Amy Adams, Disney and Blogs

This weekend I watched a film that really made an impression on me, and that film is Julie and Julia. The first film I watched which starred Amy Adams was Enchanted. I grew up with The Little Mermaid (which I saw at a drive-through in 1989), Beauty and the Beast, Peter Pan (we watched Hook and Peter Pan an hour apart from each other), and Aladdin, and so I loved how they fused the romantic comedy genre with what Disney did in the old days and it really worked (unlike Kingdom Hearts - yay, for not creating worlds structured like rooms), and I think Amy Adams did an excellent job portraying a Disney princess trapped in the real world. Julie and Julia on the other hand it also about being trapped, but in a positive way. Trapped in a passion for cooking, writing, and about blogs. By allowing yourself to see and experience another world in the real world, you can learn new things about yourself, discover that you can do things that you never believed is possible or walk a path that you thought you would walk in another couple of years (or ever) and then share it with people. :) No, this blog is not about Amy Adams or old Disney movies. This paragraph merely described why I created the blog, and that is to offer my perspective or insight into something I've had a passion for since I was 8 years old - stories/narratives.

Amy Adams
Image found here

But first, I should introduce myself. My name is Heinrich van der Berg (yup, those last three words is my surname and which literally means "from the Mountain"). I studied Multimedia for four years and at present, I'm studying web design so that I can supplement my skills. Hopefully, this blog will look a bit more artistic in a few weeks. I also have a website that you can find here (WARNING: The website is 27 mb large and so it may give you a bit of trouble if you have a slow connection, or even if you have fast connection. I'm thinking of splitting the website into smaller chunks, so that it is easier to access) and a deviantArt account.

Moon by Heinrich van der Berg

You are welcome to check them out if you want. I would have never have studied Multimedia if it wasn't for certain video game, called Lunar: The Silver Star [which was released for Sega-CD/Mega-CD and from which this blog's title derives its name from (one-half of it anyway - the word lunar is associated with the moon)]. Yes, this blog is about stories, but I'm going try to limit this blog's scope to games - both console and computer games.

Lunar: The Silver Star
Image found here

My love for games did neither start with games' crutch of killing things nor Lunar: The Silver Star (the game still had a big influence on my outlook on games, which I will hopefully discuss in a later post), but with the Adventure genre, specifically Sierra's Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel. When I'm talking about Adventure games, I don't mean Action-Adventure games (e.g. The Legend of Zelda) or Role-Playing Games (e.g. Final Fantasy or the Elder Scrolls series), but about games that focuses on solving puzzles in order to move the story along, but the puzzles is not the main feature of these games, the story is. The puzzles are deeply ingrained into a story. When someone is calling you on the phone, you pick-up the phone, but the phone itself isn't important. It is merely a tool for you to have an enjoyable (or unpleasant) conversation with the person on the other side of the line and in the same way the puzzles is present to create a world (and characters within this world) to interact with. A more technical explanation can be found on Wikipedia...namely, here.

Police Quest featured main character, Officer Sonny Bonds, who investigates a drug lord, called the Death Angel. As Officer Bonds, you need to follow the police rules, like following certain steps before leaving the police station and these police rules (and even the combination to your locker at the police station) were described inside a copyright measure...the manual. You see, if you pirated by copying the stiffies/floppies from a friend and you didn't think of making copies of the pages of the manual, you were not able to advance in the game. This might have irritated a couple of pirates, since the internet was not a worldwide phenomenon like today and manuals were not easy to obtain, except if you went back to your friend. By using the manual the fill the player's blank [e.g. the combination of the locker (VGA version)], the game director didn't have to depend on one of gaming's biggest crutches, the character having amnesia. By reading the manual, the information of the police rules and the locker's combination was transformed into the player's knowledge, just as it is knowledge in Officer Sonny Bond's head.

Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel
Image found here

Here be minor spoilers...

After managing to escape the confines of the police station, you can drive around the town of Lytton, arresting drunkards (don't forget to cuff his hands behind his back or you might have a headache), help to get rid of troublesome bikies, and solve the case of the Death Angel...James Bond style.

Minor spoilers stops...

When I first played it, it was a revelation...I was used to platform games (e.g. Commander Keen and Saboteur 2) and racing games (e.g. Grand Prix Circuit) and these games were all about the gameplay (don't get me wrong, they were fun to play), but with Police Quest, you could play a character - inhabit someone's life in a realistic, but fictional world, almost like the holodeck in Star Trek: The Next Generation (only much more low-key). After Police Quest, it would be a few years before I could again play a game that manage this sort of presentation, which was also a game from Sierra - King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! I think I will discuss this game on a later date.

I hope you enjoyed my introduction on which I hope will be a continuing blog about the games that influenced my life and reveal the further meaning of the blog's title. Being trapped in a new world of adventure isn't so bad, since you might find a trap door that leads to new horisons...

---OPEN DOOR