ForumBrowseExhibitionsShare
The universe of good computer game ideas may be large, but it is nowhere infinite. Ingenious ideas don't grow on trees, but they are rather rare like pearls. So it is not surprising that programmers – and those who wish to become one – often fall back to trusted and tried concepts instead. When one's own creativity is added to it, the original hopefully turns into an original clone. In this gaming universe, one well known means of transport is Space Taxi, which inspired a number of clones.
It is the night of Helloween and a mad professor sporting a stereotypical Einstein haircut is experimenting with his latest invention: a worm hole generator. Lightning strikes in just the right (or wrong?) moment and an alien as well as the creatures on its trail along with their space ship are catapulted right into Earth's orbit.
The time has come. The night of all nights has arrived, where I will dive into darkness. Evil awakens and a nightmare comes true: Dracula rules our city of New York and the lord of darkness is also the head of the local corporation for cyber-genetics, cyber-space, cyber-surgery, cyber-technology, cyber-weapons and cyber-surveillance. Appropriately, it has been a very long time since the city has seen any light; we are in an apparently endless night.
Mutiny of the Things for sure made me curious of what's inside, as it hardly provides any hint of what it will be. Things can, by definition, not be alive or even stage a mutiny. The intro, styled as a newspaper interview, tells me of our hero (Jack Flash) who plans to use his so-called Succ-O-Matic to literally suck the life out of these animated things again.
Atypically for an Adventure game, your own character will not appear on screen. Instead, the current view is the player's perspective. The viewpoint, however, is not scaled to size, as all the other figures are shown very small. Lacking a concrete reference object, maybe even an animated sprite, the active role of the player is reduced to observer. You never have the feeling of actually entering scenes, but only pick them through logical links and passages. The effect is increased by having the transition between rooms happen abruptly and in some cases, the newly entered room will be shown from a completely changed perspective.
In the 1980s, William Gibson co-founded the Cyperpunk genre with his book Neuromancer and even today, he still belongs to the canon of SciFi authors absolutely worth reading. A certain Timothy Leary – LSD guru of the hippie generation, visionary and "psychedelic researcher" – put the idea of adapting the book towards the developer Interplay, excited by the new capabilities of computers and the fascinating idea of the Internet. After first versions for the Amiga and C64, the PC finally got its turn in 1988.
Normality throws the player into a dystopian metropolis leaning towards the psychedelic. Right in the middle of it, you take over the role of a teenager in his fourties called Kent who finds himself in his flat which has gone under in total chaos. Due to the game being classified as appropriate for six-year-olds, there are no beer bottles, porn magazines or even a huge, filthy bong to be found. Instead, there is just a boob tube, a dripping faucet and a permanently nodding tumbler bird. The run-down gloominess of Neutropolis does not fit with the good-natured and carefree mind of the protagonist.