Arrival, or Attack of the B-Movie Clichés

Some people actively court adventure.

Some people avoid it if at all possible.

A lucky few have it plop down in their backyard like a wad of sodden newspaper....

Arrival Movie Poster Imagine being eight years old again. Going to school, doing chores, occasionally having some time to play. Now imagine that space aliens existed, and that they chose your backyard to land in.

Pretty cool, huh?

But it won't be cool for long! These are B-movie space aliens, so they must be up to no good! Can you stop them in time? Arrival gives you the chance to find out.

Arrival is one of the first games written with HTML TADS. It is a hybrid text adventure, featuring graphics, music, and sound effects. It was my entry in the 4th Annual IF Competition.

If you want to play Arrival in all of its multimedia glory, and you are running Windows 95, 98, or NT, then you have two options. One is to download an executable version (arrwin.zip; 1.2M) of the game. The other is to download the HTML TADS player's kit (look for the htads_playkit_xxx.exe file) and then the actual game itself. If you don't care about no steenkin' graphics and want to play Arrival as a regular text adventure, you only need a TADS interpreter whose version number is 2.3 or later.

Arrival comes in three parts: the game itself (arrival.gam; 252k), its graphics file (arrival.rs0; 641k), and its sound file (arrival.rs1; 249k). Alternatively, you can download all three files in a zip file at once (arrival.zip; 852k), or, as mentioned earlier, you can download a Windows executable.

Other assocaited things:

If you've played the game, feel free to rate it
If you haven't played the game, see how other players rated the game or read its review on Baf's Guide
If you'd like, you can download the source code (arrsrc.zip; 111k)
Due to popular demand, I've made some of the graphics available for your viewing pleasure
Once you've played the game, you can read my post-mortem of the game

Here's what other people have to say about Arrival:

The pictures are drawings that appear to be those of an 8-year-old, and the sounds are effects that you might hear in an Ed Wood movie--and the whole thing is immensely funny.
          --Duncan Stevens
These pictures are the funniest thing since >OPIN DOR!
          --David Dyte

I can't think of any work of IF that has made me laugh so much.
          --Michael Straight

All the funny pictures and sounds in the world couldn't make Arrival a good game if it wasn't, at its core, a well-written text adventure. Luckily for us, it is.
          --Paul O'Brian

The graphics and sound are by no means compensating for weak writing; even without them the game would be hilarious.
          --Dan Shiovitz

Quite fun to play.
          --Lucian P. Smith

Breathtaking! Has "Oscar" written all over it!
          --Jeff Craig, Sixty Second Preview

Don't be the last on your block to play Arrival. Download it now!

[Go back to the list of games.]