Ooze
| Ooze: When the ghosts got worn out | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Dragonware Games |
| Publisher |
 Ariolasoft Dragonware Games |
| Senior Developer |
Guido Henkel Hans-Jürgen Brändle |
| composer | Guido Henkel |
| platform | Amiga , Atari ST , DOS |
| genre | Text adventure |
| medium | diskette |
| language | German English |
Ooze: When the ghosts got worn down is a text adventure from the German developer studio Dragonware Games, which was published in 1988 by Ariolasoft for the Amiga and Atari ST home computers and MS-DOS computers. The translated version for the English market appeared a year later under the title Ooze: Creepy Nites .
action
Ooze is a satirical homage to the horror genre. The player takes on the role of the American Ham Burger, who is bequeathed a house in the English village of Denborough from his uncle Cheez Burger. Ham travels to England and finds that the property is inhabited by nine ghosts who may have killed his uncle. Said spirits are under the control of a tyrannical being called Ooze . The player's task is to destroy Ooze. The house ghosts suppressed by Ooze are initially hostile to the player, and the player must first earn their respect before he can set out to track down Ooze in his vault under the mansion.
Game principle and technology
Ooze is a text adventure, which means that the environment and events are displayed as screen text and the visualization is largely up to the player's imagination. In contrast to classic text adventures, which do not have any graphic decoration, Ooze comes up with a picture of the respective environment. By default, this takes up about 80% of the screen, only the lower 20% are used for text input and output; however, the portion of the image can be reduced with the mouse so that longer texts can be read in one go. In total, Ooze has around 80 rooms, around 30 of which have graphics. The game's parser , which analyzes the player's input, has a length of around 1500 words, which is significantly more than, for example, Infocom's Z-machine . However, the size is due to the complexity of the German language; The quality of the Dragonware parser was rated worse in the trade press than that of comparable companies from the Anglo-American region.
The versions for Amiga and Atari ST have a title melody as well as sound effects that accompany key scenes.
Ooze has an unusual system of built-in game aids: the player can summon a ghost named Murx at any time, who will give the player a puzzle and help him with the correct solution in his current game situation.
Production notes
Ooze is the second part of an unrelated adventure trilogy by the designer Guido Henkel . The first part, Hellowoon , was one of the first commercial German text adventures with professional graphics. The third part, Dragons from Laas , like Ooze , comes from the author duo Henkel / Brändle, who had previously renamed Dragonware to Attic Entertainment Software and who acted as publisher with this company. Ooze was the trigger for founding Attic, as Henkel and Brändle were dissatisfied with the publishing contract with Ariolasoft.
Ooze copied some ideas from the text adventures of the then industry leader Infocom. In addition to some special commands for game control, this also applies to the manual, which reproduces the transcript of a fictional game in the style of the Infocom manuals in order to demonstrate the basic functionality of a text adventure. Another parallel are the “Feelies” in the game packaging, items made especially for the game that relate to the game world and are intended to promote immersion in the game. In the case of Ooze , the package included a letter from the English lawyer with a cover letter and Cheez Burger's death certificate and diary for a period of two weeks before his death.
A C64 version of the game was announced and advertised by the publisher. Despite a preview in the German computer magazine Compute Mit , which was possibly based on the Amiga version of the game, the C64 version never appeared. Music and sound effects from Ooze were contributed by Guido Henkel himself. Henkel, a decent guitarist, was responsible for the music in some of his later games such as Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games or Ruler of the Seas . The sound effects in Ooze still generated mixed criticism; the magazine Commodore User noted a “lively” title melody and “appropriate” effects, the SynTax magazine, on the other hand, felt reminded of “a group of half-strangled cats” when wandering ghosts sigh.
Hans-Jürgen Brändle died on May 12, 2005 in Las Vegas .
reception
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In Power Play , Anatol Locker praised the parser and the quantity of text in the game, which was "the best German adventure game available at the moment". His colleague Heinrich Lenhardt saw in Ooze a "top adventure by German standards [...], but saw a residue compared to the parser from Infocom and the graphics from Magnetic Scrolls . The German magazine Compute Mit praised the graphics, texts and atmosphere of the game and only criticized a few logic gaps in the parser . The Happy Computer called Ooze despite slight weaknesses as the "best ever German-language Adventure". The specialist magazine SynTax commented positively on the graphics of the game, but criticized the “terrible word games”, a stubborn parser, obscure puzzles and overly long room descriptions in which one could easily overlook important details and which in their detail do not contribute to the atmosphere. Commodore User criticized the deliberately humorous and sarcastic to insulting comments of the parser on non-processable inputs, which according to the magazine would be inappropriate if a parser, like Ooze's , did not understand many common inputs. Overall, the judgments of the German-speaking trade press were more positive than those of the English-speaking ones.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Happy Computer 7/1988, p. 40: Ooze. Retrieved March 5, 2017 .
- ↑ IF-Legends.org: Dragonware Games. Retrieved March 5, 2017 .
- ↑ PCGames.de: Fed up . Retrieved March 5, 2017 .
- ↑ a b Compute Mit 8/88, p. 6
- ↑ GamesBusiness.de: Guido Henkel: “Too bad experiences with publishers”. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on March 6, 2017 ; Retrieved March 5, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b Commodore User Amiga-64, October 1989, p. 77: Ooze. Retrieved March 5, 2017 .
- ↑ a b SynTax # 07: Ooze. Retrieved March 5, 2017 .
- ↑ a b Power Play 5/1988, p. 66: Ooze. Retrieved March 5, 2017 .
