Quick Look: EX: Shadowgate

I'm glad that they're introducing new puzzles and such, because I remember how to solve 99% of the game and I'd hate to breeze through it so quickly.

Gotta love a developer with that love and dedication to a game!

This was really cool guys. I like how he took the time to go over both his new game and then his old game. Very awesome.

I have the Gameboy Color version. Damned if I could ever wrap my head around it at the time. Seemed completely unfair. I bet I could probably wrap my head around it a bit better now.

"Can you map that to any number?"

:/

Cautiously optimistic for this one.

Really wish they'd fired up the original Macintosh version as well, it was one of those games written as a native graphical application with moveable/resizable windows and toolbars and buttons and draggable items (see also "The Colony" and "Pathways into Darkness"). At the time I felt that a computer game that launched in full screen and had its own style of buttons and checkboxes was poorly designed and cheesy.

Nice, I had only played the Gameboy version.

I've never heard of this game before, but the remake looks pretty cool. I really enjoyed having the developer on for this one.

this seems very cool so i'm going to maybe stop watching this quick look so i don't spoil things

Having developers play the old games that they made should be a feature on the site. It's fascinating to hear a semi-post mortem like that.

I have no familiarity with Shadowgate but i'm loving hearing this guy talk about it and demo it, he's so chill and obviously enjoys this stuff

At 22:30, why does that second skull in his inventory have the Daedric sigil for the letter C? Like, that's literally Daedric. :U

My Aunt Mary and her then girlfriend Ruth introduced me to Shadowgate soon after it was released in the US. They were huge into gaming at the time and always bought new games. Ruth was a fan of computer games in the same vain as Shadowgate and later Deja Vu (both excellent). We spent the whole weekend playing and is a memory I cherish. Glad to see another generation of gamers getting their hands on this gem.

Epor!

Really liking the artstyle, and it was cool to see the NES version at the end there. Would be great if there were more videos of developers revisiting their old games with Giant Bomb.

This was pretty great.

What you expected hasn't happened.

Huh, am I totally misremembering Shadowgate? I kinda remembered it as a Adventuresoft/Horrorsoft style first person dungeon crawler with more of an adventure game/puzzle focus than something like the Wizardry/Might & Magic series, but still being fairly close to that in style. I guess a more contemporary comparison would be a less combat oriented Legend of Grimrock?

This seems far more like a more traditional point and click adventure game.

Still looks pretty neat, but I expected tile based movement and buttons to move forwards, backwards, left and right rather than just clicking on which door you want to enter?

Something more like this?

This looks cool and something perfect on a tablet. There probably is not a lot of people working in the games industry that go back to the mid 80's I'd imagine.

Pretty cool when Brad brought out the original NES version.

@rekon:

@fattony12000:

Please either contribute something useful or constructive to the conversation or don't bother posting. Thanks.

For I moment I thought you were going to talk about how Mary and Ruth made some ridiculous salary at a job they could do from home.

Looks cool. You know what platform would be awesome? The VITA! I like devs actually explaining stuff, stop expecting a Let's Play.

Brad sounded so excited about this, and hearing the developer reminisce about the original version was pretty great. This looks neat! I had a copy of Deja Vu way back when which I was completely terrible at, but somehow I missed out on this. Don't know if I'll check it out or not, but it looks pretty cool!

That is not a very good video game.

I have a weird soft spot for that not-very-good video game.

I'll probably fire it up when I get home tonight.

Yep, I liked this too. Brad is obviously excited about the game and his enthusiasm gets me pretty hype. The developer seemed like he was trying to explain how to play the game in a way that would make sense to people ignorant to this style of gameplay, no complaints here :P

@cabrit_sans_cor said:

Hell to the yes. I used to play that on a mate's oldschool classic Mac back in the day, and parts of it gave me the goddamn creeps. That game over screen with the effed up sound effect! The zombies in the maze! And the skull lady has always been the avatar for my pixelerant tumblr.

I watched a walkthrough recently, and was shocked my mate and I even got to that maze with the zombies in it. Bloody hell, are parts of that game obscure or what? But that atmosphere, man. At the time there was nothing like it.

Any time they mention the music in a Quick Look, it's too quiet for me to hear.

@bakkelun: Yes!

IT IS A SAD THING YOUR ADVENTURES ENDED HERE OH MY GOD MAKE IT STOP

I love skeletons.

Smug, bespectacled, or otherwise.

Brad is all nerding out and Dan is all, I'm here.

@vargasprime: Well, shit, you're entirely right. And I own the majority of the games made by Daedelic. I was just trying to be as optimistic as I possibly could there, and I suppose I got ahead of myself.

I love brad's enthusiasm in this quick look. Also this game seems like it was made for crazy people and I fully support that.

Totally adorable.

This really looked neat.

DEATH TO THE PHILISTINE!

Guy seems nice but I couldn't get past ten min, crushingly boring.

I was introduced to Shadowgate on the Gameboy Color as a kid, and I freakin' loved it.

I saw the Kickstarter video for the remake, and I thought it looked kinda dumb. However, after seeing it actually being played in this Quick Look, I am much more interested in the game.

...I hope it comes to the Vita, eventually. It'd be a great platform for it!

Thanks dude, but we know what difficulty settings are.

Thanks!

By the way, your reply to me got a little bit borked or something and is missing the red text styling and the hyperlink bit!

On Topic...

The first time I played any game from the Shadowgate series was Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers, me and a buddy rented it 1999 and must've spent about two months trying to get through that thing. Not helped by the fact that we could only play it whilst at his house since he had the N64 (I had the Sony PlayStation, myself).

Although neither of us knew it at the time, this was the first Shadowgate game to be set in a realtime, fully 3D world and viewed through a first-person camera; coming to that change in the series for previous players must've been quite interesting!

I also didn't appreciate at the time just how simplified the controls were when compared to the "proper" games, you only had two buttons in this version! The ACTION button and the USE ITEM button. It was great, because N64 controller + simulating a mouse and keyboard on a console = nope.

I think I want to go back and play the series from the beginning now, and also the King's Field games for some reason too...hmm...dark and dingy first person adventurey type games...they definitely appeal to a part of me for some reason.

Pretty cool bringing in the original at the end there for him to play around with and talk about.

The N64 game was so bad that it ruined any nostalgia I had for the NES original and caused me to have a "why the fuck does this exist?" moment when I saw this QLEX in the list 15 years later. Lasting impressions.

Love the dry sense of humour this dev has.

Love Shadowgate and games in this genre. Had a lot of fun with the PC version and the Gameboy version, love the mirror room. Looking forward to this.

The interface is an obvious improvement over the original game, but still kind of ridiculous in how cluttered it is. For one they should at the very least switch it to some sort of radial wheel that opens when you hold down on an object you want to interact with. And secondly I think Tim Schaefer kind of explained it super well when he talked about reducing the number of possible commands as time went on. I don't need a different command for use and open unless there is an object I can both use and open. There doesn't need to be a walk command at all. If I click on a door I want to go through it. Having a button on screen just clutters the UI. This is a nice throwback, and the art is stunning, but while the UI is better than a late 1980's UI, it now feels like a late 1990's UI, meaning it is still 15 years behind what we have today. Also, if I can't hit tab to highlight everything I can interact with then I am straight up not even going to try this. Again, love the art, but everything else about this feels like something you'd need a heavy dose of nostalgia to enjoy.

I've never heard of Shadowgate, but man, I'm sold already!

A Encyclopedia Bombastica within a Quick Look EX? madness!

This is one of my favorite Quick Look EXs! Was awesome listening to the developer talk about his new and old game.

Oh man, this goddamn game. So many hours. So much time lost. I hate this game. But I also love it.

Fuck this game though.