Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Living in people's childhood memories is the best way to continue a game.

A large-scale game with a huge world outlook, tortuous plot and rich scenes, how to fit into the Flash game with a capacity of only a few tens of M, so that players can experience it online? More than a decade ago, a game called Warner Epic Adventure gave the answer to players who had just come into contact with the Internet.

It comes from Canadian game studio Sarbakan, which is the developer of another Flash game, "famous Man" and "Miller Villa mystery".

If the Miller Villa mystery is an obscure and creepy childhood shadow, then its "twin brother" and "Warner Epic Adventure" is probably an adventure that leads children to explore "unsolved mysteries".

Warner Epic Adventure (Steppenwolf: The X-Creatures Project), originally translated as "Wilderness Wolf: project X," was released in 2001, two years after Miller Villa mystery, and is still released by Sarbakan Game Studios on Warner Bros. Entertainment's official website.

Similar to the Miller Villa mystery, the game is still divided into six chapters, four episodes and a chapter, and 24 episodes tell a story. But unlike it, Warner Epic Adventure is larger in scale and richer in plot, location and puzzle solving levels. Besides, it doesn't have a bad end.

The story probably tells the story of male scientists with developed brains and limbs and beautiful female journalists full of adventurous spirit, exploring around the world, looking for legendary creatures and fighting villain plots. The name of the game "Wilderness Wolf" comes from the nickname of the hero.

A few years after the game was released, it was moved to a domestic website and replaced with the now more straightforward name Warner Epic Adventure.

It is worth mentioning that many domestic players first came into contact with this series through the youth website "China Young Eagle Network" sponsored by the Communist Youth League Central Committee and the National Youth work Commission at that time. This place, which was once innumerable post-90s learning to use the Internet, had quite popular forums at that time, and its game section was also popular, "popular" a lot of famous Flash games.

Similar to the case of "Miller Villa mystery", the game is still not Chinese when it is moved to domestic websites, but the theme of "Warner Epic Adventure" is dominant and easy to understand, and the player experience is obviously better than "Miller Villa mystery".

Although as an early work of the Flash game, Warner Epic Adventure is still unique compared with its peers-it can control character actions with a keyboard, and introduced an archiving mode from Chapter 4, giving players a more sense of operation than the then point-and-touch adventure Mini Game.

From a gaming worldview, Sarbakan is certainly more ambitious. Players will see those unknown creatures in different locations around the world in the game, such as Mocra Mbybe, the Himalayan snow monster, the mythical sea monster Kraken, and the vampire Chopkabra, who began attacking American livestock 30 years ago. on the grounds of collecting the blood of strange creatures, players will cross four continents according to the needs of the plot, from tropical rainforests to snow-capped mountains. From no man's land to residential area, the formation spans more than half the world.

The game shows regional characteristics with its details, such as Chapter 5, a large number of slum buildings and sugar cane fields, rum wineries to players Dominica customs and customs after a series of dangers, betrayal, and even murder, male and female together to solve many crises, defeat BOSS, the end of the story. The trend and ending of the whole plot is not difficult to guess, but the characterization is complete, the characters are numerous, the turning point suspense is just right, and the ending is deliberately left blank, which brings space to the imagination of follow-up players.

But if you want to feel the Hollywood-style plot, you have to be able to get past the puzzles of the game.

Without the bizarre game over process of the Miller Villa mystery, players often "die" in various postures in Warner Epic Adventures, including scary-looking unknown monsters. Props and puzzles in each map of the game are related to each other, and the small puzzles constantly make the whole map present a big puzzle at the same time. In view of the lack of hints in the early games, in the absence of strategies, players still have little choice but trial and error and brainstorming.

The monsters gnawing on people's heads in the Antarctic lab can be regarded as the shadow of many people's childhood, but for Flash games with relatively simple systems, puzzles can be solved with exhaustive methods, and the difficulty of the game can be justified as long as players are skilled enough to find props, which is especially useful in Warner Epic Adventures, which is rich in scene maps. Players with larger brains will also find that there is more than one solution to the game.

For example, in the first section of Chapter 3, the heroine Meg, who is operated by the player, evades the killer in the building and looks for key evidence. after the character is knocked down, the player will search the key to the drawer where the key clues are located. And if players can't think of searching them, they can also use the crowbar obtained in the elevator shaft to pry open the drawer for clues.

For most players, relying on strategies circulated online is a better choice, but even if you solve a few small puzzles on your own, such a sense of achievement can give players a lot of happiness.

Generally speaking, the more mature design of puzzles and complete stories made Warner Epic Adventures a high degree of completion rarely seen in the Flash adventure game at that time. This has brought a lot of loyal fans to the game, and even years after it ended, some people are still digging up its story.

Today, Warner Epic Adventure is known by some as the "3A" of the Flash gaming world. This is not an exaggeration, because Sarbakan has taken this series of games very seriously from the very beginning.

The whole chapter of "Warner Epic Adventure" was not released at once. Sarbakan first released some chapters on Warner's official website and did not produce the next content until it received positive feedback from players.

In an interview with the media in 2002, Guy Boucher, president of Sarbakan, revealed that there were seven to eight members of the game production team, covering important positions such as designers, animators and programmers, including a full-time musician responsible for the original soundtrack of the game. Careful players must have noticed that from "Miller Heights" to "Warner Epic Adventure", the game has a special dubbing regardless of the supporting roles. Even by current standards, this is still a solid professional team.

Such efforts have gained positive feedback for them, and the game has not only been widely praised abroad, but also become the childhood of many domestic players. But what should surprise Sarbakan most is that the Flash game, which was born in 2001, will still be popular with players in the decades after that.

At the end of all the updates in the six chapters of the game, the unfinished players rummaged through the details of the game, trying to dig out the hidden lines or plots of the production team. Today, the ambiguous relationship between the leading actor and heroine can still lead to fierce discussion among loyal fans of the game.

In the original music of the game, a piece of music named "Episode 25" by musicians has sparked a discussion among players about the existence of episode 25 of the game, and even continues to this day.

The sequel didn't come from beginning to end, but the players' expectations are still there. They have created a special WiKi for Warner Epic Adventure, which collects characters, creatures and items in the game and provides them for people to retrieve.

In the past decade, there are still many players who create characters based on the images in their childhood memories.

There are even domestic players creating humanities based on their worldview. In 2017, a Dutch player conducted crowdfunding on crowdfunding site Patron and said he planned to use the U3D engine to reset the game. The news caused a strong reaction among Warner Epic Adventures players.

Unfortunately, this seemingly ambitious project didn't bear fruit, and like the end of many classic Flash games series, it seems to have come to an end. But this does not affect that players still remember the game.

In 2001, the Flash game was only in its infancy, and "playing games directly on the web" was a novelty to most people at that time. Born in that period, Warner Epic Adventure makes countless players unforgettable by virtue of its avant-garde concept, complete stories and rich puzzles.

Today, 20 years later, Flash games have become the tears of history, and Sarbakan is not what it used to be. Like the Miller Villa mystery, Warner Epic Adventure has become an ancient work that lives in videos and memories, but perhaps living in people's childhood memories is the best way to continue a game.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag), author: Bai Yi Jiu Jiu

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