Victory Game Center

John Walker wrote: Look, you’re right, these aren’t the biggest deals in the world. These aren’t game-breaking bugs, nor issues worthy of a thousand word rant. Except, you know, maybe they are. Because I care. I really care, about adventure games, about the genre. I played text adventures from the age of four. I still parse the word “exam” to mean “look closely at something”, and as I approach my fifth decade it’s apparent that’s not going away. I played every single adventure my dad bought, borrowed or copied throughout my childhood, as they gained line drawings, interactive art, dropped their parser bar and grew their verbs, lost their verbs and gained their cursors, and then struggled through the next twenty years of their flailing attempts to stay relevant. I know how ordinary these issues are, I know how common they are, and I know I’ve enjoyed many an adventure game that has committed such enormities. But it doesn’t make it fine, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t stick in my craw.

And you know what, when it’s the guy who sodding invented the verb-based adventure format, the guy who kicked the whole LucasArts classics off, it matters even more. I want this game to demonstrate to me that it cares too. When it bounces from one mortal sin to another in the first three minutes, it really feels like it doesn’t.