I intend to cover a few of AGS games here at AGG, for those who are not familiar with the term, AGS stands for Adventure Game Studio (as for AGG… ahem), and it is a tool for developers to develop point-and-click adventure games, which is my favorite genre, if you haven’t guessed already. AGS is a free development platform that has a easy-to-use editor and a run-time engine to play them, I haven’t used this but this could be useful if someone ported it to iPhone. But for the players, it is very easy to extract and install a game and it pretty much runs itself.
Nelly Cootalot is developed by the first time writer/developer Alasdair Beckett for his girlfriend (drooling with jealousy) and it won numerous annual AGS awards, which might not mean much to you, but it is the quality assurance I am looking for when downloading one of these games. The awards Nelly won included:
Best Game Created with AGS 2007
Best Gameplay 2007
Best Dialogue Writing 2007
Best Player Character 2007
Best Character Art 2007
I picked Nelly Cootalot as my favorite AGS game because of its witty and atypical heroine, and being a piratey adventure not unlike Monkey Island. The game begins as Nelly, a rookie yet fearsome pirate, bird-lover extraordinaire, is sent by her ghost captain to investigate the disappearance of a species of local birds called Spoonbeaks. Nelly arrives at the Barony of Meeth and begin her investigation with a myriad of strange locals.
Unlike the recent Tales of Monkey Island (which aren’t terrible, but their bland 3D environment is lacking personality of the older titles), Nelly Cootalot features simple hand-drawn graphics with an endearing sense of personality, and the character designs of various characters you meet around the realm are hilarious, at times so outrageous that you could not help but giggle while you meet them (Captain Widebeard comes to mind). There is no voice acting but the writing stands out here, as each dialogue is brilliantly crafted (and never too wordy) and at times it would make references to some of the Monkey Island gags with its own clever jokes.
Nelly will last an average gamer about 5 hours and the gameplay is comprised of mostly talking to everyone you see multiple times exhausting the conversation tree until they start repeating themselves, grabbing everything that isn’t nailed down, and using everything on everything else until something breaks, with a few different mini games thrown in that test your hand-eye coordination (oh nothing as bad as the driving sequence in Sam & Max Season 1), and some dialogue puzzles which comprise of choosing the right sequence of answers which are especially well written and worth your time to choose the wrong answers just to see the reaction of the NPCs.
It is hard to talk about it anymore without spoiling things. Nelly Cootalot is something you really need to set sail and explore, if not to just take a break from the long wait between Tales of Monkey Island episodes, it can be plundered here.
Sources: Nelly Cootalot, AGS
Hands down, Apple’s app store wins by a mile. It’s a huge selection of all sorts of apps vs a rather sad selection of a handful for Zune. Microsoft has plans, especially in the realm of games, but I’m not sure I’d want to bet on the future if this aspect is important to you. The iPod is a much better choice in that case.