And by the by, I’m actively looking for new participants on the podcast, both for one-off appearances and to work into the rotation of repeat co-hosts. Drop me a line here by DM or to the Retro Adventurers email contact.
Episode 8 now live, taking on Swiss Family Robinson and Valhalla (which did not have an IFDB entry until just now!)
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I just wanted to say that I really enjoy this podcast a lot. I found the interview with Roberta and Ken particularly fascinating because unlike no doubt everyone else here, I was not familiar with them at all.
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I didn’t know Tim Gilberts by name before I started working with Dave. Hopefully we’ll keep the net wide enough that everybody listening runs into at least an occasional “I had no idea this was out there”!
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Episode 9, a conversation with neo-retro developer @raymond about Kingdom of the Seven Stones is now live.
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Congrats on this… Just saw this announcement. Now following on Spotify.
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Episode 10 focusing on The Lurking Horror and Crypt of Medea, featuring the first game-playing appearance of @SpaceHobo and a guest appearance from the Strange Studies of Strange Stories podcast, is now live.
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It was a pleasure being on the show!
It was only after we finished that I remembered the Mike Berlyn story that I loved as a kid was Infidel, which could be interpreted as having “horror” elements in its own way. Either way, 1983 had plenty of games in what I’d call “suspense”, which is certainly related.
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Multi-part retrospective series “Michael Berlyn: That Dude Could Really Write” is definitely on my to-do list.
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I think this was the best one yet. I especially enjoyed the interview with the Lovecraft expert.
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An excellent podcast (as always). Anyone not subscribed who loves this era of text adventure games should be! The Lovecraft expert interview was superb, but I appreciated the game discussion equally. What was the easter egg robotic voice saying at the end of the show? Was this from the Mockingboard output?
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Yes, that was the Mockingboard output from Nick’s MAME setup. (It’s notably different and more awful than the output in AppleWin, so I’m curious about the different implementations.)
It’s the output from an early puzzle step, a little musical jingle and then
You pull the knob and hear a grinding sound come from the position of the tombstones. A hidden tunnel through the stones is revealed!
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Yeah the output of the MAME mockingboard was absolutely worse than useless. No flashing text was spoken (including important cues, such as items appearing), and often a sound cue from the game would halt the speech output.
The demos I’ve found online had a different “voice font” but shared some of the architectural limitations in the phonetic output. I suspect that either I needed to tune the board within MAME somehow, or perhaps the emulation simply hasn’t achieved the attention it gets in other emulators.
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Episode 11 featuring @RonMartinez (Rendezvous with Rama, Star Trek: The Promethean Prophecy, Hidden Agenda, etc.) got sneaky-deep in a lot of ways and it’s shocking how a guy can miss out on actual immortality if he doesn’t get the commitment in writing.
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@SpaceHobo and I learn to be careful what we wish for in Episode 12 when we go after Shakespeare games, featuring Avon and Macbeth.
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Year-end chatisode wraps up 2024 with all four Retro Adventurers, two special guests, and an overdue callback to the Clarion Beauty Computer!
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This was a fun one, and it was great to be in a chat with both Scott Adams and Tim Gilberts, as well as finally meeting Ben.
It’s a long friendly chat, and we managed to cover a number of amazing retrocomputing and IF topics in this one!
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Episode 14 now up, featuring Sierra’s The Dark Crystal and Artic’s Ship of Doom.
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Oops, two novella games. We take on G.F.S. Sorceress (Avalon Hill) and Lancelot (Level 9) in this one.
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Ron Martinez! Wow, there’s a name I remember. I loved his Interplanetary Spy books. Well, the whole series. But The Star Crystal (#6) was particularly cool to me. It’s bout the theft of priceless art on a mobius-strip spaceship.
It also had the clever trick of [spoiler]the final page leading to a “death” ending instead of the usual “you win.”
#4, Space Olympics, was also very good.
His comment “I was good at it” is indeed correct … these are IMHO two of the strongest in the series, though I liked them all.
Also I have been mispronounicing Preiss for years!
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