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Obscure adventure game discussion thread

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giom - 20 December 2016 06:42 PM

........ Now your turn to add an obscure game to the thread. Based on your quizz you know a few of them Smile

Okay! I don’t know much about this game except that it exists & I’m genuinely interested to know whether anyone has come across it/tried it?

MISSION SUNLIGHT

     

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I bought Mission Sunlight quite a few years back, but it is still in my ‘to play’ queue along with that Monet game that is a spiritual successor I guess?

     

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Anybody hear of an obscure Fujitsu game called VOID?

     
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lakerz - 22 January 2017 08:21 PM

Anybody hear of an obscure Fujitsu game called VOID?

I played it a couple weeks ago. It requires that you use Japanese locale or the game won’t be able to read one of the folders on the CD as it’s named using katakana making it so you cannot progress after a certain point.

Other than that, the only problem I had was that I couldn’t get the restore game function to work and had to play the game all the way through in one sitting. This isn’t really a problem though as the game is extremely short. I didn’t actually time myself, but it seemed about as long as a typical movie, maybe two hours or so, and some of that was spent troubleshooting.

As for language, all the dialogue in the cut scenes are voiced in English with forced Japanese subtitles, while all the text in the game is in Japanese only. If you can’t read Japanese, you can still finish the game and get the basic gist of the story from the English parts, though you will miss a lot of the details. The story isn’t really all that interesting IMO anyway.

The puzzles are extremely easy in the first half of the game. In fact, they’re barely even puzzles at all. You just push buttons, turn cranks and stuff to progress. The latter half of the game gets a little bit more challenging though and features some sound based puzzling. These puzzles weren’t difficult for me, but may pose a problem for the tone deaf. It’s a rather mediocre experience overall.

As for the thread topic, almost everything I play now would be considered obscure to most people. I’ve already played AGs in 7 different languages this month and it’s not even over yet. Smile

 

     

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D - very cool, glad to hear you made it through the whole game.  What type PC did you use?  Emulation to get it running?  Any other special tweaks needed?  When you say change the language at one part of the game, is it obvious when to do that?  Do you mean going into MS Windows settings and changing the whole PC language setting to Japanese?  Or something different? 

What other obscure stuff have you played in the past few months?  Give us details man, details!  And pics!  Smile

     

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Drolin - 20 December 2012 04:05 AM

And anyone here have tried Gadget: Invention, Travel & Adventure (from the creator of Alice: An Interactive Museum)? I couldnt get it running on XP, but as it looks, its my cup of tea.

 

I got it running on a Window98 virtual machine. You can PM me if you want help getting one to work.

I thought it would basically be a Myst-clone, with a Jules Verne-type adventure plot and a focus on inventions. In reality it’s a nightmare fever dream. There are no puzzles, it’s basically an interactive story. I’d compare it to a Lynch movie in some ways - it’s unsettling and surreal.

     
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lakerz - 25 January 2017 02:59 AM

D - very cool, glad to hear you made it through the whole game.  What type PC did you use?  Emulation to get it running?  Any other special tweaks needed?  When you say change the language at one part of the game, is it obvious when to do that?  Do you mean going into MS Windows settings and changing the whole PC language setting to Japanese?  Or something different?

I ran the game in Windows 7 x64, but I had to use Win9x compatibility mode (95 or 98/ME) or I would get a memory error. You’ll also need to set it to run @ 640x480 if you want the game full screen.

As for locale just go to Control Panel > Region and Language > Administrative (tab) > Change System locale > Japanese (Japan). This will allow the game to read the Japanese directories off the CD-ROM. It will also fix some Japanese font issues. You should do this before you play the game and it requires a reboot. Just revert back to English (US) or whatever your normal locale is when you finish playing.

What other obscure stuff have you played in the past few months?  Give us details man, details!  And pics!  Smile

Okay. Here’s one I bet I’m one of the few here to have played:

Nishimura Kyoutarou Travel Mystery: Season of Brutality - The Tokyo-Nanki-Shirahama Murders (1994) (3DO)

This is an adventure game exclusive to the Panasonic 3DO in Japan. It’s a live action FMV game in which you play the part of 5 detectives in a Police homicide department investigating a string of murders.

The player characters:

The 1st homicide:

Gameplay largely consists of questioning witnesses to find clues and exploring crime scenes and other places of note in typical adventure game fashion as you can see below.

Does this guy have any info for you or is it a dead end?

The first exploration area. Can you find any clues?

The info you accumulate is stored in the computers at the police station:

This game doesn’t haven’t any inventory puzzles in the usual sense though it has a handful of items such as photographs that you need to use on witnesses to get more information out of them.

You’ll later have to do things like use a computer to create a suspect sketch based on a witness description, interrogate suspects and answer questions about the investigation by typing the answers in, meaning this game cannot be finished by someone who doesn’t understand Japanese without the help of a walkthrough or a translation.

You also have limited moves per time segment (notice the shoes on the upper right), so you have to choose where you go wisely.

This game was remade 15 years later for Sony’s PSP, but without FMV, utilizing 3D backdrops and silhouettes (shudder).

Compare this PSP shot to 1st homicide 3DO pic above:

The game also has more than one ending. You can choose whether to let the killer go free or not.

Well, that’s enough for today. I’ll post some more games another day.

     
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Since the last few games were Japanese, I’ll talk a little about a French game called:

The Mystery: XIII (1997) (Windows)

This game is based on the Belgian comic XIII created by Jean Van Hamme and William Vance in which you play a reporter investigating the assassination of the President. It’s basically an interactive comic with some exploration and some puzzles thrown in for good measure. Most of the time you will simply explore scenes, click on things and then read scanned in scenes from the actual comic books.

The puzzles are all rather easy, though some are timed. The good thing about the timed ones is that there is no real penalty for failure. The sequence just restarts with the clock reset and you immediately try again.

Timed puzzle:

Your office, the starting location:

Near a cemetery by Capitol Hill:

One of the scenes from the comics:

I actually really enjoyed this game as I really liked the artwork and the events that occur in the game are fun and interesting.

     
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Here’s one of the few adventure games I’ve played recently that is actually in English and probably considered obscure to some people:

Detritus: The Daemons Quest (1995) (DOS)

This game is simultaneously short and extremely easy while being practically impossible at the same time due to there being a pretty much unavoidable dead end that will occur simply by talking to someone the game tells you to talk to. Doing so will make it impossible for you to get an item necessary to progress to the second half of the game.

However, once you know that, it’s easy sailing from then on. You might get stuck due to a little pixel hunting or something, but there are no difficult puzzles. People either outright tell you what items they want, making the puzzles simple fetch quests, or they tell you nothing at all forcing you to brute force your inventory on them until you magically find out they wanted something from you that they never bothered to tell you about and that you have no inkling they may even want through any other means.

It’s a pretty bad game. In addition to the horrible scripting bug that breaks the game that I’ve already mentioned, the game will crash every 10 minutes or so with some sort of GOSUB error so you pretty much need to save every single time you accomplish anything at all.

That’s all I’ve got. Here’s the screenshots:

     
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Cool, I didn’t know there was an adventure game based on XIII. I loved Van Hamme’s comics as a kid, so I’ll have to try it Smile

     
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Here’s an obscure German game I played recently:

Mystic House (1997) (Windows)

It’s a pretty short and easy game that seems to be rather tongue-in-cheek, perhaps even aimed towards children. It’s hard to say though as I don’t understand German, which wasn’t really much of a problem for me. There are dialogue puzzles, but I found it rather easy to brute force my way through them. The house has a couple of ghosts, a goblin/troll thingie in the attic and some sort of black-robed bad guy you face off with at the end. I obviously don’t know the story, but that’s probably a good thing.

Here are some screenshots:

     

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D - first of all, thanks for the set up info on that VOID game.  I appreciate it and am sure it will be helpful when I take the plunge in trying to get it running.

Secondly, WOW, thanks for posting about some of these really obscure and/or non-English language adventure games.  I love this stuff!

I don’t believe I had ever come across previous mention of that 3DO Japan game.  It sounds funky, maybe a little bit like those old ‘Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective’ games that I played eons ago on my Turbografx-16 CD-ROM machine.  I think they later were released for the PC.  Lots of FMV and tons of dialogue and interrogations.

Mystic House is a German I have heard of (think I saw it listed on the adventure-archiv website that lists a lot of German games.  It looked pretty interesting, but I never ran across a copy myself.  There’s actually quite a few cool looking German language oldschool adventure titles that looked interesting from that site.

I do own a copy of Detritus.  I have yet to try installing it or play it though.  I could only track down a German language boxed copy, but the seller included a cd-rom of the English language version.  If you don’t mind, can you send me a PM (or post here) which character you should not talk to that leads to the dead end?  I’d appreciate it for future notice.

Thanks again, I hope you keep posting some of the very unusual titles you come across.

     
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lakerz - 28 January 2017 04:54 PM

If you don’t mind, can you send me a PM (or post here) which character you should not talk to that leads to the dead end?  I’d appreciate it for future notice.

The person you shouldn’t talk to is the one in the white shirt about to be burned in this screenshot:

Only after you give him something he wants and he gives you the crystal in return, should you talk to him.

If you don’t want to brute force giving him everything until you find the right item:

HINT: He’s thirsty.

ANSWER: Give him some ale.

     
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Here’s another obscure Japanese game:

Tokyo Shadow (1996) (PS1)

This is a Playstation 1 FMV horror game. You navigate the world in a first person photo-based slideshow format (with occasional 3D backdrops) triggering movies when you are at certain locations.

There are locations where you get to explore with your magnifying glass looking for items and such but there are no inventory puzzles. Any items you pick up simply appear as additional choices in the multiple choice visual novel style format the game employs. For example, you might find a gun earlier in the game and then get an additional choice to use it at certain points later in the game.

The choices you make and the items you find and use, affect how the story plays out and allows you to see alternate versions of the various scenes of which there are a massive amount. This also affects which endings you get to see, of which there are around 50 or so. Most of those endings are just failure states, but if I recall correctly there are 5 different final endings with multiple variations of each depending on your choices.

The game is quite helpful in giving you a flowchart that depicts what locations you have or haven’t found, but it can still be tricky to get everything. I played through the game 7 times, not including various partial playthroughs, and I still had about 10 areas/scenes left to find.

I’d talk about the story, but the game has a twist very early in the game that I don’t want to spoil. If you like campy, bizarre Japanese horror though, you might enjoy this. It does feature a fair amount of gore as well.

Anyway, here are some screenshots:

     

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Thanks for the hint about the Detritus bug.  Definitely keeping it handy for future reference.

Tokyo Shadow looks hilarious.  Are you playing this game on an emulator?  I admit I have not played around with the various console emulators too much.  Sure are a treasure trove of non-US console games out there that generated a good amount of buzz.  Snatcher being an obvious one.  Tokyo Shadow looks to be one where familiarity of Japanese written/verbal language is a must.  Thanks for sharing!

     

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