Messages

"Mockup Blitz" sounds pretty interesting as an activity... let's hope I'll be able to make up for my lack of drawing talent somehow 

Your graphics don't need to be any realistic. If you're unable to draw (like me), pick something rather simplistic, stick with it and call it a "style".

Your own corpse... from the future!

Da da daaaahhh!

That's actually a pretty nice idea... even though it's rather creepy.

You're welcome 

[Review of "The Blackwell Legacy" and "Blackwell Unbound"]

Review of "The Blackwell Legacy" and "Blackwell Unbound"

With „The Blackwell Legacy“ (2006) and „Blackwell Unbound“ (2007), Wadjet Eye Games (lead by Dave Gilbert) laid the foundation for an interesting series of adventure games, carrying the subtitle „A Supernatural Mystery“. The series is developed using the Adventure Game Studio (AGS) and is currently available in English language only. This review deals with the already released first two parts because they are quite similar in their general structure*. You can view screenshots and rating for both parts via the following links.

Screenshots and Rating "The Blackwell Legacy"
Screenshots and Rating "Blackwell Unbound"

Package, Manual and Installation

The game is available both as download only and CD version via the developer's homepage.  The installation did not cause any problems and took up 240MB for part one and another 205MB for the second part of the series. A short description of the game's main features is included in a simple text file. In the options menu, subtitles, speech, the automatic tutorial and the Making-Off comments by Dave Gilbert (more about this later) can be accessed. Another menu button leads to the bonus material, but it needs to be unlocked later in the game or via a password found in the credits first.

Story and Background

In means of general background, the series follows the fate of the Blackwell family whose female members have to fulfill a special task. Under the spiritual guidance of Joey Mallone, who appears to them from a certain point in their lives on, they have to guide the spirits of the deceased out of this world. We enter the thrilling story with Rosangela Blackwell, who is just strewing the ashes of her deceased aunt Lauren down from the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. Aunt Lauren had been lying in a coma for years before, but after the early death of both of her parents, she had been Rosangela's only remaining person of reference**. Upon visiting the doctor who had been taking care of her aunt for the years she lay in her coma, Rosangela discovers that there appears to have been a mysterious secret her aunt appearantly took along in her grave. She finds further clues in the letters her aunt Lauren left behind and starts to get upset. Soon Rosangela (after a heavy headache attack) was to find out what the dark secret was that caused her aunt to fall in a coma and drove her grandmother into madness many years ago...

The first part puts the focus on introducing the story framework around the Blackwell family, which turns out to be very interesting. Rosangela explores the past of her family and it is not long until she meets Joey Mallone. The second part is a little more shallow in terms of tension because it deals more with confronting the spirits of recently deceased with their own death in so-called "cases" and leading them out of this world. It is, however, interesting in that the second part is more of a prequel and the focus is put on a new main character. There is, of course, a clear relation to the general background story, but in a much less detailed way. Due to Dave Gilbert, the second part technically consists of "flashback material" that originally had been made for "The Blackwell Convergence", the third part of the series (not released yet), but was not included because the authors felt it would have simply been too much. Because of the episodic nature of the games, it is only natural that the big picture will only be revealed part by part. The story however has a great potential, many things have been left open and there is hope for more thrilling episodes that hopefully will actually reveal further details of the background story.

Graphics, Sound and Speech

Admittedly, the low resolution and the resulting pixeled graphics mag seem little attractive on first sight, but a low resolution does not necessarily result in bad graphics. This adventure is a very good example for this. The locations and characters have been designed with a lot of love for details, it is really nice to see what can be done with few pixels (=low resolution). The animations are, too, well done, and especially the movements of Rosalenga Blackwell are very good-looking. Close-ups of the currently talking characters are shown during the dialogs, presenting different expressions fitting to the current situation. Unfortunately these close-ups of the characters are only present in the first part and are entirely missing in the second one, which is on the whole graphically inferior to the first part.

All dialogs on the game have been synchronized with a good to very good quality. Some mild interferences have sneaked in (especially in the first part) now and then, but this isn't that bad. The voices have been chosen very well, especially that of Rosangela Blackwell (spoken by Sande Chen). In general, all speech is very clear, without strong accents and comprehensible so one should, with some knowledge of English, not have any problems following the dialogs; the optional subtitles further aid in this. The music is extremely good in both parts of the series, even though the soundtracks have been done by different artists and thus are not very similar. It is always fitting to the current situation, location and/or plot, full of variations and, especially in the second part, a small highlight.

Gameplay

The controls consists entirely of a Point&Click-Interface, and you can even switch between two playable characters in the second part. For those new to the genre there is a comfortable tutorial explaining everything you need to know about controls and gameplay. It can be activated via the options menu. A special gameplay element is the inclusion of a notebook which automatically tracks all collected information. Links and contradictions can be found via the combination of two pieces of information, unlocking new dialog topics and possible actions. The inventory can be shown on the top of the screen, from where you also can access the comfortable save / load menu. The difficulty of the game definitely is "easy" and the playtime of both parts combined is about 7 hours. A very special feature are Dave Gilbert's optional Making-Of-Comments. If activated, spoken explanations and background information is included in the gameplay every once in a while. This is very interesting and even funny in parts. This feature alone motivates to play the game at least a second time. In addition, there is a lot of bonus content unlockable via competing the game. The passwords needed for this are displayed during the credits at the end of the game. While the first part only features a few outtakes that happened during the recording of the speech, the second one also has concept art, additional music, comments of the developers and director's orders of the speech recordings.**

Summary

The first parts of the Blackwell series are very good adventures; let's hope for an interesting continuation. During the first part, we are introduced into the thrilling story of the Blackwell family, whose female members have been assigned to the task of leading the spirits of the deceased out of this world for several generations. Each of these "leadings" is something of an own case, which the second part clearly puts the focus on. Unfortunately its plot does not quite reach the quality of the first part. Both part's graphics look very pixelled due to the low resolution. Nevertheless, they have been lovely designed with a lot of details, so don't be scared by the low resolution - after all, it's not the graphics alone that make an adventure good. Both parts feature very high quality speech and music. The game is only available in English right now, but all dialogs have been spoken very clearly and should be understandable with some knowledge of the English language. Also, there are English subtitles. The integrated tutorial, bonus material and optional Making-Off comments further increase the value of the games. Playing time is about 4 hours for the first and 3 for the second part; both ran without any technical issues whatsoever. In conclusion, if you're not scared away by the pixely graphics and possess some English skills, don't miss these great series!

- Michael Schachinger / 06.10.2007

Final Rating

HIGHS: Great soundtrack
LOWS: Low resolution

QUOTE: Interesting story, lovely integrated

GRADES:

Story: 84%
Graphics: 69%
Sound: 79%
Gameplay: 81%

Overall: 78%


* very rough translation, word-by-word would be "in their way of making"
** no idea if this is any correct as a translation

There you go, one translation! I'm not sure about how I translated some of the more idiomatic expressions and I most likely made a lot of capitalization mistakes, but it should be ok. 

I'm working on it right now, but you'll need a little patience 

Did you check your game_start section in the global script?

There was an interview about that in a german games magazine some time ago, shortly after the latest school shooting in Germany, with a person who said of himself that he nearly went on a shooting spree once, and it pretty much backs up what has been said in this thread before: Make somebody physically inferior an outsider, continue to bully him all the time, don't let him get any help or chance to change his situation whatsoever, then give him access to firearms and you've created an amok runner.

That's at least what the magazine said >.>

That movie was horrible.

I think I'm going to believe in the ancient Egypt gods. At least, you know where you are with THESE guys, and you can argue for or against them in the same fashion as you can for any other belief. Also, some questions just don't occur if you have gods like that.

Q: How can they allow suffering to get in the world?
A: Duh, because they HATE you.

See? 

You play as the german Zeppelin commander Wilhelm von Hadenberg, and... damn, see for yourself, the game is too short to give away that much information. Now with 500% more clichés about Imperial Germany than the next leading brand.

You might have already seen some instance of this game (like the original mAGS version, which is still floating about, or the original deluxe version, which has been deleted and purged). In that case, you might still want to give this a try since some additional bits of content have been added, like music (by Scott Joplin), sound effects (by myself) and better character sprites (also by myself).

Game is around 5MB in size now. It's played like every other adventure these days, with some exceptions, but these are answered in a text document that's supplied with the download.

So what are you waiting for? Get downloading!

Also, if you really need something like that, it's a matter of minutes to script it (without a proper interface, granted, but who needs that, anyway?) and a nice practice.

Hi and welcome to the forums, Wakeman... you might want to look at one of these threads here, though.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=28879.0
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=30351.0

But while we're already at it... what kind of music?

You're welcome, it's not that bad if you forget an obscure command like that 

If I may quote the manual...

RunAGSGame
RunAGSGame (string filename, int mode, int data)

Quits the current game, and loads up FILENAME instead. FILENAME must be an AGS game EXE or AC2GAME.AGS file, and it must be in the current directory.
MODE specifies various options about how you want to run the game. Currently the supported values are:

0   Current game is completely exited, new game runs as if it had been launched separately
1   GlobalInt values are preserved and are not set to 0 for the new game.

DATA allows you to pass an integer through to the next game. The value you pass here will be accessible to the loaded game by it reading the game.previous_game_data variable.
The save game slots are shared between the two games, and if you load a save slot that was saved in the other game, it will automatically be loaded.

Bear in mind that because the games must be in the same folder, they will also share the music.vox, speech.vox and so forth. This is a limitation of this command.

NOTE: The game you run will be loaded at the same resolution and colour depth as the current game; if you mismatch colour depths some nasty results will occur.

NOTE: Make sure that the game you want to run has a filename of 8 characters or less, or this command will fail in the DOS engine.

NOTE: The game you want to launch must have been created with the same point-version of AGS as the one you are launching it from. (version 2.xy - the X must be the same version between the two games).

Example:

RunAGSGame ("MyGame.exe", 0, 51);

will run the MyGame game, passing it the value 51.

Of course, that command is of limited use... I think DemoQuest had a Launch Minigame function, didn't it?

Yep, exactly what I had in mind - thank you! 

Although I'm going to have to abuse both AGS and your rules a little for this game...

"The Discordian Intelligence Agency Edition". Heh.

Hm... sounds interesting. I've kind of got an idea in the back of my head... but it wouldn't be doable in one month, so I'm not going to enter it. Sorry.

/EDIT: Then again, I have a different idea. Anything recognizable as something like a plane, train and/or automobile counts, right?

They're living in a funny house with lots of nice people now, a place where life is beatiful all the time, and they get to eat ice-cream every day and don't have to worry about anything anymore. If you gather my meaning.

Just finished the game yesterday, and I liked it very much! Granted, it's a bit short, and the last puzzle was some guesswork, but still... you have my vote for this month's MAGS.