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."
Why, Why, Why..... (Score:5, Funny)
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Why haven't you had coffee yet?
Re: Why, Why, Why..... (Score:5, Funny)
Because the coffee vendor is too despondent to sell him coffee. The vendor's nephew is in jail, and springing him requires a lock pick, a banana peel, and a kazoo. Only then will you be able to get coffee, but it'll be decaf,, unless you give the barista the beans you got from the voodoo priestess.
Seriously, have you never played this game?
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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.
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"Perverse" sort of way doesn't necessarily mean insane. It means thinking outside the box, with some humor. Normal puzzle solving is stacking up boxes to reach the banana. Slightly perverse means stacking up bananas to reach a box.
LucasArts puzzles are a lot smarter in puzzles than many games. You clearly can't use an axe to get through a door there because it's not your door and you'd be captured and made to walk the plank for example. There is sanity in the puzzles in that they maintain the logic tha
Why? The definitive answer is... (Score:2, Funny)
..."Samzenpus, float over here so I can punch you."
Nostalgia Nostalgia Nostalgia (Score:5, Insightful)
The games of old, we look back on when we were in our pre-teen to early adult years have a special place in our heart. These adventure games are the first few games that you have won and it was a hard win to have won. My nostalgia was more towards Sierra Online Adventures, but the premise is the same. You spend hours as there wasn't easy access to the internet to give you a hint. The excitement every time you were able to get to a new screen, as you are about to face a new challenge. Then you get older, you have real challenges in your life, and the new games just don't spark that kind wonderment. It isn't that the new games are any better or worse, but when you were a kid, things are new.
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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They were also nearly the last games of their nature that were any good. Shortly after the Monkey Island series, games started going 3D (FPS) or real-time (RTS) and the point-click adventure was pushed to the side. Some of us still enjoyed them, but we became niche and the larger budgets were spent on other genres.
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I'll remember the pain. (Score:2, Informative)
The pain.. Oh the pain of trying to install their games on my kids' computers. The incompatibilities with the video and soundblaster cards. The endless trips to buy upgraded hardware, even though you had the hardware already per the side of the box.
My kids loved their stuff, but they haven't been a player in this space, unless it was supporting the venerable Star Wars brand and IMO, that's played out. Once it went to Disney, as foretold in "South Park", expect Mickey to put the merchandising and game ti
Re:I'll remember the pain. (Score:5, Insightful)
There was not one game from that era that could install without spending a day trying to tweak config.sys files and autoexec.bat, no reason to single out Lucasarts. Its just that they made some of the better games in that era.
I remember the same headaches with the Wing Commander series responsible for causing me to have to spend hundreds of dollars to find the right combo of video and sound card just to get the opening cutscene to play without stuttering.
DOS was the dark days of PC gaming for sure.
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I had a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 and a Gravis Ultrasound in my 486dx33 back in those days (plus a US Robototics 14.4 Sportster modem). The IRQ/DMA assignments were definitely messy. The GUS sounded absolutely amazing but messing around with MegaEm, Ultramid, and all the other nasty software was a pain at times. I loved the games that would allow me to use the PAS for the digital fx and the GUS for music (yay MT32/LAPC1 via MegaEM).
DOS 6 and the arrival of multi-config was a *godsend*. Without it, I'd have need
Re:I'll remember the pain. (Score:5, Insightful)
There was not one game from that era that could install without spending a day trying to tweak config.sys files and autoexec.bat
I remember it well, and it was the first steps for me into the dark art of understanding how computers work. I can only thank videogames of that era for making me start a voyage into a new realm. Understanding memory, learning about DMA and IRQs, getting a modem to work, setting up a LAN, trying my hand at programming, ... I learned a great deal from all that and it got me interested in a subject I had little interest in before.
Thanks DOS games! You've set me onto a career which I enjoy tremendously (despite becoming such a cynic).
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So much THIS.
To make everyone happy in the household, I implemented a config.sys menu system to load EMS or XMS depending on what task you wanted to undertake. Before that, I was fixing it for every reboot (and every time Mom wanted to use LotusWorks 1.0).
-l
Thank you for playing Wing Commander! [gamasutra.com]
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.
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SCUMMVM was ported to S60 yonks ago.
Wing Commander 1 only flight control animations if you had EMS. Which you propably hadn't if you had a 286. Fun times!
Re:I'll remember the pain. (Score:5, Funny)
You spent all day mucking with config.sys? Why didn't you just Google the issue???
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Wow! I assume they're redeemable at ThinkGeek?
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.
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A=220 I=5 D=1 T=4
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Don't get me wrong, that's part of how I got so into computers. Back when I was a kid and had /time/, that kind of stuff was fun, much more fun than my old Apple //c or a Mac. Linux was even more fun than that back when Debian required actual work to get X running, or to get it booting from an add-on IDE controller, and compiling your own kernel was expected.
I've just got a different value of time now, since I've got a kid of my own.
15 years ago there was no Jar Jar (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason the games from 15 years ago were so great was that there was no attempt to shoe-horn prequel material into the story.
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Interactive Movies were at the butt of any joke in the second half of the nineties. Yet they seem to have won. Press A for victory!
Because of what they involved (Score:5, Interesting)
For the same reason we still play them. (Score:5, Insightful)
For the same reason scummvm has been ported to damn near every platform and why I still play these games on brand new smartphones. Reminds me, I need to find my Full Throttle game files.
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I ain't puttin' my lips on that...
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Goblins
Quest for Glory
Kings Quest
Monkey Island
Hook
Simon the Sorcerer
Day of the Tentacle
Space Quest
Gabriel Knight
Lora Bow
Phantasmagoria
MYST
etc...etc..
Obviously some were prettier/funnier than others and stuck out. Many of these formed our chi
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Are any of those new point and clicks good?
These are games that require a good story and characters. Making them much harder to produce then pumping out another iteration of Medal Of Duty: Call of Honor.
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If you want a true masterpiece you will have to gun for classics like The Last Express or Toonstruck.
But to be fair in most cases it is also enjoying to watch a Youtuber doing a Let's Play on them. Adventures lend themselves to that.
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Last point and click I played was Syberia I and II about a decade ago (breathtaking graphics and a great story), and The Moment Of Silence (not so bad). I'm reading that Syberia III started development last year!
Because they were good (Score:5, Insightful)
Its a shame that George forced his entire empire to eat, breath and shit out Star Wars franchise IP which is why the empire collapsed and got absorbed by an even bigger evil empire. But the few original IP created by Lucasarts were actually quite good and original.
I'm not saying we need to revisit them or have remakes of any of them, but it shows there were actually some creative and inventive original thinkers in the Lucasarts company and hopefully now they are free of the oppression of only doing Star Wars IP, we might see some new and novel games come from them again.
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PR Trick (Score:3)
Full Throttle (Score:5, Informative)
Full Throttle had the greatest opening to a Videogame I have ever seen. I would point to the screen even years later to show people, "There! This is how you do it!" *Movies* didn't get me that juiced.
And while the gameplay itself was reminscent of "Sam and Max hit the Road" (since I believe it used the same SCUMM engine); it was still mighty entertaining. Considering that most CD-ROM based games at that time were terrible "click and wiggle" titles; the stuff that came out of LucasArts during that period was well thought out, richly designed, spectacularly written, and incredibly above-average. It was an exciting time.
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Re:Full Throttle (Score:4, Funny)
Oh ghods. Now you've done it: I have to go and dig up my Full Throttle game and play it again.
It's like Deus Ex -- everytime someone mentions it, you have to go play it again. :)
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Oh ghods. Now you've done it: I have to go and dig up my Full Throttle game and play it again.
And listen to the hilarious song on the radio.
"The population is greatly decreased..."
Re:Full Throttle (Score:5, Informative)
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Better than Freespace 1? (and Freespace 2's wasn't bad either, if a bit talky)
"Send FIGHTERS!! I-I know they're following me, send everything you have NOW!!" [youtube.com]
Nostalgia. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not because those games were just particularly amazing, well-written, and well-constructed. It's because those were the games that we grew up with. Those of us in their 30s and early 40s are the ones currently dominating the industry, and we grew up playing King's Quest IV and Monkey Island and Loom and X-Wing etc. We have a fondness for those now because we were kids and those games were the world to us.
Same reason most of us love Voltron and hate Power Rangers, even though they're damn near the same thing.
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Compared to today's games, Tetris has incredibly bad graphics and sound, there's no writing and nothing about it is amazing at first glance... yet there are versions of it for virtually anything you can possibly play a game on and everyone has played it. The quality of a game cannot be measured by the quality of the graphics and sound.
In addition, I would say that the Monkey Island games are still some of the best written adventure games ever made. I shared the the two special edition remakes with a frien
Why? Simple ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nostalgia.
Everyone doing that right now is getting old. Kids today will be doing the same thing about Gears of War, Borderlands and Splosion Man.
And some of us, who are older, are still doing it about Joust, Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers.
Welcome to the pool of people not at the top of the generation queue.
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Partly. There's also more to it. I'm not of the Joust generation, but that was an awesome game. They still make Super Mario Brothers games, and Donkey Kong gets a remake every once in a while.
LucasArts, and earlier Sierra, really dominated the adventure game genre in a time when your game had to be creative because the hardware wasn't good enough to make it shiny.
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:Why? Simple ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think so. I still pick up some of their games every now and then, and they are as rightfully enjoyable as they were back in the date. Even new ones I never got around to try as a kid, I enjoy greatly now.
I think the word "nostalgia" has been shifting meaning as of late. Nostalgia is when you think of that summer in 1989 (random example). Something you only relive through your memories, if you will.
Perhaps if you relived that summer, it wouldn't be as memorable as you remembered.
However, this is videogames! Things you can pick up and play almost anytime. I still pick up games from the Genesis/Megadrive or SNES. I still find new obscure games that I never played as a kid. And know what? I love them! Because they are genuinely good, and nothing else.
This is not nostalgia. This is given credit where it's due.
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X-Wing and Tie Fighter have interestingly also aged quite well.
There are a lot of DOS era games that have aged very well and still are fun. GoG is chock full of them.
Others haven't aged very well at all. Wing Commander(1+2) for example. Back in the day we marvelled at those two. But now...hrm. Nostalgia does indeed have to kick in to enjoy those two.
Master of Magic is also a candidate for "hasn't aged very wel
Re:Why? Simple ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really. There is a difference between a good game with lots of playability and a game that can't be played anymore when the DRM servers are turned off. There is a difference between making a good single-player game and a game where the devs can't be bothered with anything but the same dime-a-dozen multi-player.
There is a difference between a finished game and a game that requires DLC. There is a difference between a game company that wants to make games, and a game company that only cares about money. This has nothing to do with that first glass of Milk and Cookies you ever had.
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There is a difference between a good game with lots of playability and a game that can't be played anymore when the DRM servers are turned off.
I believe you're confusing "lots of playability" with "can always be played." Those two are mutually exclusive.
You can have a good game with lots of playability that relies on servers (World of Warcraft, for example) which will eventually be shut down. You can also have a game with limited game play and no replay value which doesn't rely on servers (like Braid) which will always be available for you to play even though you'll most likely never do it.
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"Those two are mutually exclusive." should have been "Those two are not mutually exclusive."
The genre since LucasArts. (Score:3)
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
Re:Book of Unwritten Tales (Score:5, Informative)
I know everyone wants to complain about adventure games being dead
The genre had quite a down in the early 2000's, but it hasn't been dead for many years. Not only is TellTale putting out adventure games on a regular basis, we also have Wadjet Eye games, Daedalic, Amanita Design and a whole lot of other companies releasing new games all the time. The Walking Dead even managed to grab numerous Game Of The Year awards. The Daedalic games are probably the closest in style to what LucasArts put out back then.
Because there was no internet... (Score:2)
... and the majority of people couldn't access a BBS. Walkthroughs? Tutorials? If you were lucky, an actual real-life friend might have told you how to win the spitting competition in Monkey Island 2. Or you persevered, having a much greater attention span twenty years ago - uninterrupted by a billion browser tabs, FB notifications, phones ringing, etc. It was just the game and you.
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> Because there was no internet... ... and the majority of people couldn't access a BBS. Walkthroughs? Tutorials?
>
Nonsense they were there if you wanted them.
Magazines had huge section on tiops/walkthroughs back in the day. Nowadays they know it is pointless as you have already found one on the internet if you wanted one. Also diskmags had them as well. No need for internet/bbs if you were scared to do it!
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But yeah, the game discussions at school wer best. Kids nowadays can only say "And then I shot his nuts off."
We discussed the ideal weapon loadout for the spider boss in Xenon 2 and how to get past that "kneel down" section in Indy3. Or in very hushed voices what kind of lubber we got. YOU PERVERT!
It's because they were funny (Score:2)
Why do we still talk about them? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I disagree. People still play them, and talk about them. Monkey Island finally got a recent sequel, but it had to be done by TellTale since LucasArts had no one to do it in house.
Had LucasArts made those games instead of licensing out more and more Star Wars mmorpgs it might have survived.
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The original creative people have left and the new generation was mainly recruited from the fanbois who grew up with the games.
Lucas suffered from that, Blizzard suffers from that, SquareEnix suffers from that,...
The direct result is why the old hands make a killing on Kickstarter and the second generation fanbois at the huge companies only shovel crap upon crap into sequel after sequel.
The true and novel things that happen in th
Grim Fandango (Score:5, Insightful)
In the 30+ years I've been gaming, Grim Fandango was the best game I ever played. Such an absolute joy, and an ending that was worth the journey.
If I had to choose between Grim Fandango 2 and Half-Life 3, GF2 it would be.
Wow. (Score:2)
They haven't released much that's at all memorable in ten to fifteen years, yet they're only now being handed pink slips? Way to screw the pooch! I'm impressed! How do we find sinecures like that, or do they only exist in corporate boards of directors these days? Fifteen years of no, "What have you done for us lately?", and they got away with it (no lawsuits & etc)? That's pretty amazing.
Bleedin' obvious answer (Score:2)
What Lucas Arts games? (Score:2)
Seriously, I guess I must have missed something because I was too busy playing advanced (for the time) FPS games such as Wolfenstein, DOOM, Quake, Unreal, Diablo, Baldur's Gate, Fallout, and various AD&D style RPGs. Prior to this I had played the various Sierra games as well as the Tex Murphy series (now that was a funny game).
I chalk this up to nostalgia, rather than the games being better than any other games from the same era.
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Re:What Lucas Arts games? (Score:5, Insightful)
I chalk this up to nostalgia, rather than the games being better than any other games from the same era.
While Sierra was still trying to kill you in dozens of more or less "funny" ways and allowed you to end up in dead ends, LucasArts practiced essentially modern game design practices and made sure that you couldn't get stuck into dead ends, get killed or otherwise get your gaming experience ruined by obtuse puzzle design. I think that is the main reason why those LucasArts game are so fondly remembered and Sierra not quite so much. When you load up an old LucasArts adventure today it essentially plays not much different then a modern one would, the interface is clean and polished and the game design very straight forward without any ugly surprises. When you load up most other games of that time you are greeted with a rather obtuse interface, unclear game rules and other problems that just make those old games far less tolerable in modern times.
It of course also helps that the games are just damn good, with rememberable characters, great graphics, voice acting and all that.
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.
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Oh Zak McKracken, one of the fondest games of my youth and probably one of the most painful (if not THE most painful) game to try and play now.
Fucking keyboard cursor interface my ass. Whoever thought that selecting words from a list (using the keyboard to move a graphical cursor) instead of just implementing a parser needs to have their head examined.
Tell me about Loom... (Score:4, Funny)
Tell me about Loom
You mean the latest masterpiece of fantasy storytelling from LucasArts' Brian Moriarty? Why it's an extraordinary adventure with an interface of magic. Stunning, high resolution, 3D landscapes and sophisticated score and musical effects. Not to mention the detailed animation and special effects, elegant point 'n' click control of characters, objects and magic spells. Beat the rush! Go out and buy Loom today!
Because... (Score:3)
...they relied on story, clever dialog and had *heart* - so, the same reason everything of quality (books, music, movies) is appreciated decades or centuries later.
I just finished playing Day of the Tentacle with my wife and two kids last night, and they all enjoyed it thoroughly.
Re:Nostalgia (Score:5, Funny)
I, for one, am happy adventure games have died.
C'mon, you know you liked going pixel-by-pixel across an entire screen full of static forest background until your cursor changed to let you know that you'd found the one "stick" in the entire place that you can add to your inventory!
Re:Nostalgia (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was 8-12, I thought adventure games were pretty awesome. I rarely beat them, and figured it was just a lack of creativity/ingenuity on my part. Even though I failed and failed and failed some more, I love solving puzzles/problems (I'm a technician by trade and math student by hobby currently) and spent hours going over the same few screens, scouring for clues that I missed, inventory combinations I hadn't tried (and in the days of the infamous parser, word combinations I hadn't tried). I'd spend hours doing this.
Then I got a little older, installed a few of the old games out of nostalgia's sake (even still have a few of the more memorable ones installed) and given that I don't have hours to spend staring at the same screen, decided to give up, look up some FAQs and at least push my way through the story (some of those games had some really well written ones). At this point I discovered that my failures were not entirely due to a lack of problem solving ability on my part, as I found that the majority of puzzles I had always gotten stuck on lacked any sort of logic at all (I believe there is an excellent write up on Gabriel Knight 3's issues somewhere on the net). They required the kind of creativity and problem solving ability you get at 4am from numerous bongs, a few beers and the inability to click where you want to click.
And before anyone "wooshes" me, I totally got the sarcasm in the parent and just felt this was the perfect spot for a mini-rant =)
Re:creativity and problem solving ability (Score:2)
At this point I discovered that my failures were not entirely due to a lack of problem solving ability on my part, as I found that the majority of puzzles I had always gotten stuck on lacked any sort of logic at all (I believe there is an excellent write up on Gabriel Knight 3's issues somewhere on the net). They required the kind of creativity and problem solving ability you get at 4am from numerous bongs, a few beers and the inability to click where you want to click.
I remember getting stuck in some king's quest game because I never thought to stick a hole that was in my inventory onto a wall on the right screen. This also reminds me of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that was impossible to get through if you hadn't read the book. (Like who is going to just put a fish in their ear?)
Re:Nostalgia (Score:5, Insightful)
GK3 was the worst offender. Not only did you have to be at the right time at the right spot with little indication given. It also had the worst puzzles(and also some great puzzles). Having to molest a cat to get a fake mustache for your Mosley costume must be the worst thing ever done in an adventure game.
The only adventure that ever did the real time thing right was The Last Express which sadly has to be the best game nobody ever played. But even that had its fair share of problems. Putting an action sequence into an adventure game is propably lost on your audience. Fighting on the roof of a train may be fun in a fighting on the roof of a train game but not in an adventure game. Some did it right(you could skip the jump&run sequence in Rise of the Dragon) and some did it wrong(the kneel down sequence in Indiana Jones 3 springs to mind).
But the worst puzzles were those that referenced popular culture. In Day of the Tentacle you had to scare off a couple of morons. What you had was white paint and a black cat sitting on a fence. A friend of mine is from Romania and it took a couple of highly educational Pepe le Pew cartoons to explain to him why painting a white stripe on the back of a black cat was the obvious choice to do things.
It's the cultural equivalent of why none of us old farts will ever get why painting some obnoxious kid's hair orange and gel it into a spiky mess will scare off bullies. Kamekamehaha...whut?
I very rapidly understood why adventure games are best played with a walkthrough. And it is best to consult it only when needed. Being stuck was the worst thing that could happen to you. Being stuck because youd didn't pick up something at a place you can't get to anymore was even worse. And that is what never happened to you in Lucasfilm Games adventures and that was also something that made them awesome. That and you very rarely got stuck. And they were great fun. And they sometimes even made you think. They had great atmosphere. And diversity. They sent you on tropical islands, the afterlife, who knows where(Loom was odd), the future, the past, on a bike, on a zeppelin and even Atlantis(which would have been the better choice then looking for alien glass skulls)
Sadly they fell victim to the Doom clone craze and continued to produce rehash upon rehash of the least cerebral game concept since shooting gallery shareware was invented. Only with light sabres! And Jedi! Yay!
http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/shooting-gallery/ [dosgamesarchive.com]
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.
That cuts to the core of why adventures died (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting someone else's puzzle is HARD. For instance, in Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father, one puzzle is to translate a piece of German text. I happen to be fluent enough in German to never think of looking for a dictionary in the game to find the answer to progress to the next bit.
It is the same reason stereo-types are so common in media, when you got a X amount of time to make something clear, you can't afford to leave any room for mis-interpretation. Mine was to forget Gabriel Knight is an American and as such mono-lingual.
The Secret World is a MMO by the maker of The Longest Journey and it has some puzzles in it... and boy was it "fun" to see anyone from PhD's to xbox owners tackle them. One tricky puzzle asked you to find a password with no more a clue then "Night Helen and I meter, under the fireworks set to my favorite composer." and "Music of the Seasons" that one right next to the computer you are trying to unlock. You would be surprised how many didn't get it.
Another hinted to look at the psalms for a keycode near a church. Is it THAT obscure that churches display psalms going to be sung at the next service somewhere? I am not even a Christian and I know that. Many many don't.
Adventures games are games from a time when you had to read books to learn things in an age when everything is a Google away. People have gotten lazy. I have gotten lazy. Throw six switches when I can throw 1? Throw 1 when I can throw 0?
Look at the latest Tomb Raider, pretty enough but the "hidden" dungeons couldn't be easier to find if they had flares next to them (instead of giant white graffiti) and consists of exactly ONE short puzzles doable in a few minutes. Compared to slowly making your way all around a gigantic underground pyramid, it just don't compare.
TSW was considered by many to be to hard... as an old fart, I can't be anything but be amazed by how mindless such people must be. But the simple fact is that the old Lucasarts and Sierra adventures were THEMSELVES, dumb downs of the text adventures.
I enjoyed the new Tomb Raider, I just wish it required me to actually think for a second at time instead of being a rather tiring roller coaster all the time. I wish TSW had more puzzles but spend more time playing Guild Wars 2 which is so fucking easy you have to do something else at the same time to avoid slipping into a coma.
Because while these new shallow games are much simpler, they are also far far smoother. No endless quest bugs in GW2, or none you mind anyway. The new Tomb Raider had me dropping to my death only a handfull of times and rarely required me retrying a jump several times to get it pixel perfect.
Old quality games required quality players and quality time and that is hard combo to get when you get old or have an xbox.
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One should subject them to the full A Clockwork Orange treatment but with Xenon 2.
Logic puzzles can be hard but at least they are universal(and I remember once writing a short LISP program to solve one). But puzzles based on culture are really, really awkward. This is also why you have to be extra careful when designing an IQ test. You easily introduce cultural bias.
Gabriel Knight could at times be cringeworthy. The actors
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no hope for a new TIE Fighter or X-Wing vs TIE fighter game
Sadly, holding out hope for one of those, even before the buyout, seemed to have a strong correlation with believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Once the crappy "Rogue Squadron" rail-shooters came out, and XWA was a slipshod mess, my dreams of the X-Wing series living on into the new century were shattered.
"Alpha 2, Mission Critical Installation Destroyed."
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.
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Freespace seems to follow the X-Wing flight model quite closely from what little I have played of it so far. As for more modern stuff, Strike Suit Zero was just released and in the not so distant future we will have Star Citizen, a new Elite and a bunch of smaller titles.
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I've heard good things about Freespace, but haven't gotten around to trying it yet. I was looking at Strike Suit Zero, but it seems a bit more arcade style than what I'd like. I am genuinely looking forward to Star Citizen and hopefully it will be great. I tried out Star Conflict recently, but it felt more like a typical shooter but in space than anything else.
A multiplayer space combat sim with X-wing styled mechanics and a persistent objective based battle space similar to Planetside 2 would be awesom
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Maybe it's a confusion over terminology. 15 years is about when Lucasarts stopped developing great games themselves. They published plenty after that of course, including Jedi Outcast, but they were all made by licensees. From the outside the studio looked really bipolar to me, thrashing back and forth between internal development and outsourcing frequently enough they couldn't build and maintain any strong teams.
Re:nostalgia circlejerk? (Score:5, Informative)
Those games are gone.
Really? I bought Monkey Island 1 and 2 on Steam in 2012. The updated graphics and sound are great, but you can switch it back to the original very easily.
Re:nostalgia circlejerk? (Score:4, Informative)
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Yeah, but the touch based interface makes it almost unplayable.
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And if you've got a USB mouse lying around then simply connect it to your phone or your tablet and it will work.
Ah, the blessed bliss of using devices that come with standard IO connections.
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I bought the redone Monkey Island games on Xbox live. That brought back a lot of memories. You can even switch between the retro graphics and the new graphics.
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Well, as the FOSS community would say: "shut the fuck up and fix the problem yourself".
Here's a link to get you started OGRE [ogre3d.org]. Here's another Blender [blender.org]. And another learncpp.com [learncpp.com]
When you're done with your masterpiece, feel free to give it away and support it forever.
Re:nostalgia circlejerk? (Score:5, Insightful)
Those games are gone.
Wait... where did they go? Did some mass fire destroy all remaining copies in the world? No. They're still there. I can still have my kids, born after they came out, play those games. I can - and do - have my kids play games from 30 years ago, from when I started gaming. Even the games that actually were lost to me due to fire or whatever ravages of time. Games do not suddenly cease to exist a few years after they are released. The good games are still played 15 years later, 30 years later, and I'm assuming 60 years later, 100 years later. Like classic books, the good ones will survive, they won't go anywhere. The games that only have nostalgia going for them will be lost once the people with that nostalgia stop lamenting or die out.
By the time the servers of today's games are shut off, someone will have hacked/cracked them and made them playable without those servers. Games needing activation or some kind of server has been around for years now, many games have had their servers shut off. But I can't think of a single game that I still want to play, but that I absolutely can not play.
Re:tl;dr (Score:5, Funny)
Eight sentences is a wall of text? You'll probably have a stroke and die if you ever pick up a book.
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Maybe he has a really small display?
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"Me? In a Tie fighter? Isn't their one redeeming value that they are cheap and you get lots of them? Why would I want to play as cannon fodder?"
Larry Holland pulled that stunt off beautifully. But let's not forget that a lot of the craft you got to fly in this game indeed had shields.