The Return of (Old) PC Graphic Adventures 93
KingofGnG writes "Though they belong to a genre already considered defunct and inadequate for the mainstream video game market, adventure games have a glorious past, a past that deserves to be remembered, and, of course, replayed. At the center of a good part of this effort of collective memory, there is ScummVM, the virtual machine which acts like an interface between the feelings and the puzzles from the good old times and the modern operating systems. As already highlighted before, the ScummVM target has grown immensely over time, going from the simple support of the 'classic' adventure games par excellence published by Lucasfilm/Lucasarts, to a range that includes virtually any single puzzle-solving game developed from the beginning of time up to the advent of the (Windows) NT platform. The last video game engine added to ScummVM within the past few days is Groovie, created by the software house Trilobyte for its first title released in 1993, The 7th Guest ."
Re:In other news... (Score:1, Informative)
Maybe. But Return to Zork (RTZ) will definately not run on the Scumm VM.
Actually, there is a work-in-progress engine for it [scummvm.org] already. It seems playable, but I've only looked at the first few rooms (I'm not familiar with the game) so I couldn't say how well it works yet.
Re:Favourite ScummVM game (Score:3, Informative)
Tim Schaffer's studio Double Fine is working on Brütal Legend, you may be interested:
http://www.doublefine.com/news.php/projects [doublefine.com]
Also try Psychonauts. It's free on Gametap until the end of the year, so if you hurry...
Re:Favourite ScummVM game (Score:3, Informative)
You can get that for free including a snazzy installer set up that works directly in Win XP from gog.com. Love that site. Great price and increasing selection. As of a couple of days ago BASS was still free to download complete with modern installer.
Re:Not mainstream? (Score:3, Informative)
The term was not "visual games" though, it was video games. As stated everything that has ever been called a video game has had two common threads: interactivity and the use of a display device. The sophistication or even presence of pictures or graphics has never been much of an issue.
Indeed, if you check the literal definition of "video game", it is:
1. any of various games played using a microcomputer with a keyboard and often joysticks to manipulate changes or respond to the action or questions on the screen.
2. any of various games played using a microchip-controlled device, as an arcade machine or hand-held toy.
Any game, including text ones, played on a computer fit both of those definitions. As such if the dictionary states that they've a video game, and my own intuition doesn't disagree, then I'm not inclined to modify my perception of them as such.
That's a *good* copyright protection (Score:3, Informative)
And don't forget about the adventure games that somehow worked something from the original manual into the gameplay. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I'm scowling at you.
Yup. I remember. You had to constantly read your own copy of the Grail's book to advance in the game, just like Indy in the movie.
But also the various "Conquest" series of Sierra games which came packaged with extensive documentation about the era of the game and everything in the game being very strongly based on that culture leading the player to constantly cross check their documentation.
I personally think that it's a much more brilliant and unobtrusive mechanism for copy-protection than the average "Please type word 65 of paragraph 11 of page 174 of the manual" (Or even worse : the horribly long magical incantations from King Quest III that you had to copy as is).
Of course it integrates a lot better with puzzle/detective oriented gameplay like in adventure games or not too much combat oriented RPGs. Whereas today market is 99% FPS, and I really don't see how to integrate phases asking the player to pause the game and start mining the documentation looking for crucial clues in games which are usually action packed and fast packed (I don't know : detailed map of the battlefield that the player must scrutinize in order to sport possible place where the damn sniper who is constantly head-shoting has hidden ? Heroic fantasy gates that only open on answer of complex riddles that require knowledge about the in-game historical back-ground ?)
And not to forget the single most important factor that encouraged people to actually buy the games :
the games came in decent boxes *WITH* all the aforementioned documentation together with lots of additional merchandise :
additional books (Space Quest II came with a comics book) nice cloth maps that you could pin on the wall (a must have in some RPG with complicated geography) posters, even weirder stuff (Space Quest III came with a "Andromeda Guy" disguise). In the past, Infocom has been renown for the "feelies [wikipedia.org]" bundled with the game.
A genuine legal game box had a lot of significant advantage over a pirated copy.
Today, most of the games are sold in small plastic shitty boxes. Containing only the disc, and the activation code. If you're very lucky, you'll get a small "quick-start" leaflet explaining you how to download Acrobat from Adobe's site in order to be able to print the documentation on your own.
There's absolutely no difference between a retail game, and something that you burn yourself and throw in a plastic box.
The diminishing quality of game packages, I think, has a small role to play in the fact that lots of pirate don't even see what's the advantage of getting a retail box.
Note that both my brother and I tend to buy my games in "Limited Edition" and similar package (Bought Dreamfall together with the artwork book, bought Paradise (intl:Last king of Africa) with the making of, etc.
Because if I'm going to give money to support the authors, I definitely want to have something worth the money in return - not just something that looks exactly like a home made CD/DVD. I really appreciate the art books, etc.
Nonetheless we download the game cracks right after installing the games, because we're just fed up with yet again some obscure DRM system that fails to recognize the original disc. (The first few Starforce games I've met, were systematically detecting forbidden background task - even if my Windows partition is empty and has no DeamonTools or whatever installed. The first few SecuROMs just was unable to detect the original disc. I haven't bothered to check if later versions of the games did fix these bugs - I just crack them by default)