The Adam's Birthday Saga Continues

Adam's Birthday Game

Release type: Freeware
Release date: November 17, 1993
Levels: 6
Author: Alan Caudel
Website: DummyDuck.com
Related games: Adam's Birthday Game, Adam's B-Day 3: The Saga Continues, Adam 97, Adam 98, Adam 99, Adam 2000,

A year on, another birthday, and now a firm grounding in the tools at hand; the second Adam's Birthday game is a huge leap over the first, if just as rapidly assembled.

As with the previous game, Continues uses just a few resources: a single character wandering a single map, built of just a few types of background tiles and populated with three consciously slapdash monster types (recycled from Adam's Birthday Game). Here, however, Caudel makes more of a meal from those resources, splattering them with irregular spots of grand, often strangely aimed, ambition.

His skill in art, animation, and design has steamrolled forward; though still early days, Caudel is much more confident here in pushing Game-Maker's envelope. With Continues, Caudel builds more of a narrative arc than before; the player goes through several distinct steps to reach the end, including a search for a weapon, various lethal setpieces, and both dangerous and beneficial secret areas.

The monsters are just sort of there, as an obstacle to avoid during the first leg of the quest and to easily dispatch from there on. The real relationship here is between the player (via an avatar of Adam Tyner) and the environment. The game's single map contains several small sub-areas -- e.g., a "Guillotine Gallery" or a small room containing Adam's sword -- linked to the larger structure by hidden warps.

Avoiding danger in Adam's Birthday Saga Continues

Usually those warps are hidden in intuitively placed cul-de-sacs, that you can use NES logic to identify. "Surely there must be something over here," the brain says -- and when it does, the game indeed tends to reward that impulse. Cluttered as the map may seem at a distance, Caudel displays a healthy command of flow, ensuring that the player who sticks with the game will find a hand that meets them halfway and quietly guides them forward.

In and around the warps, Caudel differentiates the action and locations through an interrogation of Game-Maker's tile properties -- animation, gravity, changing on contact with the character sprite. Every new turn presents a slightly different task, all more or less fair in what they ask of the player, ensuring that the player is continually engaged and rarely lost.

To enhance that engagement, Caudel put the bulk of his effort into the presentation. The animation here is complex and expressive -- far more so than the systems or objectives would mandate. Through the normal course of play, the animation helps to lift the game's tone above its often frustrating moment-to-moment mechanics with flashes of strange and gratuitous humor. When Adam is injured or dies, he uses a hand to flatten his body like a clay telescope, from head to feet. The player also can elect to do this at will, with a tap of the "S" key.

By far the game's most dramatic statement comes at the very end, with an extended and smoothly animated in-engine cutscene. The technique here is meticulous; though it must have taken an age of trial and error, Caudel has erased most of the pencil marks and smoothed over the seams; the scene just happens, as if in afterthought. This is no afterthought, though. In retrospect, the whole body of the game seems like a preamble to this moment.

So, despite a little mechanical awkwardness, The Adam's Birthday Saga Continues ably guides the player through a gauntlet of small, mostly well-judged, threats and rewards, then with total nonchalance delivers a megaton punchline. You don't get many games that stick a landing like this, especially not Game-Maker games, and especially not games sketched out as quickly and roughly as this must have been.

It's around here that Caudel's command of Game-Maker really takes hold, and the big systemic experiments start to drive his creative process.

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Adam '92	Adam '93	Adam '95
Adam's Birthday series

Story

Many months ago, in a state far, far away...

         ADAM'S 
        BIRTHDAY

       EPISODE II     
 THE TYNERMAN STRIKES BACK

Adam Tyner, after finding his present last year, has come upon yet another birthday. Knowing that he was entitled to a present, he searched far and wide to find it. He asked Alan to help him find it. Days later he found a note that said "I found your present in a castle, but I can't get out because of the numerous traps, and badniks. If you can make it through the castle, I'll give you your present! -ALAN."

HAPPY BIRTHDAY !!!

Instructions

The world of Adam's Birthday Saga Continues

How To Play Adam 2!

To move, I suggest using the numbered keypad. Take a wild Guess how to move.

       7 8 9
        \I/
       4- -6
         I
         2

Special Moves

P - Pick up items

D - Drop items

space - Throw sword (find it first)

Up - Enter hidden doors, climb ladders

Down - go down ladders

Hold Left and tap Left Jump - Speed running left

Hold Right and tap Right Jump - Speed running right

S - smash yourself

Try to find all the secrets you can! You earn money that way!

Credits

This game is designed exclusively for Mr. Adam Tyner by none other than the world's greatest game maker -

Alan Caudel

with his notorious helper Dummy Duck and his friends.

Please play this game as much as you wish with our best wishes. For help or technical assistance please send $5000.00 for 5 minutes on our Toll-free hotline. Or if you don't have $5000, call anyway and maybe we can help you.

Have Fun.

Availability

This game is not known to have been distributed in any form, prior to its addition to the Archive.

Archive History

On October 20, 2010, Caudel posted a comment to a YouTube video of Peach the Lobster, under the name dummyduckrulz; following up the conversation, on June 29, 2011 he provided a link to a collection of games recently uncovered by Adam Tyner. This initial archive included:

Adam's Birthday Game The Adam's Birthday Saga Continues Adam's B-Day 3: The Saga Continues Adam 98 Big Fat Tank! Blip!

The Complete Bone Adventures Dummy Duck II Dummy Duck 3 FireAxe Lil' Choklit Donit Man in: Choklit Terror!! Mister Spiff I

Mister Spiff III: Freeze! Mother! Freeze! Raiden II Return of the Jedi Scurvy the Squirrel Star Avenger II Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

Links

• Play The Adam's Birthday Saga Continues online

Downloads

• The Adam's Birthday Saga Continues (95 kB)
• Game map (55 kB)