Renga in Blue

1940 was a curious year to be starting a publishing company, but especially one in Tokyo. This was in the midst of WW2, and the same year Italy, Germany, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact. Censorship was ongoing and total by 1941; The Japan Publishing Distribution Company (日本出版配給株式會社) was started to oversee all content, consolidating […]

This one was from a while ago, and while I’m not replaying (I beat the game, just not with a full score) I did check a walkthrough that was posted last year (after I had finished) because I was still bothered by the mazes. It was a game on the Sol-20 that was clearly heavily […]

I’ve defeated the game; my previous posts are needed to understand this one. First of all: it was a short hop to defeating the vampire master (and both John Myers and Rob guessed the answer more or less). I was thinking in particular about how there’s no pause (RNG or otherwise) like there was for […]

(Continued from my previous post.) There are two different philosophies when it comes to deathtraps involving multiple choices (buttons, doors, etc.) from around this time. Philosophy Type One (let’s call it “Signalism”) is that deathtraps should have a clue, and this might involve solving a puzzle (often given in the form of a cryptic message). […]

This continues my series on Marc Leduc starting with Epic Hero 1. At least, unlike the previous game, this game is traditionally hero-like. Before going into the gameplay: I’ve managed to unearth an autobiographical statement! It comes from the first issue of Chewing Gum (the publication for the Colour Genie group that Leduc ran); the […]

Also known as Seiko no Adventure or 星子のアドベンチャー; I decided to use the English title given in the game itself. Yasuhiro Fukushima was the child of entrepreneurs (his father: movie theaters and pachinko parlors, his mother: a restaurant) and had his own desire to start a business after graduating from Nihon University in architecture. His […]

I’ve finished the game; this continues from my previous post. (As predicted, it didn’t take that long, but I wanted to talk theory a little more so you get a whole new post for the ending.) I had a TRS-80 that didn’t turn on; the trick here was something from earlier that I thought was […]

(Continued from my previous posts about Danny Browne, which were written four years ago so don’t feel bad if you need to refresh your memory.) This is another circumstance like Marooned where I bailed on a game because it was broken, and a reader (Rob Browning in this case) came in later to repair it. […]

Long back when I first wrote about Roberta and Ken Williams and their first game (9 years ago), I mostly deferred the history to other authors like Jimmy Maher. More sources have come up since then, including new interviews and three books: The Sierra Adventure: The Story of Sierra On-Line (Shawn Mills) The Apple II […]