Sun 4 Jan 2009
Hal Barwood – Introduction & ACG Interview
Posted by Igor Hardy under Games & Game Design, Interviews, Look Elseweb
[2] Comments
Hal Barwood
I was very happy to have been recently able to do an interview with Hal Barwood on behalf of ACG. His Indiana Jones and The Fate Atlantis was the first adventure game I ever played (that’s like winning a lottery) and remains one of my favorites. It is not some kind of sentimental affection on my part, mind you (I’m a notoriously unsentimental person). The game is just really that good and perfectly represents the good old days (absolutely no sentimental connotations on my part!) when the care went first of all into the game design and storytelling departments instead of in making things more and more flashy.
So what’s so great about Fate? The multi-path structure of the game as well as ingenious puzzle ideas, enticing mini-games and other surprises ensure that you never tire of playing it. Couple that with the incredible story (deeply rooted in pulpy adventure genre) and the possibility to read the one dialogue of Plato that is missing from my (Dunlop) collection and the result is my favorite Indiana Jones experience yet!
Unfortunately, Hal’s current status as freelance game creator doesn’t seem to allow him tackling projects of similar proportions (or creative ambitions). Despite giving highly regarded lectures on game design and co-creating The 400 Project with Noah Falstein, he doesn’t get many interesting game titles to work on. However, his newest and very promising looking project (and an adventure game to boot!) – Mata Hari - has just been released in Germany (in late November). Sadly, it received mostly scathing reviews there. I’m still hoping that it just means those German reviewers are too conservative too appreciate a slightly different take on adventure gaming. I’ll definitely want to check it out myself. And in the meantime you can check (if you haven’t yet) my aforementioned interview with Hal posted today on ACG. It doesn’t focus much on Fate of Atlantis since I decided the game has already received great coverage in older interviews and there was so many other interesting topics to discuss (most importantly Mata Hari).
Note: Other very enjoyable titles from Hal that I played consist of his other two Indy’s adventures (which were quite different from Fate) and Yoda’s Stories. They too deserve to have written a few words about them – I might do that someday.
Click the Santa and check out Hal's free Holiday minigames - they're fun too!
The interview was very interesting. Hal Barwood and Noah Falstein and amongst the few designers of ol’ Lucas Arts that I really appreciate, for their sense of history and the pacing of their intrigues. Unluckily, it seems that Mata Hari is nothing more than a botched experiment, and whilst I still hope that this is not the case, I can’t help but wonder why write 400 rules for a great game design and then deny them in the actual practice of a game — if MH is so horrible like the reviewers (and users) are saying, maybe it was an intervention from the publisher which twisted Barwood and Falstein’s intentions? Uhm… I guess we’ll have to wait for the actual game!
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Personally, I can have pretty different tastes than the general public, so I’m still very curious about this game. For example many people deemed the action parts in Insecticide (another game by ex-LucasArts fames) uninteresting and not up to the standards of the adventuring bits. I found them to be a lot of fun and very well designed, even if not particularly innovative.
As for the 400 rules project, good rules are not of such a great help to make a good game I think. They allow designers to avoid certain basic flaws, they serve as inspiration, but that’s pretty much it (that’s still quite a lot if you treat their appliance seriously). I’ve been wondering about what constitutes progress in game design lately and ultimately I think you can’t really dissect the creation of enjoyable playing experiences into formulas which you can keep making better and better. Why none goes about improving the rules of chess to make it more fun for instance? I may try writing some longer piece about this.
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