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Adventure Jam 2021 concluded last Friday and, as there was quite a bit fewer entries than in previous years, I played through all the entries in a couple of days. Many familiar faces have joined in the fun of making a game for the jam, as well as some new ones. In previous years, I selected a dozen or so of my favourites, but now I've had to limit myself to a mere 9 (as well as some honourable mentions, of course). Again, shamelessly catering to my own tastes in adventure gaming, in alphabetical order, these are my favourites:
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Now there's a mouthful. And because the full title of this new game is so long, I'll just shorten it to "Jeffrey Jetsam" for convenience. It is my entry to the 2021 Adventure Jam which ran from 7 to 21 May. At the time of writing, it's actually still ongoing and I've released the game with a little over 2 days left on the clock.
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Sierra AGI games had a limited vocabulary for their command parser, but they allowed some synonyms from their word list, including some common misspellings. They also tended to just carry the list of synonyms from one game to another, so there are references in there to other games. I decided to abuse that system to get through the game with some of the weirdest commands I could find.
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It's been years since I've reviewed a point and click adventure game, but the official release of Inspector Waffles on several platforms, including on Steam and on GOG today warrants one. I've been following the game over the past 3 years or so and was extremely happy to have the opportunity to help out by beta testing as well as contributing some pixel art. So what is this game about?
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Computers only have a finite amount of RAM. When it runs out, they will "swap out" parts of memory that is not crucial to disk, soit can be read back in when necessary. As disks are much slower than RAM, even with modern SSD drives, having more RAM is always preferable to swapping, but it's still a good idea to have swap space available for when it is required. If you don't, you might find the "oom killer" has killed an important process to make some memory available to others. You really don't want your database getting killed just because PHP requires some extra memory because it's resizing a large image.
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