Some things are not meant to be missed.

Well, yes, SSH, definitely knows the way to title stuff. I'm trying hard to match his good titles, but his skills are unmatched. :P

Anyway, some really cool stuff came into my attention and it's time for you to see them!!

-Adventure Game Studio in a Danish way...

It appears that someone saw Apprentice II and spread the news. The news can be found here. I don't know how to say Hello in Danish, but well, I'm sure all of us, know how to watch a video..right? Click the image on the right.

-Vohaul Strikes Back in a Bar:
A small peak into this Space Quest Fangame, that I found really really cool. Check it out.

-I'm god, you look good.
This is a game in production but a french guy, from the forums, a newbie, that is really getting some interest with his cool drawing skills and very friendly attitude and a reference to a Lucas Arts Classic. The game as far as I know is about you being god, and a situation being screwed up. Click on the image to see the cool DOTT reference.


Last minute news:
In Wadjet Eye Games, I crossed upon this:

KO Caine

SpacePirateCaine gets a knockout win in the March MAGS competition, with his remake of ancient AGS classic Red Flagg. We eagerly await his choice of theme for next month's competition...

Indie developer questions answered

Mersey Remakes had posted kind of an FAQ for all you indie developers out there hoping to make a pile of money off of AGS. ;)

5 days an android

Two blog-type reviews are up today: firstly, Uhfgood reviews Ben's Annie Android, and rbaleksandar reviews classic game 5 Days a Stranger.

Emi explains it all

Emi Robocop Twelve and her assistant Vince explain about the utter awesomeness that is Resonance. Seriously guys, watch this video and you'll never want to play any other AGS games again.


D'oh! I didn't spot that Dualname had already posted about this! Oh well...

Games to wait for Eagerly!!

Well, it appears that AGS games WIP persons, have decided to post about it. So what games should we await for the days to come?

-A land of Magic I:
A short of quest for baldur's gate type of game, a type of adventure and rpg mix, containing as much realism as it's author Shockbolt can handle, or wishes to. Day/night circle, different seasons, it really got me into thoughts..

-This city at night:
Ben304 and Paolo, a team known for the winning entry of MAGS, Trance Pacific, had , have, or, will team up for another game, whose story will be probably as disturbing as the pacific's was. Most of all, I'm confused about how the credits will be with all those weird changes..they're like General Motors, a new chief every week.

-Jimmy the troublemaker:
Or how Dorothy would be if she was Obama..Mouth for war, has finally kept his promise and stopped posting about this only on the critics lounge. In fact he never made that promise, but hell, I was waiting for him to do so, the game has a really good animation from what I've shown and Mouth is trying to give the best quality he can.

-Get your mop, Vaderhaul strikes back!!!:
About time a fan game decided to go after the last Sierra game and expand one of the best game adventure series of all time. It appears that Roger Wilco, must get his trusty mop and clean the mess. The best part about this is that the graphics, appear not to be ripped. Yay for that.

-The Rogue Prince:
Now that's a really good looking game there. It might actually be decided to end up commercial in the end, but the quality of everything seems to be really cool. And outstanding. And yes, I really want to see this finished. The setting is similar to the games that use Rpg maker as an engine, yep the typical overheard view and the medieval fantasy setting, but its the feeling I get from the shots that make me shiver.
-Resonance:
I believe we've mentioned that around here, however, I've never mentioned my thoughts on this commercial project by Vince Twelve. Well, first the team members gathered to complete this game, are really outstanding, Vince, ProgZmax, Nikolas, MashPotato...it's surprising he can afford to get those people. When Vince released the first trailer from in-game footage, I found the interface not really flexible and kind of a puzzle itself, but with the new video he posted just a couple of days ago, I'd be lying not to say that this really looks amazing. The quality given to the project is superb and well, just watch the bloody video.

Small characters, big personalities

Whether this gets chosen as the new AGS site banner or not, ProgZMax has created a work of art!

It's a setup!

Ever wanted to change from full-screen to windowed or 2x filter to 3x filter in-game? Well, now you can with my new GameSetup module!

There are two components: a module which you include in your AGS project and call its functions in order to manipulate the settings and a VBScript file which you run instead of your game exe in your final game that you distribute. The VBScript allows the AGS game to quit, restart with the new settings and restore the game to where it was before.

The download includes the module, VBScript file and an example game. Documentation is included in the module header, as always, or can be viewed on my site.

Bet you wish your GIF import was hot like this

SpacePaw has written an AGS Editor plugin that makes importing complex GIF animations a doddle. It imports sprites and creates a view and uses the GIF's timing information, too. You can read all about it on the Tech forum thread.

Adventureless

Well, I just heard from Amber Loe, the author of the Adventuress site. If, like me, you subscribed to her blog you'll have noticed how it had suddenly become all about Sonic the hedgehog recently and that the webpage redirected to a different one. Unfortunately, this situation seems to be permanent as her employers for this blog have been downsizing. This is actually a big loss to the adventure community as Amber kept great tabs on the latest adventure-related news. And more importantly, sometimes she linked to my blog!

All the best Amber: I hope your blogging resurfaces somewhere!

Competition at last

Well, the last few MAGSes have been devoid of competition, but at last we have a match! SpacePirateCaine and lore_hellfire have both submitted entries, so quickly head on over to the thread, download them both and get ready to vote!

Smooth as a module...

*Barry White voice* I know you like it smooth, when you press that button to scroll your inventory. So, come on, baby, download my module and enable that smooth-sliding inventory window you always wanted. *End Barry White voice*

Изумрудный город Vertrauliche

Well, Emerald City Confidential is so good, its got reviewed in both Russian and German. The auto-translations of these reviews can be quite funny and there's a great quote in the Russian one: "bored housewives will certainly come into raptures"...!

Meanwhile, you can check out ECC's Mobygames , Gamestats and Metacritic pages

The Blackwell Amulet

Uhfgood's been busy reviewing again. He's covered commercial AGS game The Blackwell Legacy and also the Wintermute game Five magical Amulets.

Sacre Tasse Bleue!

Bonjours mes amis, aujourd'hui, j'ai des infos sur un nouveau website pour les AGSers de français! A la Grande Tasse Bleue has been announced by Marion and is for AGS games that have a French translation.

Use X on Y

Well, its something that many people have trouble with (perhaps the most common question in the Beginners Tech forum), so densming has once again demystified AGS this time particularly using inventory items on an object.

Skippy the cutscene kangaroo

densming's put up another video tutorial tying up some loose ends on cutscenes (e.g. how to skip them!)

Javascript Graphics Adventure Motor!

Ah the joys of translation where Engine gets turned into Motor! Anyway, there's this interesting open-source experiment in 3rd-person point-and-click adventures on sourceforge. You can read the creator's blog on JGAM, too.

Box of goodies

Uhfgood reviews Shifter's Box on his blog. And he likes it (who wouldn't?)

AGS Purity

Well, the normal AGS download is corrupted by the evil influence of MP3 and a copy of a Space Quest font that fell off the back of a lorry. So, for the sake of those with a conscience, I created a pure, innocent version of AGS 3.1.2 SP1. It doesn't have an installer, so you may have UAC troubles in Vista.

AGDI: Remaking the past

-King's Quest II: Romancing the Stones (by the way the title's meaning always bothered me):

Has been remade from a diamond in the rough, to a diamond indeed. It seems that with AGDI working on their projects without ever stopping for a break, that smile from my face will take a while to be removed. As done with KQI, they decided it was time to do it with KQII. The job done here is really tremendous and wonderful, and it's really a need to express my gratitude and joy and hysteria feelings here to the team.

So what's changed? Gazzook, it's not only the graphics and music...no..it's the puzzles, the plot, the dialogs everything. They decided it was best to deepen the plot more, give some depth to the characters, and involve some really cool puzzles in a game enviroment that would literally take your breath away.

-To quote them:
"Saturday 14 March, 2009: We're proud to announce that King's Quest II: Romancing the Stones (v3.0) is finally available for your gaming enjoyment. And this time it looks and feels better than ever!"

Psychonauts: The Adventure Game

Some of you may recall AGS Award winning game Murder in a Wheel, created by Renzo "Eshaktaar" Thönen. Well, he left the path of light that is AGS and went to the dark side that is Wintermute. Once there, he produced a 2.5D adventure called Mental Repairs Inc. By all accounts, it seems to be pretty good!

Loominous used his unfair advantage of awesome skillz to win the "Undead" Sprite Jam with the picture above.

We can save this world... with the right leadership

Wanna save the world? Wanna get paid for it? How about $20000? Well, head over to saveearthgame.org and you can do both.

You get a Shivah in the dark...

...its raining in the park, but meantime south of the river you stop and you read Uhfgood's review of The Shivah. And the Sultana of Swing, Banderwocky, has reviewed ECC.

Going Short on Wadjet Eye

No, not a stock market tip but a pointer to a review of ECC (yes, I know I said I'd stop posting articles just about those) by Emily Short, the doyenne of interactive fiction. She's got some criticism about certain aspects of the game, especially the later stages, but its overall positive.

Putting things into perspective

Over in the forums' Critics Lounge, SpacePirateCaine has posted this very good little animation on how to do single-point perspective (which so many newbies get wrong). Thanks, ye scurvy sea dog!

Oracle Review

CaptainD has reviewed photo-based AGS game The Oracle over on his blog.

Video Tutorial update

And densming's excellent series of video tutorials continues:

More on custom animations:


Putting a cutscene together:

Monkey Island WTF?

It appears that today, it's Monkey Island Memorial Day. Yep, there's a lot of geeks and nerds and really cool guys on the internet. The situation is all the geeks and nerds post stuff around the net. Apart from SSH, he's the exception. He's so cool, Zaphod Beeblebrox would appear as small breeze near him. Now on-topic, according to the Adventuress, and the INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF MOJO, today you must bring your shovel, your blue grog cup, and your sword, and get those quests done again. Ah, the bloody memories...

Soviet Unterzoegersdorf : Sector II

Capitalist pigs must stop reading here.

-Soviet Unterzoegersdorf-Sector II (or Time to kick some Nazi Ass, and not cartoony styled one):

From the team that brought to you the first part, surprisingly enough (:P) they bring you it's glorious sequel. With a graphic style of realistic rendering of all actors, who happen to be real persons, or at least I think them of as such, and with the humour being it's best asset, it's time to have some real communist party fun. The story takes you after the fall of the great Soviet Union, where you must be save a comrade. The game's audio is probably compared to few, if not to none. With a nice collection of music and a very nice job done in the voice acting sector (II), there's really some job put there. Visit the site of the team here. A site that really has a cool style. Especially the choice of language was really inspired. Also a small review (size doesn't matter) can be found at the Gnome's lair

Dare I beg for an excuse for not posting about this sooner, comrades?!

New AGS website design

CJ has done a mock-up of a new design for the AGS website (featuring some excellent blogs, by the way!) and is looking for comments in the forum thread on it.

Frequently Modulated!

Well, Masked Guardian was looking for help scaling down a big character in his game but becuase he was using auto scaling in some rooms, couldn't easily scale this character more than others. So, I created the DistortChar module to solve all his problems (and a few others too, while we're at it!). The module thread is sitting in the Tech Forum now waiting to be moved to the archive. Let me know if you find any bugs...

Just me and my shadow (module)

Well, back in 2006 when we were carefree and full of happiness and we all thought credit was a good thing I wrote the Shadow module. Since then, the world has moved on, we're all depressed about the economy and newer AGS versions have mildly broken the module. So I've fixed it! No, not the economy, the module! So check out the modules' thread on the forums and give me your praise and adulation.

Shifter's Rock

Ben's latest game has made it into Rock Paper Shotgun's radar. Meanwhile, ECC gets another review at GameBoomers.

Twitless

Since everyone else seems to be making these announcements on their blog, here's mine: if you want to follow my minute-by-minute ramblings, tough, as I'm not signed up to Twitter. So there.

Once Upon a Mini Review

Jay Underscore Zero reviews (briefly) Once Upon a Crime over at their blog. And who recommended it to them? Yours truly!

Back from Outer Space

Long time, no post indeed. Things have been wild for me lately, and I'm trying to do as much as possible but don't we all know day has only 24 hours or so?

To keep you up-to-date:
-Games you should add to your playlist?!
Yep, indeed those suckers. AGS Forums, In-Production thread appears to have tons of posts while summer just appears faint in the horizon.

-Doctor Who: Episode One - Peace and Goodwill:
Cirius seems to have a really affective love with the quite famous TV-Series. And he's proving his love and passion by creating low-res wonders. Yep, he's admitting he's quite slow at making it, but dare I say, he's also quite good. He's also offering a demo for your eyes only! Click the image on the left to start downloading.


-The Wanderer:
Frankly, I don't know what story did Wayne Adams came up with, and frankly with the game looking so surreal and reminding me of Nausica of the Valley of the Wind (an anime movie), it doesn't really matter at all. I really would spend all my dollars to get my hands on this game, if it wasn't free!!! Hope this is finished as fast as possible.



Damn doesn't that really looks great? Or is it just me?
It's actually the first time I "honour" a game with two screenshots.







-Kuma Story (Or how to draw few and let others imagine):

SpacePirateCaine or Luke Rideout, has began working on a very cool looking game of his own. A short of a weird story, but a teddy bear can have it's own adventure. The game really has quite a mix of different styles, resulting in a cute looking game. Not too many details on the backgrounds (on purpose), quite one of the best animations I've ever seen on a AGS game, and hopefully will get a good musician (Mods would be just nice) and the game will score aces.

-Now time to see what you CAN play:

-Shifter's Box Or how to sing somewhere over the Rainbow in Ben304's style:
Ben's really got the fire this month. He just can't stop drawing, not till he hits the floor. He's getting a cup grade higher with every two games he makes. So for this month, he made Shifter's Box. The game really reminds me of the Wizard of Oz story (it's not a rip-off, that's not what I'm saying). So far this one seems to be less dirty than the other one, and thank god Ben304 decided to kill that lens flare effect he had on his blog. He's making games so fast he doesn't even make in-production topics. He's probably faster than light...


-Coyote - Episode One - Il Mehicano:
That's really a surprising game indeed. Quite short yes, but really fun and atmosphere really kicks some ass. If you're a western movie fun, you'll have some fun out of this. Largopredator has also made a talkie version out of it. I've yet to complete it, but so far it's really good.

Linky links

Uhfgood reviews Limey Lizard

Gamezebo interviews Dave Gilbert

ImmoralGamers reviews ECC

Not on your Nelly

Thanks to the wonders of the author sending me a PM about something else, here's a fab review of Nelly Cootalot that I hadn't spotted before.

MAGS Remake

The March MAGS theme is to remake one of the ancient AGS games Red Flagg or House Quest. It will be interesting to see if we have a better take-up this time!

Been Reviewed, Done AG

AdventureGamers have reviewed Ben There, Dan That. That's it!