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One thing that I’ve learned from the Vintage Game Club: the mechanics of old games don’t always hold up so well, and old adventure games are certainly no exception to that, generally making me bang my head against the wall (and not in a “proud to have finally figured that out” way) a few times […]

As our third game, the Vintage Game Club chose Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee. Which has the distinction of being the most actively annoying game that I’ve played in several years. For one thing, it’s a really difficult game: it’s not unusual to find areas that you’ll have to play through dozens of times before succeeding, and […]

The final year of Grim Fandango was my favorite. Plot-wise, it drew things together nicely, letting you visit some of your old haunts in the bargain. It was perhaps not quite as interesting in that regard as year two (though, now that I think about it a bit more, I’m not so sure – year […]

Year 3 of Grim Fandango has come in for a lot of criticism in the Vintage Game Club forum, so I wasn’t expecting much when I started playing it. And my fears were confirmed by the first puzzle: the obvious thing to do doesn’t work, but it’s not at all obvious that it doesn’t work. […]

The latest Brainy Gamer podcast is up, and it’s an interview with N’Gai Croal. The whole thing’s great, go listen to it, but in particular one thing that he talked about is something that’s been on my mind: the way that enthusiast press coverage of videogames is heavily weighted towards the preview period. I’ve talked […]

I finished year 2 of Grim Fandango last night (I played it over the course of three nights), and in several ways I didn’t like it as much as year 1. I spent my first play session getting familiar with the environments; what this mostly meant was that I wandered all over the map, repeatedly. […]

In response to my earlier post on puzzles in narrative games, a couple of the commenters noted that contrasting the puzzles in Professor Layton with those in Grim Fandango isn’t fair, because the puzzles in the former game aren’t integrated into the game world in the the same way as puzzles in the latter one […]

Some thoughts on year 1 of Grim Fandango, mostly culled from my posts on the forum: Glottis is one of my favorite NPCs ever. I’m really pleased at how well the graphics hold up, I love the art deco style. Looking at Glottis, my first reaction was “wow, that’s not very many polygons, is it”, […]

Over in the Vintage Game Club forum, Michael posted an interesting question, “Do modern gamers still want puzzles?”: I’m working on a blog post focused on this, but I wonder if puzzles in narrative games are a relic of a bygone era of gaming – or are they a necessary ludic element? Has shooting replaced […]

I’m very glad that Michael suggested Grim Fandango as the introductory game for the Vintage Game Club, because adventure games and I go way back. I can’t remember the exact sequence of events, but I’m fairly sure that I was aware of the Colossal Cave adventure before we even owned a computer: I think my […]

I didn’t have much luck getting Grim Fandango working under wine; some of my colleagues suggested VirtualBox, so I thought I’d give that a try. And it worked better (helped by one amazing piece of blind dumb luck); not perfectly, but well enough that I should be able to participate in the inaugural run of […]

I was all excited to start playing Grim Fandango, so when my copy arrived today, I figured I’d spend the evening getting wine to work. Which took a little bit of doing, enough to create a blog post out of, but ultimately I got to where I could launch the game and go through the […]

Apparently I’m not the only person who feels like playing through old games and talking about them with other people: Michael Abbott and Dan Bruno noticed my throwaway comment on the subject, and, a weekend of e-mails later, the Vintage Game Club is formed. Our first game will be the classic LucasArts adventure Grim Fandango. […]