Why Are We Still Talking About LucasArts' Old Adventure Games? 285
jones_supa writes "The gutting of LucasArts was a tragic loss for the video game industry, but for many of us, it was more than that. By most accounts the last truly great LucasArts game was released almost 15 years ago, and yet, many in the industry still hold these titles as the benchmark. But why is that? Why is it that we still consider these games among our pinnacle achievements as an industry? Why do developers still namedrop Monkey Island in pitch meetings when discussing their proposed game's story? Why do we all continue to mentally associate the word "LucasArts" as the splash screen we see before a graphical adventure game, even though the company hadn't released one in over a decade? Gamasutra has collected a good majority of the answers. Following these responses, as a special treat, Lucasfilm Games veteran David Fox attempts to answer that question with his own insider perspective."
Because of what they involved (Score:5, Interesting)
Book of Unwritten Tales (Score:5, Interesting)
I know everyone wants to complain about adventure games being dead, but recently I have been enjoying The Book of Unwritten Tales [kingart-games.com], an amusing point-and-click adventure in the traditional style. Incidentally, it had a Linux port before Valve ported Steam.
Cheers,
-l
Replaying value (Score:3, Interesting)
Many games are too boring to play to the end even once. They lack story, or the challenges are repetitive in nature (Shoot that alien! Now shoot that alien! And that must be an entirely different alien, even though it looks exactly like those I shot before it, but it's still moving!...)
It is an interesting challenge to see whether you still remember the solutions to all the puzzles in the LucasArts games. If you do, playing these games is like participating in an interactive movie, but often with way more alternatives. I still like exploring large and complex environments when I find the time. Leave linear first person shooters to the masses and give me a new Fallout, Wasteland, or Elder Scrolls. Zak Mc Kracken 3D?
The LucasArts games were made with love and programmed thoroughly. I mean, while many games in that era were difficult to set up, the LucasArts games usually scaled better with faster hardware and enjoyed patches for years, long after other manufacturers would have dropped similar games. Also, the philosophy of death-free play that encouraged explorative playing style without a gazillion load-attempt-reload. The LucasArts games still serve as an ideal that is difficult to reach for many productions even despite much larger costs.
Re:I'll remember the pain. (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the games from back then were just as bad about configuration.
The worst were the games (can't remember the names, but were usually from the early '90s) that hardcoded the Sound Blaster's I/O port or IRQ or DMA channel. It could be made to work, but if something else in your system had grabbed one of these (most often a parallel port needed the IRQ) you were out of luck. Even better if you had more than one such game and one of them expected a different value (say, one wanted 0x220 for the I/O port, but another expected 0x240).
Even if you had one of the later games that let you specify your configuration, you might still have to dig the card back out because you'd set a jumper or DIP switch wrong and there was a conflict. Then you'd have to set the AUTOEXEC.BAT incantation correctly, which would be extra work if you'd been forced to switch a jumper around.
And the video! A game might work just fine with a bog-standard VGA card, but another would need VBE 2.0 and if you didn't have the newest card that meant editing AUTOEXEC again to load a TSR on boot. Oh, wait! Now with that TSR you don't have enough RAM to run your game, so you've got to either fiddle with CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT manually (reading the manual entries for EMM386 and HIMEM) or shell out for an upgrade to MS-DOS 6 or buy QEMM386 and hope that either of the latter two could successfully optimize your memory layout. If you're poor and not up to editing your config files, you could always make a boot floppy instead (sometimes the game even did that automatically! Oh the luxury.) and boot the computer from that when you wanted to play your game... except that sometimes the automagic boot floppy utilities didn't set up your Sound Blaster properly, so you're still looking at work.
Kids just don't know how good they have it these days, with working PnP and standardized multimedia APIs and a flat memory space.
Re:Nostalgia. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Last great game 15 years ago?! (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who played the shit out of the original X-Wing back in the day, I've always wished someone would put out a remake, sequel, or even just a non-movie IP based space combat sim modeled after X-Wing and with all the bells and whistles of modern gaming.
A deathstar-esque run, with on-line co-op and voice chat would be awesome.
Re:Nostalgia (Score:5, Interesting)
Even though a comment of mine further down the list wishes for a parser to be in a game, the parser could sometimes kill a puzzle. That was horrid. You had the right idea the entire time, but whomever programmed that one puzzle into the game was looking for a very specific word choice otherwise it was no go. If I remember correctly, King's Quest 3 had an instance of this when attempting to turn the wizard into a cat. I gave up on the game at this point. Went back to it about 5 years ago, decided to finish the game, downloaded the walkthrough,etc etc. Got back to that point, found out that my original idea was correct, I just hadn't been typing the command in the way the game wanted me to. Some people if given a time machine would go back in time and give themselves the winning lotto numbers, sports picks, whatever. I'd go back in time and tell myself what I needed to type to turn that damn wizard into a cat.
Re:I'll remember the pain. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting today. A few months ago a group of modders released Diaspora, a Battlestar Galactica game based on the Freespace 2 Open engine. It takes a little bit to get working, especially for multiplayer. The younger people, I'd say those 25 and under, got frustrated at the game and gave up to go back to the craptastic browser game released by bugpoint. Why? They couldn't hit the magic "login" and play button. You had to do some set up first in the launcher to get the game to work and then there are a few features in the advanced menu to check/uncheck depending on your set up. That was "too hard" for most of them. Then when they got into the game they said it was "too hard" with "too many things" to remember and those of us with joysticks had too much of an advantage, yada, yada.
I guess I don't mind because I think I spent weeks getting Wing Commander Privateer to run on my computer from with a floppy with custom config.sys & autoexe.bat files. There were others, but Privateer was the one I remember the most frustration with.
Re:Why? Simple ... (Score:4, Interesting)
because the hardware wasn't good enough to make it shiny.
Yeah, but what kind of frame rate did you get out of King's Quest? ;)
I think this is a bit like music - people always try to credit nostalgia, but really some old music is much better than most modern music. The trick is, there was plenty of bad old, music, but nobody remembers it. The winners have staying power, and color our memories.
And my favorite musical era occurred a few years before I was born. My second favorite, 40 years before I was born, and my third favorite, when I was 12. So now people will immediately jump on the one when I was 12 and say it's because I grew up with it.
c.f. the RedLetterMedia review of The Phantom Menace.
Re:Nostalgia Nostalgia Nostalgia (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's all nostalgia, we should find games we didn't play "back in the day" boring. I can tell you this is not the case. I too was a Sierra kid, but I love LucasArts adventures. I loved Civilization back in the day, today I'd rather play Master of Magic or Master of Orion 2 than Civilization 5. I played my share of DOOM and Duke3d, and I still find Blood, Strife, and Shadow Warrior to be more compelling than Call of Duty 8 or whatever.
No, I think the late 80s/early 90s were a special time in the games industry. It was no longer the case that an individual in his basement could make a AAA commercial game, but that ethos persisted. Game designers designed for the love of games still, and not to satisfy some marketers checklist. Less effort was expended in producing eye-popping graphics, allowing for more focus on good gameplay. And computer gaming was still the realm of nerds, so games were designed for a sophisticated audience who didn't mind reading the manual. All of these things contributed to a golden age, that we were only lucky to experience when we were coming of age.
Re: Why, Why, Why..... (Score:5, Interesting)
I liked Monkey Island for one reason because they were logical puzzles, in a perverse sort of way. They weren't just find random objects applied to other random objects, everything made sense in hind sight. Plus they're humorous, the solutions are entertaining in the LucasArts games. That's why these are classics and the other graphical adventures of the day aren't as well remembered. Ie, the spitting contest, the pirate barbers' song, insult sword fighting ("how appropriate, you fight like a cow"), and so forth.