A finalist in three categories (Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Excellence in Visual Art and Excellence in Audio, with the amount of nominations shared only with Closure and Trauma) in this year’s IGF competition, Ratloop Asia’s Rocketbirds: Revolution! is looking to be the early bird that catches the worm this year.
At the end of its animated intro, “OBEY” reads imprinted in upper-case on the sides of two massive missiles standing upright, shining and erect, at once establishing a poignant scene of the promulgation of violence and power.
We’ve done lots of adventure-related coverage for the past few months, including reviews on Downfall and the Blackwell series. This time around, I would like to bring to your attention some older commercial adventure games that you can access for no price tag at all!
Firstly. Yahtzee’s Chzo Mythos special edition versions are still free. Also available, for no dineros, on the ScummVM website, are Beneath a Steel Sky, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Lure of the Temptress and Drascula: The Vampire Strikes Back. There is some variation from game to game, but most do have downloads available for different language distributions and talkie/floppy versions accordingly.
Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, of Chzo Mythos fame (although admittedly now far better known for his ramblicious Zero Punctuation series that Nabeel somehow never fails to tweet for you guys), has decided to release, for free, each and every special donation version of his games. Quoth Yahtzee, “I have simply attained so much money from donations that I no longer have any earthly wants.”
7 Days a Skeptic
6 Days a Sacrifice
Trilby’s Notes
The entire Chzo Mythos is thus available: 5 Days, 7 Days, the parser-based Trilby’s Notes and 6 Days, in this order; also free for the taking is the special edition of the nihilistic, Flashback-influenced platformer 1213 (the game that laid the groundwork for the addictive Art of Theft). All of the aforementioned games are highly recommended and I would advise everyone to take a look at these pre-fame Yahtzee gems. If you never did play these well-esteemed AGS games before, the definitive versions are now out there for the taking!
Personally, as fun as Zero Punctuation is, I’d still take the games over Zero Punc any day if it came down to deciding between the two: Let us plebeians do the talking and the real designers do the walking, eh? In the same post, Croshaw also briefly mentions that he’s working “…on a couple of ideas [for new games]. It’s just that all of my free time is gradually melting away. They’re interesting ideas, though.”
