Adventure Games | Geekscape

Arcade Review: Cobra Arcade and Bar

by Matthew MorrellJune 5, 2016

American Arcades are Reborn!

If anyone’s ever had that moment while being harassed by some troll online in the comfort in their own home and said to themselves, “Where the hell are all the adults who play video games?”

Cobra Arcade and Bar in downtown Phoenix, Arizona is that place.

To verify this claim, this field reporter spent his Saturday trekking over 700 miles into hell’s front porch, Phoenix, Arizona. Temperatures reached a soul crushing 114 degrees. Expectations for whether or not this little pub was worth it began to climb.

Located just a stone’s throw away from the Phoenix Convention Center, this bar immediately exceeded those expectations. It is exactly what you’ve been looking for: a haven for gamers who grew up in the classic arcade era. Of course, if you’re at least over twenty-one they’ll let you in regardless of your recollection of the eighties and nineties. That being said, the nostalgia factor is strong in this most beautiful of bars.

She's not looking down on you, she's wondering, "What took you so damn long to come home?" — She’s not looking down on you, she’s wondering, “What took you so damn long to come home?”

Beautiful is by no means an over exaggeration (Nor was this field reporter paid to be this flowery). Even before you enter, a gorgeous black and white mural, wooden patio deck, and the delicious scent of the food-truck-of-the-week welcomes you in. Your senses aren’t lying, you’re home now.

Inside, situated underneath what looks like the engines of the Rebel Blockade Runner from Star Wars, you’ll find bartenders frantically running orders. Two huge flat-screens will play whatever happens to suit the night best; Heavy Metal, Planet of the Apes ‘68… you name it. Crammed in the corner is a live DJ spinning a perfect mix of eclectic, and kinetic tracks to mash buttons to.

Even on the busiest of nights (Saturday post Arizona Comic-Con), everyone is greeted, served, and given the time of day by friendly staff. Their in house cocktails are second to none (try an Invader). Or if you want a plain brew, they’ve got plenty to choose from along with a rotating list of ciders and beers. Take your pick from a respectable wine list too. Or, if you just really need the caffeine, Cobra’s got you covered.

What Cobra real boils down to however is that it’s far beyond a bar that just happens to have arcade games. It is without question equal parts bar as it is arcade. Among the handful of people this writer spoke with, the only criticism that could be given was a lack of racing games, and only one shooter to speak of (None other than the OG CarnEvile). But, that’s hardly a factor if you’re busy sinking quarters into TMNT: Turtles in Time, The Simpsons, or an intense two on two game of NBA Freaking Jam.

They even had Space Harrier. You heard me. Space. Harrier.

Well worth the loss of many a quarter #humblebrag

Seriously, feast your eyes upon the official list here and tell me, are you not entertained?

What was even better than the astounding selection of games, was once again, Cobra cares about their cabinets and the gamers who use them. From open to close while present, this report found NONE of the games Out of Order. None of them. Street Fighter II had a weird joystick issue going on at one point. Within mere moments, an In-House Tech had surgically opened the cabinet, healed it back to good, and players were kicking ass until last call. When the token machine ran out of tokens, a heartbeat had passed before it was refilled again.

So if you’re asking yourself, is it worth to escape the comfort of the ole’ homestead console or PC and venture outside? Deep down in your heart of hearts, you’re craving a friendly environment, delicious drinks, and an expertly curated collection of game cabinets. Cobra Arcade and Bar is the second home you’ve be searching for.

Cash in a sick day or two.

Go there now.

Matthew B. Morrell

Ron Gilbert And Gary Winnick Invite You To Step Inside ‘Thimbleweed Park’!

by JonathanJune 1, 2015

Longtime Geekscapists know that video game designers Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick have played a pretty big role in my life. They both designed the ‘Point & Click’ Adventure classic Maniac Mansion for LucasArts during the late 80s and Ron went on to work on the first two (aka “the best two”) Monkey Island titles. I spent countless hours playing through these games as a kid, and again as an adult, and so it was my pleasure to spend some time this past weekend talking with both Ron and Gary about their new “retro” Point & Click Adventure game Thimbleweed Park.

Thimbleweed Park is currently in development and you can follow along with the whole team on their blog (which includes podcasts, developer updates and more) and also donate to the ongoing creation of the game! There are still plenty of awesome perks left to get in on!

And as the team announced today on their blog, classic LucasArts artist Mark Ferrari (Monkey Island, Loom) has joined the team on Thimbleweed Park. To read our conversation with Mark, just head right over here! But first… let’s have Ron and Gary introduce you to Thimbleweed Park:

What is Thimbleweed Park?

Ron: Thimbleweed Park is a Kickstarted 2D point-and-click adventure game that harkens back to the heyday of Lucasfilm Games and the classic adventures. When Gary and I created Maniac Mansion, back in 1987, we didn’t really know what we were doing. We were just making stuff up, hoping it all worked and we didn’t get fired.We’ve learned a lot in the last 25 years and Thimbleweed Park is about bringing back the charm of those old games, but also the experience of years of adventure game design.

How is it like a traditional point & click adventure game and how is it unique? Which aspects will be familiar and in which ways are you using this opportunity to further the genre?

Ron: Thimbleweed Park isn’t about furthering, or reinventing, or modernizing the genre. It’s all about a nostalgic trip back in time to play a classic adventure game for the very first time. A lot of people love the old Lucasfilm games, they still play them and enjoy them, but none of it is new. Thimbleweed Park will be like opening a dusty old drawer in a long forgotten desk and finding a classic adventure you’ve never played before. That said, we have learned a lot about adventure game design over the years, and a lot of that knowledge will be used, but it all very subtle, yet amazingly important stuff.

What platforms do you see the game releasing on? What are the challenges for designing to multiple platforms at once (if you are) and how do today’s platforms challenge you and reward you as a storyteller?

Ron: I view platforms as very immaterial. Do I watch a movie Blu-ray or do I watch it online? It really doesn’t matter to the person making the movie. What matters is that as many people as possible can play the game. We do need to watch out for UI issues, like touch vs. mouse vs. controller. All of these bring small challenges, but they don’t fundamentally change the game or the story. I view them as primarily “technical” challenges, not “creative” challenges. Our goal is to make Thimbleweed Park playable on as many platforms as we can by as many people as we can.

Regarding The Cave, what portions of that project were you happy with and which ones do you wish had been more successful? What do you think were some of the strengths or drawbacks of that project? Most importantly, what did you learn from it and are those ideas something that you are taking into Thimbleweed Park?

Ron: The Cave was an odd project. I am very happy with it. It’s a great game that I’m very proud of. There are two things I wish I could go back and change. I really didn’t expect players to finish the game and then immediately start a new game with 3 different characters. I figured they take a break, then come back to it a few weeks later, but because players jumped right back into it, it got a little repetitive. I don’t know how I’d fix that, given the realistic constraints of budget and schedule. The second issue was the jumping. I would have made it a lot more forgiving. Jumping was how you moved around the world, but it wasn’t a game play mechanic, so it should have been dead simple.

Looking back at the LucasArts, Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island years, what is your favorite memory and also your biggest surprise? Why do you think that era in gaming is regarded as romantically as it is today (or maybe that’s just me, in my office, playing with my Guybrush doll while rewatching episodes of the Maniac Mansion TV show…)

Ron: First of all, I’m really sorry if you’re actually watching the Maniac Mansion TV show. 🙂 I have no idea why those games are so highly regarded. It is a little mind boggling to me. When Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island came out, they didn’t do that well. They were far from hits. They were just games that got good but not great reviews. I left Lucasfilm right after Monkey Island 2, and people often wonder how I could walk away from a huge hit franchise like that, and the answer is, it wasn’t a huge hit franchise. It wasn’t until around 2003 that I started to realize the huge following the Monkey Island game had slowly built over the years. It was not overnight. I do think those old games will fill with a charm and innocence.

Let’s talk about the visual look of Thimbleweed Park? How would you describe it? How much of it has come from your first inspiration for the game and how has it changed through collaboration or implementation of the mechanics? How have those things informed each other? Are you far from the original inspiration?

Gary: Ron and I envisioned the game looking very much like the Commodore 64 version of Maniac Mansion. Very blocky graphics and bright colors. You can see much of that art in the original Kickstarter, but as the game got into pre-production, we’ve evolved the look a lot. It’s getting a little closer to Monkey Island and a deeper pallette, but we still want to keep it simple, iconic and pixely. It needs to tread a fine line between feeling like a old classic game, but not feeling hampered and limited by the old technology. It’s a fun problem to solve.

You’re working with original Monkey Island and Loom background artist Mark Ferrari on Thimbleweed Park. Have you collaborated since? Is he working in the same capacity this time around as background artist and how has his work grown over the years? Are you pushing his style from what he’s done in the past and is his style pushing your designs creatively in other directions?

Ron: Yeah, we just announced that. It’s the first time we’ve worked together since our days at Lucasfilm Games. Mark is a hyper-talented artist and it’s amazing to be working with him again. I always love working with people that are running 20 feet in front of me and Mark is one of those people. When Gary and I started talking to Mark about working on Thimbleweed Park, Mark did a quick test image and sent it to us. We opened it in and said “Holy crap!”. It was just stunning. Seeing that image made Gary and I take a step back and relook at the art style. That’s the kind of artist Mark is. I remember looking at the first Monkey Island screens he did and saying the same thing: “Holy crap!”.

Gary: I first met Mark at, of all things, a science fiction and fantasy convention being held at the San Jose Red Lion Inn. Everyone was talking about some guy in the art show who drew amazing stuff in colored pencils… I took a look at Mark’s work and was amazed, they practically looked like oil paintings done in prismacolor pencil. Being the art director of Lucasfilm Games at the time had its perks and I was immediately introduced to Mark. My memory’s a bit fuzzy, but I don’t think Mark really had any computer experience at the time. In those days I invited candidates out to Skywalker Ranch for lunch and an art test working on an IBM PC in Dpaint. To say Mark was a natural at computer graphics would be an understatement, he was constantly breaking new ground, first on Loom and then on Monkey Island.

The Thimbleweed Park blog – you guys are working to be as transparent and inclusive during this creation process as possible. What motivated you to want to give your fans that kind of access this time around? How do you see the resulting dialogue influencing the final work?

Ron: Sharing everything we’re doing on the Thimbleweed Park website (http://thimbleweedpark.com) has been a lot of fun, but it’s always fun while things are going great. As all projects do, it will go to hell at some point. We’ll see if it’s still fun then. A lot of the reason for sharing everything is because people backed this project and they desire to know how things are going. When you do crowdfunding, you’re taking on a responsibility to keep people informed. If we had a traditional publisher, we’d have to keep them informed as well. It would probably be work work then the time we spend on 2 or 3 blog posts a week and a podcast. It will get more interesting as the project continues. A lot changes over time and hopefully people who backed and read the blog will understand that. We cut and change all the time. Monkey island went through a lot of changes as it was being made, the difference is that you only saw the final version, in Thimbleweed Park, backers are getting to see all the versions. It’s never a pretty process, but it can be fun. We’re still taking pledges from backers, so it’s not too late to get in on the fun, get a copy of the game and other rewards. Come join us!

Remember! We’ve got our conversation with Mark Ferrari coming up on Wednesday and you can still donate to Thimbleweed Park here!

Geekscape Games Reviews “The Walking Dead: Chapter 1 – A New Day”

by JonathanApril 29, 2012

If you’ve been following Geekscape for a while now, what you’re about to read might astound you… I’m about to heap some serious praise on The Walking Dead. Now please keep in mind that I do like The Walking Dead. I’ve read the entire comic series, have watched every episode and this past weekend played through the first chapter of Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead episodic adventure title. We’re even good friends with one of the show’s supervising producers, a recent Geekscape guest.

But like the actual dead having returned to life, the various Walking Dead iterations have each felt surprising at first, then compelling, then slowly a bit laborious and as they continue along, less and less fresh. I like The Walking Dead. I wouldn’t put myself through it if I didn’t… but it’s been a while since I consistently loved The Walking Dead comic or TV series.

Well, and I hope that I’m not predicting impending decay, I LOVE The Walking Dead video game, at least the first chapter, recently released by Telltale Games for PSN, XBL and PC. In fact, and please leave your crazy accusations in the comments, it might be my favorite version. And I’ll explain why (because those are some pretty big statements right there!).

First off, it follows the more compelling storyline of Kirkman’s original comic book series. It actually takes place just as the Atlanta of the comic book series is going to hell, being evacuated and Rick lies unconscious in a hospital bed. It doesn’t as much parallel the events of the comic book as much as give it a bit of a prequel or alternative point of view. In the first chapter, A New Day, you do run into some characters and locales from the comic book series, but this is before Rick and his group encountered them… and you actually take part in setting the stage for those characters. This is a huge plus for anyone who’s a Walking Dead fan, because you feel as though what you’re doing matters to characters that you care about. It gives you a responsibility to protect what will come later.

Which leads me to the greatest plus of this series and why it’s a much different experience than the comic book or TV series or even other zombie games like Left 4 Dead or Resident Evil. The Walking Dead game, more than the comic or the series, really strives to and succeeds at putting you squarely in the shoes of the survivors, in this case through the eyes of the controllable character Lee Everett, who is always at the center of every decision the group must make within the story.

The artwork and writing are fantastic, easily the best we’ve seen from Telltale and the game play is intensely compelling. This is very much an adventure game, but it doesn’t come without some action sequences (and you can definitely die while playing). In fact, a lot of the decision making processes, even conversations with other characters, give you the same adrenaline rush as the game’s quicktime events. The Walking Dead autosaves, so if you flub a conversation, leading others to mistrust or lose faith in you, those decisions are immediate and permanent. I found myself just as stressed out by doing what I perceived was the right choices in the conversations as I did while stuck between saving survivors, knowing that whoever I didn’t save wasn’t only dead in this episode but the rest of the series. The choices that you make in this game haunt you and I was soon playing the game with trepidation, weary that I’d make a wrong move and get someone permanently killed or lose an ally I would need later. Hell, I was also scared that I’d miss some detail in scouring the environments that would end up keep us alive down the road!

This is where the writing and the characterization really differs from my recent experiences with the comic and TV series. I find myself really caring about the characters involved, probably out of this engaged responsibility for them. Even characters that you don’t get along with strengthen the group, just by being able to help move a car or hold a weapon. The game’s characters and situations all live within a gray area, Lee having escaped from the back of a police car in the opening sequence of the game, and it keeps you there, so decision making is sometimes difficult. Not only are you immediately responsible for yourself, but when Lee discovers the young abandoned girl Clementine early on, your responsibility to make the right choices grows.

In Left 4 Dead or Resident Evil, things are very black and white. Here, nothing is very clear. Even when you think that two choices in a dialogue tree would lead to the same result, the way that you choose to word things might give you a result from another character that you didn’t anticipate. This not only makes them more realistic but gives them relatability. Everyone seems to be in a state of shock at their surroundings and it makes the story that much more compelling. You don’t see Carl lazily wandering the farm or someone making dinner. They are all driven by the need to survive.

The gameplay and situations all elaborate further on this concept of responsibility to the group. You control Lee’s movement with the right trigger while exploring the environment’s objects (or what he can see) with the right. Like other adventure games, you sometimes you have to search for items or enter areas to solve puzzles, but very early on you start doing this with other members of the group, putting them, or mainly Clementine, in harm’s way. The game forces you to work carefully in these areas, even if dying means resetting to your last save, because you don’t want them to die, or they’ll be gone from the game’s story forever.

And when a zombie (or in many cases zombies plural) DOES come at you, the game’s quicktime events are more than just button combinations or quick button tapping. You’ll usually find yourself temporarily dazed when the zombie knocks you down or surprises you and you have to move the right reticle towards your attacker just to instigate the quick time event. This really does a great job of forcing the player to “get their wits about them” so they can take back control of these intense situations. I didn’t die much while playing The Walking Dead, but in the moments in which I did, it scared the hell out of me because my shock at having these events thrown at me and not being immediately or obviously prompted to do button mashing gave me that immediate sense of “crap! What do I do!?!”

If I have to talk about the downsides of the game, and there aren’t many, it would be towards the end of the chapter, not necessarily because of the story or character work, but because the “scour environments for objects, use objects” redundancy that plagues all adventure games isn’t completely cured here. If you don’t like adventure games, you might find yourself wanting something more in these areas. But considering that adventure games are my favorite genre, I took these conventional sections of the game as an acceptable byproduct of the chosen form. Telltale do enough fresh things in The Walking Dead, and do them exceedingly well, that this never feels like a tired adventure gaming experience. In doing so, they’ve also injected new life into the Walking Dead brand, which up until now, you could only read or watch as it played out in front of you on a string. I hope that with the release of each of the next four chapters, Telltale continues to effectively expand not only the Walking Dead gameplay and story but the adventure game genre itself.