Graphic Adventures -- I want them back

[Robin]

Oh wow, I had that. Forgotten all about it.

[Brats]

This is one genre that I'm really not too sure why is failing. Graphically, the games are sumptuous, they've made the move to 3D and there isn't really anything else like them. It's a bit strange that only Revolution has anything in the pipeline. There have been whispers of a Sam & Max sequel for a while, but nothing confirmed (or indeed that it would be a graphic adventure).

This is also one genre where I think innovation was a bad thing. I much preferred the 2D graphics to the 3D in Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island (even though GF was amazing) and the idea if controlling your character rather than direct him or her with a mouse wasn't a good move imo. I also preferred it when the SCUMM games had the "Pickup" "Talk" "Use" etc icons down th bottom, rather than the clunky icons first introduced in Sam and Max.

DOTT is my favourite, because (as I detailed in DMCs thread on the old forum) I adore the whole interfering with time aspect which has never been done better (although its a sadly unexplored area).

[KempStar]

Any fans of the old text adventures here? Zork, Leather Goddesses Of Phobos, Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, and more... Ah, hours of gaming goodness, and not one damn graphic to be seen.

:: waxes nostalgic ::

I used to love text adventures when i was younger ^^

I never played any of the ones you mentioned, as I didnt have a pc in the "early days". All mine were on the speccy. My favourites were-

Magnetic Scrolls-

The Pawn
Corruption
Guild of thieves
Jinxter


Level 9
Gnome ranger

Did anyone else like these? I know i played another level 9 adventure, based on how much i liked gnome ranger, but i cant remember for the life of me what it was called. Anyone got any ideas??

Also did anyone play Fish? never got round to that one.

[Chadruharazzeb]

The only text-based adventure game which really stood out for me was The Hobbit on the Speccy. At time it was legendary as certain scenes had graphics which you could see being slowly drawn and filled before you.

[wager]

This is also one genre where I think innovation was a bad thing. I much preferred the 2D graphics to the 3D in Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island (even though GF was amazing) and the idea if controlling your character rather than direct him or her with a mouse wasn't a good move imo. I also preferred it when the SCUMM games had the "Pickup" "Talk" "Use" etc icons down th bottom, rather than the clunky icons first introduced in Sam and Max.

Couldn't agree more. All my favourtite GA's are 2D. Don't get me wrong i still love some of the 3D titles, GF and EFMI as you mention and Gabriel Knight 3 was enjoyable.

The 3D titles are a lot more enjoyable than the FMV rubbish many companies released in the mid to late 90's though. Phantasmagoria anyone?? For me thats where the adventure genre went downhill, and to this day not recovered.

Brats: If you haven't already played it i suggest you get a copy of "Flight Of The Amazon Queen." Pretty good 2D adventure with a SCUMM like interface.

[JRMacumber]

Another great adventure game series was the Tex Murphy games. I'm sure I've brought them up before, but those were just so good. "Under A Killing Moon," "The Pandora Directive," and "Overseer" were all just phenomenal. The stories were entertaining, the acting was deliciously cheesy, and the gameplay itself was hard but rewarding. One thing I'll never forgive MS for is killing it off when they bought out Access Software. "Overseer" ended on a cliffhanger, and now... Now it'll never be properly finished. Still, a solid series of games.

[goldbricker]

You can get Flight of the Amazon Queen on Abandonware from Underdogs.org (all above board). I played the demo of it on the amiga and it was great fun.

I started off with text adventures and put a lot of time into Hitchhikers Guide (I even played it a bit at Game On ) but was never able to finish it. Even when I revisited it recently I couldnt finish it I got stuck at the same point and even the solution couldn't shed any light.

I remember playing Return to Zork at the time when PC Cd-rom based games were in their infancy and the fmv based story that was unravelled in the game was pretty well done.

But the pinacle is still Lucasarts. I loved Full Throttle - it was far too short but everything was done to a consistently high standard especially the voice acting which is a crucially under developed area of most games even today. The same applied to Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle which were all beautifully presented and structured.

[PeteJ]

"You know what would look good on your nose?"
"What?"
"The bar"
Unforgetable Full Throttle.

Under a Killing Moon was fab, nice film noir setting and gripping story.

[Valiant]

If I was a game designer I would be knocking on Bill Watterson's door every day to try and get a Sam and Max/Day of the Tentacle style game for Calvin and Hobbes.

The fact Watterson never sold his soul to consumerism and made Calvin, Susie, Mum, Dad, Miss Wormwood, Rosayln and so forth timless is why I love the books with all my heart.

Still it would have made a brilliant game with time travelling, super hero adventures, days at school, Calvinball and trips to the Yukon.

Watterson = Genius

That's a FACT.

[Edame]

If I was a game designer I would be knocking on Bill Watterson's door every day to try and get a Sam and Max/Day of the Tentacle style game for Calvin and Hobbes.

The fact Watterson never sold his soul to consumerism and made Calvin, Susie, Mum, Dad, Miss Wormwood, Rosayln and so forth timless is why I love the books with all my heart.

Still it would have made a brilliant game with time travelling, super hero adventures, days at school, Calvinball and trips to the Yukon.

Watterson = Genius

That's a FACT.

Agreed, I love Calvin and Hobbes

[JRMacumber]

And there we have Rep, in four panels. Brilliant!

[Edame]

I thought that strip was very appropriate for these forums

[Lyris]

Day of the Tentacle is just amazing. One of my favorite games ever and behind the low resolution, it looks better than a lot of games out now. The Chuck Jones style to the backgrounds works so well, all in all there isn't a single thing I would change about that game. This as well as the fact that the whole idea of a game taking place over just one night but at the same time spanning 400 years (yeah I've read the manual too much, I think that was directly quoted ) really made me feel involved for some reason.

Sam and Max was brilliant too because I loved the graphic novels. It was nice to see Steve Purcell, the creator, actually involved with the game (he worked at LucasArts the whole time afterall). The whole American road trip idea I just loved.

I'd love to see these types of games come back - IN 2D. I'd love to see some new 2D side scrollers as well. We have this excellent graphics technology now that could easily handle sprites and 2D games with advanced lighting effects applied... what a pity it only gets used to show triangular renditions of artist's drawings.

[John Beaulieu]

bit of info for you all kiddies

Infocom

In early 1976 two MIT programmers started work on a pair of games inspired by Adventure - these 2 games were Dungeon (its official name but TSR, owner of Dungeons and Dragons threatened a lawsuit) and Zork.

Zork, the Great Underground Empire was released on mainframe in 1977, Dungeon was shown at many computer fayres at the time, finally in 1979 Infocom was founded, composed of staff and students from MIT computer lab.

Their first commercial release under the Infocom brand was Zork 1 - released in 1980 on TRS-80 and Apple II. Infocom adventure games had a big advantage over their competitors due to ZIL, an advanced parser which went beyond checking both VERB and OBJECT (which text based games of the time relied on) but interacted with the player to sort out clarifications and assumptions. An example of this would be if you typed "Open the door" when in a room with more than one door - the ZIL parser would reply to you "Which door do you mean" - what this means in layman terms is that instead of wielding an unruly parser which only responded to certain commands, you could type in almost anything and get a reply from the game which made it much more easy to associate with thus resulting in losing yourself 'into the game' (so to speak)

Now Infocom said that the best graphics engine every developed was the human brain - which is the reason that all of their earlier games were entirely text based. they made up for this lack of eye candy through the immense packaging which, even today, has never been bettered. Games such as Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy came packaged with many goodies including a small bag filled with a Galactic Space Fleet (read the books if you need to understand what i mean), Leather Goddess' of Phobos came packaged with a scratch and sniff card, which was used to get past some puzzles in the game. Quite possibly the best package though was a game called Suspended - which featured you as someone in cyrogenic sleep who had to take command of a space-station using 6 robots - you were given a map with 6 colour coded discs (representing the 6 robots) and the game box featured a plastic face mask which represented the person in cyrogenic fluid - imagine Hans Solo's protrouding face at the end of Empire Strikes Back. Mint condition Infocom games from this period of packaging glory now fetch very good prices ...... (lucky me has almost a full collection packed away in the loft)

In 1983 Zork III was released which reversed many of the rules which text-based games were governed by at the time. Gamers were obsessed with getting perfect scores - normally you got a score for every puzzle you completed, with higher scores coming from the hardest puzzles. In Zork III you got no score for completing hard puzzles and you got a point for completing easy puzzles... in the entire game only 7 points were possible. the idea behind this was to get gamer's back to the story and away from the score obsession

Infocom's stories were what brought gamer's back to them time and time again - 1984 saw the acquisation of Douglas Adam's to co-write Hitch-hikers guide, based on the novels and tv series. Adams was to make further games for home computers - Bureaucracy was his other Infocom title which parodied the problems resulting in an important letter being sent to an old address

Infocom had 4 skill levels by which they graded their games - Introductory, Standard, Advanced and Expert.

In 1986 Activision bought Infocom and whilst 1987 saw an increase in production, Activision wanted to change many things about the Infocom brand. first off they added graphics to their titles -- Journey was Infocom's attempt at the point and click adventure and this was followed by Circuit's Edge and Quarterstaff (only released on Mac). Arthur also followed which was based on the Legend of King Arthur (a very easy game with some good touches). Also at this time Infocom released Zork Zero - a brilliant game which stands well against the best of all text adventures and they released a game for Westwood - the quite brilliant Battletech: the crescent hawks inception (an rpg type game similar to the Ultima games of the time)

a full list of infocom titles

Fantasy
Zork I: The Great Underground Empire (download for Win95, ZIP or Mac)
Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz (download for Win95 or ZIP)
Zork III: The Dungeon Master (download for Win95 or ZIP)
Enchanter
Sorcerer
Spellbreaker
Wishbringer
Trinity
Beyond Zork
Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz

Science Fiction
Starcross
Suspended
Planetfall
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
A Mind Forever Voyaging
Stationfall

Mystery
Deadline
The Witness
Suspect
Ballyhoo
Moonmist

Adventure
Infidel
Seastalker
Cutthroats
Hollywood Hijinx
James Clavell's Shogun

Comedy
Leather Goddesses of Phobos
Bureaucracy
Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head Or Tail of It

Horror
The Lurking Horror

Romance
Plundered Hearts

Espionage
Border Zone

Immortal Legends
Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels

Chronicles
Journey

Literature
Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur

Freeware
Dungeon (original mainframe Zork)

Other Non-IF Games
Fooblitzky
Quarterstaff: The Tomb of Setmoth
BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception

there is a collection called Masterpieces of Infocom which contains 33 of the original adventures - it runs under windows via WINFRONTZ and is a perfect collection (IMHO) - ebay might have a copy or 2 for sale or you could try activision's site

Packaging Artwork













Places to buy Infocom games

http://underworld.fortunecity.com/track/946/ - best place to buy the Masterpiece collection from and also contains links to many other sites

camps

[Edame]

Anyone remember the Leisure Suit Larry series? I never actually owned any of them, but played them on a friend's machine. I think it was the thrill of playing something that was supposed to be an 'adult' game.
I remember that the games used to ask weird questions to try and validate that you were an adult.