AL GONZALEZ SHARDLIGHT MUSIC SERIES

AllMusic called her 'one of the quintessential singer-songwriters of the '70s'. She has a contralto vocal range, and cited Odetta as a significant influence. Simon was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994. She was honored with the Boston Music Awards Lifetime Achievement in 1995, and received a Berklee College of Music Honorary Doctor of Music Degree in 1998. In 2005, Simon was nominated for a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but she has yet to claim her star.

In 2012, she was honored with the Founders Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. In 2022, Simon was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Simon was born on June 25, 1943, in New York City. Simon, was the co-founder of Simon & Schuster and a classical pianist who often played Chopin and Beethoven at home. Her mother, Andrea ( née Heinemann), was a civil rights activist and singer. Her father was from a German-Jewish family, while her mother was Catholic.

AL GONZALEZ SHARDLIGHT MUSIC SERIES

Lamplight City is the latest game by Francisco Gonzalez, developer of Shardlight, (which I loved), A Golden Wake (which I’ve not played) and the Ben Jordan series (which I can never play, because it shares its name with one of my best friends and that’s just too weird for me). I really did love Shardlight though, so I had high hopes and expectations for Lamplight City as soon as I heard about it. It was described as a detective game set in an alternate history USA with steampunk elements, where your actions across half a dozen separate cases would affect the final outcome of the game. The result is a bit disappointing though. The game sees you playing as former police detective Miles Fordham, now reduced to being a private detective after accidentally killing his partner on a routine burglary investigation. Oh and the spirit of his dead partner is haunting him. First is that a detective plagued by a spirit driving and helping them to solve cases is pretty close to the premise of WadjetEye’s Blackwell series. Ok, there are several differences when you examine them close up, but the broad concepts, the elevator pitches are pretty similar and that’s an… interesting choice in a field that’s as relatively small and close-knit as the indie adventure game genre (WadjetEye worked with Gonzalez on his previous games, pretty much every voice actor in Lamplight has also worked on WadjetEye games, etc). I’m not saying that because Blackwell did it no-one else can ever do their own take on the Randall and Hopkirk, Deceased model, especially as the Blackwell series has finished, but I don’t know, it’d be a bit like if Sierra had done comedy pirates in the ’90s. They’re not doing anything wrong, but… come on. Of all the possible concepts for adventure games out there, to end up with something so similar is questionable. The second issue is that Lamplight City’s ghost, Bill Leger, is pretty damn annoying. There’s a fine line between charmingly smart-arse and unbearably smarmy (trust me, I know) and he often doesn’t stay on the right side of it. Bill provides most of the response to the player’s actions – choose to look at an object in the environment and it’s Bill, not Miles, who will remark about it.

It makes Miles feel a bit useless, like he’s unable to do detective work on his own (which admittedly is sort of a plot point), and distances the player from him a bit. This isn’t helped by Bill being unseen on screen but seemingly omniscient, as Miles doesn’t have to go anywhere near anything for Bill to see it. It’s like there’s an intermediary stage in your direct control of the character, someone jumping in to do things on Miles’ behalf. Having a second character for the player is hardly a new device, but usually they’re either a fully playable character you can switch to, or a back-up and assistant of sorts. Max in Telltale’s Sam & Max games is a good example of this, as he is the game’s hint system and you can tweak in the menus how often, quickly or bluntly he’ll spontaneously offer help if the game thinks you’re stuck, while also being there for you to directly talk to in order to get hints.

Al gonzalez shardlight music