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PC Gamer has published a list of PC Games that will be released this year. Mage's Initiation is one of them, and it looks like The Journey of Iesir will also come out in 2012. The list is incomplete and inaccurate, but it's a good reference nonetheless.

The source for Hero6 is up for grabs. The last remaining member threw in the towel a few months ago and chose to share the source code with everyone. There might be missing some resources that didn't make into the last build of the game, which could be accessed by asking deltamatrix. There's a brief mention to AGDi in its last post. It's too bad the very project that spawned the interest in fan adventure games went nowhere, but at least not everything got lost. Maybe someday some developers will take the mess and produce a cool game out of it.

http://visitors.hero6.com/

I've seen that this forum has a "quick reply" feature that you can activate on your user control panel. Wouldn't be good to have it activated by default? Cheers.

Yeah, finally I managed to get through this game, and wanted to thank the people of Himalaya Studios for such an experience. It was a pleasure to play a new adventure game in the style of the old ones, and from the start I knew that I had to write a review of the game with the most cacti and red rocks of all Anozira, once I had fully beaten it, that is.

The first thing of note is the amazing game cover, which shows a lot of things that won't happen in the game but are somehow related. Then an installation of 1GB so that the CD is no longer required, and a cute note about how cool you were for buying this game to support the genre, so that you have something to read while the game is being installed.

Now, the game: the first impression with the 3D isn't too good: some models are just much better than others; Luckily, Al Emmo is one of the best ones and his animations are good; he also has a strange voice, but as the game progresses it ends fitting him well, unlike the narrator who I found somewhat annoying for varying so much the pitch to sound like an old west commentator. The problem is that you cannot choose which voices you want to suppress, it's all or nothing. I ended leaving them "on" as the others were good enough to give the voices a chance, and the obxonious narrator goes away in some places, yeah.  :cool:

Soon, you find that the production values are very high on this game. Almost everything you try has unique descriptions, even objects whose use is pretty obvious and don't stand in your inventory for too long will spawn their own and unique answer if you try to give them to any other person, some of which seem to not have other purpose in the game than to give special and funny commentaries every time you give them something. The mouth icon, which in other games would give endless "I can't talk to that" messages, is in this case an excuse to display lots of jokes and silly animations specially done for that purpose only!!

There is no need to say, I spent a lot of time showing every single item to everyone, and talking with every single cactus and red rock in the game.

Now, the interface. I would say that Al Emmo fails in this aspect, having a very annoying interface that's is not intuitive and dispersed all above the screen. The map, menus, and game actions are located on different corners of the screen, so browsing from one to another with the mouse  means you'll have to cover the maximum distance ever. This is specially annoying with the inventory, as you go from hotspot to top-right corner to open the inventory, from top-right corner  to bottom-left corner to pick the first item in the list, and from bottom-left corner again to the hotspot. This is much worse than any other system I've seen in a graphic adventure. To alleviate the problem, the game allows for easy browsing through items in the inventory by use of a mouse wheel, but unfortunately that option didn't work too well with my Wacom mouse, and every time I touched the wheel, the cursor moved directly to the bottom-right corner of the screen. Ouch!

Fortunately, the designers included keyboard shortcuts for easy access to most of the game features, and so I was able to concentrate in solving puzzles instead of fighting against the GUI. Thank you!

The puzzles were good, some were a bit easy, some were hard. But none so hard that made me search for a guide (which I ended looking anyway, to know if playing for hours at the slot machine was worth it or not). They were mostly logical, and the most illogical ones had not-so-subtle hints shown on the pictures of each act. It was so logical, in fact, that at times (but not always) the game had to stop me from doing things too soon. Though of linear nature, I found the game still allows some freedom when solving puzzles, and talking to characters provided both hints and red herrings to keep things interesting. I even got one of them help me with one puzzle if I promised never to talk to him again!

[dead-end]

Hi! After many weeks playing the game at a calm pace and enjoying everything (and there are LOTS of things to enjoy in this game!), I finally finished it today. Hooray!

Now, I found that the last act is the glitchiest of them all. I managed to go THROUGH the death altar on the treasure room once. However, the worst glitches happen by reading the diaries at time-based events. For example, reading one at gun point (from any of the people that can kill you) will not mute the audio file during the game over screen. However, reading it while the screen bounces will mute the audio file at the time of the first bounce; in the room with the raging river it will also show a graphical glitch on the screen (some colors on the background). Finally, it will create a dead-end on the very last puzzle if you read it while the bad guy is swinging, as it freezes him forever.

Curiously (well, not quite), if you save the game before solving the second-to-last puzzle, then die on the last puzzle and choose "try again", if you then restore the saved game and die on the second-to-last puzzle, the "try again" feature will skip that puzzle and go straight to the last! :rolleyes: