Shenanigans | Line Hollis

A large cartoon explosion that reads "KABOOM"

Line On Sierra: Space Quest I

March 2, 2013 / 3 comments

King’s Quest may have been the flagship franchise of the Sierra adventure games, but as a kid it wasn’t my favorite series. That honor went to Space Quest.Probably because gruesome death jokes and Star Wars references were my primary forms of communication in my pre-puberty years. And for some time after. If you’ve been following this fine…

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Graham and the woman getting married. Fanciful characters attend.

Line On Sierra: King’s Quest II

February 12, 2013 / 7 comments

Welcome back to Line On Sierra! Last time, I stumbled around King’s Quest I [part 1, part 2]. If you want to follow along, both games are available in the King’s Quest 1+2+3 pack from Good Old Games. OH HEY THERE. YEAH, I’VE BEEN WORKING OUT SINCE THE LAST GAME. I’M TRYING TO ATTRACT A…

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Line On Sierra: King’s Quest I, Part 2

January 24, 2013 / 3 comments

In Part 1 of my adventures in King’s Quest I, I dicked around, made a map, then gave up and started reading a walkthrough. In Part 2 I finished the game with liberal application of said walkthrough, and started thinking more seriously about what this game’s deal is. When I last left Daventry, I was…

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A tree with very blocky nuts in it. Text reads "HAMBURGER TREE!"

Line On Sierra: King’s Quest I, Part 1

January 19, 2013 / 2 comments

Between 1983 and 1998, Sierra On-Line released an absurd number of adventure games. Recently, GOG.com had a package deal on a major subset of them: the four classic series that shared the “Quest” brand. These games alone constitute a seriously prolific output over the course of fifteen years. Mind you, the focus of this project…

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Dear Miss Bonelihearts: Morrigan and the Scrubs

November 18, 2012 / 0 comments

Oh damn, looks like I got some more search traffic since the last time I did this! The time has come once again to answer the pressing queries of people who mash stuff into Google to get to my site. I do this for the people. what becomes of your charecter after he travels through…

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A sampling from my site stats showing a variety of Google queries about why Limbo was such a disappointment.

Dear Miss Bonelihearts

August 24, 2012 / 0 comments

People come to my site via Google for all kinds of reasons, be it wanting to see Fenris naked, intense fury at having played through Limbo, or wanting to see Isabela naked. Every once in a while, though, someone lands at my joint with a search string that suggests deeper questions in need of an answer. In…

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A screen capture of my adventures in Anchorhead.

I Am Bad at Interactive Fiction.

February 2, 2012 / 19 comments

Here’s the thing about interactive fiction. I approve of it in theory. A genre with no graphics and huge freedom of interaction seems like the perfect platform for narrative experiments. I love Stephen Lavelle’s work with IF engines, like Blendings and Atopoesis, and I’ve heard great things about Blue Lacuna. But, to my shame, I’ve…

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A familiar debate about empathy in videogames

April 17, 2009 / 1 comment

Peter Suderman, a film and culture writer I quite like, had a short post yesterday at The American Scene of the familiar “videogames can’t really evoke emotion” type. I doubt I can contribute much to this old argument, except to say that it seems dreadfully premature to be making pronouncements on the capabilities of the medium…

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The Flower of Prolonged Failure

March 17, 2009 / 0 comments

Well, after 27 minutes, I was finally able to kill myself in High-Resolution Tetris. I thought this might be easier than actually clearing a line, but I was surprised at how excruciating the endgame got. What you see here is that it’s pretty easy to stack the pieces until you get about 4/5 of the…

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My First Visit to D.C. Since Playing Fallout 3 (2009)

March 8, 2009 / 0 comments

Pretty trippy! The poor weather of last weekend severely diminished the usual crowds, and the unusual emptiness of the National Mall added to the weird effect of my many inappropriately overlaid spatial memories. I found myself somewhat more alert than usual heading through Metro stations. This is excellent; I demand more first-person perspective games set…

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