as long as you bear in mind that the mazes don't actually join up properly, the arrow is a sword, and it will kill the ducks, who are called dragons in the manual for some unfathomable reason, with a single touch. You can only access the egg from Levels 2 and 3, but then you have to deal with the bat. I hate that bat. I hated it then, I hate it now, and I will alwayd completely detest that inventory-stealing creature forever. |
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I don't think I got past level 1, though. I couldn't figure out what to do with the object that had two parallel (sort of) lines. Was it a bridge? I thought so, but couldn't use it for anything, and couldn't get into the next castle. |
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