SQHistorian

Another little taste from Soup's On, our album of reimagined music from The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour.

Fun fact: This tune was originally supposed to be the main theme from The 11th Hour before it was scrapped in favor of "The Final Hour." By complete accident it ended up in the final game anyway, despite being an unfinished demo at the time, as the music that plays during the "train puzzle" in the attic — hence its name.

A little taste of what's to come in our reimagining of The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour's soundtracks.

My band Error 47 sat down with two legends — Graeme Devine and George Sanger — and chatted for an hour about the music of these iconic CD-ROM games. Lots of cool nuggets in here, including how Trilobyte took a massive chance in supporting General MIDI, and how we might not have gotten Nine Inch Nails' beloved Quake soundtrack if it hadn't been for Graeme's programming wizardry.

My band Error 47 had the good fortune to sit down with these two legends last week and chat for an hour about the music of these two games.

We did invite Rob Landeros to take part as well, and he was more than happy to catch up with Graeme and George (all that nastiness about the end of Trilobyte is water under the bridge these days), but he declined because, believe it or not, the man is incredibly camera shy.

Lots of great nuggets in this interview about how T7G took a huge chance in supporting General MIDI, how it all came together, and how we might not have had Nine Inch Nails' Quake soundtrack if it hadn't been for Graeme...

ScummVM dev Sluicebox just blew the doors to the Sierra kingdom wide open. He wrote a decompiler that annotates the decompiled scripts flawlessly so there's no more guesswork as to "uh, I wonder what 'global34' does."

A real game-changer for code-spelunkers!

Check the attached video from OneShortEye for a brief explanation, or go straight to the source: https://www.benshoof.org/blog/sci-scripts

What's your favorite interface in adventure games? Doesn't necessarily have to be the most perfect or easy to use; just the one that you're the most partial to.

Off the top of my head, a couple of low-hanging fruit suggestions (feel free to add more):

• LucasArts "9 verb" interface (Monkey Island 2, Day of the Tentacle, etc.)
• LucasArts "verb coin" (Monkey Island 3, Full Throttle)
• Sierra "icon bar" (King's Quest V, Space Quest IV, etc.)
• Revolution "Left does/right looks" mouse buttons (Beneath a Steel Sky, Broken Sword, as well most Wadjet Eye titles)

Mine is actually the one in Leisure Suit Larry 7. You click on something and up comes a contextual menu of appropriate verbs. If it's a door, you can "open" it; if it's a button, you can "press" it; etc. — and it also has an optional text parser for inputting your own verb.

I was nudged towards looking into Matrix, the fedi-alternative to Discord, to see if I should set up a chat space for adventure game fans... and it turns out I didn't have to. One already exists!

Now, I don't know who set it up to begin with, and it's pretty much crickets in there at the moment, but maybe we could change that? I'm in there, FWIW.

Edit: Link here, because the preview link on this post looks like a turd sandwich: https://matrix.to/#/#adventuregames:matrix.org

Edit 2: If you're intrigued but have no idea wtf Matrix is or how it works, get the Element client. There's an Android app for it, too. https://element.io/

Edit: It's solved! I'M BACK! Original post follows for posterity:

I'm sorry for not having kept up with this place in a few days. I've been trying to leave comments on people's replies and posts but my Lemmy app keeps giving me error messages ("language_not_allowed") — and, no, I'm not swearing my head off. 😅 I think it's a borked language setting.

I'll look into finding a better solution.

Mine is hands down the green alien fart cloud in The Pandora Directive. For three simple reasons:

1. I don't like being chased.
2. I don't like being on a timer.
3. It scares the crap out of me to this day.

I usually panic to the point where I forget everything I need to do, despite having played the game a million times, and I spam the everloving hell out of the hint system.

Runner-up, also from the Tex Murphy series: the GRS "eyeball droid" in Under a Killing Moon. For some reason Access just felt compelled to put one pants-crapping sequence into each of these games...

What's that one adventure game you can just boot up and have a great chill time with? Mine would probably be Day of the Tentacle. It's such a wonderful, colorful world to inhabit, and all the characters are lively and oozing with personality (no Sludge-o-Matic pun intended). I could spend hours just walking around talking to characters and not even think about solving any puzzles.

What's the one game you'd boot up to just relax with?

One of the things that have always endeared me to adventure games above all other types of fiction (books, movies, etc.) is that they give the player the opportunity to shape the story and unfold it at their own pace. While some games are content to have a linear story (and no slight against that — some absolute classics have only one straight solution), I am truly fascinated by the games that play up the "interactive" part of the medium.

While games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Westwood's Blade Runner games did a bang-up job of giving us ample replayability value, I feel nothing comes close to the sheer mind-bogglingly malleable story of Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive. How they managed to cram all that game content onto "just" 6 CDs is beyond me.

And what I truly love about it is that it's not just a case of "pick your path," like in Fate of Atlantis, but that the game keeps track of how you respond to NPCs and shapes the story accordingly. If you're kind and generous to people, you get put on the good path. If you're an opportunistic dick, you get sent on the bad path. And if you wibble-wobble between the two, you get sent on the middle-road path. And each path has multiple endings of its own!

What are some of your favorite games that let you experience the story in multiple ways?

I mean, obviously I'm biased, but Space Quest III just had one of the most amazing kick-ass soundtracks. Composed by Bob Siebenberg, the drummer from Supertramp!