Jon Gracey's

Posts Tagged ‘LucasArts’

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Games That Rocked…Tom Crowley’s World – #32: The Longest Journey

In PC on April 26, 2013 at 12:46 pm

Today’s post is by Tom Crowley.

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Title: The Longest Journey

Format: PC

Released: April 20th, 2000

TLJ box

“You’re about to take the first step on the longest journey of your life.”
“I must be insane to do this.”
“Yes, it’s pretty much a given.”

I’ve really dug myself into a hole here. All I had to do was pick a computer game to write about in a heartfelt but vaguely amusing way for up-to-but-not-including a thousand words and I had to choose The Longest Journey, about which unsurprisingly there is far, far too much to say. Ask me to describe this game in real life sometime and see a man say a lot of seemingly unrelated words in sequence and wave his hands around. Ah, well. When it comes to retrospectives, we can all be clever with hindsight. Read the rest of this entry »

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Games That Rocked…Richard Campbell’s World – #27: Full Throttle

In Mac, PC on March 18, 2013 at 11:32 am

This week’s post by Late Night Gimp Fight’s Richard Campbell:

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Title: Full Throttle

Format: PC, Mac

Released: 30th April, 1995

Full-throttle_box_front_6552x8244

“Whenever I smell asphalt, I think of Maureen. That’s the last sensation I had, before I blacked out: the thick smell of asphalt. And the first thing I saw when I woke up was her face. She said she’d fix my bike. Free. No strings attached. I should have known then that things are never that simple. Yeah, when I think of Maureen I think of two things: asphalt… and trouble.”

– Ben Whatsisname Read the rest of this entry »

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Games That Rocked My World – #25: The Neverhood

In PC, PlayStation on January 30, 2013 at 5:10 pm

Today’s post is by…me! Jon Gracey. Finally pulling my finger out.

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Title: The Neverhood

Format: PC, PlayStation

Released: 31st October, 1996

Neverhood_box_art

Or: Wallace and Gromit via biblical quantities of acid.

The Neverhood. Part claymation adventure game, part existential psychadelia-tinged nightmare, it’s not a game to be played by an eleven year old.

When I was eleven I played The Neverhood. My uncle Johnny worked in Hong Kong and occasionally he’d send games. Hong Kong had a prosperous piracy scene (sadly only in the illegal-copying-media-side, not rum and pieces o’ eight) and sometimes these thin, card CD slips would appear containing enticing, label-free discs within.

At eleven, any game with an animated bent was sure to catch my eye, and titles like Innocent Until Proven Guilty 2 introduced me to the “combine-poisoned-cheese-with-racist-mouse” logic of adventure games. Their slow methodical pace allowed my vaguely completist tendencies to blossom as I slowly scoured the static environments for clues, obessively clicking on each successive pixel like a young Howard Hughes but also a massive virgin. Read the rest of this entry »

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Games That Rocked…Paul Foxcroft’s World – #21: Day Of The Tentacle

In Mac, PC on January 14, 2013 at 8:00 pm

Title: Day Of The Tentacle

Format: PC, Mac

Released: June, 1993

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Hello Jon’s readers, I’m Paul Foxcroft. This guy:

PaulTrust me.

This will mean little to you, but I’m a human man, I live in London, I make my living by pretending; and like Jon, I like games. Here’s the quite simple request I’ve been putting off for a few days now…

“The brief is simple: 1,000 words or less, on a game that you love / has changed your perspective / made a big impact on you in some way.”

So has that eaten into the word count? Yes. But now, you and I swim in the sea of context. Brilliant.

A game that I love, has changed my perspective or has made a big impact on me. There’s so many, I mean really. THERE ARE SO VERY MANY. Read the rest of this entry »

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Games That Rocked My World – #6: Grim Fandango

In PC on October 17, 2011 at 3:07 pm

Title: Grim Fandango

Format: PC

Released: 30th October, 1998

Box_art_image

I’m going to be straight up with you, dear reader; I have no strong memories attached to Grim Fandango. No conveniently parallel life-stories to compare and contrast. Not a pithily contrived lesson in sight. Sorry about that. I have, however, one reason for writing about it today, and it’s actually the best one there is: Grim Fandango is a gorgeous, shining, pinnacle of the medium. I’ll probably still wring a tenuous message out of it, though. Don’t you worry about that. Read the rest of this entry »

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