Oh, wow. OMM, talk about memories (the linked article is from 2000.) Among other things Chet and Erik were famous for the Time To Crate system of reviewing games by how long it took from starting the game until you saw a crate. Since this was the late 90s/early 2ks, it was generally zero seconds. This was in comparison to real life, where I frequently go years at a time without seeing a single crate, but then again, I am not a genius game designer.
Kevin: This shot reminds me: You'll see games with forklifts and crates, but you won't see one goddamn pallet. You know what a pallet is right? Yeah, you worked at the warehouse, you know. But all these whiny bitches who go to college on their parents' money and then design games have never been inside a real fucking warehouse and have no fucking clue that in order to move a fucking crate, you need to have a goddamn pallet.
I thought crates were actually on their way out a few years back. Then cover-based shooters became popular. For those who don't know, a "cover-based shooter" is a shooting game in which the game explicitly has a concept of taking cover, such that your character can actually duck behind things and has explicit support for popping up and shooting things. As opposed to simply ducking behind a wall in Doom or something, which has always been good strategy but never actually been part of the engine.
Sadly, there are only two forms of cover level designers seem to be able to work into games now: crates, and in a true sign of giving up, completely unmotivated chest-high walls, which apparently on the battlefields of the past, present, and future are just sort of treated like a basic decoration tool, like an "arch" or "window". ("Hey, hon, I cleared a space in the backyard, what should we do with it?" "Ever since I was a child, I dreamed of having a white picket fence, a dog, and a small maze of chesthigh walls in the backyard. Grab a shovel.") Now we're back to a TTC of approximately "whenever the first firefight" occurs, so, yeah, few seconds tops.
> I thought crates were actually on their way out a few years back.
Ironically I think crates went out faster IRL than in game. I haven't seen crates in forever, barrels yes but not a true crate. Most things now are placed on a pallet and shrink wrapped like crazy. They'll stack a couple of these on top of each other and they remain intact.
The strange thing in games is that crates manage to get themselves into places where it just doesn't make sense. Like in Kingpin, they managed to get down an alley way with a small area for the buildings back doors. It was like some hobo was wheeling crates around the city with a dolly cart.
On (working) military bases, and some industrial sites, you will still see plenty of crates (often reusable), pallets with built-up storage things for liquids or special purpose parts, and 10', 20', and 40' containers. Plus, barrels. I was surprised just how much bases in Iraq and Afghanistan looked like video game levels.
I was going to add how I thought Half-Life given its military bases is probably the only major shooter of its era that actually had a reason for all the crates and barrels. I think the circus you end up in (if I'm remembering the original game and not an expansion or total conversion) is actually the only other place I saw a genuine crate. Incidentally it was filled with food for the animals and not headcrabs.
My problem with most shooters is that the crates are placed randomly. At least in Half-Life the crates were more often than not in a storage room/area/rack than piled in the middle of a room or in an obscure corridor.
Fallout 3 resolved the box problem too, in that most items were actually found on shelves. Something I hadn't seen since the days of isometric RPG's where tables actually found their heyday.
Not to mention their 'beta testing' of Asheron's Call's anti-griefing features by playing an effeminate sailor and harassing people.
The highlight for me though was their guest book. Rather than write their own, they and their entire readership would go and crash someone else's, with a new one each week. Here's a wayback link: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19991010010423/http://www.o...
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have archived any of the actual postings, but they were as deranged as they sound :)
I think the iOS platform is helping the revival of adventure games. Just the ones I've personally played on the iPhone over the last couple of years:
- Monkey Island 1 & 2 Special Edition (remastered graphics)
- Broken Sword special edition
- Hector: Badge of Carnage: EXCELLENT original game (if somewhat short)
- Flight of the Amazon Queen
- Beneath the Steel Sky
- Gobliins
I'm sure I'm missing something... There's also some games that are available on the iPad only, and I think the trend is there: adventure games are coming back.
Actually, I would say this is more thanks to ScummVM (an open source re-implementation of many adventure game engines), as well as the people who ported it to iOS. The last three games listed probably use ScummVM without modification (citation needed), and I would be surprised if the Broken Sword and Monkey Island remakes were not heavily inspired by the efforts of ScummVM to revitalize interest in the games.
I thought that ScummVM was GPL. Doesn't that run against Apple's rules? Wasn't there a case of a 3rd-party dev team in Europe embedding ScummVM into a Wii game for EA (or some large name) and it had to get pulled due to Nintendo's licensing rules (which conflicted with the GPL).
Yes, you're totally right! ScummVM was a great part of this, as well. I remember getting an otherwise shitty Nokia phone in 2006-07, only because it could run ScummVM (iPhone wasn't even in the rumors then)
Hahaha, beautiful article. I'd love to see someone attempt to secure cat hair to their face with maple syrup.
Having to jump through hoops like forging a mustache onto someone's passport before applying a fake mustache yourself in order to impersonate said person is the reason sites like gamefaqs.com exist.
Another stunning realization is that after deciphering that web of absurdity someone took the time to write it down in a guide instead of just shutting the program down, ejecting the disc, dousing it in gasoline, and lighting it on fire.
Decent graphics are murder for adventure games. With some of the oldest adventure games, there were only a few places you could plausibly click on and see a result. Hunting for the interactable object in a 3D textured and shadered world is less intuitive.
Syberia I & II, The Longest Journey/Dreamfall are a couple of amazing adventure game series. Neither are exactly recent (2004 and 2007 respectively), but they're still full of atmosphere and enjoyable to play.
I continue to hope that Ragnar Tornquist will make another game as brilliant as The Longest Journey. If he can manage to inject some of the creativity of that game into his upcoming Lovecraftian MMO The Secret World, it could be superb.
I've started playing adventure games in late 80's/early 90's with King's Quest and Gobliiins, and I've seen pretty much all of it, but for my money, there's no better adventure game than Longest Journey
Adventure games continue to be released by indie companies. Some of those are pretty good. For example, Gemini Rue was released just a few days ago. A Tale of Two Kingdoms came out couple of years ago. Both were polished and quite innovative in their own ways. This is more than I can say about many AAA titles today.
I think Scribblenauts + adventure game storylines would actually resurrect the genre in an amazing way. Imagine a harry potter style game where you can create anything to solve simple puzzles.
Pretty funny, but point and click adventure games are still popular. There are several titles on Steam released this year for PC.
The NintendoDS has several successful titles: Trace Memory, Hotel Dusk, and others. A new Professor Layton title topped sales for the 3DS, recently released in Japan.
They might not be as popular percentage-wise, but what are the sales totals and revenue like compared directly to those titles, I wonder? The total market must be a lot larger than it was back then.
Actually, much of the Myst series' "eye candy" provided considerable depth, with all the journals and their diagrams, video segments, and (sort of) interactive points. While the environments were largely static (read: empty, dead), the back story found in the journals and other elements was interesting enough to keep going, at least for a while.
Depth in graphic adventures may be tough, but it's doable.
I disagree. Legend Entertainment managed to make some great "text & graphics" adventure games: Companions of Xanth, Deathgate, Shannara, and Callahan's Crosstime Saloon spring to mind. Perhaps it helped that they were all based on novels.
I used to be a humongous fan of 2D adventure games. Most notably the Space Quest series. If you've never played them start out with Space Quest 4 and then play SQ6. The audio dialog in the game is unrivaled humor. Full Throttle was also one of the mega-classics of 2D adventure games. I think the downfall of these games came when the studios tried to go the 3D route.
The story, characters, art direction, music and puzzles were brilliant. I'm pretty sure the interface could have been better, though. Steering Manny through the environments felt like driving a malfunctioning tank at times.
I think the relaunch of Monkey Island on the iPhone proved that adventures are far from dead. Are they still mainstream? Maybe not, but I definitely see elements of adventures in modern games. Games like Fallout 3 and Bioshock rely heavily on storytelling. You could argue that some sandbox games like GTA San Andreas (haven't played IV, sorry) are technically adventure games or have adventure components. While I think the point and click (and text-based IF) adventures of years gone by are no longer mainstream, to say that it's dead is like saying that RTS is dead because there's no more fixed-view overhead style Command & Conquer games - they've just evolved.
The more I think about it I think you're right, but if you look at the way that games are made now, the costs and the audiences they have to reach, making a highly cerebral adventure game is quite risky. I don't see EA ever doing it for example.
I can see adventures working well in the casual gaming space, but I think that the mass appeal side probably needs to be there too.
Satcking is not a Telltale game. It's made by Double Fine, the people who made Psychonauts. Double Fine is run by Tim Schaefer, who helped create many classic adventure games like Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, etc.
They trash Gabriel Knight III, but I would go back farther and trash Gabriel Knight II and other games of that era. That was when it first became technically possible to have a significant amount of multimedia in a game, so it did things like make you watch your avatar walk excruciatingly slowly from the car to the edge of the screen everytime you wanted to go anywhere, and you had to listen to a bunch of interminable bad acting.
I wouldn't know about Gabriel Knight III because I didn't bother to play it, or other Sierra games, after getting burnt by their earlier CD-ROM era games.
It's not entirely dead. I grew up with adventure games and the best one I've played to date was actually a platformer. Highly recommend Psychonauts to anyone mourning the death of the genre.
Psychonauts is a great game, but it wouldn't be categorized in the adventure genre - at least not in the vein this article is referring to (old school point and click puzzle solving).
It's ironic to see this article just days after the release of Gemini Rue, which is an outstanding adventure game. But I agree with the general message.
I hate puzzle games, personally. Diddle the widget so that the frobulent gibbers the foomatic - extend the prior implication chain a few levels - just gets more than a little old.
I really enjoyed an interactive text-based fiction game recently. But that palled - I realized I could be coding and being productive. >..
As commercially available products, they're definitely not dead. Studios keep churning out point-and-click adventure games, just check out www.jayisgames.com, the Nintendo DS, and the smart phone app stores.
However, innovation within the genre is on life support and in critical condition, but it has been like that since long before that article was published.
They still largely depend on puzzles with only a single correct solution, even if you have items in plain view on the screen that in reality would solve the problem (this is the "dream logic" mentioned in the linked article). They also rely on pixel hunting. Nothing has really changed.
Sanitarium was weird, frustrating, surreal, fascinating. I loved when the boss tossed you out of the barn with a complimentary wrench, just what you needed to wire the tractor battery to the gas drum or whatever, and blow up the barn.
Definitely, RPGs and adventure games work well with touch screen devices that lack traditional game inputs (game controllers, keyboards), especially compared to action or platform type games.
The article's over ten years old, and since then there's been a sorta revival of the genre. There are all the Telltale games, the Monkey Island remakes, and more recently the brilliant Machinarium. Digital distribution services like Steam have helped, of course.
I just started replaying the Monkey Island games this week after about 15 years since I last played the original. Definitely one of the "best of breed". Sam & Max were enjoyable, as well as the Indiana Jones games, but Monkey Island was perfect in that it never took itself seriously so it didn't suffer from the "why the hell do I have to do this?" factor that some adventure games did.
In general, I think LucasArts was probably the best at this in the 90's.
Problem is that games like Machinarium are still just "hunt the live pixel". You have to hope you get close enough to the active object in order to notice it/grab it/operate it. On a larger resolution, this can be quite maddening.
Game Designers: How about making the useable objects more noticeable (like a glimmer or something). Also having the puzzles make sense goes a long way.
Yeah, that's the route we took with Scarlett on the iPhone as well — there's just an icon you can touch to highlight everything of interest. I'm not sure why it hasn't been a standard feature of the genre; maybe some people enjoy pixel-hunting?
Oh, dang. I am sitting here waiting to pay my big adult bucks for the HD remake of Space Quest and they had to revive that girly knock-off quest... jeez :)
I enjoyed Machinarium, but I have a hard time calling an adventure game without dialog brilliant. It's pretty and whimsical, and fun at times, but I just don't see what's so great about it.
It's very much like those flash "room games" with high production values, and those aren't very good most of the time.
