Chasing Dragonflies

Fans of  Ragnar Tornquist's  1999 adventure game,  The Longest Journey , won't be disappointed in  Dreamfall . This time around, April Ryan, our intrepid adventurer from the first game, is joined by the mysterious assasin Kian and the rudderless, but loyal Zoe Castillo. You will be able to play as all three characters throughout the game. As you follow the metaphysical and literal journeys each of these characters make, you begin to unearth the secret world that ties dreams to reality. Tornquist is a master storyteller with enough imagination to fill two worlds -- the futuristic and the fantastic. As you shuttle between Stark and Arcadia, you begin to catch glimpses of how the two worlds are tied together even as you occaisionally stumble upon a vague inbetween world that may hold the answers to the strange forces that threaten to unravel both worlds. The gameplay is pretty straightforward, and the puzzles are much more intuitive than The Longest Journey (not a...

Yes, Road to India is absolutely horrid. It's the first game I've had to quit due to technical issues. Even with Sanitarium and all of its crashes, I was eventually able to play through to the end. With Road to India, the game crashed all of the time, and there was a crash at the end of a certain cutscene that would not let me continue the game. Oh well. I'll just uninstall the game and move onto the next one. Maybe another Nancy Drew mystery. Although, I will admit that I have been a bit burned out from adventure games. I've gotten a new job at Forrester Research , and the job, while absolutely fantastic, takes a lot of energy out of me. I've even been neglecting my Adventure Gamers reading, so I'm so not in the know about up and coming games. So, I've decided -- Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower it is!

Whether or not Fahrenheit (or Indigo Prophecy for those of you in Europe) is a real adventure game, it is a fun game. (I'm bummed because I'm typing this post from a Mac, and for some reason, I'm not able to add any links -- I'll try to add them later). There's a great discussion (er, rather discussions) about what game genre Fahrenheit fits into at AdventureGamers.com. For me, it was a great drama, for the most part, and had truly heart-stopping game play. A lot has been written about game play. There are few traditional inventory or dialogue puzzle elements. There is a dialogue element of a sort, you have to choose dialogue options within a certain time frame, but it's difficult to see what difference your choices make. There are also many "simon" playing elements. Directional overlays appear periodically in the game, and at that time, the player must move the controllers as they are prompted by the colored overlays. My main complaint about this elem...

Ok, am I lame or what? I still haven't finished Road to India. I'm still playing Icewind Dale II (and also installed yet another RPG game -- Morrowind ). But my mind is racing, racing, and I can't finish any of those games. So, the only logical thing was to, of course, download and play yet another adventure game. This was actually not as crazy of a strategy as it sounds. The Adventure Gamers Christmas Quest is a nice, sweet, short game based on the Adventure Game Studio (AGS) game creator. AGS provides a run-time engine and a development environment to create games after the old Lucas Arts and Sierra point-and-click adventures. Back to the story at hand. The Christmas Quest (which can be downloaded here ) can be finished in one very short sitting. It's pretty funny, with references to recent adventure games like Still Life . Your mission: help the hapless Christmas dork decorate his sad little christmas tree. Okay, yes, it is February, but what can I say, it was bet...

Okay, well, I'm embarassed to admit that I haven't played any adventure games lately. Nirvana just didn't pull me in, and with the way things are going on in my life right now, I'm trying to save money and not buy 10 zillion (yes, that's right, 10 ZILLION) adventure games. So I'm pretty much stuck with what I have ( Nirvana , Black Mirror , and Gabriel Knight 3 ). Of course, that doesn't mean that I haven't been playing any computer games at all. I'm playing Icewind Dale II at Mikey's suggestion. It's a role-playing game based on the Dungeons and Dragons rule set. You can create a party of up to six characters (deep gnomes, half elfs, clerics, wizards, barbarians, what have you) and go adventuring out into the vast icy expanse of Faerun. All the D&D rules are gobbledygook to me and I just play it pretty haphazardly. It's not as good as a really good adventure game, but it'll do for now, it'll do.

Nirvana: A Road to India is one very frustrating game. If you decide to play this game, save often! The game crashes back to my desktop quite a bit. The game was developed and published by Microids which was subsumed by Ubisoft early in 2005. Check out this interesting article at JustAdventure.com on the deal and it's potential impact on adventure gaming. Microids also developed the fantastic adventure games Syberia 1 and 2, Post Mortem , and Amerzone , but since the business deal went down, we probably won't see the talent from Microids developing any more new adventure games. Admittedly, I've only just started the game. At this point, however, in terms of interest and quality, A Road to India doesn't come close to those other games. Syberia also had some problems with crashing, but the story about Kate Walker just drew me right in from the very beginning. I may be unfairly comparing the two games. Syberia was designed by the fantastic Benoit Sokal -- a man who ...

I won't explain this post's title, and hopefully it's cryptic enough, so that I won't give anything away to those of you new to the Gabriel Knight series. I have just finished Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within . What an absolutely fantastic game. I had never played a full motion video game before, and I can imagine that these types of games can easily go awry with bad acting. But the acting in GK2 was fairly solid with a breakaway performance, in my opinion, by Peter J. Lucas . Lucas played the role of the mysterious Baron von Glower with both sensitivity and sensuality. Very intriguing! The story itself was well told, with Gabriel going back to Germany to explore his roots and discover the true nature of his identity, which had been revealed in Gabriel Knight 1: Sins of the Fathers . Back in New Orleans, Grace Nakamura overcomes her logic and good sense and decides to join Gabriel in Germany to help him with her research skills (or is it for some other reason, hm....

I just installed Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within . It's quite a change from the first game, mainly because the creators moved to a full motion video format. The actors are different, and I actually like Dean Erickson's portrayal of Gabriel Knight better than Tim Curry's voice characterization in the first game. The interface is much simpler than that used in the first game. Now there is only one pointer for all of the actions you need. The game starts off where the first one ended: in Germany. The game is afoot!

I've finally finished Gabriel Knight 1, and I have to say it was a terrific game. The story was involving, and the ending was superb -- no let down at all. For me, the main feature that marred the game was the terrible interface. I hated having to click through the various tools (move, look, open, etc...) It got to be really tiresome at times.