Euphoric Blog

Jeff Gullett doesn’t think DS cartridges can hold Lucasarts adventures, and Chris Norris says the company has considered porting games to DS or Wii but he doesn’t know if they actually are. Their apparent cluelessness suggests to me that they aren’t really into adventure games.

Maybe Jeff was thinking of Grim Fandango. Admittedly, the games from the mid 90s are larger and might not fit on a DS cart. Those could be ported to the Wii, where the remote is a decent replacement for a mouse.

But the older games such as Maniac Mansion or Loom are tiny DOS games. They would easily fit on a DS cart and could be released as bundles like they were in multi-CD packages in the mid 90s. And with the popularity of Phoenix Wright, releasing more adventure games for the DS seems like a no-brainer.

Maybe they don’t think the SCUMM engine games would sell because they have historically had a niche audience. And that niche audience is already playing them on DS and Gamecube anyway, as the homebrew community already ported the SCUMM engine to both systems.

Still, I think Lucasarts is missing out on a great opportunity to expand their audience. And if they actually redid the artwork for some of the classics, and made it easier to save games, they would get sales from both new and old fans.

Please, Lucasarts, don’t forsake us! Bring back Maniac Mansion!

I agree with one of my compatriots on The Iris Network, the violence in the Grand Theft Auto series is not nearly as deplorable as its portrayal of female characters. I love getting my jollies out with a rocket launcher and dodging the cops as much as any other denizen, but my enthusiasm is somewhat dampened by the fact that I always have to be male. As if only men do drugs and shoot weapons. The women of GTA are either girlfriends or prostitutes, angels or whores, and we’re long overdue for some real women in Liberty City.

You might say, but there have never been any female drug lords. You might say that, but you would be wrong.

A female drug lord is currently Mexico’s sweetheart. Since she was arrested last September, Sandra Avila Beltran (aka La Reina del Pacifico or Queen of the Pacific) has been the subject of pop songs as well as news stories. She is the “highest profile female drug trafficker in Mexico” and the head of PR for a cartel smuggling cocaine from Columbia to Mexico. Her marriage to a Columbian drug lord was likely made to form an alliance between their businesses as much and more than their families.

This woman would be the perfect protagonist in a GTA game. In fact, I’m going to call it here and say that sometime by the 10th Grand Theft Auto title, there will be a game with a protagonist at least partially inspired by her.

If I were designing it myself, I would also throw in references to the blaxploitation movies of the 70s and to Nancy Botwin on Weeds, but the main story would be about the hispanic gangs of Liberty City. In the late 1980s, our heroine arrives in Liberty City with her husband to handle distribution of cocaine. We’ll call her Alexandriana, or Alex for short. Her husband dies early in the game, and Alex takes full control of the company.

Would my Grand Theft Auto play differently from Rockstar’s GTA? Not particularly. You would still steal cars and weapons and even helicopters and use Liberty City as a sandbox. I would also, however, throw in some diplomatic missions to form alliances between local gangs. Everyone wants to date Alex to gain control of her position in the cartel, and she can use local social events to manipulate them. But she is not a whore and never parks with anyone. Unless it is a male prostitute hired to be used and then possibly killed for cash. (Hey, those are the breaks when you’re a prostitute in Liberty City.) Social or dating missions would be short and based on talking to the right people. They would then be followed by assassination missions to take out rival gangs or show the new allies who is boss.

I think I’ll start a design doc myself. If I finish it before professional studios make it a reality, I’ll have a good writing sample that also shows I can predict trends in the game industry.