Tag: adventure

NES Works Presents The Portopia Serial Murder Mystery

Portopia is the biggest missing piece, to many US enthusiasts, of the history of Japanese gaming. It led to the creation of Dragon Quest, but it had a huge influence all on its own, which can be felt in a wide variety of other Famicom titles, including some that did make it to the US. Why do The Goonies II and Dr. Chaos have those weird room-based adventure sections? It’s because of Portopia, trying to mix its kind of menu-based first-person gameplay with the pre-existing side-scrolling platforming game style popularized by Super Mario Bros. It seemed random to Western players at the time, but Japanese players would have known exactly what those games were trying to do.

We’ve mentioned Jeremy Parish and his various Works projects before, and they’re always interesting and informative, a great antidote to the strident style of many popular Youtubers, and this one is especially important to anyone seeking to understand how the Japanese game industry grew and evolved in the Famicom era.

Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken retrospective: Beefing in Kobe | NES Works Gaiden (17 minutes)

Video: UCBVG Covers Nightshade

We link to U Can Beat Videogames once in a while here (in fact, here), and this week has an especially interesting installment, Beam Software’s cult classic NES game Nightshade. It’s a weird point-and-click adventure game, hugely ambitious and largely successful. Sadly it was released fairly late in the life of the NES. Nowadays it looks amazingly prescient, putting the player in control of a Batman-like hero with no powers at the beginning of his career. It’s an engaging combination of gritty and comedic, offering a Batman-style dark graphical look to its city, but also full of in-jokes, and some of the weirder character art on the system.

It’s arguably better to play Nightshade now than when it was first released. It has no save or password function, but that’s not so much an issue with save states. It’s available on Steam and on the Nintendo Switch Online service.

It does have the standard point-and-click style of obtuse puzzle sometimes, but there’s an abundance of cool ideas. You don’t have “lives,” but instead, when Nightshade “dies,” he’s thrown into a James Bond-style deathtrap. The first four times this happens, there is a way out of the situation, and if you can figure it out in time you get to continue the game with full health. (The fifth time, the trap has no escape.) Each of the traps is unique and a situation that appears nowhere else in the game.

Video: Atari Archive

Atari Archive is one of those projects that seeks to document every game released for some platform. In this case, it’s for the Atari VCS. That’s the original one, the real one, CX2600, not the one made by the company that currently wears the skin of the old Atari like a gruesome shroud.

The Atari VCS/2600 wasn’t the first programmable video game console, but it was certainly the most popular early console. (I had my own look at a few interesting examples of its software in a book of my own.)

Atari Archive is currently up to Episode 57, on Kaboom! Episodes tend to be in the 10-15 minute range, making it easy to find out about specific games in a timely fashion. Here are a few popular games to get you started:

#56: Warlords – #54: Missile Command – #33: Adventure – #32: Space Invaders – and, of course, #1: Combat

The Verge interviews Ron Gilbert on Return to Monkey

Link. Information in the article includes screenshots, the team, and the news that they’ve been working remotely. Hype is running high for a new 2D Monkey Island game. The last trip to this well was Telltale’s episodic 3D take Tales of Monkey Island, which was appreciated but some thought was lacking.