Adventure Gamers - Forums

In his interview to adventuregamers Kyrandia/Lands of Lore designer Rick Gush said that he was a professional playwright and that he had never played an adventure - or any video game - before working on those two titles. At the same time, the game itself was in fact based on a little-known text adventure/RPG also called Kyrandia by an independent developer. You can watch a playthrough here or read about the similarities in video descriptions. At least some of Kyrandia’s gameplay elements could be attributed to its text-era past, including birthstones and mazes.

Gush also told how the first game was so successful that they quickly found a new big publisher (Virgin) who ordered a sequel, but the head of their marketing team failed the ad campaign and the game made only half sales of the first. But it was still successful enough to produce a third game which, again, failed because of poor marketing as Westwood focused on other licenses - and yet, according to Gush, it “managed to outsell the other two combined”! And they stopped making those games only after Westwood was acquired by EA.

@Luhr28: Could be! The first couple of areas after the swamp are pretty good as well, the ones mentioned by the Baron. For some reason, things just get a bit weird after that. Maybe they sold Virgin on the quality of the demo, gave a couple of quality updates and delivered a final product that was deemed decent enough?

I never came across the demo. Westwood Studios was a complete unknown to me until I got my hands on a 10 year anniversary box set.. it was glorious. “Dune II”, all the Kyrandia games and “Lands of Lore”.

@Doom: wow, that’s some good information. It does confirm some ideas discussed in these threads. The reference to the VP of marketing made me laugh. I guess VPs are better at being cryptic than promoting sales.

And EA.. again? Why, EA? What did videogames ever do to you?

I’ll add the text adventure game to my list of games to play, because I’m rather intrigued.

Vegetable Party - 23 May 2021 12:23 PM

@Doom: wow, that’s some good information. It does confirm some ideas discussed in these threads. The reference to the VP of marketing made me laugh. I guess VPs are better at being cryptic than promoting sales.

And EA.. again? Why, EA? What did videogames ever do to you?

I’ll add the text adventure game to my list of games to play, because I’m rather intrigued.

Seems like navigating through the forest and collecting gemstones randomly scattered around it was the main feature of text Kyrandia which was copy-pasted to the graphic game. There is also this discussion at the old ag’s forums (along with a walkthrough) concerning the game and the BBS system that used to run it (some early internet with its own collection of games).

And yeah, EA did a lot of harm to the industry, although Westwood released some quality titles after the acquisition such as Nox.

Please, let it be some interesting board games and a quality bike!

I had the day off. I used the luxury to finish a game I had started a while ago: “Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood”.

I was curious to see what inspired Baron_Blubba’s nostalgia and to play a Sierra game I had not tried before. It has a lot of interesting qualities, some questionable humour and a lot of heart.

what I liked: wandering around Sherwood Forest, some beautiful locations, graphically very near to the quality of King’s Quest V. The game gives both a sense of freedom and direction and its story is well told. The approach to puzzles (and.. copyright protection?) was pretty cool, figuring out codes and meanings using both in-game and external information.

what I didn’t like: some of the.. let’s call it outdated humour. If this game is ever remade, I hope they’ll take a different approach to comedy.

I didn’t get a perfect score and Marian (Kate Bush) and I did not wed. I think I got an ending that worked for me.

For now, I’ll get back to “Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy” and “The Last Express”. I enjoy the former as a CPT and I find the latter captivating.

The treasure train is laden with sweet potatoes. Korean yams (aka Japanese yams aka Battatas) to be precise. The best food in the world, and perhaps by extension -depending on how hungry I am- the best thing in the world.

That’s a great screen shot, and an honor, thank you.

So no happily ever after for Robin and Marianne, eh? (Yes, I know, people can live happily ever after even if they are not married, but A) this was a long time ago and B) if you had played the game to its romanticallest swooniest potential, you’d agree that these two love birds would have like nothing more than to have engaged in holy matrimony under the blessing of their fat friar friend.)

Incidentally, do you know why he was called Friar Tuck? It’s because his order would always tuck their robes beneath their belts, which apparently was not common practice. There is precedent (or antecedent?) for this concept even today, in the Hasidic orthodox Jewish world, where some people will tie a thin black cloth belt a little above their waist and encompassing any outer jacket or clothing they might be wearing- while praying. It is done to make a separation between the upper ‘holier’ half of their bodies, and the lower more ‘earthly’ half.

Gotta go! More on Robin Hood later.

that’s awesome, looking forward to the next post.

I’d be cool with their wedding, not sure what I missed.

Speaking of weddings (and going momentarily but decidedly off-topic): the best and worst AG wedding, to me, is the ending of King’s Quest II. Worst, because Valanice apparently has to marry this dude because he rescued her from a tower and gave her some jewelry he stole/found along the way. Best.. because of the attendees. And because it’s King’s Quest II.

Finished Mutropolis last night. I liked the graphics, the general atmosphere, and the voice acting. The humor of people on Mars misinterpreting twentieth-century objects worked for me, but the setting didn’t. The characters and environments could just as well be from our own day and age, sci-fi is hard to find. The puzzles are a mixed bag, some are great fun, some are trial-and-error and I found those boring. And the little story there is fell flat on its face in the end. Storytelling is not the devs strongest point.

I had fun with it, which is all that matters. But not as much fun as Doom and the AG reviewer. Maybe that’s just me, since I’m no longer a big fan of the classic 3rd-person adventure with lots of dialogues and inventory-based puzzles. Having said that, I’m going to play another one, Not Another Weekend. 

Karlok - 27 May 2021 03:58 AM

Finished Mutropolis last night. I liked the graphics, the general atmosphere, and the voice acting. The humor of people on Mars misinterpreting twentieth-century objects worked for me, but the setting didn’t. The characters and environments could just as well be from our own day and age, sci-fi is hard to find. The puzzles are a mixed bag, some are great fun, some are trial-and-error and I found those boring. And the little story there is fell flat on its face in the end. Storytelling is not the devs strongest point.

I had fun with it, which is all that matters. But not as much fun as Doom and the AG reviewer. Maybe that’s just me, since I’m no longer a big fan of the classic 3rd-person adventure with lots of dialogues and inventory-based puzzles. Having said that, I’m going to play another one, Not Another Weekend. 

Sorry to hear you didn’t enjoy it as much as I did since I share your thoughts towards traditional 3rd-person adventures - at least those released during the past 5 years or so. Pretty much everything I really liked was either non-traditional or from earlier times. But I thought puzzle design in Mutropolis was excellent, I used trial and error only maybe twice when I got stuck exploring the map or passing the 3 trials as I couldn’t figure out the way to overcome the fear of holes - ironically those puzzles are not really traditional adventure stuff. And I thought the story was just right for a zany, but intelligent adventure, I got so tired of poor comedies build around sarcasm and endless parodies/references (to be fair, there were some here too, but I found them non-intrusive, like the Gabriel Knight 3 one).

In fact I was afraid to play Not Another Weekend for the reasons listed above as it looks like one big reference to Larry with lots of movie parodies thrown in, but people seem to enjoy it as a tribute to the 1980s, so I’ll probably try it as well, thanks for reminding!

DCast - 27 May 2021 12:51 PM

Would you mind naming some? I feel like I’m having a hard time finding any comedy games (well, as of recent releases) lately. Aside a few - like Darkside Detective - there haven’t been very many

Gibbous and Irony Curtain from 2019, for example, or Willy Morgan from 2020. I really wanted to like those games, but just couldn’t stomach their humour for the reasons above. I loved Lair of the Clockwork God and There Is No Game DESPITE they are basically parodies of video game genres (or maybe thanks to that). Even Hypnospace Outlaw could be described as one huge parody of the early Internet era - which is not a bad thing by any means, it’s a rare topic brilliantly explored. Maybe only Disco Elysium was the thing-in-itself, but then it could be called a parody of everything. The only obvious parody in Mutropolis is it’s name No connection to the movie or any other media to my knowledge, maybe only stylistically and/or thematically - as I wrote, I felt Broken Age vibes, and LucasArts might’ve influenced archeological/jungle themes.

I haven’t played last Larry games, but there’s not much Larry-ish in Not Another Weekend. There are some adult/sexual jokes in-game, but not as a basis for MC. Mike Melkout is a very different character and with specific (slightly bonkers) mission to boot.

If you’ll give it a try - I’ll also be curious to hear what you think. Although, if you’re tired of comedies built on parodies or references - this might not be the one you’ll enjoy, because there are plenty of those.

This sounds interesting, I want to try it after I’m finished with my current games. As I wrote, parodies/refs are not a huge problem to me as long as they are not overused and the rest of the humour is carefully handled. And I love the 1980s, of course.

Karlok - 27 May 2021 03:58 AM

The characters and environments could just as well be from our own day and age, sci-fi is hard to find.

This actually only increases my interest in Mutropolis. One thing I don’t like about a lot of sci fi and fantasy is how the behavior of the human characters is as fantastical as the worlds the humans inhabit. They just don’t behave like normal, rational, human beings, and that makes them difficult to relate to. I have a similar problem getting into a lot of Dostoevsky—the Russian social-class paradigm in the era when his stories take place is so foreign to me that I just don’t understand a lot of the behavior. Despite belonging to the same species as his characters, and being fundamentally the same, we are so so different. That cognitive dissonance, that lack of intuitive or implicit (better word) understanding of the cultural mores of Dostoevsky’s worlds, and the worlds of many fantasy authors, makes reading them that much more challenging and unpleasant.
So! When someone tells me ‘here’s a fantasy story where the characters act like normal people; if you removed them from their setting, you could hardly tell they are fantasy characters’, I get interested.
A good example of a book that really did this for me, in a positive way: Patrick Rothfuss’s ‘The Name of the Wind’ and ‘The Wise Man’s Fear.’
Books where the characters behavior created an immersion breaking dissonance: Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn; Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time; pretty much everything by Robert Heinlein, but especially his more ubermentschian libertarian stuff, like Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

I enjoyed every book listed above, but the naturalistic characters in the fantasy setting of Patrick Rothfuss really hit the spot for me more than any of the rest, and I can identify this as one of the primary reasons why.

PS: Isn’t ‘The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress’  a wonderful sentence?