Have you seen these games before? The Mysterious Adventures series became known to me from the bad game covers thread made the other day. The Mysterious Adventures games seemed to be text based Adventure games made between 1981 and 1983 for various early computers, and had no connected story line from the looks of it, with the exception of the 2 Arrow of Death games. They had a ton of different publishers for different platforms so there's a ton of different covers, but all of them are pretty weird looking. I made a collage of the other covers I found that seem to be by the same designer as the two ones I saw originally: Circus and Escape from Pulsar 7. I was not able to find a cover of the same design for "10 Little Indians", I suspect it's lost. Also, both Arrow of Death games seemed to have the same cover with only the title different.The games were made by Brian Halworth, a British guy that Wikipedia says is either "70 or 71 years old" since they don't know his specific date of birth. He made these games and then went on to do programming work for other video games, such as "Theme Park Mystery". the Mysterious Adventures games in order are:>The Golden Baton>The Time Machine>Arrow of Death Part 1>Arrow of Death Part 2>Escape from Pulsar 7>Circus>Feasibility Experiment>The Wizard of Akyrz>Perseus and Andromeda>Ten Little Indians>WaxworksI played Golden Baton and I've played some of The Time Machine. They seem like pretty typical text based adventure games for the time. Do you guys know anything about these games? Did you play them before? Do you have the cover for Ten Little Indians?The copyright has expired on all of them so you can play them for free in a ton of places. Here's a link to some website that lets you play them: https://www.ifiction.org/games/index.php?cat=43
>>11062871I don't know why people keep posting about text adventures on this board. Not because they're bad, they're good, but they're much too highbrow for this board and nobody here is intelligent enough to play them.Sadly, I can't say I've played them yet, but they always struck me as a C-list company. Infocom was the A-list, Adams was the B-list and these guys were the ones who were left. I've heard that they're quite clever though.
>>11063442The Mysterious Adventures games were actually made on the same engine as the Adams games, and although I've never played the Adams games, people say they're apparently pretty similar.
>>11063672It isn't very surprising that they're similar, since basically the entire genre owes a great deal to him, and his style of prose was very easy to implement on the cheaper home computers. I didn't know they were actually the same engine though, that's pretty cool.
>>11063702From what I read, Brian Halworth just seemed like a British Dungeons and Dragons nerd who decided to make a game similar to that of Scott Adams and found some success with it. They seem to have all pretty much just been one man jobs in terms of programming with maybe an extra guy making the graphics for some releases (Who we only know as "Jon"). Some interesting details I found in the 2 games I've played so far:>If you type "Fuck" it tells you to wash your mouth out>In a hint book for Golden Baton, which is generally written as a ton of first person statements, mentions that your character sees a pond and looks inside to find goldfish, but then notices they have a reddish hue. The pond is actually completely inconsequential to the game and cannot be interacted with. The fish were Red Herrings.>When you enter the time warp in "The Time Machine", the game mentions that you can see a Police Box.>In Time Machine instead of feeding the dog to get past it you can just shoot it to death
>>11062871Correction: The Arrow of Death games actually continue the storyline of Golden Baton, apparently
Turns out I was wrong about some stuff. I will be fixing this picture.
Okay, so a couple things:>Part 2 of Arrow of Death actually does have a unique cover>I found the 10 little indians cover>I made a new picture to accomodate this realization along with a little logo in the bottom left to fill in the empty space
>>11065994Bottom right. I'm retarded.
>>11065994I quite like these covers.
>>11065994>>11066435Yeah I really like these covers too. Is there any way you could share the pictures? Are they high resolution?
>>11066890What I mean is the original high resolution images. I'm assuming that the pictures you put together are not the highest resolution pictures available. Or maybe they are? Sorry for my English isn't the best.
>>11066895Yes, I do. I got the pictures from this website: https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getcompany=mystadv&npp=25&whatsnew=0&start=0&series=Mysterious+Adventures+%28Digital+Fantasia+-+Red%29They also have a ton of other covers of the games as well, these are specifically the "Digital Fantasia Red" covers. They also have manuals and promotional materials. I was not able to save the images directly from the site, but I managed to access links to the pictures using inspect element, and then I saved them from there. Keep in mind that sometimes the games were listed in different orders in different releases, but the list I made is the accurate list, and the list that they were actually created and released in. Here are the links:Golden Baton: https://www.mocagh.org/mystadv/mysterious1.jpgThe Time Machine: https://www.mocagh.org/mystadv/mysterious5.jpgArrow of Death Part 1: https://www.mocagh.org/mystadv/mysterious2.jpgArrow of Death Part 2: https://www.mocagh.org/mystadv/mysterious3.jpgPulsar 7: https://www.mocagh.org/mystadv/mysterious4.jpgCircus: https://www.mocagh.org/mystadv/mysterious7.jpgFeasibility Experiment: https://www.mocagh.org/mystadv/mysterious6.jpgThe Wizard of Akyrz: https://www.mocagh.org/mystadv/mysterious8.jpgPerseus & Andromeda: https://www.mocagh.org/mystadv/mysterious9.jpgTen Little Indians: https://www.mocagh.org/mystadv/mysterious10.jpgWaxworks: https://www.mocagh.org/mystadv/mysterious11.jpg
Man the obscure text adventure rabbit hole is impossibly deep to explore. One guy alone with some imagination could write a dozen in a decade and many did so. The amount of "new" stuff is pretty vast too.
>>11062871>>11065994These covers look like an amateur attempting to recreate old Roger Dean (you may know him from the covers of bands like Yes and Asia, and the cover of Tetris Worlds). I really like it, especially the color gradient with an airbrushed look. What makes that? You see it in the Simpsons sometimes. Also, how do text adventures work? Did the maker have to write and program responses for every possible decision? Or does it fall back on generic>you can't use that here
I love these types of games but am 2 stupid to beat most of them. There was some similar games by some john or scott guy made in the later 80s that were similar. I downloaded them to my archives but cant remember the names. if I remember i'll look in my external for them and name drop so others can track them down (only found them on archives.org so far)
All those games were released in a span of less than 3 years
