This one does look very interesting as a media combination!
Découvrez ORMUZ comme si vous étiez à bord. Ce récit/test transforme une partie sur Amstrad CPC en véritable mission sous-marine, entre tension, imprévus et humour.
Une plongée originale dans un jeu aussi fascinant que récalcitrant, à lire gratuitement dans votre navigateur ou à télécharger au format PDF.
Discover ORMUZ as if you were on board. This story/test transforms a part on Amstrad CPC into a real underwater mission, between tension, unforeseen events and humor.
An original dive into a game as fascinating as it is recalcitrant, to read for free in your browser or to download in PDF format.
The story behind ORMUZ raconté de l’intérieur is a little unusual.
It originally started as a review for the French webzine Crack’N ROM Nostalgie (CNR). The manual did not explain very much, it was in Spanish, and at first I could not even work out all the controls properly.
So the review quickly turned into a kind of blind exploration: playing, experimenting, failing, starting again, and trying to understand what the game was actually doing.
I tend to dig quite deeply into things when I work on them, so at some point I also started looking at the code. It was not planned at all; I simply needed it to understand some of the mechanics and to check whether what I thought I was seeing while playing was really how the game worked.
By then I had already spent a ridiculous amount of time on what was supposed to be a fairly short web review. Reducing all of that to just a few lines no longer made much sense.
That is where the idea of telling the playthrough from inside the submarine came from, as if the crew were actually living through the mission. A lot of what happens in the story comes directly from the game itself: its mechanics, its limitations, and some of the nasty surprises it throws at the player.
And somehow that eventually became an 80-page little book.
CPC FANZ BZH later published it for free, both for online reading and as a PDF.
So yes, the mix of formats was intentional in the end, although it mostly happened because I spent far too much time trying to understand ORMUZ properly.
That was exactly the idea behind all this: to make players want to play the game. I just added a bit more to the story’s background, to flesh out the universe and give the player a little more to hold on to, rather than sitting in front of the CPC screen like someone staring out to sea, hoping a bottle containing a few extra explanations will eventually wash up on the beach by some act of providence.
If anyone ever wants to translate the story into English, or why not Spanish, I’d be happy to give them permission.
I only have two conditions:
— it has to remain free to download and share;
— and I’d like to handle the layout myself.
