Slashdot Mirror

Erwin Broekhuis writes "The fourth and last installment of Beiddie Rafól's The Cold Hotspot: A Critique of the State of Adventure Games, has been published at Adventure Developers. The series explores some of the key points and contradictions of the stagnation and lack of direction within the adventure game genre." From the first article: "The truth is, the adventure game genre, as we all know it, has long been suffering from obscurity, lack of progress, sheer banality, isolation (surprise!), and, simply, from the garden variety of dullness. And everyone - developers, publishers, the media, and yes, we gamers ourselves - is guilty of creating and fueling this suffering."

Courthold writes "After a very long period of downtime, Adventuredevelopers.com has returned, filling the void for all amateur adventure game creators out there. It returns fully equipped with many new articles, and a forum to share your ideas and work with others in the community. Adventuredevelopers is part of the Lucasfan Network (lfnetwork.com) along with other sites such as AdventureGamers and Mixnmojo. Hopefully this site along with others will help revive the long lost genre that is adventure games."

Thanks to DIY Games for its column discussing the state of freely downloadable independent PC adventure games for July. The author raves: "I don't think I'm exaggerating if I say that July was by far the best month for independent adventure gaming this year", and goes on to profile titles such as A Very Special Dog ("You play a German shepherd with the task to save a life and find the culprit... you'll sniff objects, bark at people or lick them, all in order to successfully complete the game") and Apprentice II: The Knight's Move ("top quality independent gaming... [with] a very deep story and great character development.") Talking of character development, I'm afraid this is my (simoniker's) last ever Slashdot story post. Read on for details... Firstly, thanks to everyone who's helped make Slashdot Games (as well as my work on the Slashdot main page) a pleasure to edit over the past 18 months (and 3000+ posts) or so. It's been a wonderful experience, and I'm really going to miss it. Unfortunately, this is the final story I'll be posting, since I'm off to videogame trade site Gamasutra.com, which I've written for fairly extensively in the past, to take up a managing editor position.

I believe there will be an announcement about a new Slashdot Games editor reasonably soon. However, I'm sure the other editors will pick up some of the slack in the interim, so hang in there, everyone. In the meantime, please inundate the submission bin with stories about obscure Japanese console re-issues, why the Infinium Phantom is going to trounce the Megaton, and why the Reggielution is absolutely, positively going to be televised. Later, all.