I better find him and see what’s on his mind…” “Dagobah!” exclaimed Luke Skywalker, climbing out of his X-Wing and sniffing the swampy goodness. Transpose it to Star Wars and try to pretend there’s a narrative, and the best you’re going to get is… well, this. Which of course is all the engine could really manage. Indiana Jones was easily the more successful of the two, simply because the nature of Indy’s adventures lent it to random tricks and traps, similar-looking locations, and basic treasure hunts. Given that the most popular calculator based game at the time was entering ‘5318008’ to make it say ‘boobies’, that rather explains why the idea only had slightly more life in it than Sierra’s narrative based screensaver Johnny Castaway. Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis creator Hal Barwood took the lead, with the team putting together a simple randomisation system and sprite based engine that could practically run on a calculator. A poor, game-starved office worker sick of Minesweeper and Solitaire could fire one up over a lunch-break, play a whole game while eating a sandwich, and then continue their drudgery in the knowledge that they’d made an ugly green Muppet mildly impressed. Those were polished, refined experiences, with the typical comparison between Lucasarts and its arch-rival Sierra that Lucasarts made movies while Sierra made TV shows-its adventures in particular were more or less Pixar in point-and-click form, especially classics like Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle.ĭesktop Adventures were cheap and cheerful bits of fluff using the company’s most famous licenses. They’re all at least on the family tree though, as indeed was this week’s slice of little-known obscura.ĭesktop Adventures, to give the two-game series its proper title, was an odd idea that actually did make some sense, but was always going to struggle next to all of that. Now, of course not all of those are true Roguelikes, none being truly turn-based and not all featuring permadeath in the traditional style.
Whatever you think of the game itself, Diablo 3 managed to sell roughly seventeen billion copies of its randomly generated dungeon-crawl, The Binding of Isaac and FTL knocked the indie world’s socks off, and Torchlight 2 joined the party with no small amount of cheering.
It’s a good time for roguelikes and their descendants at the moment. “When nine hundred years old you reach, tell crappy stories you will not, hmm?” I can probably sum this one up in a single sentence. Though it is a singleplayer game, I suppose. This week, who’s the most dedicated rogue in Star Wars’ interactive legacy? No, not that Solo guy. From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random obscure games back into the light.
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