Old Video Games: Flight of the Amazon Queen

Since I'm on a point-and-click adventure kick, let's discuss another forgotten title from the 90s.

1995's Flight of the Amazon Queen is a LucasArts style adventure game released for MS-DOS and the Amiga not made by LucasArts. Instead, this was the product of a small Australian studio called Interactive Binary Illusions. Their previous game was 1993's well regarded action platformer Halloween Harry (later renamed to Alien Carnage) co-developed with SubZero Software and published by Apogee back in the Duke Nukum (not a typo) 1 & 2 days. Led by by John Passfield and Steve Stamatiadis and released by British publisher Renegade Software, Amazon Queen was Interactive Binary Illusions' second, and final game.

It was not the end for Passfield and Stamatiadis, who would form Gee Whiz! Entertainment in 1996 and produced two games, Zombie Wars (a sequel to Alien Carnage) and Mike Stewart's Pro Bodyboarding (a sports game about bodyboarding. Professionally) before the studio joined with Robert Walsh to form Krome Studios Pty Ltd. In 1999.

Crikey!

Krome would release a number of licensed titles during the PS2/GameCube/Xbox era, but also handled the first 2 games of the Spyro the Dragon reboot and developed an original mascot platformer of their own: Ty the Tasmanian Tiger. In 2006, Krome acquired Melbourne House Studio, which had once been prolific 8- and 16-bit console game developer Beam Software, and renamed the studio to Krome Studios Melbourne.

Financial troubles shut down Krome Melbourne in 2010, but Krome revived in 2012 with new games in the Ty the Tasmanian Tiger series (and subsequent remasters), and recently handled remaster duties for The Bard's Tale Trilogy and Wasteland Remastered, both for inXile Entertainment. Passfield left the company in 2005, but Stamatiadis is still with Krome, as far as I can tell.

The reason for the history lesson is because 1) its neat, and 2) it means Flight of the Amazon Queen is an early step in a lengthy and respectable career for the Aussie developers, who are still kicking around.

As for Amazon Queen itself, the game's prologue starts at the 11^th hour of 1949 and clicks over to 1950. WWII has been over for a while, and dashing pilot-for-hire Joe King has a gig to fly blonde film star Faye Russel into the jungle for a photo shoot. Misfortune strikes and his plane, The Amazon Queen, crashes in the jungle, and Joe finds himself swept up in the schemes of Floda, a lederhosen company that's a front for the totally-not-a-Nazi-scientist-hiding-in-Brazil Dr. Frank Ironstein, who's mad goal is to transform Amazon warrior women into dinosaurs so he can take over the world. To do that, he needs to rescue Azura, the beautiful princess of the Amazons.

I say “LucasArts style” because the comedy runs deep in this game and there are no dead end fail states like the “Sierra style.” The adventure itself is inspired heavily by Indiana Jones, with Joe as a fast talking, baseball loving chad of an adventurer with a mechanic sidekick named sparky. There's also jet packs, dinosaurs, the Grim Reaper, zombies, an Abbott & Costello reference, a gorilla who shouldn't be in South America and he knows it, and a crystal skull plot macguffin 13 years before Indiana Jones touched on the same concept. This is a game set in the Pulp era and embraces it wholeheartedly, and the pulp elements aren't played for laughs, either. The amazon princess is even a redhead, as is traditional for the pulps.

The interface is fairly standard for adventure games of the era, with context buttons and a mildly annoying inventory. The puzzles aren't too squirrelly by 90's adventure game standards, and the trial and error system is pretty forgiving. There is a little too much going back and forth, and some of the screens only have one or two things to interact with.

Contemporary reviews were hard on the graphics, calling them dated, which I don't agree with. They might not be as strong as contemporaries like King's Quest VII or Full Throttle, but the art is clean, the backgrounds are great, and there are some really nice animations. The lighting on Joe even changes as he walks under trees, which is a great touch.

The audio stands out even better. The main theme is really solid, but its the voice cast that really shines. A glance at IMDB shows a list of professional actors with solid careers as secondary and character actors. The biggest name of the cast is William Hootkins, who played Jek Porkins in Star Wars (and had a long career in voice work as well). The cast is fantastic. They've got the right balance of self-aware camp and earnest Gee Whiz attitude for a story about a German scientist turning women into dinosaurs.

I can't say enough nice things about Flight of the Amazon Queen. It's solid pulpy fun with an earnest sense of humor that clearly loves its source inspirations and doesn't overstay its welcome. I liked Lure of the Temptress, but I loved my time with Amazon Queen.

The game was released as freeware in 2004 and runs just fine in the ScummVM emulator, so you have absolutely no excuse to play it. Because if you don't want to see the hero kiss an amazon princess on an airship flight into the sunset after watching a giant crystal skull powered robot punch a giant dinosaur man in the face, then Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is over thataway.

Enthusiastically recommended.

Old Video Games: Lure of the Temptress

 

Classic point-and-click adventure games have two titans that loom large because of just how many successes they had: Sierra On-Line and LucasArts.

This isn't about them.

Other adventure game developers existed alongside those titans. Some of them, like Revolution Software, continue to exist, outliving both of the big two.

Best known for the Broken Sword series of adventure games, Revolution was founded in 1989 by British game developers Charles Cecil, Tony Warriner, David Sykes and Noirin Carmody.

Cecil and Warriner got their start in the mid-80s working at Artic Computing, an English studio active during the British microcomputer boom (think systems like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC). Artic folded in 1986 and after a few years working at other companies, Revolution was founded.

1992's Lure of the Temptress was the company's first product: a fantasy point-and-click adventure game slightly reminiscent of King's Quest and with a cheeky sense of humor reminiscent of The Secret of Monkey Island, though less wacky and more British in its comedy. Released for the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and MS-DOS computer systems, it was a solid hit for the company and paved the way for more ambitious projects.

The game's setup is told in a gorgeous intro cinematic that explains that a good king had united the land and on a hunting trip, hired the peasant protagonist, Diermot, to flush out game for them. Suddenly, the unnamed king learns of an evil sorceress named Selena who has conquered a town and threatens the kingdom. The king's men ride to battle, only to be cut down by Selena's orc-like henchmen, the monstrous Skorl. Diermot is captured during the battle, and awakens in a prison cell, where the game begins.

Revolution developed the Virtual Theatre engine for their games, which aside from the regular pointing and clicking, also allowed the NPC characters populating the world to wander around and interact with each other for greater immersion than simply standing in one place waiting to be talked to by the protagonist.

This is good and bad because while the verisimilitude is appreciated, the game also has you track down specific NPCs to talk to in order to proceed, and it can be frustrating trying to track them down.

After escaping the dungeon with the help of a jester named Ratpouch, Diermot has to explore the village of Turnvale, its castle and a nearby cave to find a way to stop Selena from conquering the rest of the kingdom.

The interface is quite good. Left click to look at something, right click to bring up a menu of options like talking, pulling, using, etc). The game also gives you companions that can follow you around and Diermot can even give them somewhat complicated orders which are necessary for some puzzles.

Unfortunately, the character pathfinding, at least on the DOS version available on GOG.com for free, is a mess. Its very finicky getting an NPC follower to do something because you have to stand right next to them at exactly the right spot to trigger the dialogue. Not impossible, just irritating.

With the stakes of an evil sorceress with an army of monsters threatening the kingdom, the actual scope of the game is quite small. Cozy, even. Turnvale is a nice little town, which is good, because you will spend a lot of time walking back and forth across it. The townspeople all have engaging personalities, and even ones like Gwyn, the town gossip who has no direct bearing on any puzzles, provides story hints and clues if you keep talking to her.

As a protagonist, Diermot is a lunk, but a likable one. Ratpouch is funny for a little while, then his pathfinding wears out its welcome as he constantly ends up underfoot.

The GOG version uses the SCUMMVM emulator to run, which apparently has buggy audio and there's an annoying alarm bell sound that played constantly in the town as I was exploring it. Apparently the issue doesn't happen if the game is run in DOS-Box. From what I've seen online, the Amiga version seems to run the best with the best sound, but I have no experience with Amiga emulation to have a firsthand opinion on it. This being an early 90's game made by a brand new studio with hardly any budget, there is no voice dialogue in any of the versions.

The writing and artwork are solid in all the versions I've seen, and the game has a very quaint and cozy atmosphere that allows the tone to jump between flippant dialogue with a Conan the Barbarian type of adventurer in a bar to trying to save an innocent shopkeeper from being executed by the Skorl. Like Sierra games, Diermot can get game overs in many ways, but its not the parade of Save-Die-Reload Save that King's Quest has. Only a few puzzles have built in limitations like time limits you don't necessarily know about, like the wine barrel puzzle, but overall its fairly forgiving for an early 90s adventure game.

Lure of the Temptress was a hit in England and paved the way for Revolution to make bigger games, like Beneath a Steel Sky and the Broken Sword series. Its a pleasant little game with some ambitions that occasionally exceed its grasp, like the NPC pathfinding. The writing and art style are good, the music isn't great played through SCUMMVM, but it wasn't a dealbreaker. I liked it, but it wasn't mind blowing. It is freeware, so I definitely recommend it, at least for a try.