Shadowgate: MacVenture Series

Unlike the Deja Vu games, I think Shadowgate is worth going back to for more than just a cursory glance into the past. It still shows its age, of course. Its puzzles are obtuse and convoluted. Yet it still held my interest in a way the Deja Vu games couldn’t. If you’re interested in any of the MacVenture games, try this one.

Like my brother I'm always retro, always dandy but this is the most dandy retro game I have. I have played this game a lot of times, but this mac version is charming! For the Shadowgate fan who has tried everything experience games the way they once were, before color graphics and before music. There is a black and white and color version, remember... you have to play them both! NO MUSIC! So load up your shadowgate playlist on youtube and click along changing the music to the appropriate room as you progress through the castle. If that sounds like too much trouble, shadowgate may not be the game for you. This game has a definite limited appeal, but if you like this kind of thing you will truly appreciate the MacVenture version of Shadowgate. A+++++

SCORE: 3/10 - AWFUL I got this as a freebie with Shadowgate (2014 version). I remember enjoying Shadowgate as a kid on my 8-bit Nintendo, so I was curious how the Mac version compared. Unfortunately, this game hasn't aged well at all. Furthermore, the Mac version lacks music or any audible cue when your torch is about to burn out, so I ended up with many unexpected deaths in which my torch burned out unexpectedly, inevitably causing me to stumble and break my neck in the darkness. I didn't bother completing this game.

This is an ancient Apple Macintosh adventure game where you click on various things to explore a dungeon. There's some light RPG elements as you can fight various monsters as well. The screenshots show a pretty good idea of what you're in for. The whole thing is really dated and would only be of interest for the sake of nostalgia, and apparently both of the people who game on Apple Macs already have the game. Also $4.50 is just a nostalgia gouge, it's unacceptable.

[h1][b]Not Recommended[/b][/h1]

This was the first game I ever played... ever!! I'm so glad it's been brought back to life! This game IS the original... even down to the janky Mac Classic scroll bars and inventory limits that were probably there to keep those old macs from bursting into flames. Quite a nostalgia trip!

Shadowgate was one of the handful of games we owned for the NES. I never really got what you were supposed to do and only got to like the second room. Apparently i've always been bad at point & click adventures. It doesn't help that this one is particularly bad, with really clunky controls (on PC) and a bloody timer in the form of torches. Seriously, i wouldn't recommend this if they [i]paid[/i] you €3 to play it, let alone the other way around.

Actively DO NOT WANT Let me be clear: I've played this style of game in the past, so I figured I knew what I was getting into again with another of the same, but I sat with a WALKTHROUGH and STILL found myself being arbitrarily killed for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON, well before I was even near the game end and with no apparent way to ever hope to finish the game. In other titles, this was from random encounters, so that was an easy enough workaround of reloading until the encounter doesn't spawn. In THIS one, there is an unpassable obstacle that from that point sets a time limit (or, rather, a move limit) before you just die. Unavoidable, and as far as I can find, unwinnable. Let's say it takes absolute minimum 100 moves to finish the game. 90 moves in, there's a riddle that requires an object. If you don't have the object, it's 20 moves to get it, and with death at 100 moves, OH WELL TOO BAD. Now, it's possible to reload to get a new riddle, where the object might be in your inventory, and I might consider that fair *enough* to give it a pass. HOWEVER it actually feels closer to 1000 moves (I'm not counting EXACTLY but basically more moves than I have the patience to perform perfectly optimally), plus moving things around in the inventory seems to count as a "move" even if it's not actually taken out of the inventory or used on anything else. Furthermore, there's an inventory size limit -- which makes sense from a realistic standpoint, but the walkthrough I followed operated under no such limit, nor did it seem concerned by the slow arbitrary death trigger, which means either this port is needlessly harder or broken, or this was adjusted in the NES version. I admit it's possible there's something I overlooked, but the short of it is this game is irritating and a joyless frustration to solve under the constraints given. If the trigger were closer to the end, so to allow a bit more exploration time, it would be more enjoyable -- or, at least, less frustrating -- but trying to squeeze what feels like 700 steps into 500 moves is more than enough to make me throw in the towel and say save your money and watch a Let's Play, or at least get the NES version maybe. Even on sale, this port feels like a rip-off. Edit: Okay to be fair, the graphics are pretty good for the era it was made. Otherwise, there's not a lot of draw to play this as is. Like, there's basically no story other than "don't die" and no humour like with the Monkey Island series or similar. Puzzles are fine enough (although parsing some of them is iffy: "OPEN" a bucket??), but it's easy to have a torch suddenly burn out with no warning if you aren't paying attention. Would have been more realistic if the burning out torch gave some sort of warning if you weren't in a room with another light source, such as the light gets dimmer (it does exactly this if there is another light in the room you are in but your own torch goes out).

There is an awful lot of text that you can choose to read colored or black and white. These options are useless because I don't get the point of this.

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