Adam Cadre (and guests) review some early-aughts IF games

Playing Game Hints
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For those who don’t know him: Adam was pretty active in the mid/late 90’s in IF but dropped off since then. He wrote some games that became well-known, like Photopia.

I noticed that, on IFDB, he posted links of reviews of some games that were written in the early 2000’s. These are audio reviews (with some static images) that have been uploaded to YouTube. It’s not just him talking - he has guests on and they engage in a dialogue about the game, which sometimes drifts away from explicitly reviewing a game.

Radio K #1 includes two games: Emily Short’s Savoir-Faire and Paul O’Brian’s Earth and Sky 2: Another Earth, Another Sky. In this one, his guests are Clare Parker for the first game and Jess Haskins for the second.

Radio K #2 includes three games: The Moonlit Tower by Yoon Ha Lee, with guest Alex Hoffer; Janitor, by Peter Seebach and Kevin Lynn with guest Elizabeth Sweeney; Till Death Makes a Monk-Fish Out of Me, by Mike Sousa and Jon Ingold with guest Zoe Friedland.

I’m posting this here because comments are disabled for the “videos”, but it would be nice to have a place to discuss them.

1 Like
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Thanks for posting this - I would have missed it otherwise. As with his writing, Adam has lots of interesting things to say.

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How spoilery are these? Should I play the games first?

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I’d say they were moderately spoilery, but not too bad except in the case of The Moonlit Tower.

Whether you should play the games first is a personal choice. I listened to them without having firest played “Till Death…” and now it’s on my to-play list. But, really, these games should be played regardless of the existence of Adam’s reviews.

Consider:

  • Savoir-Faire won the XYZZY award for: Best Game, Best Story, Best Puzzles, and Best Individual PC, and was nominated in four other categories.
  • Earth and Sky 2 won the XYZZY award for Best Use of Medium, was nominated in five other categories, and came in 1st in the 2002 IFComp
  • The Moonlit Tower won the XYZZY award for Best Writing, was nominated in two other categories, and came in 4th in the 2002 IFComp
  • Janitor came in 5th in the 2002 IFComp, and was nominated for Best Individual PC XYZZY.
  • Till Death Makes a Monk-Fish out of Me came in 2nd in the 2002 IFComp, and picked up four XYZZY nominations.