to celebrate @SpindleyQ's upload of PaRappa iOS (see https://gamemaking.social/@SpindleyQ/112414210000096420), I am happy to contribute The Longest Journey HD for iOS. This has been missing from the app store for more than 6 years, and was recovered from a ten year old ipod touch I had sitting in my desk.
TLJ is easily in the top five adventure games of the past 25 years, and the iOS version is exceptional. it's an absolute shame that it was never ported to 64-bit.
this IPA runs on 32-bit iOS devices running iOS 7-10. sideloadable, or however you'd prefer to install it. grab it here:
today, some obscure sierra on-line & dynamix history that shouldn't be obscure yet is due to how gaming culture developed: Front Page Sports Baseball. this just came in the mail, and i'm so glad to finally have my own copy after playing a demo from a CD-ROM Today! magazine cover disc as a kid.
this dynamix-produced and sierra-published title is weird for a bunch of reasons.
first, it's one of the last few DOS-only games that came out in the mid-90s.
second, it runs in hi-res mode using what i suspect is a blend of software-rendered 3D and 2D sprites that were a holdover from dynamix's 3Space engine used in almost all of dynamix's titles. (pic 2) the animation is crisp, the sprites are beautifully rendered in a very compressed colour palette.
third, the Front Page Sports series were massive hits - outselling other sierra/dynamix titles of the time. but no one talks about it, because sports games often get irritated yawns from gamers.
fourth, this game is fun to play. it's not just an average EA sports-style title. the batting/pitching gameplay is addictive, and the simulation of the players and teams is deep.
and finally, there is - unbelievably - still an active FPS Baseball community still modding and developing rosters for the game. someone maintains a tool that generates websites that lets other people see the outcomes of your baseball games like a late-90s ESPN network site 🤣 https://www.silverbox.com/biorhythm/
The Entertainment Software Association (the lobbying organization that represents video game publishers) doesn't just not care about video game preservation, but actively fights against efforts to preserve games, even games not owned by their member companies. They were at the US Library of Congress fighting a copyright exemption for out of print games to be made available by libraries.
Ich frage mich, ob es irgendwann zu einem zweiten #VideogameCrash kommen wird. Mit der momentanen Praktik gewisser Unternehmen, muss man sich ja inzwischen die Frage stellen, ob man überhaupt noch #Videospiele kaufen sollte, wenn man sie am Ende eh nicht besitzt und das dem Boomer Gesetzgebern scheinbar egal ist.
normal saturday night things now include browsing Snood's 2006 web store and imagining all of the great snoodwear i should have owned in grad school @davedobson
i’m going through some of my Origin Systems boxes and found this treasure - it is the install guide for the Wing Commander: Secret Missions 2 addon.
if you’ve played the original game, you might already know that there are “winning” and “losing” progression paths based on your performance during missions. this was meant to advance the storyline towards either a terran or kilrathi victory.
this unfortunately meant that you would miss out on winning/losing path-specific missions, unless you played the entire game over and lost (won) on purpose.
the mission pack apparently has a fantastic character import utility that lets you unlock all missions in WC, without having to play them over. i wish I had known about this when I was a kid!
Posting for visibility. Anyone from abroad (not the US for actually insane reasons) has a chance to use legal routes to prevent online video games from dying starting with The Crew from Ubisoft.
Killing a game is pretty much my number one pet peeve. Borderline cardinal sin levels of maliciousness.
[1/2] had some fun with some obscure video game history this morning
if you grew up playing Ultima, Crusader or Wing Commander, you might recognize the name.
recorded almost nowhere is the location of Origin Systems' building during its peak productive phase in the late 80s/early 90s. there was a single mention of a road in Shay Addams' The Official Book of Ultima which led to some cross-referencing in corporate databases
so here it is: a mapped drive to Origin's sleek 1980s office building, as it stands today just outside of Austin, TX.
(now for rent if you need 20,000 sq ft of work space!)
for the past few years i've been working to preserve as much of the multimedia era as i can.
brian thomas's If Monks Had Macs is a weird collection of hypercard modules that brian made, and collected them together into a fascinating piece of multimedia. equal parts interactive book, point and click text adventure, journaling software, art analysis, and social commentary - i wouldn't even know how to review it!
there were two editions of the program. the first was all made in Hypercard by brian in black and white in 1988. this one has a special place in my heart because all of the artwork was done in macpaint. you can play it in-browser here: https://archive.org/details/ifmonkshadmacs_1988
the second was remade by brian and his friends in 1995, using Voyager Expanded Books' Toolkit - which was basically a massive re-implementation of hypercard. it is in full colour this time, with some rendered artwork in place of the old macpaint art. disc image here: https://archive.org/details/IfMonksHadMacs
a few years ago i was able to get my hands on one of the only surviving copies (in the world) of the interactive book Portal, for the Macintosh Plus.
no, not that Portal. the original one, from 1986, by novelist Rob Swigart.
thank the gods the ~40 year old diskettes were still viable, and I was able to image it on my Color Classic.
but, no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get the damned thing to run properly. my CC hated it. mini vMac hated it. System 7 hated it. System 6 hated it. everything caused the game to lock up after a few seconds, or get hung playing random music.
that was until today. in a moment of utter insanity, i realized that the creators of Portal did something very special for the Macintosh Plus: they made the game a f'ing BOOTER. it was never meant to be run from within the OS. you just inserted the diskette, turned on your Plus. the entire game is an operating system of its own, executing instructions from the CPU and ROM. this isn't anything new for C64 or Apple // users, but for the Macintosh it was practically unheard of. they replicated the Macintosh System 2 gui perfectly, just for the game.
the Macintosh port is still gorgeous today: a mouse-driven point'n'click UI with high-res 1-bit icons, and high-res text. it feels good in a way that none of the other versions (C64, DOS, Amiga) do.
but what stands out to me, nearly 40 years after its release, is that this is a hypertext game through and through. the story unfolds as you click around, wandering from computer network to computer network, reading documents and piecing together how the Earth became abandoned hundreds of year ago.
as far as I know, Portal's creators (Rob Swigart and Brad Fregger) were never credited for producing a very early Hypertext game. Portal predates Hypercard by an entire year.
recorded some gameplay in mini vMac for posterity. as far as I know, this is the only footage of Portal for the Macintosh that has ever existed on the web.
personally, my big score was this game: Otogirisou. it is what was called a "sound novel" at the time, but would be now called a visual novel.
i picked it up for two reasons. first, i'm in love with the box cover artwork. there is something perfectly moody about it - a roughly inked haunted house in the distance, surrounded by briars, which looks like the only shelter during a pummelling rainstorm.
(and this is indeed the plot of the game)
second, it has an incredible soundtrack that was given a full orchestra treatment in the 90s. the album is called "Game Music Concert 2" by Tokyo City Philharmonic.