The Adventure Gaming Thread

ourchair

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Anybody love adventure games as much as Compound and I do? I just saw this movie, in which one guy plays twelve LucasArts adventure games in twenty-four hours and it was a total flashback trip for me, recalling all the good memories I've had with those adventure games.

So I thought, let's have a great big thread celebrating adventure games! What are your favorite games? What are your most cherished memories? Most hilarious moments? What about the embarassing things you've said while others watched you play?

I remember when my sister was playing The 7th Guest, the technologically ground-breaking haunted house turned puzzle room adventure. She was somewhere in the basement maze with her right hand on the mouse and her left hand covering her entire face except for one eye, dreading and fearing what might be around every dark corner.

Then suddenly the spirit fo Faust, the satanic toymaker, let loose a hideous laugh, and my sister SCREAMED and ran out of the room. Best gaming moment EVAR.
 
Here's the odd part about my adventure gaming love...

No matter how much I appreciate the variety and diversity of genres, and content, and aesthetics in adventure games, I find ti strangely reassuring that a lot of the gameplay -- from moving the character around, to finding hot-spots, to picking up objects, to the nature of the puzzles themselves -- are comfortably and reassuringly repetetive.

And yet, in some ways, the formulaic nature of the gameplay lends itself to the same situatitions popping up again and again.

So you just know that you'll meet the rich femme fatale -- whether she's a lycanthropic heiress or a dusky aristocrat -- with the snobby butler who won't let you into her house without an invitation or some kind of official disguise.

Or that the Secret Conspiracy is meeting in the catacombs beneath the Cathedral, whether they're a voudoun hounfour, or Neo-Templars, or the Cult of Anu-Anu. It's just a matter of figuring out the right code word, or hidden passageway, or both.

And I kind of like that same-ness, weird as that sounds.
 
You've been playing Gabriel Knight, haven't you?

One of the best scene in adventure gaming history, to me, is when Guybrush Threepwood use a ventriloquy book on Murray the talking skull. It's in the third game of the serie.

"I am mooseferatu, the devil Jersey cow!"

You have to play the game to really get it, but if you did, that was funny as hell.
 
E.Vi.L. said:
You've been playing Gabriel Knight, haven't you?
That, and Broken Sword 1 and 2, as well as Discworld: Noir. And I've noticed that a lot of the kinds of puzzles crop up several times, across the games, sometimes under very similar circumstances, despite the different settings.

E.Vi.L. said:
One of the best scene in adventure gaming history, to me, is when Guybrush Threepwood use a ventriloquy book on Murray the talking skull. It's in the third game of the serie.

"I am mooseferatu, the devil Jersey cow!"

You have to play the game to really get it, but if you did, that was funny as hell.
Sounds awesome. I really ought to play more Monkey Island.

In the video Ourchair linked to, I noticed the Manny Talavera cut-out in the background, later on. Was Grim Fandango a LucasArts game as well?

I know people are skeptical of licensed franchises being made into Adventure Games but I would really like to see a Tintin game that runs on the classic SCUMM engine. As in, deliberately retro.
 
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An interesting tidbit: Roger Wilco ranked #5 in Computer Gaming World's November 1996 listing of the 15 most memorable (and greatest) game heroes.

Adjusted for the nine years that have passed, Roger's probably at about 8 or 9 on that list now. Still, it's good to see the series get the mainstream attention that it deserves. If GamePro or one of those magazines ever does a "Top 20 Greatest Video Game Heroes", Roger Wilco better be on there.
 
compound said:
In the video Ourchair linked to, I noticed the Manny Talavera cut-out in the background, later on. Was Grim Fandango a LucasArts game as well?
Yes. And it's Manny Calavera. Calavera is Spanish for 'skeleton', if I'm not misinformed.

compound said:
I know people are skeptical of licensed franchises being made into Adventure Games but I would really like to see a Tintin game that runs on the classic SCUMM engine. As in, deliberately retro.
Me? Never! Anything's fair game to be reduced to the drudgery of lateral thinking and conversation trees!

Doc Comic said:
An interesting tidbit: Roger Wilco ranked #5 in Computer Gaming World's November 1996 listing of the 15 most memorable (and greatest) game heroes.

Adjusted for the nine years that have passed, Roger's probably at about 8 or 9 on that list now. Still, it's good to see the series get the mainstream attention that it deserves. If GamePro or one of those magazines ever does a "Top 20 Greatest Video Game Heroes", Roger Wilco better be on there.
As much as I love the Space Quest series, I've never considered Wilco a 'great' adventure game character, let alone hero, simply because he isn't a very interesting character to begin with.

Even between his egomaniacally over-inflated sense of self and his hilarious sense of cowardice, he's not what I consider a very interesting personality. It's the absurd situations he finds himself in --- from facing off a bunch of palette-insecure monochrome space thugs to fleeing from an oversized gall stone in the bowels of a loved one to liberating game designers from the clutches of software conglomerates --- that make following him around interesting.

But then again, I find the lack of intense characterization something symptomatic of Sierra adventure games to begin with anyway, not with regards to the NPCs, but the player-avatars.
 
Has anybody played Flight of the Amazon Queen before?

Wikipedia entry on FotAQ said:
Taking place in the 1940s, the game is a pastiche of adventure serials of the time. The player assumes the role of Joe King, pilot for hire and owner of the Amazon Queen airplane of the title, who crashlands in the Amazon jungle and subsequently has to save not only his passenger, the famous movie star Faye Russel, but also an entire tribe of Amazon women and even the world from a mad scientist and his lederhosen company, who have concocted a vile scheme to turn Amazons into Dinosaur warriors.
I'd never heard of it before. Stumbled upon it, while looking for games that had been modded? ported? (correct term?) to run on the SKUMM VM engine.

The content sounds like it's right up my alley. The interface looks simple enough. A quick skim over a walkthrough makes it appear playable enough. And it's readily availbe as freeware, it seems.

But I was hoping that somebody who actually has experience with the game could help me decide whether it's worth my time (and flash-disk space) downloading it.
 
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compound said:
Has anybody played Flight of the Amazon Queen before?

The content sounds like it's right up my alley. The interface looks simple enough. A quick skim over a walkthrough makes it appear playable enough. And it's readily availbe as freeware, it seems.
I can't put my finger on it, but something about the precise elements it chooses to pastiche together reek of a color-by-numbers adventure plotting, as if it were a mutant offspring of former employees of Coktel Vision and Legend.

I'm honestly not that intrigued by it since it seems like one of the also-rans of the genre. And not to be elitist or anything, but I think ten years is a long enough time for the game to receive some degree of cult following developing around it. Hell, no one at AdventureGamers or JustAdventure brought it up during my brief time there.
compound said:
I'd never heard of it before. Stumbled upon it, while looking for games that had been modded? ported? (correct term?) to run on the SKUMM VM engine.
It's not modded or ported. Rather, SCummVM is designed as an emulation environment to work with games you already own, but can no longer run on a modern PC. The principle is identical to console emulators, except that PC games are already in copyable softcode form. If I'm not mistaken, the people who do console emulation have to do ROM imaging since plugging your cartridge into your computer is uh, impossible.

For FotAQ, they've released the source code as datafiles. It's not modding or conversion per se, since all source code is encrpyted into a big data file for the PC. If you've played an old Sierra game, it's that big RESOURCE.000 file. It's a logical move on their part, since they're pretty much abandoning any commercial interest and it would probably be difficult to find a copy of the game anyway.

Only reason Sierra doesn't is because they probably have a vested interest in making re-releases of their old library for future platforms (if ever) as a sort of Sierra Anthology, WinXP edition. I hope they re-release the Roberta Williams Anthology so I can burn it next to the voodoo doll of Todd Porter.

compound said:
But I was hoping that somebody who actually has experience with the game could help me decide whether it's worth my time (and flash-disk space) downloading it.
I'll download it for you when I have the time.
 
Jeebus H. Christ! I've missed plnety of awesome game, it seems...

Has anybody ever played Beneath A Steel Sky?

It was apparently released to well-documented critical acclaim, if the WIkipedia entry is to be believed.

AND it has a tie-in promotional comic by Dave Gibbons to boot.

The concept sounds a little derivative, but it sounds fun enough in that offbeat Fallout or Superhero League of Hoboken kind of way.
 
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Flight of the Amazon Queen and Beneath A Steel Sky are both great games. Flight of the Amazon Queen harkens back to Monkey Island in many ways, with absurd situations and pure humor. Beneath A Steel Sky is serious and it's easily one of the most challenging adventure games I've ever played.
 
compound said:
Jeebus H. Christ! I've missed plnety of awesome game, it seems...

Has anybody ever played Beneath A Steel Sky?

It was apparently released to well-documented critical acclaim, if the WIkipedia entry is to be believed.

AND it has a tie-in promotional comic by Dave Gibbons to boot.

The concept sounds a little derivative, but it sounds fun enough in that offbeat Fallout or Superhero League of Hoboken kind of way.
Ha ha ha. I was just going to pimp that on to you on this thread a couple of hours ago, but I figured pimping stuff to you doesn't work so well. You nevah listen to me.

Beneath A Steel Sky is pretty much on the level of critically-acclaimed cult classic. Not exactly a Monkey Island in terms of status, but certainly induces misty-eyed memories amongst those who played it. I had a copy before but it kept hanging at a certain point.
 
I was just reading about Sierra's Laura Bow detective adventures (The Colonel's Bequest, and The Dagger of Amon Ra), and the description of the gameplay sounds ridiculously complex and frustrating, especially in the sequel.

Is it really no different from any other timed murder mystery -- for example, Last Express -- or is the "character-oriented" and "logistical" approach of the games truly unique?
 
One of the most memorable adventure games to my mind isn't really perfect, and it's called Bad Mojo. And when I say this game is 'memorable', I don't use the word lightly --- it's a photorealistic game played entirely from the perspective of a cockroach.

You play Roger Samms, an entomologist who is transformed into a little roach inside a fleabag of a motel. Getting around in the motel seems trivial as a human, but as a roach, it's a veritable obtacle course made up of stove burners, in-door plumbing and flypaper.

Solving puzzles involves using your small insectile frame to push around pennies and matchsticks to affect your environment, and none of the puzzles are overly difficult so long as you use your powers of observation. Its the limited form of interaction that a roach is capable of that makes the game easier to play since you're not exactly overwhelmed with the abundance of choices present with a point and click interface and inventory.

What really shocks me about this game is that it still looks equally disturbing in its gritty photorealism, nine years after its release. You'll literally gag at seeing termite colonies and half-dead rats and hold your breath at the dirty corners of toilets and bed mattresses. But the best news of all, is that Bad Mojo was recently re-released by Got Game Entertainment.

This new release updates the game to be more compatible-guaranteed for Windows XP computers and modern devices and the video cut-scenes have much better stability and better color resolution.

An added bonus is a special feature-filled DVD. Features include a making-of segment with behind the scenes footage, developer commentaries, concept art, a visual hint guide. All of these features are viewable on your TV, as well.

Think about it: an enhanced, more accessible version, optimized for today's technology, at less than half the price of the original release. That's just too generous!
 
Not really. But I find it strange that a whole thread is dedicated to Adventure Games and non have mentioned the best, after Monkey Island, adventure game series in my opinion: Goblins (Gobliiins, Gobliins and Goblins 3) :?
 
Not really. But I find it strange that a whole thread is dedicated to Adventure Games and non have mentioned the best, after Monkey Island, adventure game series in my opinion: Goblins (Gobliiins, Gobliins and Goblins 3) :?

Monkey Island was mentioned. Check a few posts back. Whenever I post in here I usually avoid bringing up the celebrated classics, like the LucasArts titles and some Sierra titles, because those games are already praised enough.

I love Gobliiins as well.
 

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