The Stack

Bill Powell gives us a twist on Sleeping Beauty, sending a more typical adventure game hero to lift the curse after Prince Charming fails. Spoilers follow the break.

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Lost Pig concerns an orc named Grunk, familiar to some parts of the IF community for his Livejournal. Spoilers follow the break.

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A game written in Adrift by someone using the pseudonym “revgiblet”. (The game data contains what might be revgiblet’s real name, but I won’t state it here.) The premise: you’re Death. Spoilers follow the break.

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Still trying to get caught up in these posts. Next up is a piece by newcomer Nestor I. McNaugh, concerning an arrogant gentleman thief in a modern setting. (It actually took me a while to realize that it wasn’t a fantasy setting, as the first element of the setting you hear about is a Thieves’ Guild.) Spoilers follow the break.

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So, now that the rules of the Interactive Fiction Competition allow blogging about comp games during the judging period, let’s get started. Choosing my first game at random, I got Ghost of the Fireflies by Paul Allen Panks. This did not bode well. Spoilers follow the break.
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I think most of the people who read this blog are already aware of this, but: the judging period of the 13th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is now open, and lasts until November 15. You can be a judge, and if you’ve never judged the comp before, I encourage you to give it a whirl. There are 29 entries this year, expected to vary from brilliant to abysmal. This is the smallest batch since 1998, so if you’ve found previous comps daunting, here’s your chance. 29 may still sound like a lot of games to play, but they tend to be short — judges are asked to judge each game after no more than two hours of play, finished or not, and the competitors know this.

Me, I’ll be devoting a large portion of my gaming hours to this for a while, and not blogging about it until the judging period is over, as that would be against the rules. So I don’t know how much I’ll be posting during that time. Maybe I’ll make another go at Pokémon between comp games or something.

[UPDATE 3 October 2007] Correction to the above: the rule against discussing games in a public forum before the judging period is over has been relaxed somewhat this year. Judges are now allowed to publish discussion of the entries as long as they “[m]ake appropriate allowances to hide spoilers, and don’t put spoilers in titles of posts or blog entries.” Now that I know this, I shall do so.

I mentioned before that I own three games that are based on French comic books, but this turns out not to be true. Rather, I own one game based on a French comic book (Druillet’s Salammbo), and two games based on Belgian comic books. No coincidence, either: the same artist provided the source material for both. One of them, XIII, has been off the Stack for some time. The other, Thorgal’s Quest, really should have been finished long ago too — it’s essentially a one-sitting game — but I took a break in the middle, and by the time I got back to it I had activated the nVidia glitch and made the game unplayable. (Even with my new graphics card, there are occasional video problems and even crashes, but nothing that couldn’t be overcome by saving regularly.)

Thorgal’s Quest seems to have been a straight-to-bargain-bin release. I picked it up mainly because the packaging was designed to fool you (successfully, in my case!) into thinking it was part of Cryo’s Altantis series. Apparently the original title is Thorgal: La Malediction d’Odin, but the North American release is Curse of Atlantis: Thorgal’s Quest, with “Atlantis” in much larger letters than “Thorgal”. (I’m calling it Thorgal’s Quest here to split the difference.) It just shows how provincial fame is. According to Wikipedia, Thorgal is “one of the most popular French language comics”, and a best-seller as recently as 2006, but over here, it’s so unknown that a tenuous connection to a semi-obscure adventure game series gets top billing. ¹ See also the 1983 laserdisc game Cliff Hanger. No way would that get released today without the name “Lupin III” plastered all over it, and probably “Hayao Miyazaki” as well.

The Atlantis games are first-person adventures based mainly around gratuitous self-contained puzzles slapped arbitrarily on various ancient-civilization backdrops — not the sort of thing I’d easily recommend to others, but sometimes I’m in the mood for it. For example, I was in the mood for it when I bought Thorgal’s Quest, which instead turned out to be a third-person adventure game based mainly around hunting for small objects and occasional archery mini-games.

Thorgal is a Viking warrior who, in the cutscenes, looks kind of like Mick Jagger wearing a tunic and a prominent facial scar. The game starts out with him doing the Odysseus thing, stranded far from home and family by a storm at sea brought on by the wrath of the gods. Enter a magician who shows him a harrowing vision of the future: Thorgal shooting and killing his own son. Thorgal immediately decides that the vision must really be about a shape-shifting villain adopting his guise, and rushes to get home and protect his son before it’s too late, making gamers everywhere shake their heads sadly.

On the way to the lee of the island, where he hopes he can hire a boat despite the storm, Thorgal has an adventure involving some canny bandits who keep the villagers cowed with a fake dragon. Then he almost drowns, only to be whisked away by the same magician to a place called Between Two Worlds, which is your basic Ethereal Void with floating rocks and everything. It was at this point that I really started to suspect that the game was based on a comic book, especially when I met the Guardian of the Keys. Partly it was her apparent role as some kind of cosmic keeper of the balance. Partly it was her appearance: a sexy woman with vivid magenta skin wearing basically nothing but strategically-placed locks of hair. But mainly it was the way that Thorgal already knew her from previous adventures. You could practically see the captions referencing back issue numbers.

Before the Guardian of the Keys can send Thorgal back home, he has to pass a trial involving an interactive representation of his past. And it is here that I learned of his extraterrestrial heritage.

Seriously, now, this has got to seem less bizarre to a player who’s familiar with the source material. It makes me wonder how certain other adaptations I’ve played must seem to outsiders.

It’s also at this point that the Atlantis material creeps in and provides Cryo an excuse to re-use their Altantean skyboat model. Thorgal’s spacefaring parents, it seems, are descendants of people who fled dying Atlantis for the stars centuries ago. Based on what I’ve seen online, I’m not at all convinced that this is canon. It might just be Cryo winking at the fans, much like the Sam and Max cameos in the old Lucasarts games.

I won’t say much more about the story — Thorgal does get home, and the prophecy does come true but not in the manner anticipated, just like you’d expect. All in all, the production is a bit amateurish. There’s some very nice art in the backdrops, but there are also places where the hand-drawn bits are too visible and don’t mesh with the 3-D models well. The story is completely linear, even in some cases blocking actions for no logical reason until you’ve clicked on an NPC often enough to get all his scripted dialogue (even if the last bit is just “Farewell and good luck, Thorgal” or something.) It’s far from the worst adventure game I’ve played, but it’s clearly built for Thorgal fans, who are expected to be a little forgiving.