Re: Does anyone have a copy of Endgame by Malinch Entertainment?
Good luck tracking down Howard Sherman.
I must confess I wasn't impressed with malinche's games myself. They were good as far as if goes, but very much the standard zcode parser and usual "get box with key" type puzzles.
I was quite appauled in one of them, the pentori prequel that an npc mage said to me "we have need of your skills", and it took the very garbled "ask mage about need" to continue the conversation.
There wasn't any flashy custom programming or major differences the sort of thing you'd see in an old infocom game really, no combat mechanics, no unique systems of conversation, no alterations in parsing beyond the standard zcode.
indeed just as with most if I've played the demo of Pentori, his commercial fantasy game I got stuck in the second room with no way to progress.
This was why I confined myself to playing the demos, constructing entries in the database and then moving on.
It also didn't help that malinch's own site was confusing as hell and so aggressively self promotional it was difficult to actually get any concrete information or even find the game downloads, and that Howard Sherman himself brushed off criticisms, sued people who spoke negatively about his games, and then bad mouthed people on his blog. Indeed he used to complain about blind gamers needing tech support, but then made his games necessarily confusing to use, by having self installers of each bundled with a stand alone version of either standard winfrotz or the short lived winfrotz tts (short lived because tts support was added to standard winfrotz not long after).
Indeed I sort of resent the fact that the wiki article said "howard Sherman sells to blind gamers" since his attitude wasn't exactly stellar and he didn't really do much for adaptation himself, just took what already existed and repackaged it in a rather confusing w
ay.
Then of course his prices were pretty steep even back in those days, and now, 40 usd for an interactive fiction title just seems nuts.
He supposedly justified the pricing with the basis that he did more research everyone else who wrote if, but in terms of the quality of his games the proof wasn't in the pudding, ---- the writing was good but not that! good.
So, feel free to have a go at contacting him and feel free to report back on what you find, but to be honest I'd personally recommend you just head over to the if archive and check through all the usual brands of if still being produced.
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