I haven’t posted or even played a game since… oh wow, I don’t even want to think about it. Nope, I am unable to announce my triumphant return to the gaming pursuit and upkeep of this blog tonight. In fact, it’s almost vacation time.
To tide you over for another month, here’s a little something I dug out of my archives: 2 adventure games I absolutely loved on the old 8-bit NES were Shadowgate and Uninvited. These games along with Déjà Vu: A Nightmare Comes True completed something of a trilogy of adventure games developed in the same style. I wasn’t too impressed with the latter game but I liked Shadowgate and Uninvited enough to draw up maps for each game. I have scanned them for your review.
I drew them up on plain white 8×11″ posterboard that was in great supply in my house for some reason. I drew them with pencil and ruler at first to allow for easy correction and then drew over the edges using a darker crayon-like tool. There are several parts of each map with only a portion represented in thumbnail form below. Click for much larger scans:
Shadowgate
Uninvited
There’s a funny programming story behind that rough maze diagram: The best I could do for graphing paper was a PrintScreen of a GW-BASIC program I had written to manually draw a bunch of lines on the screen. That’s why there’s that “Ok” prompt in the upper left corner. Come to think of it, since I have been playing around with vector drawing programs lately, maybe redoing these maps with such a tool would be a useful learning exercise.
Hopefully, the maps will bring back some pleasant memories or perhaps even inspire some to fire up the emulators.
At MobyGames:
Robert Swain says:
Fun stuff.
I remember playing an adventure game or two on some old Acorn RISC PCs – Crystal Rainforest and Geordie Racer. And another game (I cannot remember whether it was for Acorn or PC) called Martello Tower(s?) which was an educational maths game.
I drew out maps for all of these games as I recall, though the first two I never completed because I was only allowed to play them for an hour or so and they had no save game functionality.
Agent5 says:
Ah, early gaming and self-made maps. I can’t say I ever had much success with producing these, despite my early attempts with text-adventures like Zork. I’m fairly certain that rooms were never intended to overlap with each other.
xcalibur201 says:
Thanks for the Shadowgate maps!! The only other map I found of this game didn’t show the relative sizes/shapes of the rooms. And yes, I used two exclamation marks, because apparently one isn’t enough.