Editorial
September 2003
Oooh, excitement. After some "mofo" hacked the mixnmojo servers and destroyed hundreds of sites - some slowly make their way back onto the world wide web. And luckily, the AGDzine is one of them. And we've brought a load of half-decent stuff with us. Naturally, we've selected all the best content from former issues and updates of the zine along to the new version, plus we've stacked up on brand new content.
It's with a great pleasure that we present an interview with Ron Gilbert this month, and finally ask him some questions that focus on adventure game development. Also, it was great to catch up with Charles Cecil, the man that believes point and clicks are dead - to see what he had to say about them, Broken Sword: The Sleep Dragon and BASS going freeware. Both of these articles can be found in the interviews section.
ECTS 2003 was a slight dissapointment for me this year. The "Playstation Experience" was double in size this year which left the trading/exhibitor area and developers area half the size - which was a great shame because there were several companies I wanted to have a chat with that weren't there this year. And I bet it was floor space related, I bet it was!! Still, Charles Cecil seemed very excited about the release of Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon. I also watched a video for "Uru" - ages beyond Myst. Uru looked quite pretty, but unforunataly I didn't really delve much further - I think a playable version was there too, but I didn't really have time to take a look. Afterall, I only just arrived in time to meet Mr Cecil! Bloody trains ._.
It's not just the AGDzine thats got me excited - but there's also been the recent release of Runaway, which I'm still trying to get a hold of a copy for so I can play it and enjoy it. It alls seems good so far, the reviews I've read seem to suggest its the first "point and click classic" for five years. What do you think?
Along the same lines, Mike Doak took a brave step recently by releasing The Adventures Of Fatman, his first commercial adventure game made using Chris Jones' 'Adventure Game Studio'. After spending many many months of hard work developing the game, Mike finally got his game out into the open and it recieved many praised reviews. This is always a good sign to other independant developers that their games have much more potential than they may realise.
I've been fleshing out the idea of an adventure game expo, where independant developers and commercial developers alike can showcase their games too other developers, fans, publishers and hopefully - the press. It's just one step further in announcing that point and click adventures are alive. Find out a little more about this idea in the AdventureX article.
BASS got made freeware! How cool is that? One of the great yet commonly overlooked point and clicks of the ealrier days has finally become freeware thanks to Revolution and SCUMMvm. Great stuff.
Lately, I've been working on Indiana Jones & The Fountain of Youth with the dedicated team, and it's been great fun. It's producing even more interest than even I had imagined - try a search on Google and you'll find pages of results. We even found it listed on a cheat site, even though it hasn't yet been released! You can also find it on a "wanted" site - last time I checked, about five people wanted a copy of it. Amazing.
The new site design allows us to look a little more professional, (yet, if anyone recognises the site design, you'll win a prize) and allows for frequent updates. We've got plenty of interviews planned and what not and some great features ahead. Don't forget that you're more welcome to write for the zine, whether its a review, an article, a rant or a walkthrough - please do contact us.
So, it's time to put on your glasses and filter through all the latest interviews, gossip, articles and what not of the zine. Enjoy it, and let us know what you think of it. I think I'd better get back to coding...
Actually, I think I'll have a smoke. ^-^
Mark "m0ds" Lovegrove
Editor
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