Articles

JA Sells Out!

That’s right, we’re
selling out of games faster than we can stock them! Our new online
game store is a rip-roaring success
and keep in mind, every game you purchase from the JA Store goes
to support my Diet Pepsi habit.

Many of our readers have
written over the years that it has become difficult to find new
adventure games in their local stores. Well,
problem solved as we have all of the new releases and even offer
pre-orders so you don’t have to worry about trudging through
the snow in the middle of winter only to be disappointed when the
store clerk stares at you blankly while muttering, “What’s
an adventure game?”

My Mummy Will Dig This News

While I cannot yet reveal
all of the details – and there are
some huge surprises in store – I know the adventure community will
be thrilled to learn that Jeff & Karen Tobler have negotiated
back the rights to Riddle of the Sphinx I and Riddle of the
Sphinx III from Dreamcatcher!

What this means is that
Jeff’s company, Omni
Creative will
be republishing the first Riddle of the Sphinx (albeit with some
soon-to-be announced improvements) and publishing Riddle
of the Sphinx III, which was never released by Dreamcatcher! This is in addition
to the upcoming Egypt’s
Ancient Mysteries.

How Jeff manages to juggle all of these different projects is amazing,
but he has promised JA readers some more exclusive news very soon.

The G is for Gratuitous Violence

A year ago I cancelled
my digital cable so I wouldn’t be tempted
to watch the car-wreck known as G4 TV. Now, my local cable provider
has dropped G4 down to the basic programming tier. And God help me,
I couldn’t help myself, but I peeked – and now my bombarded
brain synapses are close to inducing a massive seizure.

Every time I tune into
G4 – and I mean every single time – they
are either showing video characters fighting, cars wrecking or someone
or something getting blown away by a BFG. Or maybe this is just the
sad state of the industry, but we know better, don’t we?

Besides the insufferable
– excluding Adam who rocks – hosts (could Morgan Webb be more cloying
with her condescending face contortions
and smirking) my ‘favorite’ moment has to be the Judgment
Day installment in which Tommy
Tallarico actually reviewed Advent
Rising, a game for which he composed the score and sound effects
and even admitted such upfront! Sheesh. Can you imagine the uproar
if Quentin Tarantino would review his next movie in the New York
Times or Stephen King his newest novel?! But in the game industry,
it seems
anything goes, no matter how unethical.

Paradise Found

Ubisoft to be publish
Benoit Sokal’s Paradise next year! Atari’s
Indigo Prophecy getting rave reviews. The Adventure Company’s
Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None receives major marketing
push. Adventures Phoenix Wright & Trace
Memory hot items on the
Nintendo DS.

What was that Computer
Gaming World said about ‘some of the
bigger developers abandoning adventure games for other genres?’

Things That Make
You Go Hmmm…..

On September 7th, Atari
announced that Indigo Prophecy had ‘gone
gold’ and that development was complete. ‘Gone gold’ means
that the game has gone to the duplicator and will usually be in the
stores within the next 2-3 weeks. Gold copies are also considered
reviewable product – as compared to a beta or unfinished copy – and
this is what is usually sent to magazines and websites.

On September 19th, the
November issue of PSM (100% Independent Playstation 2 Magazine
is proudly displayed on the masthead) magazine arrived
in the mail. On page 74 is a nice, albeit short, review of Indigo
Prophecy. Most game magazines have at least a two-month lead-time,
meaning articles or reviews must be submitted at least two months
before the street date. Even if the PSM reviewer only had a one-month
lead (which I seriously doubt), then he would have had the game well
before August 19th – taking into account the time spent to
complete it – at the very least 3 weeks before it went ‘gold’.
Hmmmm…..

Things That Make You Go Hmmm….. Part 2

Majesco management recently
issued a press statement that the company – publishers
of Psychonauts, Advent Rising and the jiggle-fest Bloodrayne – was
on the verge of bankruptcy and warned investors against purchasing
company stock.

What’s ironic, is that the critically acclaimed, but sluggish-selling
platformer, Psychonauts was supposed to be Tim Schafer’s answer
to the supposedly dead
adventure genre. Last I checked though, there
seemed to be more than a few adventure games on the horizon and not
so many platform games. Hmmmm…..

Half a Tex Murphy is Better Then None

Because I’m starting to feel somewhat lazy at this point,
I’ll just share this email from Peter Rasmussen verbatim:

Hello Randy

Some months ago you helped
me track down Chris Jones. I thought you and Just Adventure readers
might like to know the project has advanced now to the point
where the Australian director Jackie Turnure will be flying to Salt Lake
City to do a voice record with Chris Jones in late November.

Fans
of Chris from the Tex Murphy adventures can look forward to again
enjoying his dry delivery in this 3D animated Sci-fi detective story “Stolen
Life”.

Stolen Life is being created
in the exciting new medium called Machinima. This is animation
in a game engine of the kine used for 3D
first person
shooters.

Chris stars opposite
Claudia Black of the sci-fi series “Farscape” who
we will be recording in Sydney in early November.

Once the record is
done we will be putting together some brief teasers so everyone
can get a taste of what is to come. More info can be
found at the Nanoflix website.

On Your Marks, Get Set, Read!

Stephen Granade informs
us that the 11th annual 2005 Interactive
Fiction Competition for
short text adventures is now underway. Anyone
can download the games, play them and rate them. Speaking of text
adventures…..

PC Gamer – which does
not review even half of the adventure games released yet someone
manages to locate every single first-person-shooter
or war simulation, including those developed by 13-year-old boys
and released as freeware – decided to review Malinche
Entertainment’s
recent text adventure The First Mile. While I have not played the
game and cannot comment on their final score of 19%, PC Gamer should
be applauded for breaking new ground by reviewing a text adventure
(Ha, fooled you, bet you thought I was going to make some smarmy
remark about PC Gamer!).

Hello, Sailor

Harvey Patterson of Classic
Dos Games is a man on a mission. C|Net recently posted an article ‘Gratis gaming: 10 Real PC games
you Can Download for Free’, and the original Zork Trilogy was
listed. When informed that the Zork Trilogy is not freeware, it was
removed from C/Net.

Now Harvey wants to ask “nothing
more from Activision than that they add the game to their online
store and tell everyone there
is no tech support for it, or release a game they haven’t sold for
years as freeware. There is probably no possibility of profiting
from the original trilogy any more, but they can score a PR victory
and earn fan loyalty out of a freeware release, and make the news
on many websites, and that translates into future sales. If they
can’t make money off of selling the games, maybe they can make money
off of giving them away, if you get what I mean. I think that this
petition is a hundred times more likely to succeed than a petition
to produce a whole new game, and I hope you will support this initiative
on your website.

Now, while I am opposed to abandonware sites in general, Classic
Dos Games is one of the very few that offers only legally permitted
downloads. Harvey has an online
petition that he will be submitting
to the Activision legal department and it needs your signature.

Goodbye Sailor

As many of you are probably
aware by now, Vivendi threatened legal action to shut down the
fanmade King’s Quest IX: Every Cloak
Has a Silver Lining.

A group of concerned fans, led by Koko Cat, have started a Save
KQIX campaign. You can learn at the official
site and, hopefully,
become involved in this effort to save a much anticipated game.

There’s more behind Vivendi’s
decision than has been revealed and we hope to soon impart more
details.