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Happy 10th of the month! Hope you're doing well and that you had a good summer 🙂 Before we begin, I just wanted to thank everyone for subscribing to this newsletter! And in particular, say hi to the newcomers - there's been quite a few in the last few weeks, and I'm very pleased with that 😀 A reminder: if you want to catch up with the previous issues, scroll up to "open this email in a browser" and click that link, and you should see a "Past Issues" button in the top bar! I hope you enjoy this month's edition, and the article, on saving 🙂
My news Summer has been good and progress was made on various projects, including release 3 of Tristam Island. (And yes, if you're wondering, I did add more supported platforms... Oops, I guess? 😆) But there's been another bit of exciting, but also frustrating, news. One of the biggest video game websites, Polygon, recently made a video on "weird French games" (heard that angle before...). The very first part of it was on a game called "La femme qui ne supportait pas les ordinateurs" (The woman who couldn't stand computers), which is a funny game on 1986 chatrooms and being harassed by weird men, and which I ported to Z-Machine about 13 years ago. And guess what, when the video showed the game, it actually showed my port!! The video is at 100K views, so that's very cool!
Now for the frustrating part: my name appears nowhere in the video or the credits 😑 Even more frustrating: the whole angle of the first half of the video, which was the influence of French culture of standing up to political power on the video games, is taken wholesale from a paper by a Polish Ph.D student, Filip Jankowski, published in Game Studies. And even though his ideas and perspective are used, he isn't credited in the video either... So frustrating! 😤 Anyway, go ahead, the video is interesting, and Filip Jankowski's paper is too!
Community news This section is a little shorter this month, let me know if I missed anything! Torreoscura is a graphical text adventure originally written in Spanish by Bieno Marti, but was also translated to English after its initial release. (I absolutely love the cover art!) It is available for the C64, Oric, and now ZX Spectrum, MS-DOS CGA, and Amstrad PCW, with a CPC version coming soon. Download it here! When he was 16, Harry McCracken wrote a text adventure on his TRS-80, which was then published as a type-in, "Arctic Adventure". 40 years later, he found it again, and looking at the source, found a typo that made the game unwinnable! This is pretty neat, and even got a mention in PCGamer. The remastered game now has been released, without the bugs and with some additional content was expanded a bit more. What's more, Charles Forsyth, who was McCracken's classmate, also remastered his "Lost Ship Adventure"! Both games run in the browser, but the BASIC source code can be found and downloaded if you peek at the HTML source of the webpage 😉 I havent tried it, but I thought it was cool: there is now a utility that allows you to make a Windows application from ZX Spectrum tape images. This is only available for 48K, but they're looking at 128K. Perfect to share old Spectrum games to a new audience?
This month's article Woop! This month's article is on the topic of saving the player's progression in a text adventure. There's several ways to do it, each with their advantages and drawbacks. Plus, it'll answer the burning question: why are new releases of Tristam Island not compatible with old saves?
Read the article
See you soon! Thanks again for reading this newsletter, and for spreading the word! I'm very happy to see how many people are interested in retro text adventures. As always, don't hesitate to reach out, I reply to everyone! I'll see you next month 😉
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