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Showing posts from September, 2020

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Choose Your Own Adventure Retrospective: The Curse of Batterslea Hall by Richard Brightfield

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The Curse of Batterslea Hall  was always my favourite CYOA book – it was also, for reasons I'll get into, one of the more unusual ones. It sparked my later love of adventure games and inspired some of my sketchy early attempts at creative writing (including a thinly veiled recreation on 90s 'edutainment' program Storybook Weaver ). It also deepened my devastation when I returned home one fateful school night to discover my mum had donated my extensive CYOA collection – precious gems tremblingly unearthed from the dusty Mills and Boon-straining shelves of my local Scope – back to charity. Around twenty years later, and I took the obvious next step for a mildly lockdown-crazed 90s kid squinting down the barrel of their thirties: sourced a copy inflated by just four times the original cover price through eBay. But was it worth it, and does it still hold up? Dust off your bootcut jeans and fire up your Walkman – it's adventurin' time, 90s* style... The premise Battersl

Inspiring Adventure Games That Gave Me Wanderlust: Part 2

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With lockdown easing (i.e., becoming rapidly non-existent) here in the UK, the prospect of wider travel is, maybe, hopefully, starting to seem not so dim and distant after all. My Google Maps timeline update for July even cranked up from one visited place to – get this –  two . These are heady times. Meanwhile, in adventure game terms, these past few months have seen me exploring a foreboding ancestral manor in Suffolk, England , the vibrant electronic markets and maid cafés of Akihabara, Japan , and the idyllic mountainside landscape of a fictional  provincial park . I think it's safe to say that, through lockdown and beyond, games like these will continue to fuel my spirit of adventure. Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars , Paris, France 'Paris in the fall, the last months of the year, at the end of the millennium. The city holds many memories for me – of music, of cafés, of love... and of death.'  –  George Stobbart Broken Sword's first entry spans countries inc