Hey everyone, long time no see - not even on this forum, but back on the r*if newsgroups. I’m not trying to barge in with a “problematic” post - given the circumstances, I hope it’s ok.
I’m working on an unannounced project, and I’m looking for copies of Pentari: First Light and Pentari: Second Dawn. They don’t exist on the internet, Malinche has been shut down for over a decade, and the author is not available. Not even preservation specialists have been able to locate them.
To state the obvious before anybody else does: there’s a “prequel” game archived at Index: if-archive/games/zcode . This request is about the commercial (not-free, anyhow) games which that was a prequel to.
I have Pentari release 7 serial number 050929. This is probably the prequel that @zarf alluded to. I’ve also got a couple of demos, but not the full game.
A year or two ago, Howard A Sherman re-emerged on one or two Facebook groups. He was promoting a new web site offering text adventures, including his own, but you had to sign up and it looked a bit dodgy to me. I’ve searched Facebook and can’t find the posts any more. It looks like his account may have been deleted. Maybe someone else will remember the posts or the web site.
It’s not made easier by either the demo or all the other games named Pentari, no. Thanks for looking into it, @Warrigal (and everyone else’s replies, too - I know it was a long shot).
A quick look @ifdb reveals that the demo got really low grading and review, and only first light got low grade and negative (external) reviews, one of it hints toward an issue familiar to me, but last time I checked Howard Sherman is an english name…
As Historian, I appreciate the effort on documenting the Pentari series, but the obstacle of, uh, how to write legally ? overpriced low quality under copyright ?
So, I put the hard, for an Historian, and serious, question, if the historiographical effort of documenting said series, at the same time respecting its copyright is best employed toward more fruitful, if not more important, historical research ?
I’m curious, what’s way worse about the other Malinche stuff? This was all long enough ago I don’t really remember any details, though my email records show I spent ages trying to get off their mailing list.