Articles

ADVENTURE – THE
GENRE THAT DOES SELL

Herewith posted for your
perusal are the March
sales figures as provided by PC Data. As usual these figures do not
include online or overseas sales, both of which comprise a large
portion of adventure game purchases:

E3 OR BUST

With
any luck and my health permitting, I should be exploring the hectic
floors of the E3
right about now. But fear not, even if I don’t make it Valerie Davis
and Ray Ivey will be scurrying about pestering companies for information.
Sure, it’s a breeze for anyone to acquire mainstream information on
Lucas Art’s or Dreamcatcher’s upcoming releases, but we’re masters
at uncovering those hidden gems! And next week we should have our
yearly E3 round-up available for your reading pleasure.

ALL HAIL SCORPIA

Remember Scorpia? Of course
you do! For those who need a refresher, you can read an interview
I conducted with the mistress of adventure or just pick-up any issue
of Computer Gaming World before they went testosterone crazy.

For
those who have fond memories of Scorpia,
look no further than Just Adventure as we will soon be posting her
past reviews on a weekly basis and will also be adding Scorpia’s extensive
catalogue of walkthroughs. Now I hear you saying to yourself, “C’mon
Randy these are all reviews of older games.” Well, let me ask
you this, how long do you think it will take before I wield my irresistible
charm to convince Scorpia to begin reviewing newer games for Just
Adventure (hee hee)?

DIRECT-TO-VIDEO

How much longer do we have
to wait before Hollywood wakes-up and instead of catering to the 12-year
old mentality, films a movie based on Gabriel Knight or Tex
Murphy? Sure they don’t have the marquee value of Mario Brothers
or Mortal Kombat, but you can stick the paper-thin plots of
these movies and Final Fantasy and Resident Evil in
a thimble. In fact, one only had to see the previews for Resident
Evil to know it was a piece of crap. Even worse though is that
an editor of one of the video gaming magazines recently complained
that these video game movies would be better if only more money were
spent on their production. He just don’t get it, does he?

WE BUY THE GAMES JUST
FOR THE BOXES

We were recently informed
that our own Harriet Gurganus is to be quoted on the Zelenhgorm
box when it is released! Not only that, but our review of Watchmaker
is to also be quoted. We purposely do not write a lot of previews
and have long been quite vocal about magazines and webzines that write
5 page previews of a game followed by a half-page review months later.
For that reason, the few previews we do are intentionally short.

But it is also great not
only for Just Adventure but also for the adventure community as a
whole to see the name Just Adventure on a box in a retail store. Imagine
how many people who have never heard of JA will now pick up that box
and visit the site and imagine how much stronger this makes the adventure
community. So Shakespeare we may not be, but make sure to read those
box quotes!

SIMON SAYS, BUY THIS
GAME

We are currently attempting
a new approach to marketing adventure games that can’t find shelf
space at your local gaming store. We now have a direct link offering
the long-awaited Simon 3D at a special
price for Just Adventure readers. As an added incentive, each
copy of Simon 3D sold through this JA link earns us a small
commission that keeps our currently unhealthy staff with medical supplies.

We also have a link for
you to purchase
Watchmaker. We reviewed Watchmaker
a few months ago and feel it should be in every adventure gamer’s
collection. Keep the adventure community strong buy showing support
by ordering directly from the publishers.

AMATEURS NO MORE

One thing we neglected
to mention in our previous ‘State of Adventure Gaming’ were the winners
of the Amateur
Adventure Awards. Well it’s still not too late to check out the
winners for yourself and get a heads-up on the people who will be
developing games for us in the near future.

CHA..CHA..CHA..CHA…CHANGES

Yes, Just Adventure is
undergoing a lot of changes and adding tons of new staff members.
We promised a long time ago to cover all aspects of adventure gaming
and we are working hard to do so.

Some
readers have noticed an influx of reviews of console-based action/adventure
games as we prepare to split Just Adventure into two separate, but
linked, sites – console action/adventure and pc point-and-click. Plus,
on the PC side, besides the wonderful addition of Scorpia, plans are
also afoot to add an all-new Infocom section. Our collection of adventure
game walkthroughs will soon be the most comprehensive on the Internet
as will our links to downloadable, playable adventure games.

Some have also noticed
that our newest reviewer, Robert Freese, used to write reviews for
America On-Line. No surprise there, we only hire the best. So when
you have a moment, how about dropping your favorite JA person an email
and letting them know how much you appreciate the hard work they perform
tracking down the adventure games and keeping the genre alive. Put
your hands together for not only the best adventure staff on the Internet,
but also one of the best webzine game staffs, period: Tom Houston,
Harriet Gurganus, Valerie Davis, Adam Rodman, Robert Freese , Ray
Ivey, Dawn Johnson, Joe Waddington, Cindy Kyser, Michal Necasek, Audrey
Wells, Alex Tait, Matthew Desmond, Scorpia, James Korwak, Jeff Strand,
Mark Walker, Jennifer Miller, Scott Jelinek and as for me, I’m Randy
and I’m outta here!

Until next month, happy
adventuring.