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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 mor
by sid0 16y ago
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.
- hvs 16y agoI 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.
- pragmatic 16y agoProblem 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.
- weavejester 16y agoI rather liked the Grim Fandango's mechanism for solving this problem; Manny would turn to look at an interesting object when he walked past it.
- limmeau 16y agoI think it was in Simon the Sorcerer: a hotkey that highlighted all clickable objects.
- timknauf 16y agoYeah, 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?
- sid0 16y agoI don't really agree -- I found that I could reason out where to go around 95% of the time, and for the other 5% I had the handy in-game guide.
- Fargren 16y agoI 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.
- sid0 16y agoMachinarium does have dialog. There's no text, but there's still dialog.
- dpritchett 16y agoSpeaking of Steam - the OMM authors Chet and Erik have been working at Valve for years.
- mechanical_fish 16y agoErik Wolpaw was the lead writer of Portal, and is also the writer of Portal II. The guy can write.
- sid0 16y agoOK, I did not know that. I love the writing in Portal.
- pcorsaro 16y agoPlus, Telltale just announced the revival of the King's Quest series. It doesn't get a whole lot more adventure than that.
- jarin 16y agoAnd the Back to the Future series is AMAZING. Episode 1 is free right now: http://www.telltalegames.com/bttfoffer http://www.telltalegames.com/bttfoffer
- eps 16y agoOh, 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 :)
- Fargren 16y agoLet's not forget about the AAA adventure game, Heavy Rain.