Made in
AGI
Residence 44 Quest was
the first complete game that I found when searching for AGI
games [with the exception of Space Quest: The Lost Chapter].
Personally, I highly enjoy this game. The purpose behind the
game is that you want to live in this college residence only
there are no more rooms left. After you talk to some people
who already live there [the friends of the designers] you
learn that there is a woman named Josine who lives on the
3rd floor that they all want out, if you can find a way to
get her out of the building, the room is yours.
So that is where your reign
of terror begins. You walk around to different rooms, meeting
people and devising ways of getting Josine out of the dorm.
After downloading Residence Quest 44 and emailing Rinze, one
of the creators, he told me that it was based off of a real
life college dorm and all of his friends. This caused me to
worry because I thought it would be full of in-jokes that
no one but them would get. I was delightfully surprised. The
story was set up quite well and you pretty much always know
what you are supposed to be doing, kinda. Also, I quite like
the graphics. Each room is drawn small and surrounded by black,
it's an interesting way of getting past the difficulties of
drawing a full screened image and I feel it works well because
it is consistent. The humour is also consistent and good,
I didn't fall out of my chair laughing but it did make me
smile and even chuckle a bit. Considering that this game was
originally written in Swedish and then converted over to English,
there are few spelling errors but nothing is translated badly.
I also had not run into any glitches in the game. Everything
pretty much ran how it was supposed to except for one time
I got trapped in a corner by Johan while he was tying his
tie and you can answer the phone at anytime in the game, sometimes
causing an error.
There were some faults to this game, however. Because it
is a fan made AGI game and because it was originally Swedish,
the level of compatible verbs is not what I would have liked.
Sometimes good ol' "use" just doesn't cut it and you have
to type in all manner of words before you can find out that
*one* that is needed [I'm thinking Josine's window]. There
were also two times that I didn't really know what I was supposed
to be doing, one instance was because of verbs, mentioned
above, while the other time I was just lucky that I happened
to accidently try something and got it right. Sometimes an
action will not work [like knocking on Josine's door] but
then all of a sudden when you get to the right point in the
game, the action works. So expect a bit of retracing your
steps.
All in all though, this
game was really well made. The animation and backround art
was nicely done. There were plenty of things to look at and
interact with [I mean, any game with the A-Team theme song
in it HAS to be good] and the story was interesting and worked
nicely with the setting. So, I urge you to go out and try
Residence 44 Quest and remember back to the glory days of
adventure gaming [even though this game was made in 1999...]
eric
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