Save Reaper

[davidn]

Another dream! This one was about an EGA horror adventure game, a bit like Hugo's House of Horrors with the player character wandering around a large and quite blank mansion - the sprites were all black on top of backgrounds that changed colour depending on the room.

I remember very little about what was in it, apart from that I had to switch to my other computer and download a new version there - and that in the new third version, sometimes when you saved the game, the "Save Reaper" would randomly appear - a black cloaked sprite that would float in from the side of the screen and chase you or just materialize right in front of your character, and would split him in half with his scythe unless you moved at the right time. I was looking at a forum for the game and reading complaints about how frightening this had been when it was added in the second version, with other people saying how great it was because it took the safety out of saving all the time...

I can make a reasonable guess that this dream came about because of rediscovering a couple of DOS games the previous day. One of them was Rimtrix, a completely insurmountable puzzle game by regular PC Plus contributor Richard L. Wright - I remembered about it because of ranting to ravenworks about how impossible it was to slide the puzzle around to create paths through the maze for the coloured balls, guiding them from their randomly-chosen start point on the left hand side of the screen to the corresponding buckets on the other side. It's a task much like in Wallace and Gromit, laying a model railway frantically in front of a train while it's at full steam.

Then I accidentally went into the Redefine Keys screen and found out that it had a Rotate button. That would have been useful to know 23 years ago.

I've now seen level 2, and it is cyan.

Comments

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Woah, wait, hold up...

Someone else here has played the Hugo series?! o.O

[davidn]

Oh yes, quite extensively. I must have found them on one of those Internet-in-a-box gigantic shareware CDs that used to float around during the 90s... the third one was the first that I completed, and I'm really not sure how I managed it without a guide (though it was mercifully short - reportedly because it was the only one for which the author hired a graphics artist, and he quickly ran out of budget for him.)

The first one scared the life out of me - in particular, that dog (with behaviour disturbingly like the Save Reaper from this game) - not only an invincible enemy that chased you, but one you were tricked into triggering yourself...

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Ah, used the dog whistle in the wrong spot, huh? Yeah, took me a while to figure out you're supposed to use it in the room with the bats rather than upstairs.

I'm not sure where we got those games myself, but I was rather fond of them, particularly the 2nd one since it's what first introduced me to Doctor Who.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

I played the Hugo series a lot, too. . . .not. . very successfully, mind you. . Those bees got me. . .



I dreamt about Sonic the Hedgehog. . .only it was real life! On a tropical island. With lots of grinding on rails, as though it were a rollercoaster!!
So. . . it was a lot like a modern Sonic the Hedgehog game.. Even in my dreams, I can not imagine how to make a good Sonic the Hedgehog game in 3d. . .


Then I dreamed about there being scary bugs inside of everyone's computer terminal, like spiders and. . ants I guess, literally living in computer terminals, and crawling around outside and stuff. Only, also, there was this real cute ladybug that would kept living in PCs, and everyone kept trying to get rid of it the most, because it was really ruining the atmosphere of horrifying scary insects everywhere. It kept coming back, though, and it had a sort of apologetic personality, like Treetrunks from Adventure Time. So you'd try to chase it away from your computer, and it'd be like:
"Gosh, I sure am sorry for getting in the way of things here. . .it's just so nice in there. Now why don't we go make some nice, apple pie together. . . . mmmm~"
Then later, it would be in your PC again, and everyone would be kind of ashamed and embarrassed to see Ladybug there, and would be like:
"LADYBUG!!!!! D: D: D:!!!!"

So try to imagine that, and also everything had a nightmarish tinge to it. It was sort of a nightmare, but really cute.. :/

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

Make it!

[davidn]

I can't, I've got to look after my really fat sheep and supply of unspecifiedly volatile coloured boxes...!

[canadanne.livejournal.com]

Heh, I was reminiscing about Hugo 3 (http://canadanne.livejournal.com/2622074.html) not so long ago. :)

[davidn]

And so we have the entire set :) Looking back, I'm not sure how I managed to complete the game without a guide, even though I know I didn't have access to the Internet then... (it's one of only two adventure games I've managed in this way, the other being Simon 2). I must have had a lot of patience to realize that you had to synchronize blowdarting the elephant and scaring it with the mouse to block the dam, but I was very proud when I worked that out.

As for the other sticking points people mention in those comments... my friend (who first showed me the games) showed me how to get out of the witch doctor's hut with the command "mold clay", but I'm not sure how he worked that out - I remember specifically that "mould clay" didn't work. And it was my dad who told me about the significance of the bell, book and candle, and that I should use those to get rid of the ghost.

The "old man questions" at the very end was a bit weird... I'm not sure what he was going for with a 'challenge' like that, but I remember you could try it as many times as you liked if you happened to lie.

[canadanne.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think this game might have introduced me to the concept of exorcism!

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Ugh, I hated those questions. Reminds me of how much slower life was pre-Internet; the Dracula question had me stumped, and since Wikipedia was a decade and a half away, I had to find the answer elsewhere...in this case, I think I went down to the local book store I always bought MTG & Pokemon cards from.

I recall getting the question about the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster purely by luck by guessing the most absurd thing I could think of, on the logic that it would make a name for a good mixed drink. (Why a 6th grader knew so much about alcohol, especially in a family of designated drivers, is beyond me.)

[davidn]

The games' American-British duality was strange, especially in the era where there wasn't as much opportunity to find out much about other cultures online (then again, I don't know how internationally popular the Hitchhickers' Guide to the Galaxy books were). I knew about the Dracula question thanks to the title of a different game (Bram Stoker's Dracula), and asked my dad about Roy Roger's horse.

It's strange to think back to a time when the entirety of knowledge wasn't available from a search prompt. You'd think humanity would have got significantly more well-informed over the last two decades as a result.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

No kidding. I think this particular XKCD strip sums it up all too perfectly. (http://xkcd.com/911/)

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

The Save Reaper actually seems like a neat way to keep some suspense in a horror game! Kinda like how you only had a couple of Ink Ribbons in the Resident Evil games to save.

Also, the Save Reaper was a quicktime event?

[davidn]

(Oops, I forgot about this)

I've only played the original Resident Evil a little of the way through - it's the only game that I've played that has its saves restricted like that (though I know that more of them exist), and I found it... too nerve-wracking in the other direction! Getting the player nervous by making them feel they're losing progress works (oddly, 7 Days a Skeptic scared me to death while 6 Days a Sacrifice didn't, and the only real difference between the two is that one of them depicts your 'death' with a Game Over while the other one just restores you a bit further back)... but at least provide a snapshot save or something if you have to leave the game and come back to it!

It was... sort of a quicktime event sometimes... it was sort of like one in that you had to move out of the way at the right time, when he was stopped and just about to swing his scythe - otherwise he would just chase after you again.