Underground Dispatch: October 2003
Happy autumn to all of our Underground readers! Plenty of events to touch on this month, so I'll waste no time with pleasantries or feeble attempts at humor, and let the news speak for itself:
Our top story this month is Underground's very own Dave Gilbert releasing Part One of his long-awaited Bestowers of Eternity adventure. With a touch of supernatural drama and a lot of excellent characterization and dialogue (in typical Dave Gilbert style), playing this make any adventure fan excited for the rest of the series. Here's a game to satiate you if you're tired of amateur adventures being too "silly." For more information and a download link, check out this thread in our community forums.
In other major release news, the infamous Yahtzee, more than a year after his self-imposed exile from the amateur adventure community, has released another full-length adventure, which makes it fairly clear that his days of quality game development are far from over--even if his days of being liked by the majority of AGS folks are. 5 Days a Stranger, a "nice nasty horror game with some murders and gore," is available for download now at Yahtzee's website, and we'll have a full review later this month.
One of the more promising upcoming adventures has a new trailer to show off: you can download the new Ignac trailer, which shows off the game's excellent cartoonish graphics, right now at Maniac Entertainment. This game has been a very long time coming, but it looks like it might be worth the wait after all.
Tierra Entertainment's King's Quest I VGA has been one of the most celebrated amateur adventures of recent years, and for good reason; now, Tierra has released version 3.0 of the game, what they refer to as the "final version." The new version features optimized music and speech and assorted bug fixes, so if you haven't played through the updated version before it's definitely worth downloading from Tierra's website.
There seems to be quite an assortment of "serious" games being released this month--besides the two mentioned above, the new AGS adventure Conspiracy of Songo deals with a young American couple trapped in a criminal conspiracy after their vacation boat crashes into a small town. Songo is available for download at the LongLife Software website.
Fancy yourself as having voice acting talent? You may be able to offer your skills to a prominent upcoming adventure. Empty House Entertainment is looking for voice actors for their upcoming classic-style adventure Bad Timing; visit the website for more information and a chance to sign up.
We were pointed this month to a new adventure programmed in SLUDGE that we were not previously familiar with, but may be one to watch. Day of the Aliens hasn't shown a great deal of progress yet, but features an interesting plot that will hopefully turn into an equally interesting game. We will let you know more as updates are released; for more information, you can visit the game's website.
We keep our eyes and ears open, but rely on our loyal readers to point us to important news. If there's amateur adventure news of any sort you'd like us to cover, or an underground game you want to see an update on, don't hesitate to fire us an e-mail. See you next month!
