Jonathan (computer game)
| Jonathan | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Phoenics |
| Publisher | Software 2000 |
| Senior Developer | Christoph G. Földing |
| composer | Wolfgang Partsch |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
February 1993 |
| platform | Commodore Amiga , MS-DOS |
| genre | Adventure |
| medium | diskette |
| language | German |
Jonathan is a computer game by the German publisher Software 2000 . The adventure combines the everyday life of a disabled student in a small town in southern Germany with elements of horror and Celtic mythology .
action
Jonathan is set in the late 1980s in the fictional German town of Kronstadt, which is modeled on Memmingen , and in its surroundings. The player takes on the role of the eponymous student Jonathan Bedonn, a young man who has been confined to a wheelchair for eleven years after a car accident and who at times had poor telekinetic skills. Strange things are going on in Kronstadt: Honorable citizens indulge in excesses of violence or sexual debauchery, and the suicide rate has skyrocketed recently. At the same time, Jonathan has nightmares of wars, huge fires, displacement and flight, and of an ancient, evil force that tries to subjugate humanity. He also dreams of an old book that is on display at a second-hand dealer and that appears to him in a dream to be important for his future and that he later finds in reality.
The evil power turns out to be Celtic deities who, after a long banishment, set out to subjugate the earth. Jonathan has to face a mythical, come to life character called "The Dark Runner" to avert the horror. He finds help both in his friends and in the book that turns out to be Grimoire and teaches him aspects of Celtic magic.
Game principle and technology
Jonathan is a hybrid of text and point-and-click adventure . While the game is represented in text form and illustrated by pictures, the controls are carried out by icons that the player clicks with the mouse. With the help of the icons, the player can navigate within the game world, interact with NPCs or manipulate objects. A special feature of the game is that Jonathan's handicap is incorporated into the game mechanics - the player can only move within the city and only to a limited extent there; To reach far away or inaccessible places, he depends on the help of his friends. There are twelve people who can support Jonathan. They lead their own lives and can be found in different places at different times. There are around 80 visitable locations in the game. The town of Kronstadt, including Jonathan's friends, is populated by around 60 people.
An important aspect of the game is time. It is divided into eleven days during which the evil gradually grows stronger. Jonathan has to do certain tasks every day at certain times of the day in order to let the time advance to the next time of day or the next day. On the eleventh day, Jonathan has either figured out a way to successfully face the gods or the game is considered lost. During the eleven days, there are opportunities to end the game prematurely and negatively by acting in a clumsy manner. The game is designed in such a way that it does not get into an unsolvable state, so it is possible at any time, regardless of the actions of the game, to reach a positive or negative end by continuing to play.
The pictures of the game are partly hand-drawn, others are based on photos of houses, people and other motifs from Memmingen or excerpts from TV series or movies and have been edited by hand. Some of the images are animated. There is a title melody as background music as well as sound effects in the game itself, which underline the plot.
Production notes
Jonathan is one of eight games that publisher Software 2000 named "Artventure", which should indicate the high quality of the so-called adventure games. Three of these games, in addition to Jonathan yet Holiday Maker (1988) and The City of Lions (1989), derived from the development studio Phoenics, still trading as PM Entertainment to 1989th Jonathan has taken a long time to develop for the home computer game industry. A year and a half after the release of City of Lions , a playable version was presented to the press, but it took another two years to release. One of the reasons for the delays was the departure of the original programmer from the team.
The motifs on which Jonathan's graphics are based come from Memmingen. The South German Mittelstadt with its buildings, some of which date from the 14th and 15th centuries, is the home of the programmers of the game. Instead of a technical copy protection , Jonathan relies on a query of the contents of the manual: once a day the player has to compare a symbol that appears on the screen with symbols in the manual and as a result receives a letter; the letters of all game days combined result in a code word for the final of the game. In addition to the manual containing the copy protection query, the game packaging also contained a poster and an insert from the fictional daily newspaper Kronstädter Nachrichten with the TV program that can be viewed in the game and some of which provides information on the game solution.
The version for MS-DOS , which appeared two months after the Amiga version, was programmed by Andreas Niedermeier . The Munich-based programmer came from the adventure specialist Weltenschmiede and was later involved in the development of the Bundesliga Manager game series for Software 2000 .
A follow-up game called Sahara , in which the player goes in search of a mythical gold caravan in the North African desert, was planned by Phoenics, but was never realized.
reception
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The Amiga Joker assessed that Jonathan was more beautiful, more extensive and “playable” than the two previous games Holiday Maker and Die Stadt der Löwen, and in its complexity it comes close to text adventures. Reviewer Michael Labiner praised graphics in "the usual impressive (...) perfection" and texts "as gripping as a book by Stephen King ". The PC Games pointed out that the range of commands in the game was quite rudimentary, but that the ability to communicate via telephone would increase the complexity of the game principle. The magazine criticized the division of the game into times of day as "unconventional and unrealistic" and criticized logic errors in the structure of the puzzles. The story and atmosphere of the game, however, were praised; they conveyed "a high degree of certain comforting discomfort". For the PC player , reviewer Boris Schneider-Johne found primarily negative things: The user interface is idiosyncratic and wants to be “first understood through university studies”, the plot is and will be a mixture of “ author's film , (...) Lindenstrasse and schoolgirl report ” ruled by illogic, and copy protection is a nuisance. All in all, the game is "nonsense". The Play Time pointed out that the textual descriptions of the game happening at one point without warning temporarily slip into the not youth-free. The magazine praised the complexity of the game, a "logical conception (and) exemplary user guidance" as well as a "strong and sensitive background music".
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Michael Labiner: Jonathan . In: Amiga Joker . April 1991.
- ↑ a b c Thomas Borovskis: Jonathan: Esoteric . In: PC Games . June 1993, p. 44.
- ↑ Max Magenauer: Jonathan . In: Amiga Joker . February 1993, p. 44.
- ↑ a b Max Magenauer: What does ... Chris Földing actually do? . In: Amiga Joker . February 1993, p. 84.
- ↑ Memmingen artist fantasies . In: Current software market . May 1993, p. 55.
- ↑ a b Boris Schneider-Johne: Jonathan . In: PC Player . June 1993, p. 82.
- ^ A b Claudia Drotleff: Jonathan . In: Play Time . April 1993, p. 22.