Passengers on the Wind

Passengers on the Wind, I had never seen or heard of until Antoine Vignau of Brutal Deluxe sent it to me. According to the About dialog, the game was produced by Infogrames and adapted (for the IIGS?) by Ordigrames.

There is no copyright date anywhere in the program, but the main application's last modified date says 1988, if that's any help, as it's creation date states 1946!

As for background info behind the game, Antoine told me it is based on a popular French comic strip. Playing the game reminds me of something written by Jane Austin, concerning very conservative romance and the like. But I can't say I've played much of the game. This archive includes two versions, one application saying it's the demo. The demo version seems to give more of an introductory passage than the 'real' version, and starts at a different point as well. The 'real' version can be run from System 6, by launching the 'main' application and not the standard .SYS16 application.

The game play itself is akin to simply reading an electronic novel; I'm stuck on a particular part and I've no idea how to get past it. Up until that point, the 'game' simply involved me to switch between characters (by clicking the rectangles up or down next to the character's face in the bottom left hand of the screen) clicking on the face so that they may speak their lines and 'interact' with other characters. You may also have to click in the text area for characters to execute an action, although I haven't come across any real choices in doing so. Perhaps Passengers is just an interactive comic?

The graphics are interesting; I like the way smaller graphics appear to whatever is happening in the story. The colours are very washed out however. This may or may not be true to the comic original's style though. Music plays in the background constantly, which can get a bit monotonous over time, but there is an option to turn that off. Likewise, there is an option to save the game state ONCE and reload that saved game state.

So the game's more a novelty than anything else, quite like other unreleased IIGS games.