Adventure Gamers - Forums

I’ve never played the City of the Lost Children, but I’ve heard it’s not a great game. The movie, however, is very, very good and made me a fan of Jeneut’s works. Even his worst movies have a bizarre, dreamlike atmosphere about them, which I enjoy quite a bit.

Now, say something about equally bizarre… Manhunter: New York

It’s one of the ugliest games (graphically) I’ve ever seen. And terrifying, with a giant eye wandering around following you. Combine that with the fact it’s early Sierra and probably hard and annoying as hell and I have absolutely zero desire to play it.

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I tried to play Dragonsphere once. I really liked the aesthetic and well-written wordy descriptions of everything you can look at, as well as the general setting and that great old fashioned digitized voice acting. Unfortunately, I gave up at the puzzle with the fairies. The picture of the frogs has inspired me to try again, though.

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I have good memories of Elk Moon Murder. Not because it was an especially fantastic game, but it was one of the few games I owned around that time and as such I savoured it like a fine wine. I liked the native American assistant and the desert setting, it was unique and there was some challenge in the detective work that made it interesting. So although my glasses are very much rose-tinted about the game I’d still recommend it to mystery lovers who don’t mind some budget level FMV.

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Ah!  I lived in the shade’s world for a long time and learned to love and admire the little guy.  It was such a different game experience than the usual quest with it’s slow pace and time changes.  It’s an experience I’ll never forget.

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Since I doubt that Forever Worlds sold more than a few thousand copies, I sure hope that the Limited Edition is also the Only Edition.

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I remember Heroine’s Quest well. It was excellent, as good a QFG clone as could be made, and I’d be hard pressed to name a better one. Unless I’m wrong it’s freeware, isn’t it? Pretty impressive even if only due to rights issues.

Yeah, Heroine’s Quest is freeware. Probably one of the most ‘I can’t believe it’s freeware’ freeware games I’ve ever seen, and I reviewed freeware games for the now defunct Gamehippo.com for many years.

Funny you bring up Return to Zork. That was going to be my next game to ask someone to say something about.

I had the demo for this game many many years ago, during the advent of the Wow! CD-Rom! Soundblaster! era. “Hello? Are you there? I NEED A NEW BATTERY!” will be ingrained in my mind forever. I really enjoyed figuring out how to tie the driftwood together with the vines to make a raft, and I think that’s where the demo ended.
Years later, I found the CD at a yard sale for real cheap (along with the very underrated Time Commando) and played through a lot of it, almost every night, with my mom.
“Want some rye? Course ya do!”
“GO AWAY! I DON’T LIKE YOU!” (A farmer from whom I think you steal a brassiere)
Good stuff. I think we eventually got stuck in one of the mazes—-the swamp that you had to poke with the stick to make sure it was safe to walk. We fumbled through one way, but didn’t map it, so couldn’t get back.

I hope to go back and try to finish this game someday, along with the rest of the later-era Zork games. I’m just afraid I might overheat and suffocate on nostalgic warmth and fuzziness.

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All late-era Zorks deserve to be played, I’m still surprised how and why they were made: all three are completely different and unrelated games, made by people with no connection to Infocom at all, when the series was already long dead, and yet so much care was put into making all of them, like Activision felt bad about closing Infocom and claimed to make the best use of its franchise.

I always liked Warcraft 1-2 and all early Blizzard games in general (especially The Lost Vikings and Blackthorne that also featured some green Orc-like creatures). But I fell in love with Warcraft Adventures around 1997 when I saw screenshots in a computer mag, along with Curse of Monkey Island. Both games looked simply incredible, I had finished Broken Sword only recently and felt like the most lucky kid, because neither of my friends played adventures and they were missing such beautifully crafted games! Of course, I didn’t know at the time this was the end of the era of high-budget cartoon adventures, LucasArts and Revolution were moving to 3D and Warcraft was doomed.

I still never lost hope, especially after learning there was a copy of the near-finished game somewhere. When a walkthrough was published on YouTube, I didn’t watch it, hoping the guy would release the game soon. He didn’t and kept taunting the fans until someone else decided to make it public) When the whole drama ended, I downloaded the game without any hesitation, because I always thought cancelling a near-finished game and hiding it was a crime, especially for such a huge corporation like Blizzard used to be. They could’ve just released it for free, but they preferred to pretend it never existed.

Either way, I was happy to finally play it in peace. I know people felt disappointed and complained the game didn’t live up to their expectations, but I enjoyed it as a beautiful, atmospheric, funny dark fantasy with plenty of animations and orcs, and it wasn’t even a bad adventure game either despite it was designed by people with no relation to the genre (although I think Steve Meretzky was involved at some point). Somehow everyone expected a masterpiece that would beat LucasArts and Sierra, but it was simply part of franchise developed by the original Blizzard team (and Russian outsources) for fans of the RTS games. I liked it.

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How nearly finished was the Warcraft game, Doom? It looks good from the screenshots…

Yes, the game was fully playable from start to finish and ran fine on modern systems. I don’t recall any saving issues, maybe they were easily avoidable or already fixed by the time I got hold of the game, but I played it in at least several sessions, so it should be savable. The most notable problems were some missing sound effects and a couple of cutscenes, but luckily a dedicated fan had spent the past 6 years fixing all those issues and even updating cutscenes to high resolution and adding the missing ones! The final patch was released just this August. Here’s a PC Gamer article about it (without any abandonware links, of course): The ‘lost’ Warcraft adventure game can now be played the way it was meant to be.