Game of the week #6/2011 – ScummVM

I have to apologize that I haven’t made it to announce the game of the week for such a long time, but finally I’m back and I have to apologize again, because this week I don’t have a specific game that gets the title, it’s just an emulator. Actually, this whole thing happens because for one simple reason, because I can. As you may know, I was modding and coding on my cellphone for a while to improve its performance and gain a couple of features of it that I actually haven’t had before. One side effect was the installation of ScummVM, which is in some kind of way this week’s “Game of the week”. ScummVM is an emulator that lets you play all the good old Lucasfilm/arts adventure games from the early to the mid-nineties. Actually, this emulator made me revisit a couple of games that I still love and I recommend to everyone. I’m talking of games like “Maniac Mansion”, which was like my first comedy, horror adventure game ever and it was only topped by the ingenious “Day of the Tentacle”. Secondly, “Zak McKracken and the alien mindbenders” which was for me, back in 1991, the incarnation of open world gaming. I mean, you could travel the whole world, while in other games you where simply walking from the left to the right to free the princess.

ScummVM is such a great tool, you can play these adventure games on nearly every platform. I started playing “The secret of Monkey Island” on my Android and it’s such a nice experience. If someone told me 20 years ago that I gonna play Lucasfilm adventures on a cell phone you would have found laughing on the floor. Back in the pixel days you needed monstrous computer with a large amount of nearly 2-4 MEGABYTES of RAM and hard drives with at least 80 MEGABYTES of space. My first PC actually had 2MB of RAM and a large 85MB hard drive. I wasn’t able to play a game like “Doom” since I got my first Pentium PC in 1995, but that’s another story.

I don’t want to get too much in detail with the games of Lucasfilm, but I can only advise to everyone who still does not know any of these games give it a try. I also recommend these games to everyone who is simply interested in videogames history, because if you don’t know the Lucasfilm games, it’s truely a lack of knowledge. Once upon a time where adventure games where the strongest and biggest genre in PC gaming and these games are one of the reasons why. If you tried these games and you found them great, give Lucasfilms competitor a try and play the Sierra adventures. But when it comes to Sierra, you can no longer use ScummVM, for most of the games (like 99%), the DOSBox is doing a great job. Sorry for the short and minimal description on the games, I just wanted to give a short introduction to them by presenting ScummVM.

Links:

Official Website

Game of the week #2/2011 – DeathSpank – Orphans of Justice

This weeks game of the week is something special, a game created by a living legend. It’s “DeathSpank” by game designer Ron Gilbert. You might remember this name  from the legendary “Monkey Island” one and two, the good old “Maniac Mansion”, the ingenious “Zak McKracken” or the amazing “Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade”. This man created so many great games why shouldn’t “DeathSpank” be as good as the previous games? Well, first of all, “DeathSpank” is obviously a great game, with the typcial sense of humor that you can expect from Ron Gilbert and the design is something really special, but it can’t follow in the footsteps of the previously mentioned games.

DeathSpank - Orphans of Justice

In “DeathSpank” you play the homonymous hero DeathSpank who is looking for an artifact simply called “The Artifact” for his entired life. DeathSpank finds the artifact during the game, but it gets stolen by the henchmen of a guy called “Lord von Prong”. You might have already guessed what comes next, yes, DeathSpank has to get the artifact back and has to defeat the evil Lord von Prong. The game itself is a simple hack and slash RPG with a focus on a good told story. The character customisation is mainly done by getting new items that improve your attributes and by chosing cards on each level increase that improve thing like melee/range damage or the speed of the character. You don’t have to think too much and that is good because this game is perfect after a long exhausting day when you feel like getting easy entertainment but you still want a nice story to be told.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB_OQDAaX-0[/youtube]

I played this game with mouse and keyboard first but I personally find that playing with an Xbox 360 controller is much easier and faster to handle. You also don’t have to switch between two weapon sets when you play with the Xbox 360 controller and moving the character feels more ‘logical’. The combats are not too easy and not too tough and if you ever come to a situation where you find it too hard or easy you can chose a different combat difficulty. The co-op mode in this game is, let us say, okay but it’s not what you want to play the whole time because the second player soon starts to feel like the fifth wheel of the wagon. The second character can’t loot or improve his skills and equipment, he’s just walking beside DeathSpank, does some damage and heals from time to time. Besides these minor issues “DeathSpank” is a game where you can’t do anything wrong if you like hack and slash RPGs, loved games like “Diablo” or “Torchlight” and if you feel comfortable with the sense of humour from games like “On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness”. There’s a reason why this game is finally the “Game of the week”, so go and get it or you will be spanked.

Links:

Official website

WikiPedia entry