Point and Click

Ok, so I’ve been playing a lot of games recently from retro classics like Another World (which I remembered as being far more fun than it actually is) to modern classics like The Sword of Fargoal, a rebooted classic which is far more fun than it should be.

But by far the best gaming discovery I have made lately is ScummVm , an emulator for PC/OSX which allows you to play all the old classic point an click adventures. Most of the games are at least 20 years old so are not everyone’s cup of tea, but there are some real classics out there. The graphics are not great compared to modern games (although the animations can be superb) but they easily make up for this with great atmosphere and interesting and often humorous story lines.

So far I have played though Beneath a Steel Sky, Simon the Sorcerer, I have no mouth and I must scream and Full Throttle and currently I’m working my way though Broken Sword which is by far the best so far.

There are quite a few I would like to try as I was probably too young to appreciate them the first time round. I might blog some short reviews as I play though.

These games because of their age are generally categorised as abandonware, this means that they are often available for free on a number of websites because modern computer systems can’t support them and they are no longer commercially available. It’s a bit of a grey area but the software houses and original creators don’t seem to be making of a fuss about it.

Adventure Games and Interactive Fiction

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for the 1980′s choose your own adventure books and computer text adventure games such as Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork (although I never got very far with them). Recently I watched a great documentary called “Get Lamp”. I was surprised to learn that text adventures or interactive fiction is going strong. Whilst I am not ready to tackle something as challenging as Zork there is a lot of great Interactive Fiction available at the Interactive Fiction Database IFDB to play on-line, even better there is a great app called Frotz which allows you to play them on your iPhone / iPad.

There are also a few choose your own adventure books for the iPhone/iPad, I’ve just finished ‘An Assassin in Orlandes’ by Tin Man Games which as much as I hate to admit was 10x better than the old books.

glorious MUD(s)

Something that I should give a short mention to while writing all this stuff about adventure games is Multi User Dungeons (MUD). I have fairly limited experience of them having only spent a few evenings playing around in a deserted and forgotten tiny computer room while at university. In this rather dingy room there were a few old 386 computers that struggled even running windows. They were however connected to the Janet network so it was possible to play some MUDs and I took advantage of this. They were fun and my first experience of online gaming….. and surprisingly some of them are still going strong. There are a number of good terminal interfaces and you can even play them on the iPhone or iPad using apps like Pocket MUD or the TMC game client. I recommend Arrdwolf or Discworld if you are looking for somewhere to start. Sadly I don’t have enough time to spend on MUDs, they are a lot of fun and still have a fairly large following. It’s interesting to compare them to MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. I’m currently using the Atlantis MUD client for MAC OSX which was very easy to set up and get started with.

Trials and tribulations

I downloaded the 30 day trial copy of Scrivener last night. It took me a couple of hours to get to grips with it, but it’s without doubt one of best pieces of writing software I have used, also the most intuitive. Another big bonus, it’s also a lot of fun to use (as you can tell I am excited about it). So I added the bare bones of my story into it last night, characters, locations, research, chapter outlines etc. everything that I had been working on and thinking about …… unfortunately I now can see clearer than ever before that it’s all a huge pile of pants. I’ve basically got 4 weeks left to come up with an interesting plot idea or I might as well forget Nanowrimo this year. Drawing blanks at the moment…. but it’s pretty clear that I need to base the story around something I have at least a small understanding of. Prehaps Biochemistry? A zombie, outbreak type of story would be pretty easy for me because I have seen so many… but how to keep it original?

Writing aspirations.

I remembered today that Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) is just around the corner (start date 1st of November). I’m still considering giving it a go …. although I’m still very short on good ideas at the moment and I do tend to worry about having enough time (poor excuses I know). If I do manage to start I think I will stick with the Ghost story idea. I have the iMac now and there is no shortage of great writing software, so I will probably use Scrivener which looks like it might be a great tool for someone as disorganised as myself and of course My Writing Spot which will allow me to do some sneaky covert writing while at work. The main hurdle is my own inability to stick with anything. Messing around on Plotbot was fun for a while but I couldn’t even stick with that. This will be a huge challenge for me.