Ben Croshaw
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Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw is the British-born but currently Brisbane-based author of adventure games created using Adventure Game Studio software. He also writes articles for Australia's Hyper Magazine, a major games publication. He uses his website Fully Ramblomatic as an outlet for his own work, including weekly dark humour articles, essays, the novels Articulate Jim: The Search for Something and Fog Juice, and webcomics including Yahtzee Takes On The World and his most recent, Chris & Trilby.
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[edit] Games
Croshaw became known in the AGS community for The Rob Blanc Trilogy. Since then, he has created The Trials of Odysseus Kent, 5 Days a Stranger, 7 Days a Skeptic, Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment, the 1213 series, and Trilby's Notes. He also helped to found the collaborative Reality-on-the-Norm series by creating the first RotN game, Lunchtime of the Damned. His recent works have experimented with the AGS engine to produce games in other genres than the point-and-click adventure games that AGS was designed for.
Croshaw writes his games and creates their graphics and animation himself using Photoshop, though he does not compose his own music.
[edit] The "John DeFoe" Series
5 Days a Stranger, 7 Days a Skeptic and Trilby's Notes, are three parts of an ongoing horror series. In 5 Days a Stranger, the player controls the shady cat burglar Trilby, who stumbles across a demonic force that manifests itself as a masked killer in the tradition of Jason Voorhees or Michael Meyers, while finding himself one of a group of strangers thrown together in an abandoned mansion and being picked off one by one. 7 Days a Skeptic emulates the claustrophobic horror of Alien, following a spaceship crew that finds artifacts from the first game floating in space, four hundred years after the events of 5 Days a Stranger. Trilby's Notes, set in a hotel which exists in both the real world and a horrific alternate dimension in the style of Silent Hill, goes back to flesh out the origin of the cursed African idol from the other games. While the first two games use the point and click interface typical of recent adventure games, Trilby's Notes requires the player to move with the keyboard and type commands with a text parser, similarly to early Sierra On-Line games like King's Quest I-IV. Croshaw has announced that a final game in the series is in development.
[edit] 1213
1213 combines platform-based environments with fluid animation and realistic movement in the style of Another World and Flashback: The Quest for Identity. It tells the grim story of the amnesiac subject of a medical experiment.
[edit] Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment
AitGoFW features cynical science-fiction humor similar to Sierra On-Line's Space Quest, but mixes adventure elements with turn-based space combat, resource trading and space exploration gameplay mechanisms reminiscent of space simulator titles like Star Control and Wing Commander: Privateer. AitGoFW is both a parody of and tribute to science fiction games and movies. For instance, a major plot point is the deployment of Redshirts (an obvious homage to Star Trek's disposable red-shirted crew members), who are used as cannon fodder when the situation planet-side is deemed too dangerous for the ship's crew. The easily replaceable Redshirts invariably die, often in gruesome and darkly comic ways.
[edit] Special Editions
While all the Fully Ramblomatic games may be downloaded for free, Special Editions of most of the later games are available for a donation of US$5 to Croshaw's PayPal account. These Special Editions contain commentary, extra music and occasionally additional gameplay or exposition.
[edit] Criticism
Some players have argued that because 1213 was developed using AGS, its controls are not fluid or intuitive enough for an action title.[citation needed]
Up until Trilby's Notes, Croshaw relied upon RPG Maker's included MIDI files for musical accompaniment. Some argued that these fantasy-inspired songs didn't mesh well with horror or science fiction games. In response, Croshaw enlisted outside help for the music in Trilby's Notes. That game's soundtrack, composed by a well-known member of the AGS community, was received warmly by players.[citation needed]
[edit] Trivia
Croshaw really likes the actor Bruce Campbell.
Croshaw sells merchandise that endorses eating lions.
[edit] External links
- Fully Ramblomatic, Yahtzee's homepage
- AGS wiki link
