Lucky Dip week

[Ponch]

For an AGS game released in January of 1970 (two years before I was born!), and having a download size of only ZERO megabytes, Bob's Quest II wasn't a terrible game. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a good game at all. It has no winsetup file. It has no .cfg file. It won't run on my modern machine at all and my video card won't accept a full screen 320x200 resolution. I wasn't able to even launch this game.

But it was still better than the last game I played for Lucky Dips week. So it's got that going for it.

[Stupot]

I'm still playing Eric the Anteater (this game is quite big actually). I have to say I'm thoroughly enjoying it and I can't see why it's only got a 2-cup rating.  There are some really nice touches, including some nice little 3D FMV sequences.  The game is also really funny with lots of subtle jokes.  There is a cheap gag about raping corpses, which might cross the line for many players, but that's a blip in what is otherwise a really charming and fun game.

There isn't too much to do in each room, but there are loads of rooms, some more pretty than others.  At first glance, the graphics do look rather like someone's experiments with a 3D program, and that's probably exactly what they are, but they are used creatively in the game world. For example a random blob floating in space turns out to be the Walrus's space ship. Fair enough

I'll add more when I've finished, but I've played enough to say that I can certainly recommend downloading this game and playing it if you haven't already.

[TheBitPriest]

Cacho Quest.  There's a room with a girl kissing a lizard while a Pink Floyd midi plays in the background.  It's in Spanish.  The whole game... not just the lizard kissing girl.  There's a hippy too.  I have no idea what's going on.  Well... okay... I have *some* idea, but it's more of a "I know enough Latin to know some Spanish" kind of idea.  Spanish for hippy is "hippy," but with an accent.  I think Cacho refers to illicit drugs.  Just guessing. 

[tzachs]

Great thread!
I got "Don Spillacy's Conspiracy Quest", MAGS winner of September 2006. The theme was conspiracy, weird inventory items and 16 colors. The game sure lived up to its theme, it had all of the above.
Quite amatuerish with a very weird ending, but it kept me amused till the very end.

[Igor Hardy]

There is a cheap gag about raping corpses, which might cross the line for many players, but that's a blip in what is otherwise a really charming and fun game.

Some would say those blips are exactly why the gods have created AGS.

[kaput]

I got Nerdy Quest this time. Review will follow soonish.

[kaput]

Nerdy Quest review

If you're the type of person who enjoyed the first LSL game and are looking for a way to spend half and hour, Nerdy Quest may be the game for you. With understated retro graphics, music and sfx to boot, Nerdy Quest serves up a decent dish of nostalgia perfect for any adventure gamer's lunch break. That is, if you're the type of adventure gamer who doesn't mind silly, sometimes crude humour.

In the game you take up the role of an office nerd who is tired of his job and is yearning for more in his life. To explain what happens next without ruining the story, let's just say the game soon descends into utter madness. A good kind of madness, mind you. When you finally leave the office you travel to different locations on the in-game map by use of taxi driver. Quite a nice feature to create the idea of a more ‘open world'. There are also plenty of bat-shit crazy characters to talk to, which is always nice.

Don't get me wrong, the game is far from perfect. Just off the top of my head I could write a whole list of faults in this game eg a lack of player direction, empty interactions, default cursor graphics, no hotspot labels and a lack of music in places (although for some reason this particular ‘fault‘ actually makes the game feel more retro). It's easy to point out the bad stuff, but what the game lacks in is certainly made up for with a genuinely enjoyable experience. Again, that depends if you have the patience for such things.

Overall I'd say download this game and give it a try. My only advice would be that if you are stuck - try everything. It's never an ideal solution, but it works.

I give it 3 out of 5 cups.

[Ponch]

Okay. Two dips. Two lousy games. But I'm game to try one more time before the week ends.
Yoda
Wish me luck!

EDIT: A fun, quick little game! Hooray! Lucky Dip Week didn't end in tears!

[Khris]

I got really lucky this time and got Dread Mac Farlane. It's a medium length adventure made by french comic artist Marion.  If you haven't already, give this a try. It's a fairly classical adventure that has you filling mugs and unlocking doors, but the graphics definitely stand out. 4/5

[Adeel]

I got Jonah's Place. It's a MAGS game and rated 3 Cups by the panel. I've yet to play it.

EDIT:

Played the game and it was fun. It had little bugs but that's what you expect from a MAGS Game .

The game tested my patience in the start. At first, I were about to stop playing it but I didn't and I'm grateful for that.

A very enjoyable entry, overall. It well deserved its rating of 3 Cups. I also give it 3/5.

[OneDollar]

I rolled RoN-The Outbreak, rated 1 cup by the AGS panel.

RoN-The Outbreak review
RoN-The Outbreak is an strange game. Set in Reality on the Norm, and mainly using graphics from that series, The Outbreak is a short story about a plague killing townsfolk and your character's quest to find a cure. I have to admit I am not very familiar with the RoN series, but to my mind the story, combined with some unpleasant photos of people in horror make up, doesn't quite fit the colourful town setting. This lends the game something of a patchwork feel.

This mishmash of different styles and sources is continued in the game's graphics. The game runs in a 640x480 resolution which matches the main character, but almost all the backgrounds and others characters were designed for half that. These graphics are mostly shown upscaled, which makes them pixelated by comparison, though occasionally a background will be displayed in the correct resolution which means it only partially fills the screen and leaves the rest black.

Similar attention seems to have been paid to interaction with the world. There are next to no background objects to interact with, and the few objects you can click on usually only have one or two interactions that give a response. What the game lacks in objects however, it more than makes up for in locations. A large number of RoN locations are present, but most have no purpose and nothing to interact with. I guess the author is trying to be faithful to the established layout of the town, but it means that most of your play time will be spent walking. My biggest complaint about the game is that many times the exits to these screens are not obvious, which necessitates clicking up and down the pixels on the edge of the screen to see if your character can leave that way.

The story isn't bad, but there isn't a whole lot of it and you are mostly just told what is going on by other people, rather than discovering anything for yourself. Talking to characters also seems a bit broken â€" listing all the dialogue options at once instead of them becoming available as you progress further through the conversation. It's also worth mentioning that the game's text contains a lot of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, but it's never bad enough that you can't work out what's going on.

I wouldn't say the game feels rushed, but I suspect the author focused on the bits he was interested in and paid very little attention to almost everything else. While there were one or two glimmers of potential in the game, this is drowned out by poor or lazy execution. Unfortunately this isn't a game I can recommend to anyone, but then my feeling while playing was that this game wasn't really intended for a wider audience. Overall RoN-The Outbreak feels like an author creating a game for their friends or even just themselves, purely because they want to, and I suppose that's a large part of what Adventure Game Studio and the Reality on the Norm series is all about.