#videogame
The Quintessentials | Illustrated Trading Cards Set
The Scarlet Sorcerer
Affiliation: The Quintessentials
Weapon: Fireblood Pen
Special Attack: De Profundis
Secret Identity: Oscar Wilde
The Cinemancer
Affiliation: The Quintessentials
Weapon: Luminary and Sound Slinger
Special Attack: Ora Pro Nobis
Secret Identity: Lino Brocka
The Galactic Gladiator
Affiliation: The Quintessentials
Weapon: Stellar Magiphone and Tuning Sword
Special Attack: Bohemian Rhapsody
Secret Identity: Freddie Mercury
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Edna from Tales of Zestiria! Bc she’s cool. From 2018.
You can also find this piece as a print at my shop Link in bio!
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While I often profess to not have a sense of humor, I have a real fondness for Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. I find them quite funny! I got the paperbacks with the little round green guy at book fairs at my elementary school — I think I’d read through the first three by sixth grade. I got tapes of the BBC radio play around then and was pretty fixated on the franchise in 7th grade (I had a minor corrective surgery that year and the doctors were very perplexed by my 42-centric anesthesia ramblings). Around that time, someone passed along a floppy disk to me that had a Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy interactive fiction game (1984) on it. I set about playing it immediately. I found it maddeningly hard! I still do. I’ve never finished it. There were t-shirts made to specifically mock people like me. You can go to the BBC and bang your head against a web version of it if you like.
The difficulty didn’t impede the game’s popularity — it was one of Infocom’s biggest sellers and is warmly remembered today (the nice thing about text-based games is that they always look as good as they did on the day they released).
The feelies are kind of a mix of genius and eye-rolling, and I mean that in the most positive way. You have an empty plastic bag labeled “Microscopic Space Fleet” and opaque cardboard “peril sensitive” sunglasses and some pocket fluff (a cotton ball). There are also orders for the destruction of Arthur Dent’s house and the planet earth. The best one is the Don’t Panic pin. That one’s spent time on my various bags over the years, not gonna lie.
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Out of old RPGs, so let’s move on to interactive fiction games. This is The Lurking Horror (1987), a rather late Infocom game (perhaps their last truly great one) and their only foray into horror. As the name implies, it is very much inspired by Lovecraft’s work.
The game is set at the fiction GUE Tech and begins with the player stomping through a snow storm to the computer lab to finish a term paper. A weird glitch in the file reveals something strange is going on at the school’s Department of Alchemy, something…supernatural! Because of the snowstorm, the university is pretty much deserted and impossible to navigate, forcing you to use the underground steam tunnels to get from building to building. This immediately sets the mood of isolation and helplessness. Dave Lebling’s prose effectively switches from the mundane to the horrific and back again. Lots of folks consider this one of the scariest videogames ever made for good reason.
It’s also pretty funny, as Infocom games tend to be. GUE Tech is a send-up of MIT, the university where the founders of Infocom, including Lebling, attended. In an amusing case of jokes coming full circle, practical jokers have at various time labeled various doors at MIT the Department of Alchemy.
Infocom’s games came with various props to further set the mood — “feelies.” This one is above average, containing a student ID, a campus guide book and, unpleasantly, a rubber centipede thing. The guide and the ID are advertised on the box. Not so much the centipede, making for a potentially unpleasant surprise. Have I mentioned how much I hate centipedes?
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Venture was an arcade game by Exidy. It came out for arcades in 1981 but I know it primarily because it was a launch title for the ColecoVision in 1982, my first console. I think we got it a little later, because I just don’t think I was four, but memory is a weird thing.
Anyway, Venture! You play a little archer guy exploring rooms in a dungeon, killing the monsters that lurk within and stealing their treasures. Pretty standard dungeon experience. The music is pretty catchy and the monster designs are neat, though none of them really do anything interesting aside of jumping around in your way. EXCEPT the hallmonsters. They’re little green floaty octopus things that dance around the hallways. If they touch you, you die, just like any other monster. They’re harmless enough otherwise. In the hallways. But if you stay too long in a room (and it is possible — monster corpses linger and can still kill you, so you can easily get trapped), the music will change into a horrible pulsing noise as the nearest hallmonster appears and COMES THROUGH THE WALLS to get you. Scared the crap out of young Stu, lemme tell you. Nightmares! I still wince when I hear it.
But I love the game, an all time favorite, fast, easy to play, doesn’t ask a lot of the player. Shame we don’t know who designed it. This post has photos of both the ColecoVision version and the Atari. The Atari game is inferior but it has better box art.
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The Keys of Acheron (1981) is the first expansion for Epyx’s Hellfire Warrior (which I posted about back in December).
It’s kind of interesting, because up to this point, all the DunjonQuest games were sort of the story of one character (I say sort of because you only get that info in the manual, not in the actual game). Keys switches it up — this time you are tasked to find four gems (one for each level) so you can defeat the evil demon Kronus (the illustration of whom, I believe, was done by the game’s designer, Paul Reiche III). The twist here is that Kronus is actually pursuing you through the levels (similar to the demon in the last level of Hellfire Warrior), which adds a new sense of urgency to the proceedings.
Like Hellfire Warrior, only two of the levels have room descriptions — the Abode of the Dragon and the Crystal Caves. The other two, the Temple in the Jungle and the Shadowland of Kronus are up to you to navigate without help. I kind of hate that. It made sense for the labyrinth and the hell plane in the first game, but I really would like descriptions for the temple in the jungle! Apparently, though, because the first game was designed to not have descriptions in the second and fourth levels, that had to be true of the expansions, because code or something. Programming, man! It’s for the birds!
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I enjoyed doing the vintage videogame posts last year, so I am back with some more this week. First up, Gateway to Apshai (1983). I believe this is the last of the original DunjonQuest games (not counting the Temple of Apshai Trilogy remake) from Epyx. It is a sort of remix of the formula that aims to keep up with the new advances in console technology — this is on a floppy, but it was also available on a cartridge for home consoles. That means it is a more streamlined experience, since the game was going to played using a joystick of some sort (can you call the weird telephone that was the ColecoVision controller a joystick?). So the RPG elements are streamlined quite a bit to focus on the action and the game plays FAST.
Like, almost ridiculously so. There are eight levels. There are something like 7000 rooms in the game. But you’re timed, so if you last on any given level for five or so minutes, you automatically progress to the next level, until you get to level 8, which is endless. Its fine! But it lacks a lot of the stodgy charm of the previous games. I particularly miss the room descriptions. There isn’t a lot in this booklet.
I love the cover though. A lot of Epyx games use this Tron-esque neon styling for the cover art — probably most iconically in their edition of Rogue. More neon wireframe videogame art please.
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Hot tea and Rachel Amber… I’m doing some sketches to sell on etsy with my artbook, print and pins. I’m kinda excited
“Try to try again,To hear yourself again from time to time “
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I’ve bought a polaroid about a week ago so I wanted to do something related. I hope I will be able to do some photos using drawings as filters upon film but I’m afraid they won’t work.
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EDIT: I saw the trailer of LiS2. Hype!! I’m a lot interested in the new characters and plot!!
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EDIT 2: printed copies now avaiable on ETSY
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