Adventure Gamers - Forums

lakerz - 29 January 2017 04:33 PM

Are you playing this game on an emulator?  I admit I have not played around with the various console emulators too much.

Yes. Even though I have a bunch of old computers and consoles in the closet, I would never actually consider using the real hardware anymore unless I had no other choice. Emulation is so much better. You can save anywhere and at any time with save states. You get faster load times. There are no physical disks to deal with. Plus you can multitask by playing the game in a window while keeping track of other things.

This is also convenient when I’m playing a game in a language I don’t understand as I can have a web browser open to a machine translation and/or OCR site and translate things as I play, though I generally only bother if I’m stuck or confused about something as I don’t really care much about the story.

In the last year I’ve played games on about 30 different platforms, so I’ve been using a lot of different emulators. I use virtual machines as well, though that’s almost entirely for Win9x, either through VirtualBox or QEMU. If you or anyone ever has questions about emulation, feel free to ask. I may not have all the answers but there’s a good chance I might have come across some common issues.

Thanks for sharing!

No problem. It seems a shame for me to play all these games hardly anyone else does and not a least share some screenshots now and then.

Here’s another uncommon game I played recently:

Monster Palace (1997) (Windows)

This is a first person, Italian language cartoon inventory puzzle based game with a campy Halloween horror shtick obviously meant to appeal to kids. I thought it was pretty decent for what it was.

The pics:

Which is your preferred emulator for PS1?  I have yet to use virtual PC programs, just been using DosBox and/or SCUMMVM for some classic PC games.  I know I have a few old PC games that will likely need to use a virtual image of Win98 or even Win95 and/or win3.1.  I’ve been kind of putting off those games till a later time.

You must be setting a world record or something in playing games on 30 different consoles in the same calendar year, LOL.  Pretty cool!

lakerz - 31 January 2017 12:21 AM

Which is your preferred emulator for PS1?

I typically use ePSXe. It seems to have the best game compatibility for me.

Today’s walk down obscurity lane comes from the Dutch:

The Red Light District (1997) (Windows)

Yes, this is exactly what you think it is.

I don’t understand Dutch and didn’t translate all that much but I believe you play the role of the son of the world’s wealthiest businessman who has gone to Amsterdam to take over the family business who decides to lie to his wife about working late so he can sneak out for a night of debauchery.

At first I thought this was some sort of cheat on your wife game, but it turns out your wife is a gold digger who is only interested in your money and is conspiring with her secret lover to catch you in the act of doing something improper so she can get rich off the divorce. So with the help of a co-worker, a disguise and some ingenuity, you head out to the Red Light District to get laid without getting caught or catching something yourself.

Once there you can get high, watch peepshows, gamble, have sex with hookers and so on. The goal of the game is to have sex with a specific person though, so you’ll have to jump through a lot of hoops to attain your goal. In the end, this is a just a soft-porn adult adventure game with some simulated POV live action FMV sex acts as a final reward.

Here are the screenshots:

Title Screen:

Your office:

In disguise:

I think this guy’s a drug dealer:

Exploring the town:

The entrance to a hotel:

What is it with adult games and trivia questions?

The woman you’ve been looking for:

Since we are on the subject of adult games, here’s another one I played recently:

Night Crawling (1983) (MSX)

This is a Japanese text adventure for Microsoft’s MSX-DOS OS but the entire game is in (broken) English. Its untranslated title is Yobai, about which I will simply post the Wikipedia text on the subject for your edification:

Yobai is an ancient Japanese custom that was usually practiced by young unmarried men and women. It was once common all over Japan and was practiced in some rural areas until the beginning of the Meiji period and even into the 20th century.

According to ethnologist Akamatsu Keisuke, the practice varied from place to place. In some places any post-puberty woman, married or unmarried, could be visited by any post-puberty man, married or unmarried, from the village and even by men from other villages and travellers. In some places, only married women and widows could be visited, while single girls could not. And there were variations; for example, the “closed type” yobai was a custom in which only men from the same village had the right of visitation.

Now that you have some context, you’ll note that this game isn’t concerned with that whole “consent” thing as you can see by the opening text:

I quit playing this game after maybe 5-10 minutes so I can’t really say much about it, but here I am getting caught in the act of breaking into the mansion:

It’s highly doubtful that I will ever revisit this game as it doesn’t really interest me, but yes, rape games have been around since the earliest days of gaming. This might be the first adventure game about it. The only other adult game I’ve played from back then is Softporn Adventure though, so I’m not really very knowledgeable on the subject.

Some of you may know that I like horror, but there’s something I actually like even more and that is Surrealist Art, which brings me to today’s obscure game:

Surreality: Expressions of the Unconscious (2003) (Windows)

This is a Portuguese language edutainment adventure game (now freeware) about the history and forms of Surrealist expression including many examples of artwork from famous artists like Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer and more. It even features in its entirety the 1929 surrealist film An Andalusian Dog by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel; a film deliberately made to make no rational sense or contain any symbolism.

The gameplay is first person slideshow and features trivia questions on the Surrealist movement, inventory puzzles, dialogue puzzles and even an arcade mini-game.

Sadly, I have yet to finish this game. The arcade game has two levels. The first is relatively easy, but the second is absolutely impossible for me to beat. I don’t know if this is due to playing it in a VM or what, but the controls are just too sluggish for the speed of the game. I’m going to have to try this on an actual Win98 machine.

It would be absolutely hilarious though if the arcade game isn’t even important to finishing the game and I’m actually stuck on something else entirely and quit playing on that false assumption. I’m definitely going to try and finish this game in the future though.

The pics:

Title Screen:

Starting Location:

Book on Surrealist history:

Famous Artist slideshow:

Conversing with the Oracle:

Artwork by the game designer:

Watching “An Andalusian Dog” in the theater:

Creepy hallway:

This lady needs a laugh:

The arcade game from Hell:

Sir Beardalot - 01 February 2017 09:51 PM

Thanks D! I’m also a huge fan of surrealism. I’m gonna give this one a try. I don’t speak Portuguese but I did take 2 yrs of Spanish in high school. It’s been over 20 yrs but maybe I’ll remember enough to enjoy the experience And if all else fails I’ll just use a translator!

Good luck! Hopefully the arcade sequence will be easier for you. I still need to try it on actual hardware though. Maybe it’s not as bad then.

If you’re a Lovecraft fan and trying to play all the games dealing with his work, then here’s a game you’ll eventually need to play:

...Something’s Here! (1998) (PS1)

This is a Japanese language PlayStation 1 game whose original untranslated name is ...Iru!. It features a bunch of creatures from the Cthulhu Mythos, notably Deep ones and the Spawn of Cthulhu himself. Gameplay primarily consists of inventory puzzles and dialogues.

This game can be rather boring at times due to its extreme linearity, leaving you wandering around the school trying to find out where the next trigger is to advance the plot, but it has its moments. Getting the bad ending and seeing Cthulhu’s spawn rise up to kill you and conquer the world is always fun.

Title Screen:

Creepy picture to hang in a school:

It doesn’t look friendly:

A Deep One:

It’s just a flesh wound:

The old statue crying tears of blood trope:

Your friend is about to become Cthulhu chow:

When you think you’ve played quite a lot AGs, think again. Number of those obscurities you’ve played, D is just unbelievable!  
This one is for you, Advie

I played Surreality: Expressions of the Unconcscious on an actual Win98 machine just now and was easily able to get through the arcade game on my first try and that includes the 3rd level I didn’t know about, so the problem was entirely due to playing in a VM.

Needless to say I am quite happy about that and am off to try to finish the game now.

BTW, the game does run in Win7 x64, but some of the videos don’t play due to a missing codec (on my PC anyway), which is probably why I was playing in a VM to begin with as they play in Win98SE without any problem.

Surreality looks cool, I may have to track down a copy.  Except I no longer have a working Win98SE hardware set up.  You should make a saved game for right after the arcade part, for now you may have piqued others interest in playing this game. 

Iru also looks interesting.  There are so many Japan only horror adventures for PS1 and PS2 that never made it to US shores.  I found a youtube Let’s Play for this one, bookmarked it for later.

That Red Light District game looks ... err ... unique. 

As always, thanks for posting and taking the time to upload all the screen captures.

There are some Polish adventure games worth a look. I don’t know if they are obscure but here is a list:

Teenagent - great puzzles and engaging story, highly recommended. There is english version as well and its freeware.

Ksiaze i Tchorz - beautiful hand drawn graphics, the puzzles and story is not as good but worth playing. Though I don’t know if there is english version.

Skaut Kwatermaster - DOTT influence is definetly strong here.

Kajko i Kokosz - Great adventure game based on polish comics.