Oops… what happened to August?

This morning Adventure Gamers published my review of Strangerous, a Nintendo DS game based on one of my favorite namesakes tee shirt celebrities, Emily the Strange. You can read it here.

This is sort of a weird beast… a DS game based on a license enjoyed mostly (I think) by girls and young women with a particular sense of humor. The DS almost seems passe for a game like this. I would have expected it to turn up on the iPhone. It did give me an excuse to turn on my DS for the first time in a very long time, though, and I liked seeing Emily in motion even if the game itself was basically a Professor Layton knock-off. It’s probably best suited to younger Emily fans who haven’t played many puzzle games before, since most of the puzzles are very easy and very familiar. As of right now it’s only out in the UK; a US release is reportedly coming later this year.

Now that I have dusted off my DS (it seems so clunky compared to my iPod Touch), maybe I should finally play that Last Window import I bought earlier this summer…

What do the words “documentary” and “text adventure” have in common? Before you say “They’re both boring,” check out my impressions of Get Lamp over at Adventure Gamers. It’s actually a very entertaining film if you’re a fan of the adventure game genre. (And let’s face it, if you’re reading this blog, there’s a 50% chance that you are. Sorry, dollhouse people.)

I ended up with a copy of Jason Scott’s documentary Get Lamp thanks to the generosity of Howard Feldman, owner of the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History, whose site I have used for research more than once while writing articles about the good old days. He happened to have an extra and sent it to me as a gift. I’d been waffling on buying it myself due to the $40 price tag and the fact that text adventures aren’t my preferred slice of adventure game history. (If it had been a Sierra documentary, that would have been a different story!) But after watching it, I’m a Get Lamp believer. Plus you get a really nice package for your money… nicer than most games you’ve bought lately, I’m willing to bet.

In the small world department, included on one of the DVDs is a music video for MC Frontalot’s “It Is Pitch Dark.” The song is infectiously catchy and I’ve spent the last week or so warning Rosy that she is likely to be eaten by a grue. (She remains unfazed.) The existence of this video is especially amusing to me because I used to know the enigmatic MC Frontalot (under a less enigmatic name) when I first lived in San Francisco, back before he was famous. Tragically, I didn’t realize at the time that he was an old-school adventure game fan. Oh, the conversations we could have had…