Comic for Wednesday, Nov 17, 2004

Posted: 9:15 am, Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Dammit, this sucks - sorry it's a little later than the norm, gang, the F-train blew. But more frustrating is that I thought of a much better way to end this one while walking along 42nd Street into the office. But the bullshit's started already, so I don't have the time to fix it up. I may do a revision of this strip to run tomorrow, that will become the official strip, but, maybe not. Anyway, sorry - the whole thing kind of irks me now.

Disclaimers: Pete is actually wearing a Pietasters t-shirt, not a Redskins t-shirt. I bought that when I saw them open for Less Than Jake with Lauren and Eric two years ago. The Russian lady I used to send my laundry to two apartments ago lost it. I hate that. Also, I know using the word 'gay' as a derogative is not so cool in this day and age. I fully intend to do a strip in the future when Jen dresses Pete down for that. Thirdly and finally, Lane Kim is, like, puppy dog cute, not hot cute.

It has been an awful week for me at work so far, so this may not be the longest of posts. Sorry.

E tells me that she has Anne David looking at this thing now. Anne, Walter and I ate breakfast together for a semester back in collitch. I don't know why the hell I bothered to eat breakfast for an entire semester, but I guess Anne's conversation was probably at least a third of the reason. (Walter's conversation being a third, and the final third being comprised of the donuts with sprinkles on top - as many of my friends are aware, I would gleefully tread over their still-living burning bodies to reach sprinkles.)

Grafe sent me this quest for good vodka yesterday. The ingenuity of collitch kids never ceases to amaze me. Then we all get jobs and our souls get crushed. Also, that's one of the better blog titles I've ever seen.

R. Stevens of Diesel Sweeties fame is doing a panel at NYU tonight. I should probably go to that, since he'll be talking about webcomics and such. But Lost is on. I'm torn. I think I'll try to go and get turned away at the door, probably. If not, hey, maybe I'll actually have something insightful to say about webcomics in the near future. By the way - webcomic creators having panels at NYU? Can you imagine me doing a panel at NYU? Me neither. (Especially not after this strip.)

Today's episode of Who Needs the First Amendment is brought to you by Boulder, Colorado. The article notes that Boulder is a bastion of liberalism. If that means that it's a nice place near nature that happens to have a bunch of hippies smoking up on the courthouse lawn, then, yes, I guess it is. I really liked Boulder when I spent the day there.

Over at PopCap, they have Bejeweled 2. Shit, I'm going to get fired.

But, uh, yeah, anyway, the office calls, cutting the lunch break short. So, for no real reason, I'm going to post a write-up of the Colonel's Bequest (which will also be in the Recommends section).

The Colonel's Bequest, Sierra

The release of a new Leisure Suit Larry game made me realize that Sierra is actually still in business, something that I was completely unaware of. Sierra On-line was the game company that made a huge chunk of my favorite computer games from back in the day. I figure I'll start writing little reviews/reminisces of the old Sierra games, starting with what I oftentimes think is my favorite computer game of all time.

I got my first computer back in eighth grade, for Christmas of 1991. It was a Hewlett-Packard 386, and I'm pretty sure the 486 came out about two months later, sonofabitch. Still, it didn't get totally obsolete until I tried restyling the config.sys files so that I could play Ultima Underworld or somesuch game by Origin. All of Origins games needed this bizarre XMS memory, and almost everyone I know busted their computers trying to get those effing games to run.

Anyway, in January of '92, I was fishing around the bargain bin in Babbage's in Crossgates Mall, and found a ten-dollar copy of the Colonel's Bequest. It was a murder mystery. I was on a big Agatha Christie kick in eighth and ninth grade, so I bought it. I remember my 'rents and I ate at Pizza Hut on the way home, too. No idea why I have that memory.

Anyway, The Colonel's Bequest is set up somewhat like a play. Certain game events trigger a grandfather clock to appear and chime off fifteen minutes. Every hour that passes represents a new act.

The game takes place on a bayou island near New Orleans. Your character is Laura Bow, a journalism student at Tulane, who is accompanying her flapper friend Lillian for a weekend at her uncle's. Her uncle is Colonel Henri Dijon, a miserly old coot who lost the use of his legs in the Spanish American War, and who announces during the opening credits that he is going to divide his fortune evenly to his family and several confidantes upon his death. He actually says 'Should any of you die before I do, the treasure will be divided amongst the survivors.'

Not surprisingly, the first body shows up about an hour later.

Besides Laura, Lil and Henri, the characters in the game are Ethel, Lillian's mother and Henri's sister. Provided that Laura asks Ethel about every character in the game right off the bat, she's a wealth of information. After that, she is soused the whole rest of the game. Gertie is Henri's other sister. Gertie's two kids are Gloria Swanson (a platinum blonde actress-type) and Rudy (a Rhett Butler-looking smoothtalker). Henri's lawyer is Clarence Sparrow (old Sierra games were nothing if not full of puns), and his doctor is Wilbur C. Fields. The mansion is kept up by Celie, the cook whose family has lived on the island since they were slaves there, Jeeves, the butler, and Fifi, the sexy French maid. Despite the fact that all the characters are easily described in a few words, they're actually all fleshed out awfully well, too. There are love triangles, sour business deals, old family scores, jealously, all sorts of issues between these people.

The mansion and surrounding island is almost as important and lively of a character as any of the people in the game, too. The mansion has several secret passages, and Laura can spy on people from these passages by looking through the cut-out eyes of pictures. This is how much of the story is observed. There is a secret attic, a secret basement, dangerous areas of the swamp, a chapel, and all sorts of other stuff to explore.

Through the course of the game, almost everyone winds up dead. There are people pushed from windows, bludgeoned, strangled, poisoned, shot, and stabbed. To make matters worse, Laura is the only one to every find the bodies, and as soon as she turns her back on them, the bodies disappear. So everyone thinks she's a liar, until it becomes impossible not to notice that people are disappearing left and right.

The Colonel's Bequest is an ancient EGA game, but the graphics look more charming to me than dated. Between the graphics and the writing, the game does a wonderful job at building an air of suspense. Not the Silent Hill type of suspense, where you're sure something's going to jump out and rip your face off and eat your entrails or something, but when Clarence starts freaking out at about midnight about where everyone is, you can't help feel but the mansion is shrinking around you, and there is precious little space to hide from the murderer.

When the game is finally beaten - there are three different endings that I've ever found - you are given a score from 'Barely Conscious' to 'Super-sleuth' depending on how many plot points and items you stumbled across in the course of the game. Hints are given for those who rank closer to the Barely Conscious side of things (as I did when I first beat the game lo these many years past).

The Colonel's Bequest rocked. It's still on my computer to this day. It spawned a sequel, which I may write about, but the second game didn't capture the feel of a British cozy as well as this one did. If anyone's read Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians (also known as ...And Then There Were None), The Colonel's Bequest is basically like playing that novel. I'm fairly certain the game's not available anywhere these days, but if anyone's really interested in giving it a whirl, lemme know, and I'll see if I can find the discs for it anywhere. Even the stupid copy-protection is cool - you have to identify people's thumbprints using this red-cellophane magnifying glass. Ah, just writing about it, I long for a gray, rainy day and my laptop. There's a murderer about, and I've got to find him!

bullfrog