Haunting at Cliffhouse 1: A Pleasant Time

Having finished my entire stack of Kirkus books, and having done some good de-dusting (my house was the empire of dust during the worst part of the rennovation), I earned the pleasure of playing a simple but fun new adventure game. This one is made by the same lady who did Intrigue at Oakhaven Plantation, which I reviewed for Four Fat Chicks years ago. It's essentially the same style of game, although more complex.

You can get Haunting at Cliffhouse as a digital download, available here. You can get it on CD from the same site, if you like. It's a very nice little game done by one independent lover of adventure games, and so far I think it's well worth the price.

I am having fun! There are puzzles to solve, and while they're certainly not devious in the slightest, they still require some concentration. The easiest so far was in fact a game of concentration. There was a nice jigsaw puzzle that I really enjoyed. It had enough pieces to make it a real jigsaw puzzle, and not one that you could just slap together in two minutes. There was, alas, a piano puzzle, but the clues were simple and non-audible, and you can go back to the piano and have it play some nice music for you anytime you want. There's an ongoing scavenger hunt for which I've found everything except one item that needs to be combined with another item. I just haven't seen that ellusive item yet.

The basic premise is that after your husband suddenly died, you decide to take a vacation at this lovely old place on the Oregon coast. There you explore the place, pick up inventory items and start seeing ghosts almost immediately. As a reward for completing puzzles, you get another ghost scene. These scenes reveal the history of the family that built the house. There is conflict and scandal.

Cliffhouse

Isn't it pretty?

The screens are all static, as with Oakhaven, and the folks you talk to are immobile. Some of the shots are really lovely, as above. Some real work went into the art. 

This time, unlike Oakhaven, there is voice acting. The lead character (you) is quite good. Others range from excellent to pretty bad, down to just reading out the script. But who cares--this isn't a high budget game. As with the Carol Reed games, I think the use of some obvious amateurs contributes to its charm.

Once we get into a scene, it's fairly easy to find hot spots. The large blue cursor changes to red, so you have no excuse for missing anything. 

Entry Hall

Plenty of exits here!

So far I think I'm pretty far into the game. I've found lots of items, used a few, and done lots of stuff over the course of two or three hours (ha, I lost track of time!). I've played a couple of games of ESP. I've even broken into a couple of rooms and stolen stuff. I was pretty sure I would not get caught.

However, obviously I still have plenty more to do! There are a couple of puzzles I haven't been able to access in the "Japanese" garden (which looks entirely Chinese and is run by a Chinese guy, Lu Ling, who's family has been in the country for more than 100 years but who, oddly, still dresses and sounds like a refugee from the China of the 1850s--no, I don't think he's a ghost). I also can't get into the chapel, and I have a mission to go "in the morning" up the coast to a rain forest, for which I have acquired a map.

The Chinese Gardener in the Japanese Garden

However, somehow I'm going to have to find the trigger that lets me end this day so I can get to the morning mission. I'm in a bit of a stuckness until I find that trigger. Ergo, there is more fun ahead! Ah, how nice it is to just immerse myself in a fun little game made with love.

Tomorrow! Literally!

Next Entry

Adventure Games History!

Wow! I found this outstanding series of five YouTube videos done by "Machinima." These are a really excellent video retrospective on the early history of adventure games, from the very start with the first text game of "Colossal Cave," which morphed into "Adventure," which morphed into the "Zork" series, and thence to graphic adventures.

These videos cover the major publishers, the major games, and get into how adventure games changed everything.

Of course I completely disagree with his premise that the genre "vanished," although he does leave room for its revival in his final video. Certainly the genre is far from the top of the bestseller lists, but it isn't dead by a long shot and never was. Excellent, good, mediocre and lousy adventures found publishers well beyond the '90s and are published today. Adventure games have a rich history after the late 1990s. He misses, for example, the marvelous second and third Gabriel Knight games, the brilliant Obsidian and Pilgrim, The Longest Journey, the Syberia and other B. Sokal games, Keepsake, Scratches, the Dracula games, Mysterious Island, the Journeyman and Rhem series, The Longest Journey, the popular Agatha Christie and Nancy Drew series, and a whole host of others. Independent authors like Jonathan Boakes have continued to produce wonderful point and click adventures to this day such as the outstanding Darkfall series and the Lost Crown, with more on the way. Jane Jensen has returned with the excellent Gray Matter. Michael Nyqvist continues to keep a niche audience happy with his Carol Reed mysteries. Here's a list of the Adventure Gamers website's opinion about the top 100 games, as of a few years ago. A third of them were released after the turn of the millennium.

Nevertheless, this YouTube series is a really outstanding early history of the genre, at least up to the late 1990s.

And the narration is actually good!

Watch and enjoy!

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Part Four:

Part Five:

While I've Been Out

Just a heads-up on why the blog has stopped for the time being. 

I am doing an extensive renovation of the house, in preparation for starting a little business for live-in elderly ladies.

There is almost no furniture in the house. I am literally camping out in the living room. Also, the old iMac that plays Shivers is sleeping in the laundry room. We will hope that it is capable of waking up once everything is done.

I think we have about two to three weeks more work to do on the house, assuming the carpet, which I ordered and paid for two weeks ago, ever arrives.

Until then, Shivers is on hiatus.

I miss it, but I will get back to it, provided the iMac still works.

Thanks all!

Shivers 7: Eating Ixupi

Finally some progress! I have caught the wax ixupi (that took some time, actually), and am in hot pursuit of the wood ixupi.

The pot and lid of the wax one were in the anansi spider music box room. And lo! There was a wax snake. Had to go in and out and in and out of the room to catch it there--and then it kept running away instead of getting in the pot. After about a dozen tries I went downstairs and did the Maya god door puzzle to get into the same room from the other direction, and this time I got it!

That door puzzle used to give me fits, but I got it on the first try. Also got both puzzles in the astronomy room. However, that multicolored disc puzzle is stumping me this time. I have solved that several times on my own so I know I can do it, but gad. It's elusive. 

Anyway, I got the wood head in the astronomy room, and had been carrying the wood jar until I put it down to get the wax one. Now I've got the two joined and have tried a couple of times for the wood monster. I've got him scared and on the run, and I'll try again when I have a few minutes to rub together.

But all of that was fun! I don't recall ever doing it this way before. Normally I solved everything and then went ixupi hunting. But hey, if I get lucky enough to get joined jars and lids, I'm going after 'em!

Alas, I won't be able to transfer screenshots from that computer to this one. The "new" iMac is so old (which is exactly what I wanted), it doesn't recognize the thumb drive. Have to stick to cute cat pics instead.

Next Entry

Shivers 6: Escaping the Monsters

Really getting places in the museum now, but I'm running into ixupi everywhere, as usual. Problem is that I know where they lurk, so it makes things a bit more tense. However, now that I have the game playing on the iMac in almost full screen, I can evade the monsters much more easily. 

But! I got into the theater (had to do the door puzzle twice when I went back later--normally you shouldn't have to solve a door-opening puzzle more than once--hmmm.) Found the marvelous little film with Windlenot, and, alas, got into the clock tower. I remember that clock-setting puzzle. Not my favorite. Figured out how the chains work, re-set it to 12:00, and left it for later when I'm more in the mood for math.

I still couldn't solve the chinese checkers puzzle. I really tried. Then I printed out the solution from the Gameboomers walkthrough, saw where I ought to end up, and couldn't get that configuration on my own either. Problem with that puzzle is that you have to think well ahead. It's a good chess-players puzzle. Even though I normally can figure out chess puzzles, this checkers one is beyond me. Well, it's infamous. One of the most difficult puzzles in puzzle-gaming history. There was a separate WT just for that puzzle on Gameboomers.

I found the basement electrical room too, but because I know that's the endgame location, I stayed outta there. The electrical ixupi lurks there, and he's always the last one you get. I think the ashes one is always first, and the rest just might be randomized. 

Solved some nice puzzles though. The Egyptian sarcophagus puzzle, three door puzzles, the Sumerian lyre puzzle, the drums puzzle, and the siren singing in the Atlantis room. Didn't go into the maze though. I'll save that for later. It is of course easier for me, all of it, having played the game several times, even though it was years ago. These puzzles do seem on the easy side anyway (except for chinese checkers)--if you've spotted the clue somewhere along the way--usually in the books you find--you've got many of them. That flashback feature is excellent in this game. You still have to take some notes, but it saves a ton 'o time.

I've found both Beth and Merrick's ghosts. I must say, that except for the opening and closing scenes and that one awful VO from the sphinx in the Egyptian puzzle area, the acting in this game is pretty darned good. Windlenot takes some liberties going overboard, but he should. The narrator is really great--very Rod Serlingish, but with nice dry humor.

Tomorrow I'll venture into the third floor. Had good fun today. (And I was able to find Ferazel's Wand and load it, and it works perfectly!)

Next Entry

Shivers 5: More Progress

Things are going well with Shivers and the new iMac, although I did have a few glitches today. Sorta normal with a new machine.

But I progressed enough to actually capture an ixupi! I managed to get the ashes one, which took three tries, but I got him. I went to the library to get the book that shows you which pots are which. Now that I have a large enough screen window I can see the designs, with a bit of squinting. Just got lucky and got the right head for the right pot. Looked in the book, saw it was ashes, and headed back to the office to capture my monster. Finally got him! 

So now I have at last rejoined the game where I left off on the Thinkpad, but with more accomplished.

I did encounter some "Type 1 errors," which doesn't mean the same thing it means in research, that crashed the game. Kept happening. Most annoying. But it said to restart the machine, so I did, and it worked just great after that. Still, I am saving early and saving often, just in case.

I loaded some more great games today. Got all the Index+ games I enjoy so much, Crusader, Vikings and Genysys. They all work perfectly. Also got Morpheus, Timelapse, The Ring (which I've never played), Titanic and Traitor's Gate, which gave me a bit of trouble because I skipped too fast in it. At first the Traitor's Gate CD spun out of control and I had to crash, but it loaded and installed the game just fine on the second try.

I must look for Ferazel's Wand. I loved that game years ago, and I know I have it somewhere.

It is just so awesome to be able to play these old games again. They were marvelous in their time and they're still darned good today. The imagination is still there even if the graphics aren't what we'd expect today. I still enjoy the graphics.

And the Shivers museum still looks good, even if it isn't as sharp as today's hi def stuff is.

Awesome.

Next Entry

Shivers 4: Restart with New Old iMac!

So I was surfing on E-Bay the other day, just looking at old blueberry iMacs to see what they tend to sell for, and I found one advertised as brand new, never even taken out of the box. 

Now, I don't need to be throwing money around right now, but I figured that I do have this inheritance, and I can justify getting just one thing that I really want. So I bought it! Cost lots less than I would have had to spend to fix my old one.

Yes, it was factory sealed! But somebody had used it, because it had payroll software on it, and it was upgraded to OS 8.6, when the box had 8.5.1 included. There were weird things in the extensions. 

I decided, because all the old games I have are really, really old--most running System 7, actually, that I could go ahead with the 8.5 OS, because the stuff already loaded was giving me fits. At one point my cursor froze and I had to consult the google on this machine to figure out how to get out of it. Yeah, I know 8.6 is kinda the cutoff point for later software, but the stuff I want to play is older software. If I need 8.6 or 9.0 (I know I have a 9.0 disc somewhere), it's easy enough to find on the internet, and the download is free.

So I did a clean install of the 8.5.1, which went well. But I still couldn't get Shivers to install--it kept saying it hadn't loaded one file. Yet, I knew it should run. 7th Guest wouldn't load either--said it needed Quictime 3.0, or Obsidian. 

But ha! I learned by loading stuff onto that IBM Thinkpad I bought that plenty of games will install the software you need. So I installed some more stuff. I got a copy of Quicktime 4.1 from my Alice CD--just loaded that. That made 7th Guest happy, although it still needed something else. So I kept loading games, and most worked just fine. I think I must have gotten some good software from my Zork Nemesis CD--which ran just fine.

Tried 7th Guest again, and voila! It runs perfectly now! Tried my beloved Obsidian again, and that worked too! (Oh man, I thought I'd never be able to play that again.) 11th Hour runs too, and Day of the Tentacle, and The Dig. Haven't tried much else.

And . . . finally Shivers loaded and runs! Ha ha! However, it still won't go full screen. Doesn't matter in this case though, because the window it runs in on the iMac is three times the size of the Thinkpad window. Perhaps it never did go full screen--but this window is plenty big enough to play just fine.

There are still a couple of games I've tried that won't load, but later on I can load newer software, or perhaps transfer some stuff from my old machine to this one.

Anyway, I'm only going to use this new machine for my old, much loved games. A few are being reproduced on the GOG site, but they don't go for adventures much. Most likely it will take years, if ever, for them to get most of my old stuff. I'll try to transfer some screen shots, but I might have to hook it up to the internet to get shots onto this blog.

Of course, the Thinkpad is for PC games. But I have dozens of old Mac games that I'd never be able to play again, without this new machine. So I'm pretty well thrilled!

So! Back to Shivers! I've solved the gazebo puzzle again, although it took three tries this time. I didn't remember everything on the Stonehenge puzzle, but I'll go back and scope out the clues. Then it'll be easy to get back to where I left off on the Thinkpad.

Woo Hoo!

Next Entry