New Issue Of Independent Adventuring

Greg Micek writes "DIY Games has posted another edition of Independent Adventuring, their monthly round-up of the underground adventure game scene over the last month. The latest edition, found here, covers the news and releases for the month of August and includes information on the recently released Brain Hotel, the new title from the developers behind A Case Of The Crabs. When comparing the two titles the writer states that "...the developer came up with a radically different world, story and graphics, and yet succeeded in creating a title that matches or even surpasses the previous game in all aspects." Other titles covered include a depressing tale of murder called Dead City, some bad news for the long awaited Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Youth, and much more. Read the entire issue at this link, links to previous editions can be found at the end of the article."

Adventure games - the distillation of gaming

[tod_miller]

When a new game comes out, people may wow at the graphics, but always come back to - is the game play good, and even, is the story good.

A compelling story is in itself a good gameplay, a simple standard point and click, and interestingly rendered worlds (not necessarily realistic, see Sam and Max and DOTT).

So why are adventure games destined to be always the dying genre of computer games!

Anyone ever play 'Terrormolinos' for the Spectrum? I played it for the best part of a day and got ran over. The good old days of pocket lint and useless stuff.

The game has great looking graphics, I would love a JOGL powered adventure kit, where you plug in 3ds/obj and textures and rooms, and ogg dialogue and text and use x on y.

Anyone know of anything? Anyone also interested in doing such a program? XML desriptors for the games, such like... then work on making 3d versions of DOTT! just to showcase it of course... the sotry and characters are the best parts!

Found something nice

[tod_miller]

Nothing to do with Gibson, but the Wintermute engine:

Wintermute [dead-code.org]

Wintermute Engine Development Kit is a set of tools for creating and running graphical "point&click" adventure games. The kit includes the runtime interpreter (Wintermute Engine, or WME) and GUI editors for managing and creating the game content (WME tools) as well as the documentation, demonstrational data and prefabricated templates.

Re:Adventure games - the distillation of gaming

[Ayaress]

They're not a dying genre by any means, just a very small one that never was all that big compared to action or RPG titles. There've been a few big name adventure games like Myst, but not enough for me to say the genre's on a decline now.

Re:Adventure games - the distillation of gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. The Adventure game was a VERY big genre when I first got into PC gaming. My first Sound Blaster card came with a copy of Kings Quest V. The gameplay was pretty horrid by today's standards (or even the standards of the time, to be honest), but this was regarded as the big, flashy genre in which you could show off the PC's capabilities. I mean, some of these games even had proper speech, which was pretty much unprecedented at the time (although this didn't come into its own until the CD-ROM drive became widespread). Some of what were, at the time, the biggest names in PC gaming were heavily focussed on adventure games... Lucasfilm (later Lucasarts) and Sierra being the most notable examples.

I think what really killed the adventure game as a mainstream genre was the coming domination of 3d graphics. Publishers and, to a slightly lesser extent, customers, came to expect that every game should have 3d graphics (the superb Monkey Island 3 predicted this, with a spoof "3d acceleration" option on the settings menu). The adventure game genre worked best in 2d (or even in text format) and the few attempts at doing 3d adventure games (most notably Grim Fandango and *ugh* Monkey Island 4) fell completely flat.

Re:Adventure games - the distillation of gaming

[Ape_the_Dog]

Good points, but I think the reason they're not longer made lies more in that adventure games have to be completely original to sell. You can't steal other peoples ideas and put them in another setting the way you can in a 3D FPS. If your puzzles weren't original, your game was a bad one. If your story was bad, so was your game. Every adventure game required a tremendous amount of creative work. I guess it just doesn't pay off to do them anymore.

advent

[brilinux]

You find that you are in a maze of twisty little links, all slashdoted.

R.I.P?

[Anonymous Coward]

A Slashdot article with only six responses? Maybe the Adventure genre really is dead.

Adventure gameplay

[Anonymous Coward]

I do wonder why I'm posting to what seems to be an utterly dead thread, but never mind...

I've recently started to wonder if the (commercial) adventure game is really as dead as it's made out to be. Undoubtedly, we just don't see games marketed as adventure games any more... the big franchises are dead (eg. Monkey Island, Kings Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, all the other Lucasarts titles), but many of the gameplay elements live on, albeit in a rather diluted form.

Where is this? In the survival-horror genre. I've recently been getting into this genre more, playing through the Gamecube remake of Resident Evil and the PS1/PS2 Silent Hill games (can't wait for the 4th installment, out here in the UK in a couple of weeks). These are difficult games to define, as they mix together game-play elements from quite a few genres, but I think it's ultimately the adventure elements that are strongest.

Take Silent Hill 2 for example. This has both "action" and "puzzle" difficulty settings. On my first play-through, I bumped them both to "normal", but on a replay, I put "action" to the easiest setting and "puzzle" to hardest. Why? The combat sucked a bit. I could understand why it needed to be in there (it's hard to maintain tension and fear if you know that nothing is EVER going to jump out and have a go at you), but I felt that the most interesting side of the game lay in the puzzles.

The format of the game is very similar, in many ways, to the old adventure games. It's broken into a number of multi-area sections, which you have a varying degree of freedom to move between (cf the division of the Monkey Island games into different islands). In each area, you have to locate a variety of items and use them in the right places to solve puzzles (the hotel towards the end of the game is perhaps the most obvious illustration of this). You also have a variety of non-item related puzzles, such as solving a riddle to find the correct code for a keypad. The more I played these games, the more familiar it felt.

I'm not going to press the comparison too far; none of the Survival Horror games I've played has been anything like as puzzle-oriented as the old adventures. You don't tend to find youself wondering whether you need to use the anchor and the shaving foam with the custard pie dish so you can get hit in the face by a real pie which you can get the cream from which will let you make the hang-over cure that will turn you back into an adult. Also, it sucks a bit if you want adventure-style gameplay outside of the horror genre. Nevertheless, it's encouraging in a way. The basic gameplay elements of the adventure genre are still there and still being experienced by new gamers. As such, there's no reason why the genre couldn't rise from the dead.

Re:Adventure gameplay

[MemoryDragon]

Ahem, plain adventure games are not dead, you just dont see them advertized in the mass market anymore. Where Lucasarts and Sierra left off, a bunch of rather small development houses now fill the niche nicely. With Black Mirror, The Westerner (Wanted), Runaway, Uru, Syberia2, Tony Tough, Dark Fall, Lights out, Law and Order2 and a bunch of new titles in the line. The List of commerically released adventure games has been quite impressive, too big for a genre, already declard dead, if you ask me.

Here is [justadventure.com]

Hurrah for DIYG

[bear pimp]

Not much to say here other than it's great to see people keeping this genre going in a world of licensed games.

If only more big sites would cover this kind of thing. Respect to Diygames and Slashdot for always putting in the effort to cover these genres.