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[mildmojo]

From Subtext Wranglers comes the startlingly fresh text adventure, Road Trip: Southwest USA.  Originally released in 1996, Road Trip was Subtext's last ditch effort to save their long-ailing company in the middle of a text adventure market slump.  More of a market funeral, really.  The market was dead.  Dead, dead, dead.  Parrot dead.

The ensuing copyright controversy over thematic elements that were strikingly similar to a yet-to-be-released Sega CD game resulted in Subtext's demise.  The publisher pulled the product, and it plunged headlong into obscurity.

Until now.



We recovered the last known copy of Road Trip from a 5.25" floppy found in a surplus disk caddy purchased at a local estate sale.  We don't know how the disk came to be there, and it appears that the original box, instructions, and 3.5" diskette have been lost to time.  And now, we make the game available to you, free of charge (actual cash value).



Desert

demake.

Developed in linux from scratch in 4 or 5 days.  Written in Ruby using the Rubygame library with SDL bindings.  It looks like a text console, but it's actually an animated graphic recreation.  That's why the scroll looks sluggish on your kitten-flogging quad core; it's intentional.

Linux download! (zip)
Windows download! (zip)
Source tarball!

Windows compatibility: Tested to work with Windows XP Home, tested NOT to work in Windows 98. I'm going to pretend that it's compatible with Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista until someone proves me wrong.

OSX users: I don't see why the source shouldn't run if you can get your hands on an OSX version of the Rubygame library and its dependencies. I don't have an OSX box for testing, don't see one in my future, and don't have any OSX developer friends.

[Noyb]

Desert Bus as a text adventure? :D

[mildmojo]

Nailed it. 

I like the idea that someone might've heard about Desert Bus and thought that it would actually make a fun game, and didn't realize what they'd done until it was too late.  And that they named it such that it could become a series if it were successful.  "Road Trip: Alaska".

The idea and original mockup was from my talented friend quixote, with whom I'm collaborating; he's provided much of the writing.  We discovered the compo about a week ago, just before the deadline extension.  How could we resist?

[mildmojo]

Linux version is up, win coming soon, source coming soon.

[cyber95]

Wait, a Linux version before the other two more popular operating systems?

[mildmojo]

I'm having an absolute *bear* of a time getting the ruby dev environment set up in win98 under an emulator right now...  So yeah. 

[mildmojo]

Source is up.  No go getting the windows version to compile tonight; gonna have to wait 'til tomorrow. 

Are late entries okay if they're just ports to other platforms from the same codebase?  Since it's an interpreted language, it's literally just a platform swap and a recompile, provided the platform cooperates.

[mildmojo]

Finally got it to build in Windows XP Home on a borrowed laptop.  I forgot how god-awful the Windows command interpreter is; maybe this copy of XP was hosed, there was no command history (not even doskey), no tab completion (of course), and 'cd' couldn't seem to change to a directory with a hyphen or space in the name, even when quoted!  Blargh.

So, Windows version is up.  Lemme know if it fails, or if it's enjoyable, or if it bores you to smithereens. 

[Terry]

Just tried this out; very funny idea. I wasn't expecting it to have so much more material than the original, which was a nice surprise

loved the SH2 reference  :P

[mildmojo]

Just tried this out; very funny idea. I wasn't expecting it to have so much more material than the original, which was a nice surprise

Thanks for giving it a go!

You probably didn't make it to Vegas, but there's some extra content there, too, along with the ability to make the trip back to Tucson.

loved the SH2 reference  :P

Heh, I have confirmed with my partner that this was unintentional.  Neither of us has played SH2.  I think we just sort of recognized it as a very uncomfortable situation that could make players cringe and chuckle at the same time. 

[masterwriter42]

Desert Bus does have one use however, the Desert Bus charity event that Loading Ready Run does every year in November. I'll try out your demake and if I find it worthy, I'll let them know about it. Maybe they'd do an episode or something referencing how someone made an IF spinoff.