Eric the Unready

Looks like this will be the first review of this game! So cool! :-) Anyway, this is a classic Legend game, with an interface that some might find too archaic even for 1993. Basically, it's a text adventure with static pictures, but you can use your mouse to interact with the hotspots on the pictures and the list of available verbs in the menu to the left. However, for me nothing matches typing sentences by hand. The story is rather simple - collect some Magic Items scattered around the world, defeat the Evil Witch and release the Princess in Distress. However, the game shines in at least two aspects: 1) The humor is absolutely hilarious and I don't even know where to begin describing it. First of all, you will constantly find yourself in ridiculous situations (pulling a banana from a stone, attacking a fortress that has only the front wall, fooling a dwarf by dressing up as another dwarf, trying to break a spell by kissing a pig, etc.), with each chapter ending with some disaster you have inadvertently caused, "truthfully" described in the newspaper you find at the beginning of the next chapter. Also, no matter how ridiculous the thing you attempted, the game will have a more ridiculous answer. Try EVERYTHING. 2) The game is designed by Bob Bates and closely follows his design philosophy. This means that, despite all its weirdness, it never tortures you with illogical puzzles or pixel hunt. If you are careful and have some prior experience with adventure games, you almost certainly won't need a walkthrough, so you'll be able to enjoy the game without frustrations. All in all, for me this probably ranks up there with Gabriel Knight, Monkey Island and the likes as one of the best adventure games ever made and I would recommend that you try it even if you're not a fan of text adventures (it's not that this game simply has an archaic interface - this is actually a pure text adventure in all its heart and soul and it probably wouldn't work as a P&C game).

A game that's been compared to monkey island more than once, but this is a beast of a very different nature. Monkey's a pont'n'click adventure. This is not. Eric the Unready is basically an illustrated text adventure. You may pont and click together sentences from the (optional) wordboxes on the left, but you can just turn those off and play zhe game entirely via typing. I guess the other reason for the comparison is the very meta, Douglas Amads-ish humor, full of modern day references, nerdiness and fourth wall breaking. but this is the part where Eric goes off the rails into unfiltered nerdcore. In most games, you have a story, which the authors light up with jokes, funny characters or geek references, But in Eric's case, this process' clearly started on the other end. I mean, there is a plot (you clumsy mcnobody, yet you must save princess), but tit takes a backseat to the jokes (the episodic nature of the story pushes things even further). This game references EVERYTHING under the sun from Trek, to Zork, wether it makes sence in the given situation or not. It's not saying that it's like a friedberg-seltzer movie. because it' really, genuinely funny at times, but the amount of winking, nudging and overall (and overwhelming) nerdiness can really get under one's skin. The gameplay's perfectly fine, the quests you do are solveable, they're usually based on pretty funny setups and - in keeping with the parody tone - you usually beat them by at least paritally failing. If I played this when I was around 12, I think I'd loved it. As a grown ass man, this makes me think of more innocent, nerdier times in gaming, but the kind of humour the game bombards me with, makes me bury my face in my palms.

This is the peak of text adventure games. The parser understands almost anything and was the most sophisticated in text adventure gaming. Alternatively to typing you can use the mouse and just click your sentences together. Hiding the graphics gives you the "pure" feeling of playing "the old way". Based on this parser are the Spellcasting and Homeworld series too. After that Legend changed to a system which focused on graphics more and reduced the parser to a very simple one (Super Hero League of Hoboken, Death Gate, Shannara). Solving the sophisticated puzzles of Eric the Unready is a hilarious journey through references to fantasy, science fiction, pop culture and comedy. You take a swamp tour for example ("Swamp Trek") where the captain constantly speaks into a piece of wood ("Captain's log") and the Scottish engineer is constantly sorrow-stricken over the rowing Indians ("The Injuns can't take it anymore!"). You'll play Jeopardy ("Sayings of Bjorn the Berserker for 200 please!"), find many references to Monthy Python, visit the "Not So Great Underground Empire", see the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and find many, many more small and not so small gags. If you're just a little bit interested in adventure games of the "good old time" this is the thing for you.

Eric the Unready was a comic text adventure (with graphics, but the game is controlled with a parser) ; it's kind of a shame that the medium should have died off just as it was being perfected, because games like this show how good text adventures could be. With a list of objects that could be interacted with taking the place of the “hot spot” indicators of modern adventure games, and a list of verbs that the player can scroll through at any time, the classical problems with the genre (most especially, knowing the solution to a puzzle but having to guess the word choice that the devs want you to use) are almost entirely absent, and the fact that the puzzles are logical (within the framework of the game, anyway), plus a LucasArtsian design philosophy that largely keeps you from screwing yourself over (you can die, but the “undo” command removes the sting, and except as mentioned below, you won't be able to make the game unwinnable by accident), makes this an enjoyable, relaxing experience. On the cons side of things, the sense of humor occasionally falls flat (including an extended Monty Python reference, because of course there is). Each day (chapter) actually has a hidden time/turn limit, so it is possible to save your game in an unwinnable state; since beating a day takes a matter of minutes once you know what to do, this doesn't really matter as long as you keep a save from the beginning of each day. The last chapter requires a certain amount of timing (as you're trying to stop an event that happens at a fixed time, and everything you do advances the time in-game), but again, unless you just keep one save file and repeatedly write over it, you'll be fine.