I suppose I should technically put "Hero Quest I" in the title, but I'll get to that ( Read more... )

When I was young and had newly acquired an original Nintendo, I went shopping one day for a game with my parents. I fixated on a game--I no longer remember what it was--and told my father that I wanted it. He looked it at dubiously and suggested something different, a game I had never heard of called Maniac Mansion. I looked at the cover, with the ( Read more... )

Ah, shareware. Source of so much of my gaming in the 90s. It's how I played Castle of the Winds, Jill of the Jungle, Solar Winds, Aethra Chronicles, Doom, and a ton of other titles, a lot of which were forgettable. This one, for some reason, stuck with me. Maybe because unlike the other ones I mentioned, I never managed to beat it the first time ( Read more... )

Wadjet Eye is one of those names I've heard multiple times in connection with the revival of point-and-click adventure games as a mainstream concern. Not that they ever went anywhere, really--Hardcoregaming101's Guide to Classic Adventure Games points out that the problem was never that adventure games were losing popularity. They just weren't ( Read more... )

The Gabriel Knight games are one of the few game series where my sister can claim more knowledge than I can. She bought Gabriel Knight III when it came out, and while I never played it because of the III in its name--which seems odd in hindsight, because I had no problem starting King's Quest with King's Quest V, other than fifteen minutes played ( Read more... )

I'm not sure how generally useful or applicable this review will be, even beyond the normal subjectivity that is inherent in any kind of review, because Heroine's Quest is a direct homage to the old Hero's Quest / Quest for Glory series of games and those were foundational for me as a young child. I'm not sure why I took to them as well as I did, ( Read more... )

I honestly think that some of the reason I love roguelikes so much, why I mod games like Oblivion and Skyrim and Fallout 3 and XCom to be much harder, and why I'm so excited to play Dark Souls is because I grew up on Sierra adventure games. You have died isn't exactly something I'm unfamiliar with. Neither is permadeath, really--realizing that you ( Read more... )