News Catch Up

There's been quite a few things that have happened lately that I've missed, mostly related to adventure game developers, but that aren't adventure games themselves, so I'll list them all in this post:

First of all, the actual adventure game news. The Walking Dead Season One and Season Two is going to be coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on the 24th of October, both in physical form at retail and digitally.  Additionally, The Wolf Among Us will be coming to retail for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One in North America on the 4th of November and in Europe on the 7th of November.

The Wolf Among Us is also going to be adapted into a graphic novel, titled Fables: The Wolf Among Us. It will appear in digital form first in December of this year, with collected print issues following in early 2015.

Secondly, since this blog was at one point dedicated to Telltale, Double Fine, and Autumn Moon news, I feel like I should mention that there's quite a bit of Double Fine releases going on at the moment:

Costume Quest 2 is now available on Steam.  This sequel to Double Fine's 2010 role playing game Costume Quest and its downloadable content Grubbins on Ice is a time traveling romp to save Halloween.  Fans will be happy to know that it takes place right after the cliffhanger ending of Grubbins on Ice.

Costume Quest: Invasion of the Candy Snatchers is now available as well. In this graphic novel by Zac Gorman, the author of the webcomic Magical Game Time, the usual Costume Quest plot is reversed as it follows three Repugnian children who travel to the human world on Halloween in search of candy.

Brutal Legend: Limited Edition is a limited edition collector's boxset by Double Fine and Indiebox commemorating the 5th anniversary of the heavy metal themed action strategy game Brutal Legend.  Since Indiebox likes to keep its contents a surprise, nothing has been revealed about the contents, but they are said to contain "hand-painted artwork with DRM-free game copies, Steam keys, full color manuals, CD soundtracks, posters, collectibles, and much more".  For an idea of what to expect, check out the contents of September's Indiebox release.

Lastly, The Habitat Preservation Project is a non-profit project to get the world's first graphical massively multiplayer online game, Habitat, back online.  They managed to get a partial server working when they had a coding session in September 2014 with many programmers in attendance, including the original creators of Habitat, Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer. The original Habitat, which had an interface and graphics similar to the adventure game Labyrinth, was released in beta form by Lucasfilm Games (now LucasArts) for the Quantum Link online service for Commodore 64 from 1986 until it was shut down in 1988. A sized down version was released as Club Caribe on Quantum link in January 1988. Fujitsu later licensed the code and released Fujitsu Habitat in Japan in 1990. Habitat and Club Caribe was highly influential, and it's code still lives on through WorldsAway, which premiered on CompuServe in 1995, and moved to the public internet in 1997. WorldsAway had multiple worlds, two of which survive today and are now known as Dreamscape and NewHorizone. Dreamscape was Fujitsu's first virtual world, and appeared when WorldsAway premiered in 1995. NewHorizone was originally Club Connect when it was launched by Fujitsu in 1998 and New Radio World when the WorldsAway worlds were sold and became part of an online world known as VZones in December 1998. New Radio World was renamed VZConnections in December 1999, and then newHorizone in September 2001. These two worlds are still a part of vZones, and the WorldsAway software has also recently been licensed for use in MetroWorlds.