Posted by Bob Mackey
Tim Schafer, the legendary (and hilarious) developer behind awesome titles like Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, and the upcoming Brutal Legend, has a new old-school point-and-click adventure game available to play for free at Double Fine's website. Titled Host Master and the Conquest of Humor, this throwback to those LucasArts adventure games of yore puts you in the shoes of Schafer himself as he desperately scrambles to come up with good jokes before the GDC Awards Ceremony.
Obviously, if you're expecting a full-length adventure game, you're going to be a bit disappointed; given its status as a mini-game, Host Master is a pretty brief experience. But it's still an entertaining way to spend a handful of minutes, especially if you're a fan of Schafer's legacy; everything from the command system, to the graphics, to the sound effects are completely authentic to the SCUMM games of the 90s. Give it a whirl, and don't be surprised if you're swept away to a time where testing your sound card was a common practice. (I still can't tell you what "IRQ" and "DMA" mean. Sorry.)
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About Bob Mackey
For a brief period of time I was Bull from TV's
Night Court, but some of you may know me from the humor column I wrote for Youngstown State University's The Jambar, Kent State University's The Stater, and Youngstown's alternative newspaper, The Walruss. I'm perhaps most well-known for my bi-weekly pieces on Something Awful. I've also blogged for Valley24.com and have written articles for EGM, 1UP, GameSpite and Cracked. For all of my writing over the years, I have made a total of twenty American dollars. It's also said that I draw cartoons, which people have described with words such as "legible." I kidnapped the Lindbergh Baby and am looking to do so again in the future.
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