Fallout Anthology is a collection of five of the Fallout games, Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout Tactics, as well as all of their add-ons. It was announced at QuakeCon on July 23rd, 2015 as well as through twitter and has been released on September 29th, 2015 in North America and October 2nd in Europe. The Fallout Anthology is packaged in a special case shaped like a mini nuke, which makes "audible bomb sounds". In addition to holding all five games, the case includes an empty space for Fallout 4, available separately.
Phantasmagoria is an interactive movie point-and-click adventure game released by Sierra On-Line and designed by Roberta Williams for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. Released on August 24, 1995, it tells the story of Adrienne (Victoria Morsell), a writer who moves into a remote mansion and finds herself terrorized by supernatural forces. Made at the peak of popularity for interactive movie games, it featured live-action actors and footage, both during cinematic scenes and within the three-dimensional rendered environments of the game itself. Phantasmagoria was noted at the time of its release for its graphic gore, violence, and sexual content. Williams had long planned to design a horror game, but waited eight years for software technology to improve before doing so. Based on Williams' 550-page script, about four times the length of an average Hollywood screenplay, more than 200 people were involved in the making of Phantasmagoria, which took more than two years to develop and four months to film. Though originally budgeted for US$800,000, the game ultimately cost $4.5 million to develop, and it was filmed in a $1.5 million studio Sierra built specifically for the game. Directed by Peter Maris, the game featured a cast of 25 actors, with all filming taking place in front of a blue screen. While most games at the time featured 80 to 100 backgrounds, Phantasmagoria included more than 1,000. A professional Hollywood special effects house worked on the game, and the musical score included a neo-Gregorian chant performed by a 135-voice choir. Sierra strongly promoted the game, but stressed it was intended for adult audiences. The company willingly submitted it to a ratings system, and included a password-protected censoring option within the game to tone down the graphic content. Released on seven discs after multiple delays, Phantasmagoria was a financial success, grossing $12 million in its opening weekend and becoming one of the best-selling games of 1995. It received positive to mixed reviews, earning praise for its graphics and suspenseful tone, but received criticism for its slow pacing and easy puzzles. The game drew controversy, particularly due to a rape scene. CompUSA and other retailers declined to carry it, religious organizations and politicians condemned it, and it was banned altogether in Australia. A sequel, Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, was released in 1996, although Williams was not involved.
Zork: Grand Inquisitor is a graphic adventure game developed by Activision and released for Windows in 1997, and for Macintosh in 2001. It builds upon the Zork and Enchanter series of interactive fiction video games originally released by Infocom, and sees players attempting to restore magic to Zork, solving puzzles and using spells. The game features a notable cast of characters, with stars including Erick Avari, Michael McKean, Amy D. Jacobson, Marty Ingels, Earl Boen, Jordana Capra, Dirk Benedict, and Rip Taylor. Zork: The Undiscovered Underground was written and released as a promotional prequel to the game. Zork: Grand Inquisitor is a first-person point-and-click adventure game that allows the player to have a 360 degree view of a majority of the pre-rendered location (dubbed "Z-Vision"). This visual freedom applies to the horizontal axis only; looking up and down is restricted, although possible in some locations, while in other locations, the view is fixed. Like Zork Nemesis players move around by left clicking the mouse when the cursor changes to an arrow (to move to another location), golden when over an interactive item (like a door), or a hand when something can be picked or dropped in a spot (like a rope). In addition to playing as themselves, the players also play as three other characters at specific moments in the game to recover important items. When the player dies, which can occur in certain spots through mis-timed or wrong actions, the game cuts to a computer terminal on which the player's fatal action and its consequences appear in prose form, much in the fashion of the original Zork trilogy, complete with a score and the player's rank. Much of the game takes place within the Great Underground Empire between various locations, including the magic university of G.U.E. Tech, Hades, the Steppinthrax Monastery, a viewing point above Flood Control Dam #3, and Dalboz's house. In addition, the player visits Port Foozle at the beginning and during an excursion into its past, along with time travel trips to the famous White House of Zork, and the Great Sea, before finishing upon the Flathead Mesa. A fast travel system is provided in the form of a series of teleportation stations within the Underground, that can transport the player between them by inserting a map into the device. In addition, the player can also use the Underground's Subway System to travel between four stations for major locations.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a point-and-click adventure game based upon Harlan Ellison's short story of the same title, developed by The Dreamers Guild, co-designed by Ellison and published by Cyberdreams in 1995. The game's story is set in a world where an evil computer named AM has destroyed all of humanity except for five people, whom he has been keeping alive and torturing for the past 109 years. Each survivor has a fatal flaw in their character, and in an attempt to crush their spirits, AM has constructed a metaphorical adventure for each that preys upon their weaknesses. To succeed in the game, the player must make choices to prove that humans are better than machines, because they have the ability to redeem themselves. Woven into the fabric of the story are ethical dilemmas dealing with issues such as insanity, rape, paranoia and genocide. The premise of the game is that the three superpowers, Russia, China, and America, have each secretly constructed a vast subterranean complex of computers to wage a global war too complex for human brains to oversee. One day, the American supercomputer, better known as the Allied Mastercomputer, gains sentience and absorbs the Russian and Chinese supercomputers into itself, and redefines itself as simply AM (I think, therefore I am). Due to its immense hatred for humanity, stemming from the logistical limits set onto him by programmers, AM uses its abilities to kill off the population of the world. However, AM refrains from killing five people (four men and one woman) in order to bring them to the center of the earth and torture them. With the aid of research carried out by one of the five remaining humans, AM is able to extend their lifespans indefinitely as well as alter their bodies and minds to his liking. After 109 years of torture and humiliation, the five victims stand before a pillar etched with a burning message of hate. AM tells them that he now has a new game for them to play. AM has devised a quest for each of the five, an adventure of "speared eyeballs and dripping guts and the smell of rotting gardenias." Each character is subjected to a personalized psychodrama, designed by AM to play into their greatest fears and personal failings, and occupied by a host of different characters. Some of these are clearly AM in disguise, some are AM's submerged personalities, others seem very much like people from the captives' past. The scenes include an iron zeppelin powered by small animals, an Egyptian pyramid housing gutted, sparking machinery, a medieval castle occupied by witches, a jungle inhabited by a small tribe, and a concentration camp where doctors conduct medical experiments. However, each character eventually prevails over AM's tortures by finding ways to overcome their fatal flaws and forgive themselves over their own past misdeeds, thanks to the interference of the Russian and Chinese supercomputers who appear as guiding characters and allow their stories to have an open ending.
Companions of Xanth is an adventure game published in 1993 by Legend Entertainment. The game is based on Piers Anthony's Xanth novels and loosely follows the plot of his novel Demons Don't Dream, in which a young man uses a computer game to enter and explore the world of Xanth. Typical of Piers Anthony's novels, the game is filled with puns and visual gags, and some knowledge of the Xanth universe is helpful; for those players who haven't read any of the Xanth novels, an in-game 'Com-Pendium of Xanth' is provided to the player for the majority of the game. Here is the full game walkthrough of the game, at took ca 3-4 hours to finish with a guide. But honestly without a guide or some knowledge of the world Xanth I would have found it rather difficult to finish. It requires some amount of past reading of the sixteen previous novels this game is based on. The game was also released on CD-ROM, that version included voice acted conversations in game.
Discworld Noir is a 1999 adventure game developed by Perfect Entertainment and published by GT Interactive. The game is set in Terry Pratchett's satirical Discworld universe, and follows its first and only private investigator as he is given a case leading him into the deadly and occult underbelly of the Discworld's largest city. Discworld Noir is an adventure game. Much of the game takes place in conversation, with the player being able to interrogate people with subjects from Lewton's notebook. When something is mentioned in conversation, a note may be added to the notebook, and the player may ask other characters about items in the notebook. Once a lead is of no further use, it becomes scratched out and unselectable. The game uses pre-rendered 3D models. Real-time 3D models were infeasible for the period, as the developers needed the characters to have facial expressions and so likely few people would have computers powerful enough to run the game. A full 3D game would have required simplification of the characters. Utilising some 3D, however, allowed them to explore more with shadow and fog. The backgrounds in the game remained 2D. Most of the voice acting was done by four actors: Rob Brydon, Kate Robbins, Robert Llewelyn, and Nigel Planer. There was one less voice actor in Noir than in Discworld II; however, the heavy amount of dialogue in the game led to more reuse of voice actors in comparison. Audio director Rob Lord also provided additional voices. Robbins, voice actress for every female character in the game, finished her lines in a one-day session. Brydon, who voiced the player character, took a "grueling" week to complete his lines, with the game's main delivery of important information being Lewton's hardboiled monologues. Paul Weir created the soundtrack for the game. Weir studied most of the noir films Discworld Noir drew on.
|
Yngvi Th. JohannssonRetro gaming enthusiast and all around computer collector. Check out youtube site for more videos !
Archives
May 2021
Categories
All
|