The Return of (Old) PC Graphic Adventures

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:Not mainstream?

[jd]

Muxes, mushes, moos and MUDs are not video games, they are text adventures or text social roleplaying systems. AberMUD (and descendants) would qualify, as would anything produced via one of the open-source graphical adventure systems. Text adventures, though, are generally superior to graphical ones as they can be larger, more powerful and less constrained by technology or graphics design skill. It would be hard to make a good graphical version of Dungeon, for example, despite Dungeon being ancient. For every graphical attempt you see, a hundred Dungeon-like adventures which truly take advantage of the power of modern PCs for even greater gamescapes could be churned out. Given the choice of one so-so graphical game or a hundred truly superb text games, I'll take the hundred.

Re:Not mainstream?

[Umuri]

Ok no offense but you're full of it.

That's like saying newsweek, the new york times, or a manga isn't a form of literature.
Sure it's not traditional, but it is.

And you will find VERY VERY few people who would back you up saying that Zork wasn't a video game.

You are using the age old trick of "Oh it's on the internet, therefore it's something else". No, it's not. Just because multiple people can play it and it doesn't have graphics does NOT mean it's not a video game.

Also, if you're going to get that technical, at least use the right terminal. Don't capitalize MUDs and not capitalize MUXs, MOOs, and MUSHs. They all stand for something.

Re:Favourite ScummVM game

[mvanvoorden]

Have you tried holding the stylus in your other hand?

How do you expect to play these games?

[Lord Byron II]

With many of the companies that made these games now defunct and out-of-business, how do you expect to connect to the activation servers in order to play these games?

And some of these games likely came on 3.5" disks, unless you happen to have an old disk drive connected to your machine, you're also out of luck, since we all know that you need to have disk #1 in the drive in order to get past the Securom checks.

Besides, I'm sure that most of you have long since used up your 3 installs.

Re:Not mainstream?

[Psychotria]

Umiri, as funny as it may sound I think that you and jd agree ;-)

Re:Not mainstream?

[MBGMorden]

So the question is: does a video game need video?

Define video though. In the "filmed reality", or even rendered video, sense, "video games" didn't have video for a very long time. I mean, Space Invaders, Galaga, Asteroids, Pac Man, etc, didn't have "video" in that sense but they were still "video" games. I think it's obvious throughout history that a "video game" has been effectively any game played on a video display device (ie, a monitor). By that definition text based games still fully qualify.

Re:Not mainstream?

[jd]

In a nutshell (or is that a C shell?), yes. There is a difference in the mental process, in addition to the conceptual difference, between an adventure like Dungeon or an online experience like Essex MUD and games like Space Invaders or Chuckie Egg. There is a difference in communication between MUD's "get all the keys except the gold one and put them in a box" (which was perfectly allowed) versus "left, right, fire". There is a difference in the entire nature and spirit between Level 9's Snowball and Attic Attack. There's an entirely different kind of rapport between you and the characters between Infocom's Deadline and ID's Quake. Writing mods for Adventure/Colossal Cave was easy. Writing mods for Pole Position was not. Computer mags circulated far more adventure writing engines than arcade game engines, resulting in far more people being able to experiment and hack their own. More people today remember Zork and do so fondly than can remember Citadel or Knight Lore, despite the fact that both titles were at least as revolutionary and as popular in their day.