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I didn't do much gaming over the weekend - spent more time staring at walls - but I did get a few hours into my replay of Phantasy Star with SMSPower's retranslation and FM restoration patch. I've got all four members of my party and am having the scientist guy build my spaceship.

My plan is to start Phantasy Star II when I finish this as I never actually got around to finishing it last time I fired it up.

I bought and downloaded Athena (arcade) and Namco Museum Volume 3 (PS One) on my Vita last night.

I’ve never played Athena and my initial impressions are that after this month I may never play it again. It’s brutally difficult and not very fun. The jumps are floaty and it seems like how high I jump is arbitrary sometimes. I’ll need to jump high to kill an archer in a tree and instead I’ll hop; then I try to hop over a tree stump and leap into the air instead. You start off really weak and enemies sometimes appear from offscreen and kill you before you make any progress. I’ll put some more time into it but initially not a fan.

I downloaded Namco Museum for Ms Pac Man and that’s always a good time. I played one round and scored a little over 18,000, which is pretty typical for me. I suck at the game but I love it anyway. It’s a good game to have portable and I didn’t have it portable on any other system. I’m going to try and get a better score this month. It seems like I always get Game Over around the 5th level.

ElkinFencer10 wrote:I didn't do much gaming over the weekend - spent more time staring at walls - but I did get a few hours into my replay of Phantasy Star with SMSPower's retranslation and FM restoration patch. I've got all four members of my party and am having the scientist guy build my spaceship.

Definitely the best way to play. It does cause some issues when you get stuck and need to refer to a guide, though. Pretty much everything out there is keyed to the US translation.

Are you ready to get totally meta Eighties Ladies!?

Last night I started up The Colonel's Bequest. It's one of the second-stringers in Sierra's line of adventure games from the 80's, or at least I'd assumed it to be a second-stringer due to the fact that it doesn't share the same sort of popularity as better known series in the Sierra stable (e.g. any of the '- Quest' games or even Leisure Suit Larry for that matter). At any rate I was unfamiliar with it when I purchased it on GOG, and at this point it's been a game that's remained unplayed in my GOG backlog. This month was the perfect month to jump in!

So what we have here is basically a straight up homage to the works of Agatha Christie mixed with a splash of Nancy Drew, and garnished with a game board of Clue for good measure. The setup is a classic who-dun-it 'murder mystery in a mansion' affair. Interestingly this one is much more focused on characterization than other Sierra games I've played. The cast is interesting and varied although every character is also some sort of genre pastiche that you'd expect in a murder mystery game set in the 20's. So not groundbreaking, but interesting nonetheless.

But here's where we get full meta! When we talk about women and gaming in the 80's, it's almost impossible to do so without doffing ones cap to the contributions of Sierra creative force and co-founder Roberta Williams. Sierra absolutely dominated the world of adventure gaming in the 80's, a fact due in no small part to the contributions and creativity of Roberta Williams. She contributed so much to this genre in fact, that she is credited as co-creator of the very first graphical adventure game Mystery House in 1980. (As an aside ... glancing over the plot and setup of Mystery House now, I can't help but wonder whether The Colonel's Bequest was an expansion upon this earlier work). At any rate like so many Sierra games, The Colonel's Bequest is the product of Roberta Williams creativity. In a month celebrating games featuring ladies of the eighties, I figured it would be worthwhile to recognize the contributions of this IRL lady protagonist of eighties gaming.

nullPointer wrote:The Colonel's Bequest

This is in my queue too. I was saving it towards the end, because I'm trying to knock out the shortest/simplest games first.

Sierra absolutely dominated the world of adventure gaming in the 80's

I wouldn't say "world" but I'd agree with "western genre". Japan was doing its own thing in adventure games of the '80s, as the genre was hugely popular there. Albeit in a different format than western adventure games skewed towards.

In a month celebrating games featuring ladies of the eighties, I figured it would be worthwhile to recognize the contributions of this IRL lady protagonist of eighties gaming.

Yes as a designer and writer, Roberta Williams was (and continues to be to some degree) hugely influential in the world of adventure gaming. As far as Japan goes, I think her closest equivalent (insofar as the eighties are concerned) might be Rieko Kodama. Rieko is often credited as the creator of the Phantasy Star series. She was the chief designer, principle writer, and staff artist for the original entry, and continued to work closely with many other entries in the series. She's also well known for being the producer of Skies of Arcadia. (She's produced a lot of games actually: https://segaretro.org/Rieko_Kodama )

Anyway, if you end up enjoying Laura's first game (hope we both do), don't forget about this one:

https://www.gog.com/game/the_dagger_of_amon_ra

Sarge wrote:

ElkinFencer10 wrote:I didn't do much gaming over the weekend - spent more time staring at walls - but I did get a few hours into my replay of Phantasy Star with SMSPower's retranslation and FM restoration patch. I've got all four members of my party and am having the scientist guy build my spaceship.

Definitely the best way to play. It does cause some issues when you get stuck and need to refer to a guide, though. Pretty much everything out there is keyed to the US translation.

Yeah, I've run into a couple of those issues with location names, but the biggest irritation for me (and, ironically, the thing that's actually the least important) is item names in shops since it uses the original Japanese names (albeit translated) instead of soda and burger.

Also, full disclosure before anyone thinks I grew hair on my chest, I'm definitely going to try out this Phantasy Star II "Easy" patch that supposedly lowers some of the BS that popo was warning me about. If it's too bullshit easy, then I'm gonna just suck it up and do it vanilla, but I'm not above reducing some BS as long as it doesn't wipe out ALL challenge entirely.

Exhuminator wrote:

nullPointer wrote:The Colonel's Bequest

This is in my queue too. I was saving it towards the end, because I'm trying to knock out the shortest/simplest games first.

Anyway, if you end up enjoying Laura's first game (hope we both do), don't forget about this one:

https://www.gog.com/game/the_dagger_of_amon_ra

To be honest I might have played that one first (another one in my GOG backlog), had it not missed our decade cut-off by a couple of years. Oh who am I kidding, I'm almost religiously fanatical about playing game series in order of release. It's true though that I'm a much bigger fan of graphical adventure games that utilize a point & click interface (like Dagger of Amon Ra) than those that rely heavily on text parser interaction (Colonel's Bequest). To be fair The Colonel's Bequest does feature some contextual point & click actions but all of the puzzles and item pickups I've encountered so far require the use of the text parser.

I'll be interested in hearing your thoughts on this Ex! It has a weird 'passage of time' mechanic that I'm a little iffy on. As far as I can tell you could easily miss whole chunks of the game simply by hitting a trigger event that moves the clock forward (thus closing you off from other events occurring within that block of time). I may have already missed crucial clues for all I know, lol! I'm not sure whether various events will repeat depending on whether you missed them. As is usually the case with Sierra (in my experience) save early, save often, and use multiple saves.

nullPointer wrote:Are you ready to get totally meta Eighties Ladies!?

Last night I started up The Colonel's Bequest. It's one of the second-stringers in Sierra's line of adventure games from the 80's, or at least I'd assumed it to be a second-stringer due to the fact that it doesn't share the same sort of popularity as better known series in the Sierra stable (e.g. any of the '- Quest' games or even Leisure Suit Larry for that matter). At any rate I was unfamiliar with it when I purchased it on GOG, and at this point it's been a game that's remained unplayed in my GOG backlog. This month was the perfect month to jump in!

So what we have here is basically a straight up homage to the works of Agatha Christie mixed with a splash of Nancy Drew, and garnished with a game board of Clue for good measure. The setup is a classic who-dun-it 'murder mystery in a mansion' affair. Interestingly this one is much more focused on characterization than other Sierra games I've played. The cast is interesting and varied although every character is also some sort of genre pastiche that you'd expect in a murder mystery game set in the 20's. So not groundbreaking, but interesting nonetheless.

But here's where we get full meta! When we talk about women and gaming in the 80's, it's almost impossible to do so without doffing ones cap to the contributions of Sierra creative force and co-founder Roberta Williams. Sierra absolutely dominated the world of adventure gaming in the 80's, a fact due in no small part to the contributions and creativity of Roberta Williams. She contributed so much to this genre in fact, that she is credited as co-creator of the very first graphical adventure game Mystery House in 1980. (As an aside ... glancing over the plot and setup of Mystery House now, I can't help but wonder whether The Colonel's Bequest was an expansion upon this earlier work). At any rate like so many Sierra games, The Colonel's Bequest is the product of Roberta Williams creativity. In a month celebrating games featuring ladies of the eighties, I figured it would be worthwhile to recognize the contributions of this IRL lady protagonist of eighties gaming.

I applaud you for having a good perspective into this month's together retro. I would have been digging hard into those games if I hadn't already played them. You sir, get all the points.

After much graphing, creative cursing, and gnashing of teeth, I have finished...


Space Hunter for the Famicom.

It's a wannabe Metroid rip-off. I'm pretty sure it is. I can't prove that in a court of law.
Not an amazing experience regardless. Unless you are amazed at being aggravated and confused.
Lots of bad ideas here. A couple good ideas, stolen from an obvious source. Samus avert thine eyes.
Yeah that's four hours of my life I'm not getting back. Oh well, sometimes you gotta take one for the team.
Anyway folks! I'm glad this one's over. Happily moving on now.

Full review here.

Buzzing along quite nicely in Phantasy Star now. I'm on Dezoris and have the ice drill and after bumbling about for a bit picked up the Lac Armor to go with the Lac Swd I found on Palma. People keep saying Lassic is afraid of Laconia so I guess I'm just a LacShd away from kicking his ass, wherever he is.

I'm finding the game is surprisingly addictive with quick paced battles and the planet hopping. It's obviously got its flaws mostly owing to its age. There are some quality of life things missing (being able to heal everyone at a hospital, limited inventory, cryptic progression) but generally it holds up really well.

I kind of feel I must be closing in on the end, my party is getting quite powerful and I'm picking up what I assume is the strongest equipment. Alis will have her revenge.