Adventure Gamers - Forums

I played Phantasmagoria twenty years ago and I’m curious to see how I feel about it today. So I decided I’m going to replay it and pay special attention to the characters of Adrienne and Don, their behavior, roles, interaction, etcetera from a female and/or feminist perspective.

Seven days in the game, seven days in the playthrough.
Starting this weekend.

I have to replay this game too - loved it way back when.

I hope you enjoy your play through!

No subtitles… *sigh*

zobraks - 19 November 2016 03:41 AM

No subtitles… *sigh*

Yes, and the sound is not very good. I’m halfway the first chapter and I find it hard to understand what people are saying.

Imagine we have just translated into Spanish two months ago and we had to understand everything they say without subtitles. We finally managed to show subtitles in the game and after all this years, we can play it!

walas1974 - 19 November 2016 09:49 AM

Imagine we have just translated into Spanish two months ago and we had to understand everything they say without subtitles. We finally managed to show subtitles in the game and after all this years, we can play it!

Good for you, must have been a lot of work. I hope you will share your thoughts about the game with us. 

chrissie - 19 November 2016 12:25 PM

I haven’t got a lot of time over the next 7 days Karlok but I’ve been spurred on to at least start the game this weekend. 

Great! I haven’t been able to finish the first chapter today and I may have been a little too optimistic. The chapters aren’t very long, but I don’t think I can do the game in one week.

is there a space next to the avatar expanded (inside the post box itself) or could it be just my browser (anyone else is seeing this ?

wrong thread, i know, sorry

Great idea!!!    I’ll follow the thread closely, and perhaps join in as well if I find the time.

Yes, Spaz. And later it gets harder, with some characters with ‘peculiar’ accents that even a friend of mine who lives in USA couldn’t undertand!

I was going to post my comments on Chapter One today, but I’ll give chrissie, wilco, and hopefully diego the chance to play it first. So this is going to be a very short post.

I liked the game a lot when I played it all these years ago, in spite of its shortcomings, but I’ve forgotten many details, even some of the gory ones. It was groundbreaking and exciting, it had real people, the music was good and the “puzzles” were not hard. In my memory the acting was pretty bad and so far I haven’t changed my opinion. 

The Intro

Adrienne has a nightmare (of scary things to come) and wakes up terrified. Don holds and comforts her, which turns into lovemaking. Only one naked breast, seen from the side, no nipples or anything.

Happy, loving couple. Yes? Sure. But…

Adrienne doesn’t say anything, she just pants a lot. She doesn’t talk about her nightmare and Don never asks. Don: Ssssshhhhh… it’s just a bad dream… you don’t ever have to be afraid of anything. I’ll always be here to protect you. That’s something you might say to a young child, not to a grown woman. It’s a cliche. It’s patronizing.

[to be continued]

I remember seeing a playable demo of this back when it was released at Electronic Boutique at the mall. They actually had a computer set up where you could play a little bit of it. I was 15 at the time and was blown away that you could play a real person. My first taste of FMV. Unfortunately, the computer my family had at the time (a Tandy 1000 I believe) didn’t have a CD-Rom drive. Well, 10 years later around 2005/6 I bought it on ebay and finally got to play it lol. I replayed through it last Halloween and got that nostalgic excited feeling I first felt when I played the demo at EB all those years ago! It always made me think of a Soap Opera turned Horror B-movie

wilco - 20 November 2016 04:59 PM

There was some hype for it at the time and it started great with a cool horror intro with a little twist suspense (and the sideboob ... teenager at the time ).

I think “some hype” is a bit of an understatement. Sierra brought out all the marketing cannons it could muster. Sierra’s first multi-disk game. First FMV game. And while the $4.3MM actual budget far exceeded the $800K projected budget, even that was hyped as the most expensive game Sierra ever made. It was the first time I remember Sierra releasing a game with its own point-of-purchase displays. On a 1-to-10 Hype-o-meter, this was a 27. And it was the most expensive game at retail that Sierra ever released.

This was not some hype. This was all-time over the top hype.