![]() ![]() The fact that everyone has blank faces looks really creepy, and the dead bodies are much more dramatically posed, with blood pouring out of them (or, rather, something that looks like blood – it’s still black and white) rather than the Looney Tunes-style lumps in the original one. The redone visuals look really nice in comparison. Part of this may have had to do with better technology, but the Japanese PCs also ran at a higher resolution than the Apple II, allowing for more screen real estate. It still uses the simplistic black and white line drawings, but all of the characters now have vaguely realistic proportions, despite not having any faces, and the visuals look far less rough. This means there were two games on the market with the same title – one a shoddy ripoff, the other quite authentic.) While Starcraft’s port is very similar to the original Apple II version, all of the graphics have been redrawn and improved. (There’s another graphic text adventure developed by Microcabin using the same name, although it’s entirely unrelated to Sierra’s game. In 1983, a Japanese company called Starcraft ported Mystery House to Japanese computers such as the PC-6001. Still, one of the major puzzles really makes no sense – you need to figure out how to get into the trapdoor in the attic, which only magically becomes visible (and therefore accessible) after you’ve looked at it through a telescope, which is perched atop a tree in the middle of the forest. The manor itself is relatively small, but there are a number of secret passageways, hidden compartments, and underground tunnels that fulfill its promise of being a “mystery house”. For example, in one room, the door is on the right side of the screen, so it’s natural to assume that it’s to the east, but it’s actually to the south.Īt least the house has several interesting secrets. It gets more confusing because the visuals don’t necessarily match up to the directions. Right at the beginning, once you open the door to the house, you can’t just type “enter” or “go in” or even type the direction. And there’s a short time limit at the beginning, where you need to find a light source lest you find yourself wandering in the dark.Īnd this is to say nothing of the extremely simple text parser, which only understands two word sentences. You can easily kill yourself through stupid means – such as lighting a candle, tripping, setting the house on fire, and not putting it out in time – plus you can get lost in the surrounding forest. If you pay attention to their bodies you can piece together some clues that implicate the murderer – one was strangled by pantyhose so the killer is probably a girl, and another is holding a daisy, which… well, spells out the killer’s name right there. (“You are in the kitchen.”) All of the characters have professions, but none have any personality, nor any real purpose beyond popping up dead. There’s not really much in the way of prose so much as stark descriptions. While Mystery House was a true pioneer amongst text adventures, its puzzles, story, writing – pretty much everything, actually – are all quite amateur. It’s all understandable given the game’s age it had to fit in the limited RAM of the Apple II, and since there were no real drawing programs on the market, Ken and Roberta Williams had to assemble their own device, combining a graphics tablet with a mechanical arm. The characters look as if they were lifted from a first grader’s notebook, and even minor items like knives and shovels are crudely drawn. The visuals are, of course, quite rudimentary, consisting of shakily drawn white lines against a black background. One of the most important adventure games ever made, Mystery House was the first in the genre to add graphics, whereas all previous games were entirely text-based. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |