Thimbleweed Park-Spiritual Successor to Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island being made

 

Welcome back to 1985!

If you played video games back in the 80’s then you might remember the classic point and click game Maniac Mansion. The game was created by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick and was LucasArts first adventure game and pretty much introduced PC gamers to the world of what would be called “2D Point and Click” adventures. Maniac Mansion was released on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990.

“It’s like opening a dusty old desk drawer and finding an undiscovered LucasArts adventure game you’ve never played before”.

Maniac Mansion was a huge success taking the computer world by storm and was praised for it’s use of complex puzzles, humor, engaging game-play and compelling story. It gave birth to numerous 2D Point and Click titles like “Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Zak McKracken and others”.

[https://youtu.be/HnjqcITQ6wY]

 

Now Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick are at it again with a new game called “ThimbleWeed Park” which is supposed to be the spiritual succesor to Manic Mansion. They have started a KickStarter campaign with a pledged goal of $375,000 and only 29 more days to accomplish it. So far their total “as of this writing” is at $109,201. KickStarter rewards include boxed editions, game soundtracks to even having your name placed in Thimbleweed Park’s phone book and actually having it used for puzzle solving!

 

So why make a retro 2d Point and Click game?

“Because we miss classic adventures and all their innocence and charm”.

“They were fun and would put a smile on your face. We want to make one of those again and we want to do it right. We don’t want to make a game “inspired by,” or “paying homage to” classic point & click adventures, we want to make a real classic point & click adventure”.

“Thimbleweed Park is a game for true lovers of adventure games. This is a Kickstarter for fans who loved Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and everything else that made that era great.  It strips away all the cruft built up over the years and is distilled down to what we loved about the genre”.

“Thimbleweed Park” is the curious story of two washed up detectives called in to investigate a dead body found in the river just outside of town. It’s a game where you switch between five playable characters while uncovering the dark, satirical and bizarre world of Thimbleweed Park.

For more game details check out the kickstarter page here.

Thimbleweed Park will be available for digital download on Windows, Mac and Linux and is expected to be released by January 2015.

Play Hundreds of classic console games online, free

Thanks to the good people at the Internet Archive, classic console video games like Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., Asteroids, Dig Dug, and Pac Man are now fully playable online. The games, released as the Internet Archive Console Living Room, are also available for free downloads. They don’t have sound yet, but the archive promises to get that up and running soon. And even though the collection isn’t complete at this point, the archive promises to expand it “in the coming months.” Because the archive has versions of each game available in an browser-based emulator, you can jump right in to the game of your choice without downloading any specialized software.

ET: It hasn’t improved with age. 

Right now, the archive contains a selection of games from the Atari 2600, Atari 7800 ProSystem, ColecoVision, Magnavox Odyssey and Astrocade. The selection is particularly abundant for the Atari consoles, but as the archive notes, “there were many not-excellent cartridges produced for the Atari 2600,” meaning that some of these games aren’t really worth the time to get to know. For instance: the archive contains ET: The Extra Terrestrial, a game so bad that someone made a documentary about its failure. On the other hand, there’s always Frogger, which is still excellent.

Some of the games even come with the original manual, which if nothing else, gives a good glimpse at the conceptual imagination behind the very sparse graphics game designers had to work with at the time.

The Internet Archive’s project is aimed at preserving a widely-unavailable software phenomenon, as the consoles and cartridges needed to play these games have largely disappeared. The rise of the home console, as they note, more or less destroyed the popularity of arcades, especially once console graphics began to approach the look of arcade offerings. And as each console evolved, the previous generations also gathered dust or were tossed out.

Players will note that the controls vary widely by console: the Internet Archive does a pretty good job explaining how the games have adapted from, say, a joystick control to a standard keyboard. And even though these games are old, the Internet Archive recommends players use the most up-to-date browser possible.

 

[source]

Steam accounts now over 65 million

The popular digital distribution platform has seen 30 percent growth in the last 12 months.

Valve has just announced that its Steam platform has grown another 30 percent in the trailing 12-month period, bringing its user-base to more than 65 million accounts. Now in its tenth year, the digital distribution service offers more than 3,000 games, and Valve continues to expand the feature set for the service as it takes Steam to the living room.

Valve plans to introduce the recently announced Steam Machines with a variety of hardware partners later in the year. Combined with SteamOS and the unique Steam Controller, which features touch pads and no analog sticks, Valve is hoping to further disrupt the marketplace.

“The main goal of Steam has always been to increase the quality of the user’s experience by reducing the distance between content creators and their audience,” said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. “As the platform grows, our job is to adapt to the changing needs of both the development and user communities. In the coming year, we plan to make perhaps our most significant collaborations with both communities through the Steam Dev Days and the Steam Machines beta.”

 

[source]

Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls adds The Mystic to its Artisans

Diablo 3‘s Reaper of Souls expansion will see the addition of a new Artisan, Myriam Jahzia, the Mystic. She’ll aid players in their quest to keep the forces of Hell at bay by Enchanting and Transmogrifying their items, Blizzard explained in a post that reintroduces the Mystic.

Enchanting in Reaper of Souls allows players to re-roll one of the properties of a rare or legendary class item for another, possibly better random property. Players are required to pay a gold and material cost to complete the Enchanting process, but the Mystic’s skills will likely pay off for players looking to tweak an item that’s not perfectly suited to their needs.

Transmogrifying an item in Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls lets players alter the appearance of that item without sacrificing its properties. Players who prefer the look of a particular armor item, for example, can visit the Mystic and pay in gold to change its style, leading to better dressed heroes. There are some restrictions and rules that govern Transmogrifying in Reaper of Souls, which Blizzard details at the official Diablo 3 site.

The Mystic was originally planned to appear in Diablo 3, but the developer removed her from the game after determining that her function was redundant in the game’s customization system.

Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls is scheduled for release in 2014 on PC and PlayStation 4.

 

[source]

Console games need more variable pricing, says Riccitiello

Former EA CEO laments that “$60 is a giant FU to a very large number of people”.

New consoles are launching in under a month, and for the average consumer, buying new hardware in addition to several games at the price of $60 each is a significant outlay of cash. Game pricing has been a sensitive subject for some time now, and former EA boss John Riccitiello believes that the console/PC side of the business could learn a thing or two from the booming mobile space.

“Another thing that console and PC guys could and should learn is variable pricing,” Riccitiello said at the recent Gaming Insiders Summit, as reported by the [a]list daily. “$60 is a giant FU to a very large number of people. There’s not been a console game with even half as many installs as Clash of Clans. Puzzle & Dragons has got more installs than any console game in history. Getting a larger audience through variable pricing is a really useful thing.”

The executive also noted that even with all its efforts of late, the traditional games industry still hasn’t been able to get “games as service” right. The recent GTA Online hiccup serves as the newest example.

“More than anything, what the traditional game industry should learn from mobile is it’s really about service,” Riccitiello said. “It’s an ongoing business. You’d think we would have learned this some time ago, but I find it interesting that WoW and Sim City and GTA and Starcraft and many other games all fell over at launch when they put their service components together. Some of the biggest brands – I’d argue almost all the biggest brands – fell over from lack of the testing and research that mobile people do in the regular course of their day.”

And the traditional industry still makes games too complicated for the masses, he argued. It may be fun for the hardcore crowd, but it’s ultimately limiting when it comes to audience. “The third thing to learn is simplicity,” he said. Riccitiello noted how games used to come with “500 page manuals” and while games have gotten simpler, “It’s incredibly rare for a new game from a traditional game company to be learnable without instruction in ten, fifteen or twenty seconds and get to the fun that quick.”

 

[source]