UCHG

While LucasArts are known as the kings of Point ‘n’ Click, another stu­dio in the 90’s was pro­duc­ing some of the best and most grip­ping adven­ture games of all time — and they were British. Revolution Software, based in York, were behind one of the biggest fran­chises in adven­ture game his­tory — Broken Sword. The 1001 book touches on the first game in the series, as well as another point and click clas­sic, Beneath a Steel Sky.

1001 No.55: ‘Broken Sword’ (1996)

Playing Broken Sword is one of my fond­est child­hood mem­o­ries, and is one of those games where see­ing the open­ing cutscene and first screen of the game just brings back waves of nostalgia.

It’s an amaz­ing story, an adven­ture that starts so sim­ply but ends up in loca­tions around the world. You are George Stobbart, a sim­ple American tourist, caught up in an explo­sion at a Parisian Café. Everything and every­one is of course not as they seem, and the plot descends into a com­plex con­spir­acy, involv­ing mur­der, decep­tion and the Knights Templar.

It’s a bril­liant plot, one that twists and turns all over the place as more mys­ter­ies are uncov­ered. The voice act­ing, sound and music are all top notch, and the con­trols are so refined com­pared to the ear­lier LucasArts adven­tures. Despite being set mostly in France and star­ring an American, it’s full of very British humour — and the puz­zles are clever but not so abstract that it requires a walk­through at every step.

I’m a huge fan of this whole series, which is still going today, but the orig­i­nal game is undoubt­edly the best. Play it, and the sequel ‘The Smoking Mirror’, and if you like them try the oth­ers — they went 3D for the 3rd game onwards, so it’s a bit of an acquired taste. Never feels quite the same as the good old original…

1001 No.56: ‘Beneath a Steel Sky’ (1994)

One of the ear­li­est adven­ture clas­sics from Revolution Software, Beneath a Steel Sky is set in a dystopian future, where the world has been rav­aged by con­flict and pol­lu­tion. There’s a great atmos­phere through­out, and it’s awe­some. You can see how Revolution honed their craft, going on to pro­duce the Broken Sword series — and if you’re a sci-fi fan like me, you’ll love it.

It’s short but sweet, with some excel­lent humour, but also a real sense of dan­ger — you can die in these games, not like in those cutesy LucasArts adven­tures! Like Broken Sword, your char­ac­ter is thrown into a mys­tery, and you have to uncover the truth about the city that you’re lost in. It was a huge com­mer­cial suc­cess at the time, and won numer­ous awards — and is still called by some the best adven­ture game of all time.

Get some free games

One of the best things about this game though is that it is now free­ware — either sign up with www.gog.com (an essen­tial resource for your clas­sic gam­ing needs) and down­load it from them, or get it straight from www.scummvm.org — which I hope you’ve vis­ited already to get your old awe­some LucasArts games work­ing. You can also grab Lure of the Temptress while you’re there — the first game that Revolution produced.

It’s a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to describe the WarioWare series — every game is very sim­ple at heart, and yet so bril­liantly put together. You could call them a bunch of ‘minigames’, and have done with it — but that doesn’t come close to show­ing how much fun and often down­right hilar­i­ous these games can be. The UCHG had fun a few years back with the Wii edi­tion of the series, ‘Smooth Moves’ — check out that vid here.

The 1001 includes a cou­ple from the series:

1001 No.53: ‘WarioWare, Inc.: Mega MicroGames! (2003)
& No. 54: ‘WarioWare: Twisted!’ (2005)

Mega MicroGames was the first in the series, with Twisted! com­ing out later — both on the Gameboy Advance. All WarioWare titles fea­ture the char­ac­ter Wario, straight out of the Mario series of Nintendo games — but the story and use of char­ac­ters is never impor­tant. What is impor­tant are the minigames — and there are tons of them.

Reaction times are a huge fac­tor in each game. You have mere sec­onds to assess what the hell is going on on-screen, and then react accord­ingly. The sheer ran­dom­ness and bizarre nature of some of the minigames is what gives the WarioWare series its charm: some chal­lenges range from try­ing to shave someone’s beard off, to catch­ing weird bits of food to make a giant sand­wich. And some of them are really odd — but the con­trols remain ever so sim­ple it becomes instinc­tive in no time.

Each sec­tion of each game has a set of dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters, together with their own kind of theme, my favourite being ‘9 Volt and 18 Volt’. Like the UCHG these guys love retro games, and every minigame is full of ref­er­ences to bits of gam­ing his­tory. Part of the fun is just recog­nis­ing what each screen has been pulled from.

All these WarioWare games are sim­i­lar at their core. The Wii ver­sion obvi­ously uses the Wiimote, and the ‘Twisted!’ edi­tion actu­ally shipped with a kind of accelerom­e­ter built into the car­tridge to pro­vide the actions — though because of the mer­cury in the car­tridge was never allowed a European release. I really urge you to track down at least one game from this series — it’s hard to explain how much fun it can be, so just give it a go yourself.

Every year, thou­sands of nerds and gad­get fans descent on the real-life accom­pa­ni­ment to a pop­u­lar TV show: The Gadget Show Live. This year the UCHG sent a del­e­ga­tion in the form of Fen and Ross, and this is what they saw.

There were count­less stands, from all sorts of tech com­pa­nies — rang­ing from the tech­nol­ogy of tomor­row (like con­trol­ling stuff with your mind), to the more use­ful house­hold gad­getry — such as a flush­ing toi­let for your cat.

Of course, there are some things that catch your eye more than oth­ers: it was great to see some 3D print­ing going on, with real-life objects being cre­ated straight off a USB flash drive; a mini ver­sion of robot wars; and some super smart fly­ing drones, con­trol­lable from your mobile, full of gyro­scopes and accelerom­e­ters to keep them steady as a rock.

Custom built arcade machines made an appear­ance, though priced at £2-5k they were deemed a ripoff — and no where near as authen­tic at Fen’s own restored original.

There was a com­pany that deliv­ers retro gam­ing to par­ties, con­fer­ences, cor­po­rate events - though peer­ing behind their flashy LED screens revealed just a pile of wires and consoles!

And of course there was the live show, though most of what we can recall is a few chicks
danc­ing about in skimpy out­fits. Ross seemed to be too dis­tracted to take a picture.

The PC hard­ware area was quite a draw for us — as long time cus­tomers of the site
overclockers.co.uk it was great to see them have a pres­ence there. They showed off some of their rigs to us: cus­tom made water-cooled beasts, run­ning at nearly 5ghz with 4 meaty graph­ics cards. Rivalling this was Scan’s effort, a ridicu­lous machine called Swordfish: with three screens and some ter­ri­fy­ing specs! It wasn’t func­tion­ing when we arrived, but we couldn’t stand by and not mess around with stuff: we had it work­ing in no time.

We couldn’t leave with­out seek­ing out the retro com­put­ing area: as well as tech from through­out the years like an ancient morse code machine, PDAs the size of bricks, and the orig­i­nal com­puter that inspired Bill Gates (Altair 8800, pic­tured above) there was a host of gam­ing history.

We tried out a TurbograFX, Amiga CD32 (which was deemed to be shit, and took for­ever to load the game), Binatone pong machine, Commodore 16, Atari 600 XL and some early hand-helds includ­ing Astrowars and Munchman (which unlike the orig­i­nal Pacman only allowed you to eat the dots in one direction).

In sum­mary it was damn awe­some, so look at some retro consoles.

In a con­tin­u­a­tion from the last post, here are a few more clas­sic LucasArts adven­tures, taken from the pages of the 1001… all of these adven­ture games rather filled my child­hood: who knows how I ever got any­thing done at all.

1001 No.47: ‘Maniac Mansion (1987) & No. 48: ‘Day of the Tentacle’ (1993)

For me Day of the Tentacle is the real mas­ter­piece here, but you can’t men­tion one with­out the other — Maniac Mansion is pretty much the game that started it all, essen­tially one of the ear­li­est point & click games. Both games are sim­i­lar with its sig­na­ture LucasArts humour, but with the abil­ity to change char­ac­ters at will. This of course cre­ates some real crafty puz­zles, as each char­ac­ter needs to be utilised to find your way through — and with a time travel ele­ment intro­duced in Day of the Tentacle, things can get seri­ously mind-bending. Still, these games are hailed as clas­sics today, and with good reason.

1001 No.49: ‘Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis’ (1992)’

As far I know, this is the only game to really do half-decent jus­tice to the Indiana Jones brand. It’s got that great mix of globe trot­ting, nazi fight­ing, and puz­zle solv­ing that make the Indy films (the first 3 any­way) so much fun. The game com­plex too — you hardly realise it when play­ing, but there are mul­ti­ple path­ways branch­ing off all over the place. Don’t want to talk your way past that guard? Try sneak­ing around him, trick­ing him, or just punch him in the face. You can team up with your side­kick Sofia, or go it alone — this means mul­ti­ple playthroughs offer new choices and puz­zles, some­thing that isn’t that com­mon in a point and click.

Nazis are once again the bad guys here, rac­ing you in a search to find the lost city of Atlantis. It’s great stuff, with excel­lent voice act­ing, and a real sense of humour. The game had huge crit­i­cal acclaim at the time, and is a real adven­ture classic.

1001 No.50: ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ (1990), No.51: ‘Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge’ (1991) & No.52: ‘The Curse of Monkey Island’ (1997)

Monkey Island is an absolutely leg­endary series of games, and one that seemed to bring a new brand of humour to gam­ing — before the world met Guybrush Threepwood, it would’ve been a chal­lenge to think of a game that was classed as ‘funny’. Based in the age of pirates and pirat­ing it spawned many silly in-jokes that remain today — like the punch­lines from ‘insult sword­fight­ing’. The series is still kick­ing around today, though sadly not in any shape to rival the orig­i­nals. The 1001 book sug­gests play­ing the first 3 games and then no more, and they’re prob­a­bly right.

So there you have it — more than enough to get your teeth into. What are you wait­ing for? Update the gap in your gam­ing her­itage if you’ve never touched these awe­some exam­ples of clas­sic point and click gameplay.

I’ve always loved point and click games on the PC. Sadly an almost for­got­ten genre now, it’s still one that every­one should expe­ri­ence some­time — get immersed in some great sto­ry­telling, and use your mouse to tax your brain a bit more than just shoot­ing end­less Russians in the face.

Arguably the mas­ters of the genre were LucasArts, the video game branch of George Lucas’ pro­duc­tion stu­dio. And through what was a ‘golden age’ of gam­ing, they pro­duced a whole bunch of point & click clas­sics, most of which seem to have made it into the 1001… It’s also worth point­ing out that most of these are per­fectly playable on mod­ern machines, thanks to the emu­la­tor Scummvm — and many are now kick­ing around for free. Take a look…

1001 No.42: ‘Loom’ (1990)

An early one this, and it shows. It’s pretty basic in many ways, and no way as intri­cate as some of the LucasArts mas­ter­pieces that were to come in future years. However, it’s still very smart — and obvi­ously plays up to the trend of proper ‘sound’ within games that must have been rel­a­tively new then: one of the key ways you solve puz­zles is through your var­i­ous abil­i­ties, all accessed by play­ing dif­fer­ent melodies. A fas­ci­nat­ing game, and a pretty short one too — so def­i­nitely worth a look.

1001 No.43: ‘Sam & Max Hit the Road’ (1993)

These char­ac­ters are cer­tainly vis­i­ble nowa­days for those who use the online game ser­vice Steam — their mod­ern series of games was one of the first to start being released in episodes. Whatever you think of the cur­rent games though, the orig­i­nal is one not to be missed. It’s bonkers. One of the first puz­zles fea­tures hav­ing to pull a cat inside out. Because of how crazy it is, solu­tions can be slightly off the wall — I’d be sur­prised if you never had to resort to a walk­through on this one. But don’t let that put you off!

1001 No.44: ‘Full Throttle’ (1995)

A bril­liantly funny tale about the leader of a biker gang, framed for a mur­der he (or rather ‘you’) didn’t com­mit. Features a great sto­ry­line full of twists, and even some awe­some Road Rash style fight sequences. Also as is the norm with LucasArts games it’s full of awe­some art­work, and fan­tas­tic voice act­ing — includ­ing Mark ‘Luke Skywalker’ Hamill… I just love this game.

1001 No.45: ‘The Dig’ (1995)

One of my favourites of all time. It starts with you plac­ing charges on an aster­oid bound for Earth — so far, so Armageddon. Soon though you end up in a bizarre alien place, strangely deserted of all life — and you have to get home. Challenging puz­zles, but a really engag­ing story — and with Steven Spielberg onboard it was a more seri­ous one than other more slap­stick LucasArts adven­tures. And the music is gor­geous too: dig­i­tal remixes of Wagner…

1001 No.46: ‘Grim Fandango’ (1998)

I always won­dered how point & click games, in the past restricted to 2 dimen­sions, would make the tran­si­tion to 3D. And then Grim Fandango came along — and not only did it, but kicked ass at doing it. A bizarre back­drop of one of the cir­cles of Mexican folk­lore after­life, where every­one is a skele­ton — cou­pled with an amaz­ing twist­ing story straight out of a ‘film noire’ movie. Just bril­liant. Everyone should play this.

To be continued…

1001 No.40: ‘F.E.A.R’ (2005) & No.41: F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin (2009)

Around 1998 a movie came out called ‘The Ring’. It was a Japanese hor­ror flick, some­thing about a spooky video that if you watched it some ghostly girly came and ate you. There was also ‘The Grudge’, sim­i­larly about some ghostish pre-adolescent, that killed you while burp­ing in your ear.

Anyway, the point is that very quickly these scary Japanese hor­ror movies became cool, so loads came out and all seemed to involve a ter­ri­fy­ing lit­tle girl. Presumably because, you know, girls are scary and that.

All were pop­u­lar movies — American remakes fol­lowed — and so inevitably some exec at Vivendi went “hey, we could make a game out of this!”, and thus FEAR was born.

Combining these spooky activ­i­ties with another craze at the time — slow-motion gun­fights — along came the F.E.A.R series. Hilariously, it’s mean to stand for some­thing — First Encounter Assault Recon, which means.… who knows.

The title means noth­ing of course, and it very quickly just descends into shooty mad­ness, with graph­ics and action that were at the time rather impres­sive. It’s not so much scary (for real scares check out the recent game ‘Amnesia’), but it does shock you — fre­quently a ghostly lit­tle girl in a red dress pops up into your view and dis­ap­pears just as quickly; and at times an even freakier grown up mouldy old ver­sion of said girl occa­sion­ally chases you down corridors.

It’s a qual­ity game — and the first-person bullet-time thing hadn’t really been done before prop­erly before FEAR came along and made it so much fun. FEAR even man­aged to get a bit of hand-to-hand com­bat in there, so you could fly­ing kick peo­ple the face in slow motion. And who doesn’t want to do that?

Enemies were mostly dumb, cor­ri­dors got repet­i­tive, and the story was a just a rea­son to give you bul­let time — but it worked as a whole. It had a cou­ple of addons, which were mostly rub­bish. Then (four years later!) came… FEAR 2.

Mainly build­ing on the fun­da­men­tals of the first game, FEAR 2 car­ried on the sto­ry­line of FEAR, but with a twist: you now played a dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter, though strangely with the same bullet-time capa­bil­i­ties of the first game. More strange still is that it actu­ally does build on and improve the plot of the first game, and ends on a rather cool twist.

It is of course essen­tially more of the same, but tight­ened up — it seems more like the game the orig­i­nal FEAR should have been.

Like the orig­i­nal, FEAR 2 had an addon released, called ‘Reborn’ — but also like the orig­i­nal addons (‘Perseus Mandate’ and ‘Extraction Point’) it’s point­less, and isn’t worth your time. I recently blasted through the more recent FEAR 3 — but sadly I can’t rec­om­mend it. This one-time PC clas­sic series has gone the way of the con­sole mar­ket, and thus has been dumbed down too much…

But FEAR 1 + 2 — if you never expe­ri­enced jump­ing at the sight of a scary girl, then jump­ing feet first into some­ones face while fir­ing in slow motion, they’re def­i­nitely worth a go.

1001 No.36: ‘Left 4 Dead’ (PC, 2008) & 1001 No.37: ‘Left 4 Dead 2′ (PC, 2009)

It is fair to say that I am by far the most qual­i­fied mem­ber of the UCHG when it comes to talk­ing about these games. If it is proof you seek then may I men­tion my part in both the 2008 and 2009 New Years Eve Massacres, as well as my 3 day marathon in which I com­pleted the Zombie Genocidist achieve­ment in L4D. That’s right! I killed 53,595 zom­bies in under 3 days! — suf­fice to say, I enjoy shoot­ing zombies.

If the above was not enough I can add to my some what com­pre­hen­sive résumé with my L4D fan art - I rest my case.

For this post I will start at the begin­ning, as I am told this is a very good place to start.

Left 4 Dead is set in your generic US city where you’re thrown into the action as one of 4 aver­age peo­ple who are all just try­ing to sur­vive. Now this may sound cliché (and it is) but the game suc­ceeded where so many oth­ers have failed. The multi-player dynamic works superbly and requires you to not only watch out for your aver­age run of the mill zom­bies, but also keep an eye on your fel­low sur­vivors in case they become inca­pac­i­tated by the Special Infected. The Special Infected are not the result of a Zombie hoard over­run­ning the local Learning Difficulties school, far from it in fact. They are a breed of more dan­ger­ous evolved zom­bie that has the abil­ity to divide and destroy your merry band of sur­vivors at any minute. The Special Infected come in the form of the Smoker, Boomer, Hunter, Tank and the dreaded Witch. This mix or zom­bie type cou­pled with the sheer num­ber of them on screen at any time cre­ates a fast and furi­ous game with all the re-playability of Keira Knightley. It’s highly unlikely a game will all go down the exact same way twice (just like Ms Knightley).

If I were to sum up this game in one sen­tence. It would be this:

Great guns, zom­bies, story, fire, explo­sions and gore.

There is also the whole online multi-player side of it, which I’ve par­tic­i­pated in many times. It is oh-so-satisfying to fuck up some ran­dom guys on the oppos­ing side when you and your friends exe­cute a coor­di­nated attack and wipe out all the sur­vivors in one fell swoop.

Left 4 Dead 2 was in the opin­ion of many released far too soon; only a year went by from the launch of L4D and it all seemed a lit­tle rushed. In my opin­ion the story reflects this. Now set in New Orleans and with 4 new — and less appeal­ing — char­ac­ters the game fol­lows the same events as the first only in the deep south. However. If you look past the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” approach to the story you will see the intro­duc­tion of a dynamic weather chang­ing sys­tem, more zom­bies, improved graph­ics and even more gore!

This game also intro­duced melee weapons; although it’s some­what fun to smash a zom­bie over the head with a gui­tar or crow­bar it’s nowhere near as fun as shoot­ing them. To com­bat this the game also brings a new and excit­ing range of shoot­ers to the table includ­ing the mighty M60, Desert Eagle and the AK-47. This presents you with a tough choice. Charge in with noth­ing more than an unhealthy head full of rage and a hand full of fry­ing pan, or pop some heads with the words coolest zom­bie killing guns. Only you can decide…

Along with the melee weapons and char­ac­ters came new Special Infected: the Spitter, Jockey and Charger. These were added along side the Special Infected from the first game and in my opin­ion made it a lot more chal­leng­ing to pre­dict and destroy the range of encoun­ters that would ran­domly come at you. They also pre­sented the oppor­tu­nity to be rid­den by the Knob Jockey and dragged into the Spitters goo — dirty girl!

Overall, I love both of these games and I doubt I’ll stop play­ing them com­pletely any time soon. Although not retro, I feel both of these will go down well in his­tory, and I hope that in years to come gamers will look fond­ley back at these games and remem­ber them as the pin­na­cle of the zom­bie shooter.

1001 No.39: ‘Theme Park’ (1994)

Simulation games have been around for a long time — and in all types of indus­try. But few can for­get the game that really kick-started that whole genre, and cre­ated a fas­ci­na­tion with amuse­ment park cre­ation — Theme Park.

As do all games that came from UK devel­op­ers Bullfrog (sadly closed in 2004), it’s got a wicked sense of rather British humour. It’s a real chal­lenge too, with huge amounts of man­age­ment issues: main­te­nance, cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion, wage dis­agree­ments, stock prob­lems, and most impor­tantly the finances — these are just some of the prob­lems you’ll face in bring­ing your park to suc­cess. God knows how we man­aged to play it at ~8 years old.

Frankly we don’t care much for the many sequels, spin­offs or mod­ern remakes — it’s the orig­i­nal all the way. It’s so easy to get hold of nowa­days, so there’s no excuse not to give it a try. We recently booted up our old Megadrive copy — see how we got on.