Okay! We’re off the RPGs and onto action/adventure game hybrids!
This game is a personal favorite of mine; I played it all the way through from beginning to end. It was a very well-designed game with a huge world and a fascinating storyline. It helped that it was based on a series of books by a real author and that the author was intimately involved with the creation of the game. She even went so far as to say that the game is the true end to the story, rather than the one presented in her books.
Name and developer, please.
EDIT: Wow, I seem to have finally stumped you guys!
EDIT: Okay, I’m giving you guys until 12 PM Eastern and then I’m going to reveal. Warren, you are now allowed to guess, if you so desire.
EDIT: Okay. Wow. No one got it. The game is Below the Root, by Windham Classics. It’s based on the Green Sky books by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. In the last book of the series she had one of the main characters die, which she realized after the book was published was a mistake. So the plot of the game is to actually find out if this character is really dead, and rescue him if possible.
So it seems, although I saw the EDIT comment when I first saw that entry, but anyway..
The blocky graphics sort of points towards spectrum, but the palette is wrong and I’m not entirely sure if you could do that kind of sprite trickery on the speccy, so I guess it’s out.
The next guess would be c64, where using that sort of graphics is easy, and sprites solve the player character bit, and the palette could match..
Too bad there’s way too many c64 games to know each one, although from the description it sounds weird that I had not come across this one.
Which then points at some other system like amstrad cpc, which I never used. Could be wrong, naturally.
Cue in someone who knows the game from the first glance.. =)
That’s actually a PC-DOS screenshot from the 16-color composite CGA version. There were Apple II and Commodore 64 versions of this game as well, however. I personally played the 4-color CGA version on a Tandy 1000 PC compatible computer. Back in THE DAY.
On PC? That’s pretty amazing, I thought I’d seen most of the “big” early games for the PC.. That is, I really assume this to be an early game for the PC due to the horrible graphics =)
Oh well. I’ll be interested to know what this one is..
Grabbed the c64 version and its graphics, while similar, look better than that of your screenshot =)
I doubt I’ll start playing it though. I wonder what other masterpieces I’ve missed..
I missed the posting of this entirely. But, no difference. I had no idea. And even with the reveal I can’t say I’d even ever HEARD of it much less played it! Nice stumper, Viridian!
Yeah…this is why I don’t really like posting stumpers. These are supposed to be conversation starters, but a stumper does not serve that purpose. I’m really surprised that I was the only person to have played this one.
Oh, no! I haven’t been to your blog in a long while, and I LOVED playing Below the Root on my Apple ][ c+!
Well, I loved it after I was old enough to understand what the heck I was doing. I also had Alice in Wonderland, but the disk got corrupted around the time I figured out how to play. B-(
I would have won this one, too. Just goes to show you that you can’t avoid Anthony’s blog for too long. You pay the consequences.
Oh, and as proof that I know what is on the screen, that is probably pan next to the thing that lets your character float instead of fall, and those are three coins or whatever the currency was on the table.
And I think I almost always ran into the wall immediately after picking up items. The Apple joystick wasn’t very forgiving.
Woohoo! Somebody else played it! And you are correct; the top table holds a shuba and pan bread and the bottom table holds three tokens.
And yeah, the game had a kind of wonky control scheme. You pushed in a direction to walk, and would continue walking even if you stopped pushing in that direction. Jumping after walking would make you run. And to stop, you pushed in the opposite direction – only once. Twice and you’d start walking in the opposite direction! This made getting things like the Temple Key (which required several precise jumps) a pain in the butt. It is a testament to how fun the game is that I beat it anyway.
And I usually post new Name That Game screenshots around noon on Tuesdays, so come on back tomorrow GB!
est il availible en Francais, my English not good