Category:Sherwood Forest Software

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[[File:sherwood.png|thumb|320px|Sherwood Forest]Another industrious pairing, Rob Sherwood and Dan Whalen pumped out game after game. Their concern lay more in high concept scenarios than in exploring Game-Maker’s abilities. The result is that each game stays well within the limits of Game-Maker’s back-of-the-box feature set, and so comes off like a cross between Pipemare and Sample, except without the polish. To the last, the games are top-down action adventures, controlled with the arrow keys and the space bar. They even use most of the same filenames.

Although the individual games may be unremarkable, when you scrape up a big enough pile of them you begin to take each new concept strictly within the limits of the Sherwood Forest template. Shootout at Dodge has a wild west setting, and a kind of neat side-scrolling overworld or map screen. Big Bob’s Drive-In has a 1950s diner setting, which rationalizes attacks as food orders and monsters as customers. Robo Wars wraps its generic top-down action in a sci-fi techno setting. Rocket Fighter tries to sell itself as a space shooter, though you and I know better.

Perhaps Sherwood Forest’s best-known game is an adult title called The Adventures of Melvin Freebush, that may or may not have been created with Game-Maker. Although I have yet to track down a reference copy, I have noticed a certain fond following in some circles.

Erotic Game-Maker games are hardly unusual, particularly in the wake of Sheldon Chase’s Woman Warrior games. Yet it is interesting to see wink-wink eroticism as just another plug-and-play theme next to wild west shootouts and space operas. I suppose that in the end Game-Maker is just an empty engine that fills in its blanks with standard data files. Yet it takes a certain chutzpah to not only lay that structure bare but then in one’s callousness to extrapolate it into our wider understanding of theme and narrative.

All is one, most is crap, and the sooner you submit the further you can go. I’m not sure what to make of this philosophy. All I can think of now is how Sherwood could easily have included porn in any of its genres. Had they that foresight, I wonder where they would be today.

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