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Warpath: Jurassic Park

Oh, it’s that time again. Time to tune in, sit back, put on your best Dino-attire, and listen as I deftly lay out the intricacies of another Jurassic Park game that I’ve sampled in my ongoing, but very slow, quest to play all the Jurassic Park games out there. Given the rich world that the original movie created, I’ve been surprised by the lack of story driven games in the ones I’ve sampled so far. Despite being flawed, only the Telltale offering has embarked upon any kind of meaningful story driven experience. That is until Warpath. Its expanded plot fills in the gaps of the movie’s lore creating a delicately woven web of intrigue, mystery, and suspense that….

… ah, no, wait. It’s just dinosaurs kicking the ever-loving cretaceous out of each other.

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Dark Summit: is better than it has a right to be…

… I mean, sure, that’s a bit of a clickbait-ey title, but let’s face it, when was the last time you heard anyone talk about 2001’s ‘Dark Summit’, a game that I picked up from last week’s Gaming Market in Birmingham on a bit of a whim. My retro-gaming habits tend to be ones of experimentation. If I see an interesting game that I’ve never heard of… and it’s cheap… then I’ll give it a shot, but I wasn’t expecting to give it much more than a quick hour in the GameCube to see just how bad this … snowboarding/action/adventure?… was.

For me, SSX3 holds the crown of snowboarding games, and I’d probably go as far as give it the crown of best reality-pushing extreme sports game. A genre that seemed to peak in the late 90’s and early 00’s. Dark Summit really owes a huge debt to SSX3 with the box proudly proclaiming ‘detachable board tricks’, a continuous mountain experience with the player able to ride form the top to the bottom, avalanches, challenges dotted around the peak, and even a run called “function junction” which will sound very familiar to anyone familiar with “dysfunction junction” in SSX3. Yes, ‘Dark Summit’ really borrowed a lot from ol’ SSX 3 that was released earlier in…. hang on, I’d better go check...

…. Wait? What? SSX3 was released a full two years After Dark Summit?!?….

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‘In the StackZ’ – ACT I of my text adventure can be played now!… or more interestingly “Why I Decided to Write a Text Adventure”

“Get Ye Flask”
… and it say…
“You can’t get ye flask!”
… and you just have to sit there and imagine why on earth you can’t get ye flask…

– StrongBad, 2004

Spare me your blogging nonsense and just let me download the Z-machine file for ‘In the StackZ – Act I’

Text Adventures! … or Text-Based Adventure Games… or Interactive Fiction… or just IF… whatever you call them, I’ve got a weird history with the genre. For younger gamers, who may not even be aware that these are a thing, they are games where the interface is entirely text based, usually looking a little like some kind of terminal window. The player enters instructions on what they want to do, and the game responds with some kind of descriptive text. For those of us who played these many years ago (or still do) then there’s a particular set of instructions, ‘style’, or conventions to the genre that you learn: For example, you can move between areas using compass directions, use key verbs like look to describe what’s around you, ‘i‘ to show your inventory, examine item to hone in on something specific in the scene…. heck, there’s a whole load of them, but you get the idea…

It’s a genre that sits in that interesting space of “It just made sense at the time” and “in hindsight it was basically a work around for the contemporary technical limitations“, which always makes me wonder what aspects of games that are current will be perceived as a ‘workaround’ in the future? For text-adventures, their backdrop was a home console market that could manage some blocky shapes moving around the screen, or early computing that were mostly text only blasted at the user through a green and black screen. Released in 1977, ‘ZORK’ probably represents one of the best known examples, but it’s not a game that I’ve ever played. Short descriptive paragraphs or scenes, characters, and objects served to power the most powerful graphics engine of all… Human Imagination…

… oh yes, I actually went there…

Continue reading “‘In the StackZ’ – ACT I of my text adventure can be played now!… or more interestingly “Why I Decided to Write a Text Adventure””