Adventure Gamers - Forums

Yup it is one of two casual Nancy Drew games released. As usual - got it for $4 bucks at half-price books. The mini-games are a bit much, but the puzzles, while simple are fun to solve.

I played the demo of Beyond Light Advent, and bought it. It’s an interesting game. Quite true to the way Becky described it in her AGSotD posting.

She posed the question of why this other planet seemed so interested in saving Earth. Well, to start, if they weren’t there would be no game to play!

But the real answer has to lie with Nix, her imaginary Earth friend, who turns out to be a real person from the other world. This, unfortunately gets very confusing in the demo, and I hope some of it gets straightened out as I continue playing the game.

Nix is her imaginary friend who turns out to be a real person. Only this real person is from another world. So their minds/thoughts must have in some way connected over the gazillion miles of space. OK, I can buy that. I can even buy the idea that Nix’ people developed warp drive so that he could fly those gazillion miles so he could arrive at Earth one day before the bad guys appear. But then, at the very end of the demo, when they activated one of the three shields that will save Earth, Nix says something to the effect that he knows where the second shield is located because his father was an engineer on the project. WHAT?????!!!! How can he be an imaginary/real friend from another world and have a father who was an Earthling engineer who worked on a defense project?

Confused hardly describes my thinking process. We will see how this all plays out.

I finished Beyond Light Advent, and I found it enjoyable. Mabye a 3.5/5.

I will say that the game did little to clear up the confusion I mentioned in the above message. We did meet Nix’s father, who appears to be in his 50’s. Nix, himself, appears to be in his mid-20’s. But if Nix’s father was an engineer on the shielding devices, and he did so at a time that would preclude observation by any contemporary human, he would have to be 3000+ years old. That puts a big dent in the plausibility factor.

Yes, I know “It’s just a game!” as my wife is fond of telling me. Then there is Carl, our protagonist Diane’s co-worker at the observatory. He also turns out to be an alien who is at least as old as Nix. How long has he been residing on Earth? How long has he avoided detection as a never-aging nerd who’s primary objective is scouting for a conquerable planet, the co-ordinates of which he will trade to the invaders in exchange for his own planet’s survival?

This is a Mad Head game, by the way. I’ve come to like their output of late. Although this game, to me, isn’t their best. The graphics are very good. The music is good. Even the voice acting, which could have taken a really bad turn if dialects had been allowed into the mix, are pretty good. There are HO scenes, but not as many as I thought there might be. The puzzles ranged from fairly easy to infuriating. Not necessarily because they were hard, although some of them were fairly difficult, but because the mechanics of the puzzle were not well implemented. For example, in one puzzle it was obvious that different parts of the device had to be rotated in order to achieve the stated objective, but getting the parts to rotate using the puzzle’s controls was impossible.

On the bright side, Beyond Light Advent is truly a space-oriented science fiction game. There are very few of them out there. So, for those of us who enjoy the theme, we take what we can get. Even if it comes with a few too many flaws.

I think there were about five or six list-based HO screens. Which isn’t a lot based on many of the games we play. My coming AGSotD has MANY more.

Re: Nix and Father, when I said “contemporary” I meant just about any sentient creature post australopithicus. But then all the defenses were built in a small location in North America. So I suppose they could have been constructed in pre-1800 Wyoming, and nobody would have noticed. To me, the fact that Nix’s ship was noticed somewhat negates the idea that they could have built this under our “modern” noses, and nobody would notice.

I’ll speculate that the Iridessans were developing their shield technology, but it was too late to implement it prior to their invasion. But that means that Diane would have to travel back in time to meet P’Tula and Nix’s father. Which makes her meeting Nix in real time implausible. The sequence of time in this game is a bit confusing.

The puzzle I was referring to was the four squares where you had to move the die through all four squares to get from point A to point B. Maybe it was a bug, but in order to do same, it is required to move each square both clockwise and counter-clockwise. I was only able to move the squares clockwise. Although, even if I had been able to get the controls to work, this is the type of tedious puzzle I hate. Interestingly, when I skipped the puzzle, it showed the squares moving in both directions, as I assumed they would have to. There were three other puzzles I had this type of problem with.

We discussed Maze: Subject 360 in the last casual playthrough voting session. At that time it was only available as a CE. I’m not sure when it happened, but it is now available as an SE. I bought it today. Will let you know what I think once I get past the part where the CE demo left off.

Speaking of which, is time to consider a new CCPT?

Since everybody seemed to like E.P.I.C. Wishmaster, I downloaded the demo from the Mac App Store. It seemed interesting and worked fine so I got the full version, which is an entirely separate download and you have to start over from zero. Well, the video in the full version is utterly glacially slow. The cursor lags and the cut scenes are ridiculous. So my question is, has the Mac version always been like this? Did everybody play the Windows version, which for some reason is no longer available? I’ve gotten pretty far in and I will probably continue, but it’s a real exercise in patience. Also I have to skip any timed puzzles. 

I’ve never played the Mac version. The only member of our regular crew that plays games on a Mac is Lady K. I don’t know if she has ever played this game on her system. Hopefully she will read this and respond. I have never experienced the type of slowdowns you have experienced on my PC.

Regarding PC availability: If you ever bought the game from BFG and, for whatever reason deleted it from your system, you can re-install it from their site. You just can’t buy it from their site.

There was a site from which you could buy the PC version, but just like BFG, you had to download and install the game client in order to download and install the game. I’ve not looked into this recently, so I don’t know if the site still exists. As long as the site was virus/malware free, downloading the client to get the game didn’t seem to be an unreasonable request. It could all be deleted once you were no longer interested in playing the game.

This is a fairly old game. So I don’t know if the Mac version was ever intended to be played on anything other than a Mac computer. I seriously doubt it was ever ported to an I-Pad or similar Apple device. Just because it is available as an App at the Apple store doesn’t mean it was ever intended to run on a portable device.

I haven’t played it.  When you downloaded the full version, did you delete the demo?  I’m thinking there could be a conflict between the two.  What kind Mac are you using?  I play my games on an iMac.

I think it may have been Iznogood who reported the problem. Although I don’t recall what software, other than the game client, was downloaded with the game. I do recall that the extraneous stuff was easy to uninstall, but that it took time to do so. Requiring that you download the client isn’t onerous to me. I have the BFG client on my machine. And the GOG client; and the GamersGate client….. Everyone requires their own installer if you are buying the game from them.

rtrooney - 28 September 2015 10:13 AM

I think it may have been Iznogood who reported the problem.

Among others, yes.

chrissie - 02 January 2015 11:38 AM

I don’t know whether I’ll have time to keep up but I tried to download Wishmaster from Alawar. Alawar doesn’t seem to have any info so I don’t know whether I’ve got a demo or the full game & also to install it I need to accept Alawar’s search engine which I don’t want to so Goodbye Alawar! Alawar seems to be greatly lacking on info if you want to buy a game from them?

Iznogood - 03 January 2015 11:39 AM

Yeah - I actually downloaded and installed the trial version, before reading about Chrissie’s experience first, and speed-clicking through the licence-agreement , and I ended up with all kinds of special-Alwar-shit installed in my browser. Fortunately I was able to get rid of it again (I think) without much trouble, but I have lost all confidence in the site, and don’t trust them enough to actually buy anything from them.

I don’t know if they have changed things in the meantime, so it is now only bundled with a game client, but at the time it was bundled with crapware.

I finished Maze: Subject 360 and really liked it. Thanks to Lady K for recommending it. It certainly has a few of the “jump scares” that Becky seems to like. There was lots of blood, but very little, if any, gore. So while I might classify the game as really scary, I don’t think it fits into the horror genre.

I’m not sure where the word Maze from the title fits into the game. There are a few pseudo mazes that must be worked out on paper. They are about 12-15 steps long. But when you’re put at the start of what you think is the real maze, it’s solved in 5-6 steps no matter what direction you take. It would have been much more interesting if you had to recreate the paper maze while walking the building’s corridors.

The music is sufficiently spooky to match well with the game’s ambiance. The voice acting is fair, at best. One of the main characters has a voice that I thought was “cute” the first time I heard it. By the fourth time I heard it I wanted to put a bullet through her already-dead head!

There was another character, voiced by the same person I believe, that appears later in the game. I took great pleasure aiming my slingshot at her toy pony balloon, and blowing a large hole through the side of it. I clapped as she left the screen crying.

This is another MadHead game. They also did one of the other recent-discussed games, Beyond Light Advent. I think this game is superior. However, I’m still only going to give it 3.5/5 Stars because of some things that bothered me. There are three fairly easy action sequences at the end of the game. I say they’re fairly easy, but only once you know what you’re supposed to do. I had to look at a walkthrough to understand the concept. They were a piece of cake after that. That, and the voice acting kept it from scoring higher.

This is a short game. I finished it in a little over 3 hours. I think a game of this type would make an interesting CCPT. But its brevity and the lack of well-defined break points would make that hard. I’ll play it though if someone else wants to lead it.