The Rise and Fall of Graphic Adventure Games 134
The Opposable Thumbs blog has a detailed retrospective on almost three decades of history in the graphic adventure genre. While this type of game has fallen from favor in recent times, many classic titles made indelible marks on the memories and preferences of an entire generation of gamers. If you played video games in the '80s and '90s, you'll probably see something you recognize. Quoting:
"In its sometimes-turbulent thirty-year history, the graphic-adventure genre has driven technology adoption, ridden at both the crest and trough of the graphics and audio waves, touched the lives of millions of people, and shaped the rise (and, in some cases, fall) of several big-name people and companies in the gaming industry. It's a genre that has often been held back by its own insularity, suffering from an unwillingness to adapt to changing market conditions or to further push the boundaries of interactivity. Adventure games certainly did these things, but the efforts to truly innovate seemed to peak in the mid-'90s, before rapidly falling off—with only a few exceptions. The improving fortunes of adventure game developers in recent years may at least in part be attributable to their efforts to innovate—Telltale with the episodic structure, Quantic Dream with a new control system (for better or worse), and Japanese developers such as Cing with Nintendo DS titles that introduce elements from visual novels.
Creativity (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a lot of GAGs (graphical adventure games) I remember fondly. Of course there's Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion and Indiana Jones (sorry, I missed some of the other big names of that time) and a bit later, Ripley's Believe It Or Not: The Secret of Master Lu (or whatever it was called in the US).
Then there's modern adventures and even modern instalments of some of those I have named. I did see a fall from grace. It's the same fall from grace a lot of other games had: While graphics, gimmicks, gadgets and gizmos skyrocketed, creativity withered and died. What games, in general, nowadays often lack is a good story, humour, interesting characters etc. A combination of those things, any combination, will do to keep one interested.
This is, of course, a matter of opinion, but frankly, I think game makers should rethink their business strategies. Even though Indiana Jones was just a bunch of pixels in Fate of Atlantis, I still felt the somewhat oppressive and clammy atmosphere in the maze, trying to avoid encounters with similarly pixelated Nazis. That is called immersion, folks. It is what makes any kind of entertainment enjoyable. This proves that you don't need high class graphics to obtain a high level of immersion. It's not the photorealistic artwork, that will enrapture your audience. It's the story you are telling.
If the story sucks, if you don't care about the characters when planning the game, how can you expect us to care when playing? Perhaps I just haven't found the right games for me, but lately it feels like these studios are 60% management, 40% development and one dude in a basement to whom the script has been outsourced. Then again, that one dude in the basement just might produce better work than what I've been seeing...
Old Man Murray's Death of Adventure Games (Score:5, Insightful)
Old Man Murray made a compelling argument explaining the decline of adventure games:
http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html [oldmanmurray.com]
Re:Did not recognise any of these titles... (Score:4, Insightful)
Brute force pixel hunt... (Score:5, Insightful)
Without tough-to-quantify-or-demonstrate-in-a-ten-minute-tech-demo-to-the-suits stuff like wit, good puzzle logic, and a dash of elegance, it is all to easy for an "adventure" title to fall into the morass of being a mixture of grindingly dull and unrealistic pixel hunts(You need a stick for reasons that make no sense. Go to the 'forest' area and move your cursor from right to left, line by line, until it changes to the 'action cursor' icon when you have found the one stick in the forest that is actually an inventory item, rather than painted background.) and dialog trees that read like the bastard spawn of a choose-your-own-adventure book and the worst tech support call ever endured by man. Extra credit for puzzles that make up for their childish simplicity by tacking on utterly arbitrary requirements that can only be fulfilled with fanatical inventory management and the prescience of the Kwisatz Haderach. The technical requirements of making such a game are minimal, so the barrier to entry is low; but the result is utterly unplayable dreck.
By contrast, with the exception of the "baby's first 3d engine" horrors that no sane human pulls out of the bargain bin(Extreme Paintbrawl anyone?), the world is full of utterly generic; but playable enough, Doom Clone N+1s, illegitimate children of either C&C or Warcraft, and Diablo clones of assorted stripes. Most are not good; but the more action-oriented genres seem to have a much wider band of playable adequacy. This both makes them lower risk to produce, and makes the average endurability of those genres higher. Ergo, more are churned out.
It's like humor vs. generic summer splatterfests. Humor well done is excellent. Humor ill done isn't simply dull, it is downright painful(I find this odd; but it seems to be the case). Your basic run-and-gun action fest or hyped horror vehicle, on the other hand, has to work much harder to be downright painful, even if its odds of being excellent are basically nil. For whatever curious reason, there is just a broad band of "OK" in some genres; but much sharper division between "superb" and "painfully worthless" in others...