developed by Revolution Software (Hull, England)
first published by Virgin Games, June 1992, for Amiga/Atari ST/DOS, £30.99
(£30.99 = $59 at 6/92 conversion rate. 1992 $59 = 2015 $99.)
[current website]
GOG package ~40MB. Actual game ~2.6MB.
Played to completion in 4.5 hours, 4/10/15–4/11/15.
Finished with my 2011 purchases and moving right along.
On April 8, 2012, I read a blog post telling me to play a new game that was free at GOG.com. So I signed up for a GOG account, which was instantly populated with their seven free games.
Six of these I didn’t really ask for, but since I went on to be a fairly loyal GOG customer (well done, GOG! the promotional freebie tactic totally worked!), I’ve come to think of them as actual possessions and not just welcome-spam. So they’re on my list; they count. Here we go, in the order they were added to GOG in the first place.
Lure of the Temptress was added to the GOG catalog on December 18, 2008, only a few months after their launch. This was back when GOG officially stood for “Good Old Games,” unlike now, when it stands for “KFC.” Revolution Software officially declared this game “freeware” back in 2003, so when GOG worked out terms with Revolution for distributing their non-free games, the idea of “you get free games when you sign up” was just dropped in their laps. In the coming years they’d really run with it.
Lure of the Temptress is a quintessentially 1992 second-tier adventure game in which a medieval everyman wanders around a medieval everyvillage. He gives gem to bartender, uses tinderbox on oil burner, etc. etc. Eventually he winds up in “the castle,” and in the very final (non-interactive) moments of the game, uses a magic rock to zap a villain. Them’s the plot.
Now, this villain happens to be a woman in a dress, “the enchantress Selena.” But Selena does not appear until the last 10 seconds of the game, never speaks, and is of no consequence to the gameplay or even, arguably, to the story. The functional bad guys in the game are these orc-ish monstermen who are oppressing the townsfolk. We’re told at the outset that X commands the monstermen, where X is “Selena,” but apart from those last 10 seconds (and a brief Polyjuice Potion bit in the middle where the player assumes Selena’s appearance), X could just as well be any other quantity, including 0.
Here is a word that never appears in the game: “temptress.” Here is something that Selena never does: “lure” (or “tempt”) anyone in any way.
The story behind this game’s hilarious name: a few weeks before the release date, the publisher asked the developer to submit possible titles for the nearly-completed game (which did not have Selena in it at all). The project director wrote up a list, and included “Lure of the Temptress” on it as a joke. The publisher called him back and said they really liked that one, thought it would really sell. The director said, “But that was clearly just a joke; there’s no ‘temptress’ in this game.” The publisher said, “Well, you can put one in.”
And so they did.
This is coincidentally very similar to the way Leather Goddesses of Phobos came to be a game: the title originated as a “ha ha, can you imagine us being so unthinkably tawdry?” joke, and then someone said, “Yes!” And the jokester responded, “huh, I guess I can too.”
Or maybe it’s not such a coincidence. Humor is the magic mirror through which repressed emotions can sometimes reach out and become real; for nervous types (such as 80s computer professionals tended to be), scoffing at the outlandish tackiness of lust can be a natural sublimation of, and gateway to expressing, actual lust.
But of course, once you’ve committed to a public show of mocking the power of sex, any concessions you make to it are going to end up being severely cramped by shame. Cramped in scope but not necessarily in intensity! Which is what leads to the much-commented sexual cartoonishness of so much geek culture. Like I was saying about Shank, you aren’t going to have a lot of images to work with, so you’re going to overinvest in the ones you do.
God knows there are a lot of video games that reveal the stunningly limited sexual preoccupations of computer geeks. But for whatever reason — probably just time constraints — even after deciding to run with a ridiculous “we don’t care” title and cover, and shoehorning a dress-wearing villain into the nearly-finished game, the makers of Lure of the Temptress didn’t actually put in any hint of sex. It really is just pure marketing bullshit.
Okay, well, maybe a hint. When, in those final 10 seconds, Selena transforms (rather grotesquely) into a scorpion-demon-thing and then, after being zapped, back again into a woman, the animation includes the suggestion of naked breasts, in passing — something never lost on the target market. I guess that’s as much smut as they could manage on such short notice.
Anyway, seems to me the proper title of this game should be something hardcore bland like “Village Quest” or “Fantasy Adventure #2,” which were the kinds of things games were called back in the earliest days of home computers.
I bet you one of the real submissions for the game title was “Turnvale,” which is the name of the village, or, say, “The Secret of Turnvale.” That has the right lame-ass ring to it. Imagine that’s the title.
But enough about the title. What about the game?
The graphic adventure is probably my all-time favorite genre. It is also one of the most absurd and awkward forms of entertainment imaginable. An adventure game purports to tell a story, but the story is almost always somewhere between yeesh-not-very-good and that-doesn’t-even-qualify-as-a-story. It purports to consist of “puzzles,” but the puzzles are almost always somewhere between yeesh-not-very-good and that-doesn’t-even-qualify-as-a-puzzle. It purports to be interactive but the actual interactions are never of any interest; it purports to be dramatic but most of the player’s time is spent waiting while the character walks across the screen.
When I was a kid, my enthusiasm made me certain that if only my friends, parents, grandparents, sister, whoever, could just be made to sit with one of these adventure games for a little while, they’d come to love them too, and I’d have someone I could share this world with. But whenever I’d cajole someone into sitting next to me and playing, what would actually happen is they’d immediately sense the clumsy pointlessness of it all, and then look to me for some explanation of what they were missing. I wasn’t an idiot, after all; if I liked these games, there must be more to them than meets the eye, right?
And there was nothing I could say. There is no more to these games than meets the eye; in fact generally there’s less.
I think to love adventure games like I did, you have to have an overdeveloped sense of the mystique of the unseen. If you go into a guest bedroom and there’s a locked trunk in it, how much of a frisson does that give you? If the answer is “none — it’s probably empty or has old blankets or clothes in it or something, who cares” then there’s no point in your playing adventure games.
The real game that adventure games most resemble is “Memory,” an important pastime from my early childhood that’s somewhat undersung in culture today. “Memory” is the mystique of the unseen in its simplest possible form. What’s under each card? You don’t know; you can’t know; it is overtly secret. But bit by bit, you will unveil what is veiled! Tarot readings are the same, except they claim that what is revealed when the card is flipped will be important and have power; “Memory” makes no such claim, because there’s no need. It’ll just be pictures of apples and flowers and buses and whatnot, the same old pictures, but they start face-down and must be coaxed face-up, and if you have a certain type of mind, that is importance and power enough. This is the appeal of adventure games. They start face-down, and by applying your concentration, you gradually turn them face-up.
“Memory” is also exactly the mechanism of adventure games. In one room, a character is leaning on a shovel. Remember that! Now you walk on past a pig and a laboratory and a pirate to another room where a character says he needs a shovel. A-ha! Flip both cards at the same time and you can claim them.
To this very sturdy core, adventure games slather on set dressing and story dressing, heaps of third-rate showmanship that could never stand on its own, and doesn’t need to: it’s just there as a thickening agent, to enhance the satisfaction of turning everything face-up. When any sort of simple satisfaction has been made thick enough, baroque enough, it takes on a feeling of depth: gosh, you could get really spend some time in here. There’s something to this! “This is important. This means something.”
For me, a born locked-trunk fantasist and adventure-game sucker, even a piece of badly-dated junk like Lure of the Temptress can be gratifying. The graphics, firmly in the Amiga/DeluxePaint school of the early 90s, do their very best to seem lush and inviting. That was an era whose technology made it immediately clear how labor-intensive a given piece of bitmap artwork was. Even when the craftsmanship falters, the mere show of effort creates its own kind of mystique: “these images required great care to create, so who knows what they might hold?” As you look at the same backgrounds again and again in the course of playing, they begin to deepen, to contain more and more potential for investment, the way a jigsaw puzzle does as you work on it. To my overeager mind, every stippled shadow holds nameless implications.
In those years, whole games got by entirely on this sort of thing, and oddly enough, they haven’t aged as badly as maybe they ought. That impression that care = meaning is still powerful, even within a completely outdated context. And maybe in some deep human way it’s true. Someone applied conscious artistic judgment to every single one of these pixels, so every single one of them becomes a place where daydreaming is possible.
Lure of the Temptress has an attractive intro sequence with well-animated silhouettes, a classy technique that’s never again used in the game. It establishes a (false) sense of promise and depth at the outset. Yes, yes, it’s very obviously just smoke and mirrors — but smoke itself can be interesting, and so can mirrors!
To be clear, the particulars of this game are pretty lousy.
I counted about 40 discrete things you have to do, cards you have to flip, to get through the game. Of those, 3 or 4 are passable adventure-game fare, involving some slight modicum of forethought. About 30 are of the lowest order, an arbitrary linear chain of bland trial-and-error tasks: “talk to the blacksmith and he’ll tell you about the girl; now you’ll find that you can ask the drunk guy at the bar about the girl…” And another 5 are really asinine and irritating. (You need an empty flask, whereas you have a flask full of strong liquor. Pouring it out apparently isn’t an option. The only way to empty it is to walk around offering it to everyone until you find the one guy in town willing to drink the liquor for you.) All adventure games are dumb but that’s a particularly bad ratio.
The most distinctive thing about this game, heavily touted in the manual and on the packaging, is that its engine manages the independent activities of eight NPCs, whether they’re on- or off-screen, so that the village seems to bustle with free-roaming characters genuinely going about their business. This engine also allows NPCs to be given orders by the player, using menus to laboriously construct sentences like (spoiler for by far the hardest and most interesting puzzle in the game!): “Tell Goewin to go to Entrance Cave and then pull left skull and then pull right skull and then go to Green Cave.”
That might sound like a pretty cool engine with a lot of potential, but it’s more ambitious than it is polished. After an initial “hey, this village does seem kind of bustling” payoff, the system mostly becomes “that stupid buggy thing where the characters are always in each other’s way and can’t figure out how to step aside.” Half the time when you walk your character off the screen — whoa there, first he’s got to back up and walk automatically in a big circle for 10 seconds, to get out of the way of some free-roaming NPC who happens to be arriving from that direction. Okay, now try walking him off the screen again. Good luck!
So all in all this is a pretty lame little game, both sloppy and unoriginal, and I understand why after 10 years Revolution felt it was no longer something they could rightly charge money for (certainly not the original asking price of £30.99, good lord!). It was their first game, and one of the very first UK entries in this genre, and it feels like what it was: hopeful, not authoritative. 90% awkwardly derivative, 10% awkwardly ambitious.
But still, mostly nice pixels, and a little deck of Memory cards to flip over if you’re into that, which I am, so I didn’t mind.
Here are some parting questions from Marlene M, who seems to have put more thought into it than I have.
The GOG version is a reimplementation of the DOS version courtesy of “ScummVM,” which fixes a couple of bugs from the original but adds a couple new ones, and, crucially, does not emulate the audio hardware that the game was designed for, so it ends up producing a lot of weird tinkling instead of proper sound effects. I followed some advice in the GOG forums and ended up playing from the original files in a DOS emulator, using a Roland CM-32L emulator for the audio, which meant the game used the built-in “dog bark” and “bird tweet” and “fire” and “droplet” sounds. Pretty state-of-the-art stuff for 1992. Unfortunately GOG can’t package it this way because the legality of the CM-32L ROMs I had to download is dubious.
This is to admit that I only played this dumb old free game because it was in my GOG library, but I didn’t even end up playing the GOG version, I downloaded it from elsewhere. So it’s almost like I just freely opted to play it, which of course would absolutely have been a waste of time. I mean, of all the games in the world, why this? Nobody needs to play this.
Elephant-memoried readers will note that this is in fact the second stupid adventure game from Revolution Software to be covered on this weblog. Stay tuned!
I’m aware that my word-to-interest ratio in recent entries has been exceedingly high. But that’s just a state in my process and must be borne. If I try to edit these things into shape, I make them outwardly better-written but the process makes me a more anxious writer when the next one comes around, so it’s a vicious cycle. Better to place trust in what’s there and let it settle and clarify over time, of its own accord.
That was the original project of the blog: get used to being seen as I am. Well, this is me as I am when getting used to being seen as I am: skittish and verbose and dull. Hooray, I’m finally doing it!
Oh right, the credits:
Charles Cecil: managing director
David Sykes, Tony Warriner: system design, programming
Dave Cummins: game design, writing
Adam Tween, Stephen Oades, Paul Docherty: art
Richard Joseph: music, sound
I was always terrible at these games. I would get far too drawn into the window dressing — the characteristically shoddy window dressing — and could (can?) never see the underlying “Memory” structure you are describing. Frequently I would get much too frightened of the villains, monsters or other obstacles to think clearly about the problems. (I am thinking here of a scene in the Black Cauldron game in which you have to leap into a moat of alligators and swim across. The solution is to jump into the moat when they are on the same side as you, because you all swim at the same rate, and they are moving at a diagonal while you outpace them on a straight path — but I was so scared of the alligators that I would just leap blindly in, and die, and I couldn’t move past that scene until I used all the spoiler hints.) Along the same lines, I never see the twists coming in movies because I get too absorbed in the here-and-now of what’s happening. Man, what does this all say about me?
This makes me want to play some Kings Quest or other arbitrarily frustrating pixelated classic.