Atomicvegetable wrote:Perhaps the original Police Quest is a good answer. My introduction to adventure gaming and i've gone back to it many a time throughout the years.
Whoa! The original EGA
Police Quest was my introduction to adventure games, too! It may even have been my first video game of any kind! I played it on a very old PC, an XT, maybe, with a big red flipper power switch on the right side, near the back. I loved the buzz of the 5.25" floppy drive during boot-up.
Due to my weak English skills back then, I didn't understand everything that was going on. That wasn't what stonewalled me, though. It was a mysterious, incomprehensible card game called five-card draw poker.
I was
so angry. I was so close to the end, and this dumb, totally unfair grown-up card game stopped me cold! My encyclopedia set was no help at all—I couldn't comprehend its description of poker. It took many,
many years before I finally figured out the basics of that confounded game. Ugh...
Well, anyway, I like to think games like that raised me to view video games as the greatest storytelling medium currently in existence. No other medium can enthrall me like a video game does. Many have expanded my mind, given me all kinds of new viewpoints to consider. They've even helped me learn English. I credit Sierra and Dynamix adventure games and the Super NES RPGs
Final Fantasy III (actually
Final Fantasy VI renumbered),
Chrono Trigger, and
EarthBound for refining my understanding of basic English grammar, greatly expanding my vocabulary, and improving my flexibility with the language.
The first game to come to mind that left a lasting impression on me was
Terranigma, a Japanese Super NES action-RPG released in English in the U.K. and Australia only, as far as I know. The main story of
Terranigma is a story of good versus evil with many, many twists, turns, and layers. An optional part of the story involves being the key catalyst influencing several world events, each of which illustrates a different philosophy of life. As a teenager, I was quite fascinated by the balanced portrayal of each viewpoint.
For example, in a small country town, your vote in an election will decide whether a democratic politician or a communistic politician will lead. If you choose the democratic politician, the town will grow into a big city and prosper. A gifted seamstress will leave the tyranny of her taskmistress and open her own boutique, quickly ruining her former taskmistress and allowing the seamstress to flourish. However, the city's prosperity will condemn the resident artist to producing art like a factory, no longer for his love of art, to meet the growing worldwide demand for his works.
If you choose the communistic politician, the town will never grow. However, the gifted seamstress' cruel taskmistress will change her ways to adapt to the new communist economy, becoming much kinder to her seamstresses in the process. The gifted seamstress will decide to stay with her taskmistress, but this means her talent will never flourish independently. The artist, meanwhile, will blissfully continue making art to his heart's content.
Another example is a small, sunny little island town. Although it is a very inviting place, nobody else in the world knows about it. By advertising the town around the world as a tourist destination, you can bring it new prosperity and growth. However, the newly grown tourist town will then capture many of your animal friends from an earlier chapter of the game to populate its new zoo. Their vast former habitats become as ghost towns, the zoo, a stifling prison.
The most affecting part for me, however, was the ending. After struggling so long, from beginning to end, with the hero, the game kicked us in the teeth with a bittersweet ending that was far more bitter than sweet. It shook me to the core. I wanted to cry, but I didn't know how. It didn't help that my high-school graduation party was the next day. To this day, I have trouble replaying
Terranigma because I'm afraid of reaching the ending again.
Many in the world will dismiss what I've just described as nothing, even less than nothing, compared to the world's literary, theatrical, film, and television masterworks. As a teenager, however, I felt I was learning some important lessons, although I wasn't exactly sure what they were. The hero's struggles were my struggles. His happiness was my happiness. His despair was my despair. His lessons were my lessons. No other medium could have touched me this deeply.
I felt strongly then, just as I do now, that video games were an emerging medium of expression with its own growing body of masterworks. I yearn for the day humans in general, including gamers themselves, will finally see video games as more than just playthings. Then, video games will finally stand tall among literature, theater, film, and television.
) houers playing adventure!!! 
