"Beware! Beware! Take care! For you are about take part in an interactive story that will reveal the terrifying truth behind the mysterious Soviet space programme! Revelations of incredible horrors that will terrify you with their brutal reality!
For this is the story of a mysterious force — a force that has crossed the billion mile vastness of infinite space! Boneless, fleshless, almost invisible and yet imbued with incredible power — I speak to you of cosmic radiation!
The deadly solar radiation that has the power to raise the dead! The power to amplify brainwaves to many times their natural strength — so that even a weak little puppy could wipe out a city of concrete and steel — with the power of her mind!
In a future that grows ever closer, the fate of the Earth lies in the hands of one man. That man is Detective Frank Douglas — that man, my friend, is YOU!
God help us… in the future!"
Renegade Brainwave is an interactive fiction inspired by Hollywood B-Movies, based on my 2010 ECTOCOMP 2nd place winner. The new version features more locations, more puzzles, more polish, and an atmospheric soundtrack.
I made the soundscape as an exercise in teaching myself Adobe Audition. It features music by Monstrous Movie Music, who specialize in recreating previously unavailable classic film music from the 1940s - 1970s. The sound effects in the soundscape are also sourced from the golden age of Hollywood. A film-maker called Craig Smith has painstakingly digitized more than a thousand optical sound effect recorded from the 1930s - 1950s, and made them available on Freesound. At present, the soundtrack is only available on the download version, but I hope to have it working in a browser before long.
Renegade Brainwave was written in tandem with Alias ‘The Magpie’ and finished over the past year. It is a love letter to the films of Ed Wood, Phil Tucker, Ray Dennis Steckler et al, and was a lot of fun to make. I hope you have as much fun playing it! You can find it on my blog site, and on the IFDB. Reviews are welcome and encouraged!
Renegade Brainwave can now be played online complete with the atmospheric soundscape. Many thanks to Mathbrush for providing me with the necessary javascript.
Simply type “music” or “sound” to toggle the soundscape on or off.
The soundscape really does a lot for the ambiance. It didn’t feel overly repetitive and annoying which I find game music often does.
Spoilery nitpicks
One thing I found a tad annoying is that when I moved to a new location the game would tell me about a comment I made to Donald before telling me that Donald arrived.
Removing the planks with the crowbar could use a few synonyms. I had to try a few phrasings to get it done. (“open boards with crowbar” and “use crowbar on boards” don’t work)
I tried getting Donald to set the planks on fire with his lighter. Perhaps a message about the planks being too wet or the lighter being out of gas after setting your car on fire would be nice.
I had to use a hint at the end because I’d forgotten about the rift. I’m not sure this really needs fixing since it was there all along in the room description but perhaps having an occasional message about the light from the rift glowing eerily would help remind the player that it is there.
“rift” and “curtain of light” aren’t recognized as synonyms for the cosmic curtain.
“aim gun at gorilla” doesn’t work
This is very very minor but the fact that the Animal Cemetery wasn’t on the critical path felt to me like a grave crime against symmetry. A fix would be to make the doughnut there extra delicious and the only doughnut Donald will trade for the turban.
Despite all those quibbles* I really loved this game.
If you haven’t yet, check it out. And turn on the sound!
Thank you Nils! That’s some great feedback, and I’ll definitely implement those small improvements including the doughnut idea, because that lack of symmetry bugs me, too!
I finally got around to playing this bite-sized parser game. This is a fun genre send-up, competently put together. The setting is brilliant, and the puzzles are varied and possible to solve without hints. Highly recommended!
At one point I had to restore a saved game after I had accidentally given the sweater to Lobo. Is there a way out of this situation?
I reviewed this game, because it’s been on two different “needs more reviews” polls with lots of reviews and hasn’t gotten any reviews on IFDB in 14 years. I had fun playing and thought the writing and characters were really funny! I had some issues with bugginess and mentioned them in the review. I definitely like all the different music; it’s a really great fit for the game.
Thanks for you review, Brian! I received an email from Wade who flagged some of the same bugs. I will play it through and try to see if I can reproduce them, and fix them. If anyone is interested, it would be good to get some further beta-testing to catch things missed in the first round. PM me if interested!
It would be nice to get it more polished, because of all my parser games, it’s the one I enjoyed making the most.
The sound was added thanks to you sharing the code you’d used to add sound in Absence of Law. I’m wondering if this game would be a good candidate for an update using your Bisquixe interpreter—I understand this can handle sound? Since I’ll be updating the code anyway…
Bisquixe enables other music extensions to work in online play. Your game is pretty advanced; to me, it sounded like you had a playlist, where when one song ended, another began. That is definitely doable with an extension (there’s code in GLK for checking when a sound ends, and then playing another sound after. I’ve made a sample game that does that). But I don’t think there’s currently an available extension that does a playlist-style (the main extension people are using now is Daniel Stelzer’s Music and that allows songs to play on loop and for songs to change based on input from the player or game environment but not, I think, to do a playlist).
If you want me to make an extension that lets you make a list of songs and play them in order and then loop from the beginning, I should be able to either do it or say it’s impossible for me in about a few hours. Otherwise, it might be wise to just stick with your current method!
It’s actually pretty simple - one continuous soundscape which I created in Audacity and a bit of Adobe Audition.
Many of the sound effects are original nitrate optical sound effects from the 1930s & ’40s created for Hollywood studios, and digitised by Craig Smith on Freesound dot org.
The music is licensed from Monstrous Movie Music, run by B-movie enthusiast David Schecter. His team, led by Kathleen Mayne, recreates the soundtracks of old Hollywood B-movies by listening to the films and transcribing the scores by hand, the original sheet music being long lost. The recreated scores are then re-recorded by the Radio Symphony Orchestras of Cracow and Slovakia, conducted by Masatoshi Mitsumoto.
The steam calliope was recorded by Tom Gavioli, and used with his permission. I applied some effects to give it a slightly broken, off-kilter feel, like the music from The Shining.
I put in quite a lot of work to give it an authentic B-Movie horror feel, which is why I was so happy to finally get a review!
If the soundscape is a single file, it should be extremely easy to use Bisquixe and Music by Daniel Stelzer. It would take about 5 lines (2 lines to include the extensions, 1 line to define the file for Inform, 1 line to define the file for Bisquixe, and 1 line to play it on loop).
