Adventures in Adventures!

[cradlediving]

Oh dear, oh dear.

Looks like Janus the Great has been FINALLY cornered!

How will he ever get out of this horrible predicament? Could it be that our hero can not outwit a mindless clockwork beast? For shame!

Treasurehats is the story of Janus D'Great. a devious bird who wears a birdcage-headed body as clothing (or... something of that description, I'm very glad there are pictures) and his deprecatory living shadow, Fe.

Janus finds employment in "treasure hunting", or "pillaging artefacts from the dangerous nearby magical forest and selling them for money", in order to pay rent and also buy off the "freedom debt" he has incurred as the "privilege" of living in the bizarre monster city around which the adventure is set. Not long after our initial introduction to the perils of treasure hunting he is offered a job by the mysterious Debra Classified, for a company known as "Cadaver and Cadaver", though if he's going to make it to interview he'll have to sneak past his expectant landlord first.

Wow that was a lot of "scare quotes".

Treasurehats is set in a bizarre world of charmingly fanciful characters and the two main characters we've been so far introduced to are well written with distinct personalities, something adventures frequently stumble on. It's author professorlizzard is a very active community member and has been planning on this story for a long time, so it has a very high chance of seeing itself through to a satisfying conclusion, or at least lasting longer than these threads sometimes tend to do after I've told you to read them. 

If you like birds, stage magic, weird monster people, floating eye imagery, sharks with beards, treasure, or hats then you should hurry up and already have clicked this link.

[cradlediving]

You are a security drone. There are only two security drones in your facility. Your activation means that the first drone has either been damaged, suffered from power failure, or has been completely destroyed. As standard safety protocol dictates, in the event of your activation you must evacuate all human workers from the building. Under no circumstances are you to stray from your programming.

Search and Rescue is a surprisingly cheery adventure about a small faceless cube with arms who is chiefly concerned with knocking things off desks, tidying up and collecting felt tip pens. The protagonist (who actually doesn't remain faceless for long, being remarkably good at doodling expressions onto himself with said pens) is as the opening post would imply nominally doing his best to find out where all the missing humans of the facility (and his similarly unnecessarily gendered robot brother) have vanished to, but actually mostly concerned with indulging the subforum's collective desire to go into every room and collect every object there is to be collected, to keep in that small hole in our apparently hollow hero's head.

All of the panels are made in 3D which is a rare and surprising touch for a Forum Adventure (excepting the one I linked just last week) and one I don't think I've seen done as skillfully as it is here, the artist saying that they are treating this as much as an exercise for their rendering skills as a forum adventure, and while (as you may have picked up) the story so far is not particularly deep there are hints that there is something more sinister going on in the background (apparently this is a facility that manufactures bombs, corridors are guarded by automated rifle turrets and it seems that our protagonist might not even have been ready to be activated at all).

Updates have been fairly regular and the most recent one was only yesterday, so hopefully this one is going to avoid the usual propensity of adventures I feature to give up the ghost immediately after being linked.

If you like boxes, small baby robots, entirely empty office buildings, wilful endangerment of microwaves or mountain dew dude, you should probably read this adventure.

[cradlediving]

This is an office. Your office. You're an FBI agent with a license to kill, but no target. You've been hoping to be put on an assignment soon and, as luck would have it, today is finally that day.

Look at that beautiful retro logo, look at the glorious "2D sprite people in 3D environment" art style. You might not have any idea what's going on yet but I feel like just looking at our hero's pixelated face, rectangular office, and enormous 2 dimensional newspaper gives you a hint as to the kind of narrative style you're going to be experiencing in TIME FORCE. And it totally delivers on that! I love it when art and writing fit together properly.

Special Agent Owen Phisher is the greatest operative the world has ever seen, or so he'd like you to think. In truth so far he's maybe demonstrated that he's not the type you'd necessarily trust with a license to shoot people but let's not judge too quickly. He needs to crack this case on the double to earn his chance of meeting the president himself. The story hasn't really got going yet, but after Dick follows a suggestion to escape from being trapped inside his own locked office by diving bodily out of a window, it appears that time travel may be involved (who would have guessed). 

If you like secret agents, the X files, master criminals with criminally poor spelling, mysterious temporal teleportation, rectangular houseplants and/or enormous three-dimensional pixels then get yourself a subscription to Time Force post haste.

[mspfa]

I'm glad you answered that previous question because my experience on tumblr has always been that people tag sburb adventures with mspfa and the original ones are all mspafa (the adventure community tends to refer to itself as mspafa too) so I thought this was just going to be a blog about trolls

Yes, the reason I’m tagging these with MSPFA (and a couple of its thousand other variations) is because much of the audience I’m trying to reach are the people who right now don’t know there’s a world outside of trolls; if I can turn on a few into the bigger world of Adventures I will consider this blog a success.

[cradlediving]

Some poser thinks they can do my job huh ?!

Maybe having someone on the other end of the scale is the motivation I need to keep baby adventure blog running, it is almost time for the 7th biannual u4g contest results and an excellent time to refill the queue with a bunch of stuff that you should all read immediately

Especially if I reduce the post interval from “daily” to “twice weekly”

Watch this space .)

[mspfa]

There is room in this world for both of us, never fear. This blog’s focus is on adventures that are established. Yours is more about exciting new adventures that haven’t been going very long. Both our goals are the encouragement of people who would otherwise not read adventures to do so. I’m not saying we’re the batman and robin of forum adventures, but I am saying maybe you should consider buying a cape.

[cradlediving]

I was joking, I think you're doing great things and very much hope you continue.

Please be more reliable than I am!

[drazelic]

I’m drawing a reader-interactive adventure named Symphonica over at the MSPA forums!

http://mspaforums.com/showthread.php?56917-Symphonica

The premise is that you, a Song-caster who can convert Songs into warriors to fight for you, enter a tower in pursuit of a legendary Song of unmatched power. (Think Pokemon, if you want to get a frame of reference for the gameplay I have planned.) 

It only just got started, but I have high hopes for it! It also needs some people to actually get it off the ground, so, like, if you happen to read MSPAFAs, showing up in the thread and just posting a youtube link to your favorite track of music would help a lot.

[itsbenedict]

Hey, my ultimate bro Zerovirus is doing another adventure! I think the very first post I made on this blog was about how cool his old adventure Dreambattle was. Dude’s an incredible artist and this is super exciting so check this thing out already

[jovian12]

ＲＥＡＤ ＭＯＲＥ ＦＯＲＵＭ ＡＤＶＥＮＴＵＲＥＳ

[cradlediving]

First things first, we always appreciate it when people write their own advertisement posts for us.

If you like playing JRPG battle systems except on a forum, with beautiful handcrafted sprites, you will probably want to read this adventure.

[mspfa]

I'm glad you answered that previous question because my experience on tumblr has always been that people tag sburb adventures with mspfa and the original ones are all mspafa (the adventure community tends to refer to itself as mspafa too) so I thought this was just going to be a blog about trolls

Yes, the reason I’m tagging these with MSPFA (and a couple of its thousand other variations) is because much of the audience I’m trying to reach are the people who right now don’t know there’s a world outside of trolls; if I can turn on a few into the bigger world of Adventures I will consider this blog a success.

[cradlediving]

Some poser thinks they can do my job huh ?!

Maybe having someone on the other end of the scale is the motivation I need to keep baby adventure blog running, it is almost time for the 7th biannual u4g contest results and an excellent time to refill the queue with a bunch of stuff that you should all read immediately

Especially if I reduce the post interval from "daily" to "twice weekly"

Watch this space .)

[cradlediving]

This is an Adventure. This Adventure has rules. These rules, if followed well, should result in chaos. Let's begin. (Carlos) and [Bert] are at HOME DEPOT. They have come to purchase LUMBER. This timeline is at it's ANCHOR. ANCHOR may be abbreviated ANC. This is the CURRENT point in the timeline. CURRENT may be abbreviated CUR. There are two types of commands to submit: 1. A COMMAND command. Preceed them with a ">". eg: ">(Carlos): Do the thing." This will make (Carlos) do the thing. 2. A JUMP command. Preceed them with a "//". A JUMP command is used to jump forward or backward in the current timeline. They should be written in the format of ANCHOR +/- <length of time> or CURRENT +/- <length of time> eg: "//ANC + 2 hours" This will show what is happening 2 hours after the ANCHOR, or provide an opportunity to input what is happening. eg: "//CUR - 4 hours" This will show what is happening 4 hours before the CURRENT point, which would now be relative to 2 hours before the ANCHOR. The ANCHOR can be referenced at any time. When given the opportunity, there are no parameters on a command that is explaining what is happening. Please be specific with commands. In this timeline, ACES are ACES. You may begin.

An adventure that almost managed to get close to the update count required to leave The Cradle ahead of the u4g tide, but didn't quite make it, Linearity is Stupid just needs one last little push to break itself free of being buried and move on to safer pastures.

A tale of two best friends, united by their love of flagrantly abusing time travel for absolutely no reason at all, is more reminiscent of the antics of Problem Sleuth than most of the adventures the forum produces today. Even though it has rules to follow, they are fairly silly ones, and the author tries his best to respond to every suggestion given (only giving one "no" to date, which was fairly well-deserved given the command).

Even though, as everything linked on this blog, it's not very long at the moment it already promises to do some fairly interesting things with the medium (the first appearance of The Joker will show you what I mean) and delivers the impression that the author knows exactly what he is doing, despite readers repeated attempts to drive the narrative purposefully off the rails.

If you like time travel, pizza, harlequins and/or metafiction hijinks, you will like Linearity is Stupid.

[cradlediving]

Have you heard of Dangan Ronpa? I've heard of Dangan Ronpa, I haven't read or played it but what I've heard about it makes it sound pretty similar to Artificial Throes.

Or... vice versa I suppose.

Artificial Throes is Dangan Ronpa but with a cast entirely composed of reader-generated monster OCs. It was probably my favourite adventure to come out of the contest, despite not being particularly halloweeny. Or at all halloweeny. Our diverse cast of eccentric humanoid creatures has been locked in a large manor by an obnoxious stranger with magical powers and have to do whatever they're asked if they want to get out of their with their lives.

One of the main characters is an old man with a mysterious mask. One is an aspiring necromancer. One of them is part dragon. One of them is a plant. Is that Father Christmas? Click the adventure link and find out.

If you like intrigue, murder, monster people, mysterious wizards, monitors, monster people, meringue or more monster people then you should definitely read this topic. And if you don't then you should also read this topic.

Read this topic.

[cradlediving]

Messorem is an adventure about Death, with a capital D. That's her in the pictures up there! She's not quite as Grim as usually depicted.

Death's job is to interview the recently departed and ascertain from their souls what their eventual spiritual destination should be. Unfortunately it seems that whoever hired her was a little lacking in options for the post, as she doesn't appear to take her Great Responsibilities seriously at all. She could even be accused of being irreverent!

If you enjoy ghosts, reaping and giant faceless skeletons with barcodes printed on their heads, this is definitely the topic you've been looking for.

[cradlediving]

Ominous Trail is a spoooky adventure based on everyone's favourite educational wagon simulator (I... assume, I've never actually played Oregon Trail).

What with being a written version of a video game it starts of a little dry but trust me, it picks up fairly quickly (make sure you open the spoilers to read what the follower characters have to say about what is going on!). Things never actually seem to get as tense as the video game version is reputed but I imagine that's simply because we're dealing as humans with another human rather than having to speak to a computer through a text parser. 

If you like orcs, oxen and interminably long pilgrimages then this is the adventure for you!

[cradlediving]

Ghost Ship is a cool adventure that manages to hit that pinnacle of excellent ways to open your adventure that is: a flash animation in the first post.

It didn't end up scoring as highly as it could have done in the actual contest because real life interference caused the author to have to suspend updates just after they breached the minimum update ceiling for consideration but I feel like if it had had the chance to continue it would have been among the strongest contenders.

While the plot is only just beginning, the composition of the images, frequent animations and sound (a very infrequently used medium in forum adventures) do a good job of creating an atmosphere of tension and abandonment which isn't really something any of the other adventures in the contest managed to replicate. 

If you like adventures about completely empty space ships then you should read this one.

[cradlediving]

I may also queue up some of the better recent halloween u4g entries just to get you in that festive mood and in case you missed them, even if they aren't technically all that new at this point.

[cradlediving]

This isn't meant to be any kind of grand return, but I did notice that most of you never bothered to unfollow me and this adventure caught my eye and I thought, "Well, I do have a blog specifically for sharing things I find in the cradle..."

Honestly it is less progressed than most of the topics I used to link and so I can't give any kind of particularly useful review. But hey! The main character has a number for a name, a neat bird mask and lives in some form of sterile observational facility! That's usually a good start right?

Please read this adventure.

[cradlediving]

(Is this dead, or on a to-do list?)

I think it'd be pretty safe not to expect any updates in the near or even in fact far future, I want to keep making posts here but it's time consuming and I am lazy. 

I still intend to come back to this at some point but I am going to have to accept that it is not a very realistic promise! So I'm not going to promise anything.

If anyone thinks they could do my job for me I would very much welcome volunteers, and the submission box is still open if you see a new topic which you really like and want advertised but don't want the pressure of being expected to do this on a regular basis.

[thelightintheloft]

The Light in the Loft has finally launched!

After hundreds and hundreds of hours spent working on this project between me and whimbrel, countless tears and buckets of sweat, not to mention the over 5000 custom made pre-rendered sprites and backgrounds and over 300 page scripts (that’s 120,000 works folks) we are finally ready to launch our magnum opus. This is an MSPAFA like you have never seen before, with an original story that could rival the works of Kant or Dickinson! I am very pleased to share with you the very first frame of this epic yarn, for your viewing pleasure. I hope our hard work will shine through and impress all of you, I am certainly blown away every time I gaze upon it!

…So it begins:

A young man stands in just outside of his tent. It just so happens that today, the 1st of April, is this young man’s birthday. Though it was eighteen years ago he was given life, it is only today he will be given a name!  What will the name of this young man be?

[cradlediving]

A sure to be masterpiece of our era.

[cradlediving]

So when are ye going to start reviewing adventures again? The forum is back up.

I can't say exactly but it should be soon! I've got a list of things to write, I am just looking for time to write them.

[cradlediving]

Are you going to do every U4G adventure when the forums come up, or has that period passed since they're no longer new? I AM NOT SAYING "DO MINE" PLEASE DON'T TAKE IT THAT WAY I DON'T HAVE THAT BIG OF AN EGO

I think we can ignore the one month rule for a little bit. If we pretend the forums never went on hiatus then we can pretend all the U4G adventures are still brand new.