Adventure Games(Mac Style) and Spam
Agent 5
else but spam. Not much spam, I grant you, but this is all that's left.
Of course I suppose one could blame this on the inherent lack of Mac
Adventures of late, which would be a perfectly valid claim. There have been a
plethora of Adventure games over the last few years but it seems that the Mac
platform is relegated to one a year. And two of those are Rhem(No, that isn't
a complaint). There was also that sequel to Riddle of the SPhinx, as I
recall. Even Zarf has taken to reviewing PS2 and PC games neigh on
exclusively. Niche gaming on a niche computer that isn't exactly famous for
gaming. Ah well. (ScummVM is a given, don't start).
At this point in the post, I'm required to either point to the future(It can
only get better!) or to the past(But look at all those games we already
have!). Plenty of people are already doing the first, and plenty of people
have done the second. Titanic: Adventure Out of Time really is a good game,
however. And I worship the Journeyman trilogy. And of course there are all of
those hardly known games such as Rama or Welcome to the Future(Still haven't
gotten around to playing that one...). But that's enjoyably tedious, you must
understand. No, I shall simply sit and scowl, refusing to buy an intel Mac
and install BootCamp. Or use Parallels. Or whatever the hell.
Andrew Plotkin
> Even Zarf has taken to reviewing PS2 and PC games neigh on
> exclusively.
Sorry!
Some of my reviews are for games that are PC/Mac releases. But I've
stopped posting them here because, well, it's all spam and nobody's
listening. I wrote a lot about Myst Online, which supported (Intel)
Macs, but those essays were posted on my web site rather than on
Usenet. (And now it's been cancelled.)
Newsgroups die. It's unfortunate. It's not necessarily the same as Mac
adventure games dying, but it's related.
On the other hand, quite a bit of current adventure gaming consists of
micro-games written in Flash. Those work on Macs. The "hidden object"
genre has sort of extended its tendrils into the adventure world --
they're not pure adventure games but some of them have puzzles and
environmental interactions. Most of those are available for Mac and
PC.
For the big adventure releases, yeah, you pretty much have to run
Windows in some way.
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
If the Bush administration hasn't thrown you in military prison without trial,
it's for one reason: they don't feel like it. Not because you're patriotic.
Rikard Peterson
Agent 5 <gheto...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> As I'm sure is blatantly obvious, this newsgroup is now, in essence, little
> else but spam. Not much spam, I grant you, but this is all that's left.
My news server filters out the spam, so it was a bit of a pleasant
surprise to find two posts in this group today.
> Of course I suppose one could blame this on the inherent lack of Mac
> Adventures of late, which would be a perfectly valid claim. There have been a
> plethora of Adventure games over the last few years but it seems that the Mac
> platform is relegated to one a year.
On the freeware front, the most used game engine - Adventure Game Studio
- does have a Mac version in beta. I haven't tried it yet though (I have
a Windows box too) so I don't know how far along it is, but it is
something to look forward to.
Another thing to look forward to is a porting project I'm working on.
SLUDGE is another game engine that hasn't had as much use as AGS, but
some quite good games has been made with it. (I've also made a game with
it, but if it qualifies as "quite good", I'll leave for others to
decide.) It was recently made open source, and I intend to make it run
on Macs. Lack of free time and things like that (as well as the fact
that I'm only a hobbyist programmer with less than amazing skills) keep
me from making progress as quickly as I'd like, so I can't make any
estimate as to when it'll be done, but I'm working on it.
Rikard