Titanic: Adventure Out of Time

Well folks, my apartment is filled with boxes and I’ve been going through all my old stuff preparing for my move, so it’s time to go nostalgic again!  Today I’ll be talking about a little known game called “Titanic: Adventure Out of Time”, one that I had a blast playing as a kid and still holds up pretty well today as a graphic adventure game.

A Letter to Bowser

As a sort of project to get myself in front of a camera more (hot damn they make me freeze up) and to cement my nerdiness straight to the core of the earth, I've created a sort of vlog series in which I write letters to video game characters.  Observe:

Special thanks to Dan Charrington for helping it happen.  Hopefully there will be more to come after this!

Top 6 Adventure Game Heroes

In case I haven't made it abundantly clear, I love villains.  They always seem to be the more interesting characters in movies, books, games, you name it.  But they wouldn't be much without a hero to challenge them.  The hero characters of the gaming world are a difficult bunch to write for.  Unlike movies, you'll be following game characters around from anywhere between seven and sixty hours.  If they're too dull, the game becomes dull.  If they're too emo, you'll turn the volume off just to escape their whining.

Every once in a while, a protagonist comes along that is not only interesting but sometimes even more delightful than the villain and it's important to give props to them.  These are my personal favourite heroes of adventure gaming.  And since we're talking about characters you play as, this will be the first Top 6 list without a Myst title!  Woah! (although I am my most favourite hero)  Warning: some spoilers will follow.

Video Times

Hey everyone! I was at a convention last weekend. It was amazing. Instead of typing stuff out, here is a vlog I did with my friend's Dan and Jen. Their links are in the youtube link!

Alternativa

I've written about a number of games by now on this blog, many of them being either nostalgic fun, a new shiny adventure, or a Top 10 list no one agrees with.  So it's with great pleasure that I'm able to talk about a pretty mediocre adventure game: Alternativa.  Warning: spoilers are present for this game you probably won't play.

Guide to Survival Horrors

No games lately, but I'm in a typing mood, so I present:

Manda's Guide to Playing a Survival Horror game:

1. Look for an adventure game.  Find you've played them all.  Out of sheer boredom pick up the one other game you have that requires a gun.
2. Turn out all the lights for atmosphere.
3. Go to menu screen.  Immediately get intimidated by just the screen.
4. Start game.  Spend as much time as possible in the beginning level where you can look at the pretty village/training grounds/abandoned city and be content with this existence.
5. Do this until the game grows weary of your wimpy ways and almost physically push your controller hands to just freakin' get a move on already.
6. Turn back on the lights.
7. Pick up weapon.  Button mash your way to figure out how on earth it works.  Then try to figure out which button mash combination actually made it shoot.
8. Shout in joy when you make it shoot.  Feel somewhat like a caveman discovering fire.  Shoot the wall in glee before you realize that bullets are a finite resource.  Oops.
9. Tell stupid scary music to stop playing.  Realize that music cannot hear you over it's own scariness.
10. Physically jump off the couch when something grumbles and roars in the distance.  Hope no one saw. 
11. Prepare yourself to walk around the corner, guns blazing, and be the totally most badass crazy zombie killer there ever was.
12. Scream instead. Flail your arms even though that doesn't make the controls work better.  Shoot the wall.  Shoot the ceiling.  Shoot your own blood stains.  Never ever hit the zombie.
13. Watch yourself die in a bloody bloody mess.
14. Quit game.  Call your survival horror gaming friend.  Have him play it while you cower in a corner and give "advice" mostly consisting of "DON'T GO IN THAT ROOM!"
15. Go to bed.  Never sleep.

Back to the Future- The Game

I always see and hear a lot of talk that point and click adventures are dead.  But really, they’ve been clinging on for years and in the last couple of years they’ve actually been making a bit of a comeback, finding a way to survive in the modern gaming world.  There are a number of factors in this, a couple of which are the Wii’s contributions and the emergence of casual gaming which give a watered down adventure game feel. 


The other popular form that’s emerging though is the episodic adventure game. One of the more recent is Back to the Future Season 1, which I got the chance to download thanks to some sales on Steam.  It’s certainly not the first of its kind.  It comes from Telltale games, makers of other great episodic franchises such as Sam and Max and Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People.