The (ominous sounding) House adventure and its freeware gaming siblings

Non-AGS indy adventure games are a rather rare breed indeed, but it's them Visual Basic ones that are downright exotic. Apparently, The House, a short highly atmospheric horror point-and-clicker is such an exotic rarity. It also happens to be a freeware adventure with a Myst-like interface, great music and simple yet very smart graphics, that feels like one big elaborate puzzle. Not a very easy puzzle mind you, but still a well designed and very intriguing one.

To download The House (and its walkthrough) you could be cunning enough to follow this humblest of links. Oh, and don't be surprised if you end up looking at a whole herd of them freeware mostly VB games. Download wantonly and do not forget to try Rotris the Tetris clone, Sokoban inspired Strokio and Blockmania a Columns like thingy.

Related @ Gnome's Lair: Rise of the Hidden Sun news, Indy Adventuring Guide, Prototype 2 free shmup

Pac-Man gets freeware & Zork treatment

You awaken in a large complex, slightly disoriented. Glowing dots hover mouth level near you in every direction. Off in the distance you hear the faint howling of what you can only imagine must be some sort of ghost or several ghosts.

Almost on par with "you are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here", eh? Then again, this is no Zork. It's an alcohol (allegedly) inspired Zork/Pac-Man hybrid, that's properly freeware and can be played right here. The game, aptly named the Pac-Txt, is quite obviously a text/turn-based version of Pac-Man, which plays less than an adventure and more like a pill-popping maze.

So, should you really go grab your graph-paper notebook? Well, absolutely yes, for Pac-Txt, despite supporting only a bare minimum of game commands and being coded almost entirely in a day, is quite a brilliant and at times demanding little online maze game. Besides, glimpsing at a ghost will definitely remind the older among you of the glorious 3D Monster Maze days, without of course the 3D bit, and ...uh... that's quite a feeling. Just don't forget to enable the autolook and autonibble cheats.

Related @ Gnome's Lair: Cthulhu i-f gaming, Half Life 2 Flipside, Textfyre, the Saboteur remake

Steal Away Jordan & Board Game Slaves

Must have been due to my recent indulgence in the generally shallow world of video games, but I was happily shocked when excellent all around gaming blog Play This Thing! mentioned Steal Away Jordan. After all, a political roleplaying game focusing on slavery, for that's what SWA is all about, isn't what I consider banal, and, yes, that's coming from someone still enjoying the odd Class Struggle session. It's just that spending all this time shooting (mostly undead) stuff, makes such a game really stand out, especially considering that most RPGs have the player step into the iron boots of some hairy barbarian instead of a rather desperate slave.

Now, as I've yet to buy or obviously review the game, you'd better help yourselves to a lovely PTT review and of course have a look around the SAW official website. Rumour has it it's a narrative heavy game with a unique game system and that I'll soon be getting myself a copy.

Related @ Gnome's Lair: D&D instant campaign builder, Proletariat: The Uprising, 1000s free RPG character sheets

Prototype 2 free shmup

First glimpsed over at Independent Gaming and then micro-reviewed by TIG Source's Derek Yu, Prototype 2 is a freeware shoot-'em-up you absolutely have to play. It's got fantastic graphics, sports some classic side-scrolling action and offers enough options & power-ups to remind me of the glorious Amiga days. Download it here and don't expect a walk in the park. Prototype 2 is a tough little bastard (well, either that or I'm far too old for such games and alcohol has finally started taking its toll).

Related @ Gnome's Lair: The B-Game Compo feature, Epic Saga, Soldner-X HD trailer, Platform!

Retro Gamer eMag Review

So, uhm, what's an eMag, eh? Simple really, as it apparently is a collection of digitized magazines in PDF on a disk, which obviously means that a Retro Gamer eMag is a selection of digitized Retro Gamer magazines, or to be more precise 30 issues/3000+ pages of Retro Gamer in PDF on a disk. To be even more precise this particular eMag I'm currently reviewing features the first 30 (now out of print and pretty expensive) issues of said mag and a variety of extras, complete with full search capabilities via an excellent and lovingly animated retro themed interface.

What's more, searching/exploring the brilliant and rich content available can be done in three ways. First of all you can very virtually grab each one of the issues as a whole and read the PDF from -so to say- cover to cover, even though admittedly the PDF quality isn't that great, as all the images (not the text) are too low-res to enjoy. Then, you can search for individual top/printable quality high-definition articles through smartly indexed predefined categories (unfortunately not every single article has been included, which is quite annoying) and finally you can search the PDF documents themselves for any silly keyword you could come up with. All in all, finding what you are looking for or simply browsing is easy and intuitive and, considering the quality of what's on offer, my only true gripe is that I can't seem to find quality scans of the magazines' covers.

Now, for those of you that haven't even heard of Retro Gamer, suffice to say it's my favorite video gaming mag ever. I even prefer it to the early issues of PC Zone. Besides, it covers everything from 8-bit computers and consoles to arcades, game making ofs, retro-remakes, long gone developers, handhelds and even Jeff Minter's ship obsessions. As a prime example of what to generally expect from RG, please do read this excellent Sega MegaDrive Genesis retroinspection, one of the rare RG articles to make it to the web for free, though neither with all it usual bells and whistles nor in its 100% complete form. Oh, and here's Imagine's official Retro Gamer website.

As an added bonus, and probably as an incentive to buy the compilation regardless of the number of RG issues in your possession, Imagine threw in some lovely little extras. These include wallpapers (1024x768 and 1280x1024, 40 each), a couple of rather pointless files to help you create your own RG cover, 6 never before published pages on the magazine's history and impressively all 257 PDF pages of Retro - Micro Games Action, featuring the best retro articles from 24 issues of games TM. This PDF might not be of the highest resolution, but it's easily readable, and one could argue it's enough a reason (besides the obvious collector's obsession) for regular RG readers to grab this eMag, which incidentally is available here.

That's a (nine) out of (ten).

Related @ Gnome's Lair: Wii retro gaming guide, free CPC games, The Lurking Horror by Infocom

Rise of the Hidden Sun re-entering the freeware indy adventure games saloon

It was more than 5 years ago when Adventure Gamers published their first installment in the Adventure Architect series and indy/freeware adventure gamers promptly started fantasizing about playing through a cartoon point-and-clicker set in the Wild West. As the dev-diary like AA installments kept coming (read 'em all here), it was clear that a) this would be one of the shiniest freeware games ever, b) it would be episodic c) the graphics would be more than impressive and d) the game's name would be Rise of the Hidden Sun and the team behind it would be Chapter 11 studios.

Then, after the first enthusiastic previews started hitting the net, production apparently stopped and eventually even Chapter 11's website disappeared. But was the game gone for good? Had the evil powers of daily struggle crushed another creative group? Happily, no, and here is a brand new Rise of the Hidden Sun site to prove it. Hurrah!

As for the game itself, well, it will indeed be the freeware yet professional quality AGS adventure spanning 4 episodes and 100 (!) locations it was always meant to be. I mean, really, look at these screenshots... Rise of the Hidden Sun will also come complete with a classic Sierra-style point-and-click interface and a full musical score. Intrigued? Great! Feeling helpful? Why, that's even better, for you can still join the team and help.

Related @ Gnome's Lair: AG Speedruns, Resonance, Space Quest IV review, Indy Adventures Guide