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Hello hello! Welcome to the first
">REMEMBER" of the year 2022! The Apple II is going to turn 45 soon,
the Speccy is turning 40... And text adventures are even older than
that! It's amazing to think about how old this genre is, and how much it
still has going on! The "Community News" section this month is
particularly long, and I think you'll enjoy this month's article - I had
a lot of fun making it! But first...
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My news
My news? What do you mean, my news? Why, of course, last month was the month I released a very big project! Release 3 of "Tristam Island" is now out,
with an even smaller file size, some optimizations, dozens of bugs
fixed, and 3 new retro platforms (the Dragon 64, the Sam Coupé, and, uh,
the PlayStation Portable). If you've enjoyed this newsletter, I can
confidently that you are going to want to buy that game 🙂 This is a
long game (6-7h of gameplay) with an Infocom feel but without the
annoyances and the frustrations - instead of making the game obtuse so
you buy the hint book, I give you the hint book with the game to help
you finish it 😉 And it's had extremely positive reviews, and even a
"Sizzler" from ZZap!64 !
And I have also released "L'île Tristam", the French translation of the game!
This was a significant effort, and you may recall me talking about it a
couple of times. Not only did I need to translate the game's text, but I
also translated the Inform 6 library, PunyInform, for the game - and it
had to fit within the space constraints! I had to dig deep, but I'm
very proud of what I accomplished with this French translation.
Unfortunately I had to set it up as a separate page on itch.io, which
means two separate games, but here's my offer: if you've bought "Tristam
Island" and you'd like to check out the French version, reply to this
email to let me know and I will send you a free download key! (Or buy it
- it's only $4! 😁)
Anyway, buy my games, please and thank you!
🙂 I will probably take a break for a few weeks, and maybe release my
translation of PunyInform soon. After that, there will be another
game... You will be the first to know about it, don't worry 😉
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Community news
As always, the world of retro text adventures is very busy! If you folks keep this up, this is going to turn into a magazine! 😁
- Dwalin
recently released a short graphical text adventure in Spanish and
English, entitled "The errand boy". It was written for MS-DOS first,
then ported to DAAD and released on the ZX Spectrum, ZX Spectrum Next,
Amstrad CPC, and MSX 2. Download it here, for free! Congrats, Dwalin!
- Clive
Townsend, the creator of the "Saboteur" series, has returned to the
series; his "Saboteur: Deep Cover", a text adventure for the Spectrum
128k, was in the Kickstarter for Retro Fusion Annual 2022. It was
recently announced that the Portuguese, Spanish, and German versions of
this game are now available for sale on Teknamic's website, while the
English (and Brazilian and Polish) versions are coming very soon! You might want to bookmark Clive's website.
- Sequentia Soft released the English translation of their game "The Time Machine", a choose-your-own-adventure-style game for the Spectrum 48K.
- Uto has recently released PCDAAD, a new DAAD interpreter that supports 256 colors (instead of 16); and is, I believe, working on getting Atari ST support in DAAD!
- Jason
Dyer, at his Blue Renga blog, has been playing every single text
adventure chronologically for the past few years, which has been a very
interesting read. At the end of 2021, he has finished playing every text adventure published before 1981! He's tackling 1982 next, which is a very good year...
- I
was telling you last month about Drew Cook's blog, "Gold Machine". The
last few posts have been about "The Witness", and I've really enjoyed
them; but Drew has been even more busy this month! "Gold Machine" now has a podcast, and Drew is also starting a project aiming at filling the blanks in terms of which Infocom feelies have been published in a format that's accessible for visually impaired people!
- Last
month, I was telling you about translations of retro text adventures;
but I actually forgot to talk about one! Stéphane Wiart wrote last year a
translation of "Pirate Adventure" in French, which can be found on his itch.io account.
- In other translation news, Auraes has released a beta version of his translation of PunyInform into French
- the first public release of PunyInform in another language! The z3
format doesn't seem to be supported, as that format forces fairly big
compromises for non-English languages (I 100% agree, there are
significant hurdles in z3!...).
- And Davide Bucci has been working on a translation into Italian of his game "The Queen's Footsteps"! Hooray for more translations!
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This month's article
I had a lot of fun for this month's article! It involved downloading
thousands of games and using some wonderful command-line utilities to
build a database filled with every sentence ever written in close to 500
Quill and PAWS adventure games! And what for? To run some fun
statistics on them that provided me no scientific value but lots of
entertainment! Dive in 🙂
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See you soon!
Happy new year to you all! I hope 2022 will be another great year for retro text adventures, and for this newsletter! 🙂
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