Chasing Dragonflies

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.