I'm back this week with The Longest Journey, a game proposed by Crow of Retro Road Show. While the game suffers from a very slow start, if you can get through the first couple hours you'll be rewarded with one of the best game narratives ever.

Download the mp4.

In the fourth and final installment of my interview with Dave Marsh, we talk about a variety of topics including his later FMV games (including MTV's Club Dead), AOL-era MMOs (Starship Troopers Online, Aliens Online), and finally, his thoughts on getting a good job in the industry.

You can download the video here.

I'm back this week with ICOM Simulations veteran Dave Marsh. In this episode, we chat mainly about his two famous FMV projects, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective and Dracula Unleashed. These delightfully cheesy productions were big news back in the early 90s, when even grainy, heavily-pixelated video footage was extraordinary. We wrap up with a discussion of the TurboGrafx CD game Beyond Shadowgate and the Looney Tunes games from SunSoft.

Download the video.

Shadowgate designer Dave Marsh returns to the show this week to talk about ICOM Simulations' Macventure series. We also chat about Kickstarter and why his earlier effort, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, failed to reach an audience.

You can download the show here.

Stay DeadFriend of the show and site Gnome wrote in to tell us about the eclectic delights bundle. If you're looking for some cheap new games to liven up your holidays, this is it! You get 11 games for only $3! (This average will climb as more people purchase it, so act quickly). It's hard to go wrong with this value, because the selection really does live up to its name. There's even an FMV game in there--Stay Dead! There's also plenty of platformers, strategies, and plenty of cool extras like soundtracks and comics. On top of all this, you'll be supporting charity and the Indie Dev Grant. My advice: pop over there now and grab this bundle; perhaps a few for your friends, too!

I finally got around to finishing Halo 4 last night and the ending troubled me. Not because I thought it was incoherent or unsatisfying, but rather I didn't know what to make of its attitude towards women--or, rather, what assumptions it seems to make about the player's attitude towards them. One thing really stood out to me: clothing and the lack thereof. I looked around the net to see what others had written about Cortana, and quickly discovered I'm far from the only one who has some issues with it. As Jon W of Gamasutra puts it: "It doesn't seem particularly fair to permaban pumped-up teenage boys from acting like immature sexists when that is exactly what the game has trained them to be." Warning: there are some spoilers here.

Shane R. Monroe is out with a great new episode of his show Retrogaming Radio. As always, there's a lot of great content to enjoy, but this one covers a subject near and dear to many of us here at Armchair Arcade: videogame preservation! It might sound simple, but have you ever seriously thought about what we should be doing NOW to ensure that we can still play our favorite games ten, twenty, or fifty years from now? While there will almost certainly be ways to play Pac-Man or Super Mario Bros, what about lesser known shareware and public domain games favorites like Scorched Tanks? It's good stuff.

Hi, guys! I'm back this week with another fan request: Eye of the Beholder! Produced in 1991 by Westwood Associates for SSI, EOB was an attempt to wed AD&D rules to Dungeon Master-style gameplay. The finished product wasn't the best--apparently the second game is much better--but it's still a fun game well worthy of an episode. If nothing else, you get to watch me flip out about R.A.T.S.!

Download the mp4 here.
P.S. Indie Retro News has a DOS version of EOB with an Automapper and mentions a special Amiga AGA version that also had this feature (who knew?).

In my book Dungeons & Desktops, I wrote in the introduction that I think CRPGs are the greatest learning tools ever designed. To my shame, however, I did not properly defend that statement--at least, not directly. While I think most of us would agree that the basic mechanics of a CRPG teach us valuable transferable skills like resource management, long-term planning, team management, statistical analysis, and so on, what makes them better than other learning tools, including other types of videogames?