1001 Challenge

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.