A New Year's Revelation

Happy New Year, fellow sleuths! I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday and got to spend time with family and friends.

I personally had an awesome holiday, made amazing memories, ate delicious food, and got amazing gifts! What was the best part of your holiday?

We are now officially a week into the new year. How crazy is that? A few days ago I was working on extracting all the game files for the beta versions of Trail of the Twister, Shadow at the Water's Edge, and The Captive Curse (generously donated by Calina Herman of StoryRetold) and made some interesting discoveries. For instance, can you believe that about 1/4 of the audio files from The Captive Curse were taken out when the game shipped in 2011? I can't wait to play the game through and see how much is different!

The other day, I had a realization which turned into a revelation. Do you remember the mini-games that HeR Interactive used to have on their site? I played through all of them on YouTube which you can check out here! They ran on Adobe Flash which is no longer available. Through the amazing power of a program called Ruffle, not only have I got them up and running again, I've actually implemented them into my website! You can go play most of them right now by clicking on the button called Extra+ on the website navigation bar, then clicking Mini-Games! I'm SO excited about this, especially because the ones that work will actually also work on mobile devices! This means that for the first time ever, you can play Scopa exactly as it is in the PC game on your phones and tablets.

Now, I will say that not all of the mini-games work. Some won't even start while others only make it to a specific point before malfunctioning and will refuse to progress. I'm not sure why this is the case, but my goal is to keep working at trying to figure out why they aren't working. Anyways, the list of all the mini-games that are currently inoperable is at the top of the page.

In other Nancy Drew news, I will start uploading the walkthrough for the mobile version of Ghost of Thornton Hall starting on January 15th! Channel members get to view the walkthrough early, so if you're super keen you can become a member now to view it before it goes public! The first 3 episodes are now available for all channel members.

Finally, I re-uploaded the soundtrack to Mystery of the Seven Keys because I just want to have it up on my channel again and implemented into the game page on the website. I quietly uploaded it and it can now be viewed here:

I also realized today that I never actually recorded a proper walkthrough for Mystery of the Seven Keys! I only ever recorded and uploaded a blind playthrough. Time to add that to my list of things to do!

That about wraps up today's post. Until next time, detectives!

Huw

NOTE: I started this post on Jan 4, 2025 but posted on Jan 7, 2025. That is why the publish date says the 4th instead of the 7th.