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A Gothic horror adventure
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From the link below you can download my interactive fiction game. "Ghost Train." The game is free.
Ghost Train is set in England on Christmas eve night 1935. You are traveling in first class luxury onboard the London express, en route to spend a traditional Christmas holiday in Devon. That is, until fate intervenes to give you a one way ride into gothic terror.
Interactive Fiction (IF) games are text based adventure stories. You are the hero in an interactive environment where objects can be manipulated to solve puzzles. This game has been designed much like a novel with detailed backgrounds and an interesting Gothic story line. Ghost Train uses a powerful phraser to understand full sentence input from the player. The game also includes save and restore commands to save your state of play.
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Iwork as a Paramedic in Solihull which is a small town just outside Birmingham, England. I work on the fast responder cars. "Ghost Train" was written on a tiny Psion 5 in between waiting for 999 calls.
I wrote my first IF game "Castle Dracula" way back in 1983. In 2002 I wrote a new director's cut version which became "House of the midnight sun - A vampire's tale." This game is also available to download from this web site. "Ghost Train" is smaller, but a technically more complex game.
Why Ghost train? A couple of years ago, I got quite spooked whilst walking the railway line on a 999 call. We had a call to a local railway line. The driver of the Birmingham to London express reported seeing a body lying at the side of the track. We arrived at about two in the morning. It was a cold and foggy winters night. We had to leave the ambulance on a bridge and walk the length of the track with flash lights. Very surreal, very disturbing.
I also remember at junior school when for a week in June, everyone would become excited, looking forward to Carnival day. The only weekend in the year when Solihull would get a travelling fun fair. This was in the early 1960s long before the days of "Alton Towers," or "Drayton Manor Park." For us, this was as close as we would ever get to the Disneyland. A few days before, some of us would go down to Tudor Grange park and watch "Bob Wilson's" fun fair being built. As we cycled through the park the first thing you would notice was the top of the "Helter Skeleter" it's red and yellow point sticking up over the tree line. And then there would be the Ghost Train, with its outside painted in rich garish detail, depicting ghostly steam engines, skeletal station masters and other ghosts and ghouls. One year I remember asking a friend at school who had been down to see the fairground being built, what was there; "Saw the dodgems, and there's huge Ghost train. On the outside there's Frankenstein and Dracula, and Cabbage man." Cabbage man! It turns out my friend Jeremy had not seen the film "Creature from the Black Lagoon."
So here it is, my version of that fairground Ghost train ride.
Included in the games menu is the complete Dickens short story "The Signal-man." and be sure to check out "A history of the ghosts of London's underground railway." reproduced, with thanks from the "Going Underground" web site.
By downloading the game from the link below you will end up with a Zipped file containing the program; Ghost Z8. This is the inform game.
Not much use on its own.
To play this game you need the interpreter (this is the program that plays Inform game files on your PC or PDA.) Good news, this too is free and can be downloaded at the link below. From this link you will find many different Inform interpreters allowing you to play the game on anything from a PC, to a Sony PDA. I have also provided a link to hundreds of other Inform games.
For "The Ghost Train" the game file is: Release No 7. Serial number 290912.
For those that do, thank you for downloading and playing my games.
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NEW & FREE! To play " The Ghost Train" now in your web browser, click here.
FREE! Download a walkthrough for release 7 of the game by clicking here.
FREE! To download " The Ghost Train" - release 7 game file by clicking here.
FREE! To download an Inform interpreter for another type of computer click here.
FREE! To download other Zcode (Inform) games click here.
CLICK here to go to my other gothic game "House Of The Midnight Sun"
CLICK here to go to my latest IF game "Jet-Blue"
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I hope you enjoy your journey. All aboard!
Paul T. Johnson.
