I’m neither pining for this nor averse to it. I’m bound to try it since Mystery House was basically the first adventure and parser game I played. I’ll probably most value some scariness, since that’s the main quality the original has, I think. Most of the characters appear alive together, once, and after that you only ever find them dead. This avoids all the interactions that would have been impossible for the game to handle, but it’s also the source of the scariness. That and having the lights go out.
I’m not pining for any IF game to be remade in 3D. The IF games that I enjoyed are just fine by themselves, and aren’t likely to be improved by translation to a different medium.
I’m always skeptical of these sorts of projects, but I also always root for them. It would be great to have a graphical game that captures the vibe of mystery house. If it turns out well, great!
I think that the Mystery House Taken Over project effectively remakes Mystery House over and over in such delicious ways that I stopped pining over Mystery House remakes. Which I wasn’t pining for anyway. Once you play Michael Gentry’s lovecraftian Mystery House remake, I mean… as far as I’m concerned, that’s it, game over, he won the internet, mic drop, and all those things.
Mostly, if I pine for remakes, it’s to get rid of certain oldschool design decisions (mostly walking deads, but by no means limited to them), or to allow time for a project which was rushed to meet a deadline to become what it was meant to be.
But this remake appears to be more transformative, and actually build upon the original - much like how King’s Quest II was transformed into “KQII+: Romancing the Stones”. That’s definitely interesting. I’m not super excited about this, but I wish them luck and hope that the end result is a successful new take on the original.
Personally, I’d be more interested in some classic top-down RPGs or Action adventure titles being demade as Text adventures for the zmachine or glulxe. Granted, being blind, I couldn’t care less about graphical overhauls that are often the main draw of remaking an old game over just rereleasing it via official emulation or a cheap port and chances are the remake will be no more accessible for blind players as the original because most devs don’t think about accessibility in the disability sense, and when they do, they often have no clue how to handle blindness and either don’t offer enough help to blind players or overshoot and make the game practically play itself(granted, making a game blind playable is a hard problem for a lot of genres, but some devs come across as paying lipservice to disability rather than making a good faith effort to make their game accessible).
I used to be so into that… Demaking a game into IF, if it’s a straight port, means that you have the game’s design all laid out for you. If you don’t have the creativity to do something that you think is worth it, but really want to make a game, it’s a fun project. I mean, that was the reason I made the Larry 2 point and click remake in my teens - I loved adventure games, I really wanted to make one using AGS, I had no graphical ability and not much of a grasp on coming up with a story or game design, so I used SCIStudio and just ported that wholesale.
I also played with demaking Phantasmagoria into a text adventure. My younger self meant well, and if I could somehow re-read my old attempts I probably would look upon them kindly, but it was probably pretentious over-writing that went on for too long all the time.
Demaking a game into text can be really interesting, but the writing capabilities of the demaker are going to be really, really exposed. Adapting your prose to what the game needs - a game which was someone else’s baby and who uses someone else’s voice - can be tricky.
I don’t really have a point, I’m just somewhat surprised that someone is expressing a preference for the thing I dreamed of doing. Demaking games into text is usually viewed as, “why?” There was a time when I could reply “Hey, at least I can play the text versions of these awesome games in my iFrotz”, but then ScummVM exploded and I can now play the originals in my portable device anyway, so…
well, in the commercial JRPG scene, the remakes are becoming a major game-changer (the remaking of FF VII’s THE SPOILER is a masterpiece on par with the Original) but we go deeper into the OT field.
On the IF, I’m pretty confident that the Zork trilogy (originally in .z3 format) can be merged into the original mainframe Zork using the .z8 format, and this is by far the remake I’m pining. (side point, there’s the sources around and also an compiler capable of compiling into .z8 format…)
You mean the finished Zork trilogy all in one game like the original mainframe Zork? Like, mainframe Zork was split and content was added to each individual part; so reaggregate those parts together with all of the added content to make one mammoth Zork+ ?
There’s a curious ghost story I discovered while reading this tragic thread about Conrad Cook’s passing. I’ve played a bit of it myself and read the transcripts, and I find it fascinatingly different from your average IF fare. The setting, the partially-autobiographical nature of it, the protagonist’s clear lack of belonging, his unease at the assholes he hangs out with (yet his inability to confront them directly), the historical tragedy hanging over every step of the game, it all goes together to create a dreadful but engrossing atmosphere.
The author has passed, so I hope this isn’t disrespectful to say, but I’d like to see a remake of this game or create one, to make it more accessible. The downside is that since any remake would necessarily be building on his material, you’d be unable to put the remake in any of the major IF events and it therefore wouldn’t get much attention.
I feel like demakes are pretty niche in general, at least more niche than hacking/modding retro games or doing whole cloth homebrew for retro hardware and seem to be mostly limited to “what if this super popular game got a spin-off for a retro handheld(not to be confused with a emulation handheld) or got a port to a less capable contemporary of its original platform?” type deals, and text games, IF or otherwise, are a niche even among the hardest of hardcore retro gamers(honestly, it’s possible I wouldn’t have returned to this genre in a timeline where I never went blind), so while text is kind of the ultimate demake, I can’t say I’m surprised its rare.
Granted, its entirely possible demakes are more common than I think and I’m just not in the right online spaces to see them.
Remake Dark Seed; make the design fair and solvable and less opaque; give the player some indication of when they’re making the game unwinnable, or if after the fact, WHY it became unwinnable.
And then we’d really have something. That’s the one I’m pining for.
Now that this topic’s been going along for a while, being successful, I can admit that I didn’t even intend the original question / subject line to be non-rhetorical. It was just me saying, ‘(Is Mystery House) the remake you’ve been pining for?’ But everyone’s been describing the remake they actually have been pining for, or lack thereof, which has been a lot more interesting.
Awwww, how sweet of you to assume that some of us need an excuse to talk at length about games we like or want to like but are disappointed by. Believe me when I say some of us need no excuse and view the “rethorical” in “rethorical question” as optional.
Me neither. But if I were to guess, I’d imagine it had something to do with it not being a “question” in the literal sense of something that asks for an answer, but rather a tool for rethoric. It looks like a question but it’s just a rethoric method; a rethorical question.
BTW, I’m bullshitting you right now, and I’d be surprised if I were right. It does make sense, but this kind of rationalizing usually does. And is usually wrong!
Believe me when I say some of us need no excuse and view the “rethorical” in “rethorical question” as optional. 