Accolade's Comics is an adventure game

Adventure game

An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenge. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media such as literature and film,...

 released in 1987

1987 in video gaming

-Notable releases:* January 14, Nintendo releases Zelda II: The Adventure of Link in January for the Famicom Disk System in Japan only. The game would go unreleased in America for nearly two years afterwards.* February 20, Konami releases Contra...

. Published by Accolade and developed by Distinctive Software

Distinctive Software

Distinctive Software, Inc. was a Canadian software house established in Burnaby, British Columbia, by Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember. It is the predecessor to EA Canada....

, the game intersperses arcade-style games into its plot. Computer Gaming World

Computer Gaming World

Computer Gaming World was a computer game magazine founded in 1981 by Russell Sipe as a bimonthly publication. Early issues were typically 40-50 pages in length, written in a newsletter style, including submissions by game designers such as Joel Billings , Dan Bunten , and Chris Crawford...

disliked the repetitive action sequences, but admired the game's satirical tone and writing.

Game play

The protagonist of the game is Steve Keene, a man fashioned as a wisecracking secret agent. Game play involves multiple adventures in two arenas: panels of a comic book page where dialogue and actions are selected for Steve that may or may not determine what will happen on the next panel (similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure

Choose Your Own Adventure

Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children's gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character's actions and the plot's outcome. The series was based on a...

book format); and traditional scrolling action boards where Steve is a moving character doing the physical task necessary (e.g. swimming, jumping, shooting) to advance through the stage. Steve can lose a life inside the comic page portions as well as the motion portions.