I miss the good ol adventure game days

Does anyone remember a game called Loom? It was made my Lucas Arts. How about the Myst games. Those were very difficult. However, they had great graphics.

Yeah - I do remember Loom. Pretty early Lucasarts game but quite good actually

I'm surprised I didn't see mention of Simon The Sorcerer. The first and second installment were real gems! The third was crap though, but they've done a whole lot better with no. 4

Other than that I must say that I too miss the good old days with the classic Lucasarts and Sierra On-line games. I absolutely LOVE the Monkey Island series, and I've also played the Leisure Suit Larry series a whole lot. But then again a lot of Sierra titles were great. Here are a few that may not have been mentioned yet:

Gold Rush
Codename: Iceman
Future Wars
Operation Stealth

Also games like Curse of Enchantia and Lure of the Temptress were enjoyable games - and not to mention Cruise for a Corpse. Coktel Vision's "Lost in Time" was also a very nice game.

As for newer games I can mention "The Moment of Silence" and "Still Life" as being very enjoyable great games!

I can also see that Microids have plans of releasing Syberia 3 in 2010 ... looking forward to that ... loved those games.

I actually have a copy of Codename: Iceman. It's on the original floppies, too!

-Fred

I'm with netroam on the future release of Syberia 3. The first two games were VERY good, especially the story lines. I was hoping they would come out with another installment.

Loom was an odd, intriguing and fantastic little gem. One of the very, very rare games to feature gameplay and puzzles built into the story so flawlessly. Definitely one of a kind.

I wish they would have finished up the two planned sequels to Loom. They were tentatively named Forge and The Fold. I would have loved that.

-Fred

I believe adventure games are going to make a big comeback in the next five years or so. A lot of first-person-shooter games are adding more factors of exploration and problem solving to gameplay so the like of the gamers. It'll just take some time and help from the adventure gamer fans to revitalize the genre.

I went out and replayed Loom, because of this convo.

Now I've got an urge to come up with a game based on transmutation of matter, and music, playing as an alchemist, in a first person adventure.

Who's with me?

RogueAgent wrote:Hey Bafitis,

I tried to play the second phantasmagoria but there were way to many movie sequences. It felt more like a movie then a game. I was watching way more than playing.

I got P2 as a christmas present and I honestly thought it was so bad it was good. The acting, characters and dialog were so cheesy I laughed out loud several times while playing. I think I even updated my machine to a quad speed cd just to play it (not cheap in 1996).

With the tex games, the acting often wasn't stellar, but since tongue-in-cheek humor is part of the experience, it works well. Phantasmagoria 2 was trying to be a serious horror game/movie and it just really misfired.

I hope you at least played to the sex scenes.

I have to go against the grain on this subject.

What I miss are the old days, but I don't really miss the old games.

Back in the late 80s/mid-90s, games on the PC were still a mess. Drivers had to be written to the hardware level (no Directx) and you had to hand-modify startup files to get them to work. A good graphics card cost $300, which is probably equivalent to $500 today.

But the interfaces of the old games were often a pain and not intuitive at all. They were often really unfair and unmercifully difficult.

Back then, games on a computer were still very novel in most ways, so we took all the shortcomings in stride. In fact, we prided ourselves on being able to overcome them. And then later, we would discover glitches that allowed us to truly "control" a game.

Meh... the world has changed, though. Nowadays, the resources are out there to make really deep, intuitive, incredible games and people are doing just that. When I go back to the old games, it takes a major effort and lots of deep sighs to "get into the game" again as I'm reminded how clunky the controls, story lines and dialog were and how ridiculous some of the puzzles could be.

When I played Shenmue and later, Indigo Prophesy, that was heaven for me for adventure gaming. Shenmue had a lot of shortcomings but Indigo Prophesy is near perfect, in my opinion.

And I love the current generation of games which combine Adventure, RPG and Action elements to varying degrees, such as Grand Theft Auto, Fallout and Bioshock. This is what the early developers WANTED to do, but couldn't because PCs and game systems were too limited.

For pure adventure, I still think there are a lot of good options, like the Sam and Max episodes.

Personally, I think adventure gaming has evolved and it's better than ever.

billbixby wrote:

RogueAgent wrote:Hey Bafitis,

I tried to play the second phantasmagoria but there were way to many movie sequences. It felt more like a movie then a game. I was watching way more than playing.

I got P2 as a christmas present and I honestly thought it was so bad it was good. The acting, characters and dialog were so cheesy I laughed out loud several times while playing. I think I even updated my machine to a quad speed cd just to play it (not cheap in 1996).

With the tex games, the acting often wasn't stellar, but since tongue-in-cheek humor is part of the experience, it works well. Phantasmagoria 2 was trying to be a serious horror game/movie and it just really misfired.

I hope you at least played to the sex scenes.

I didn't mind P2 all that much... True the movie scenes excessive, but nothing like they were in TLC... TLC pretty much was a movie that you watched and then you answered questions later... It was narrated by English actor John Hurt...

As for the Sex Scenes in P2 they were okay, for a computer game anyway... The girl who played Jocilyn, Monique Parent, has done a lot of soft porn movies... Everyone else pretty much were nobodies and still are nobodies...
The game itself was a bad attempt at a sequel... The puzzles {which is what they were called} were pretty much the easiest puzzles I've ever seen...
If you ask me the game looks like an attempt at a short film or possibly a Sci-Fi movie of the week, but no one was willing to do that so they chopped it up and put some interactive features in it and turned it into a game...
It was a good game for its day... Not a great game like Tex or many others, but something good enough to pass the time...

Meh... the world has changed, though. Nowadays, the resources are out there to make really deep, intuitive, incredible games and people are doing just that.

I can't possibly disagree more, but I'll just take a deep breath and let this one slip by

The technology is there, but the depth has long since left the building. Games simply took a strange tangent at the most unexpected moment, at the very peek of what we all believed, around 2000, to be the future of gaming.

After Half Life, Baldur's Gate 2, Deus Ex and No One Lives Forever, I was convinced it was going to be the start of something big. The long awaited boom of technological prowess and fantastic games. How games quickly took an entirely different, shallow, empty turn, I couldn't say.

What's dead may never die, though. We'll see it again, at some point. I'm a believer

I agree with you Frank.

What a coincidence it is that games started to lose their soul when distributors figured out there was a lot of money in the gaming industry.

The same thing happened to the music industry... there was a golden era, but now people just make and download what they want, when they want it, and the industry is finally becoming free from distributor influence again.

The same thing happened to the TV/Film industry... now people just make and download what they want, when they want it, and the industry is becoming free from distributor influence again.

The same thing will happen to the gaming industry... people will make/download what they want, when they want it, and the industry will again become free from distributor influence.

Distributors say its pirates and dishonest consumers who hurt the industry. But if the industries were not invaded and ass raped by these distributors who only came in and took control becuase they smelt money in the first place, perhaps people would be less inclined to screw the system.

That's my rant. Games today may be better designed... but lets be honest: they all f**king suck!

-Cub. =o)

Yeah I agree with Frank as well... Deep Games started to die off and were replaced with Smash 'Em Shoot 'Em up types... If games had remained Deep and Thoughtful, the continuation of the Tex Murphy Stories would have have been continued without question or budget...

Cubase wrote:That's my rant. Games today may be better designed... but lets be honest: they all f**king suck!

I have to disagree with that last statement Cub... We still have Final Fantasy coming out with new Episodes, those are pretty decent games... Heavy Rain will be released soon, hopefully it's as good as it has looked so far... While it's a Kill 'Em and Smash 'Em style, God Of War still has a good storyline to it, I feel...

Anyway all I'm trying to say is I don't think They ALL Suck... Though I agree with everything else you said about distributors and whatnot sticking their hands in the money bag of almost all industries...
Also as you stated people can just make whatever they want...

The technology has just become so cheap that if someone has a car accident and gets awarded 25-30 grand, they could practically have a film making studio in their garage...
No like 15-20 years ago when all the equipment like that was something you could only dream of...
Same goes for computer equipment... If you have 20 grand to invest into your machine and software, you could turn out a Shoot 'Em Up game with little trouble... And that is what the kids today eat up...

It's almost like no one wants to "Think" anymore... Games like Tex Murphy and others from 10-20 years ago made you Think about the solution... It made you think on how to get it done... True Gamers know what it's like to be stuck on a Puzzle for 2-3 days or longer... That's what gaming was all about... The adventure of being pulled into the game world where you felt like you had to get that puzzle completed... Games use to pull you in and for the time while you were playing it, you were in that world...
Ask a 15 year old to play Tex Murphy {UAKM or PD} today, I'm willing to bet he gives it back to you within 24-48 hours and you'll be lucky if he completed 3 game days{chapters}...

I remember one time I was stuck on a puzzle and I went to the MVA {motor vehicle administration} and I'm sitting there waiting for my number to be called... Well I was stuck on this puzzle for at least 2 days, I had hand written scraps laying around trying to figure it out and I'm just sitting there thinking in the MVA... All of a sudden it hits me on what the solution might be... I started talking to myself, It Can't Be That Simple, How Could I Have Missed That, along with a few other things referencing the game... I looked up and said a loudly, not quite a yell, "That's Gotta Be It"... Then I looked around and kind of mumbled, "I Gotta Go"...
I can't imagine what I must have looked like... lol

Life was so less serious back in the 90s...