This week we’re going to take a nice, hard, powerful, righteous look at MS Paint Adventures by Andrew Hussie. But the thing is, they aren’t even made with MS Paint. What the hell, man. What the hell.
Nah, it’s cool, because the concept behind MS Paint Adventures is pretty awesome: he basically creates text-based adventure games. Using the responses of the readers, he will draw up and animate the next page in the story, and leave a small tagline at the end to motivate suggestions for where to take it next. It works a lot like those style games would be expected to, wherein the main character of each story will pick up a radio. Or put a hat on their head. Or stick a fork in a light socket. It’s a very fun little experiment creator-reader cooperation.
Andrew has about four stories set up on the website. He began with Jailbreak, which he lists on the site as being a story that will go unfinished. He also has Bard Quest listed as unfinished, Problem Sleuth which is completed, and Homestuck, which is a work in progress. What’s cool about Homestuck is that it is the first of his stories to incorporate music. This is what I like about interactive comics like this. The creators will do what they can to integrate a lot of different work from different people, and use all sorts of varying art forms blended together for a more powerful effect.
If you like puzzles and gadgets and riddles and stuff like that there, you’ll be very pleased with MS Paint Adventures. On the site you can even use a ‘Save Game’ feature to keep your place when reading through a story. They tend to get pretty long, so it’s definitely a handy feature. I just love the fact that you have the potential in some respects to alter the path that the story takes. It’s weird, kind of like one of those games you’d have played in computer class in grade school. Remember Number Munchers? Hell yes you do.
Seriously though, if you like things like Choose Your Own Adventure books, this is kind of like that. Not entirely, as you only get the one option and need to hope that your recommendation is used, but still… if you like anything where you are involved in the progression of the story, take a look at MS Paint Adventures. It’s a fun and interesting time.
You can visit the site here.
