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The Adventure Game (Or The Rise And Fall Of LucasArts)

Started by Steven, March 16, 2015, 12:06:00 AM

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garbed_attic

Oh and let's see if we can name all of these guys and where they're from, in horizon rows from bottom left to top right:



1.) Bernard from Day of the Tentacle
2.) Hogie (sp?) from DoTT
3.) Murray from Curse of Monkey Island
4.) One of the Gremlins from Gremlins - did they have individual names? EDIT: AH! Maybe not as I see another creature near the top that definitely *is* one of the Gremlins...
5.) Max! from Sam and Max Hit the Road and the Telltale games
6.) Sam! from Sam and Max Hit the Road and the Telltale games
7.) Some creatures from Botanicula. What are their names?
8.) The robot from Machinarium. Can't remember his name either...
9.) Edna (?) from DoTT
10.) Larry Laffy from the Leisure Suit Larry series
11.) Manny Calavera from Grim Fandango
12.) That detective from that Telltale detective game thing... (?)
13.) Rincewind from the first two Discworld games
14.) Simon (the Sorcerer) from the ill-fated Simon the Sorcerer games
15.) Mona (surname? - trying not to check these answers) and her bat (what's his name?) from A Vampyre Story, which I have owned since release and still haven't got round to playing...
16.) Klayman from The Neverhood (wonderful game, shame that the creator is a homophobe - sigh)
17.) Ben (surname?) from Full Throttle
18.) Guybrush Threepwood from the Monkey Island games
19.) ??? glasses kid
20.) ??? Maybe one of the guys from Ben Dere Done Dat? (if that's how you spell it)
21.) Torin and Boogle ("get in the bag, Boog") from Torin's Passage
22.) ??? Maybe the rabbi from The Shivah
23.) This one is definitely a Goblin from the Gobliiiiiiins games.
24.) Someone from Space Quest or The Dig?
25.) ???? Maybe the character from that odd claymation game series which I own but haven't played
26.) ??? Some bro
27.) Indiana Jones???

Sexton Brackets Drugbust

#31
4) Woodruff from The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble
9) Laverne from DOTT
12) Inspector Hector from Badge of Carnage
15) Mona's bat is Froderick
22) Boston Low of The Dig
26) Roger Wilko of Space Quest (Plunger)
27) Zak McKracken

garbed_attic

Awesome. Think that just leaves 19.) 20.) 22.) & 25.) (and the specific names of the Amanita Design characters and the Goblin)

Sexton Brackets Drugbust

Quote from: gout_pony on March 20, 2015, 12:37:12 AM
Awesome. Think that just leaves 19.) 20.) 22.) & 25.) (and the specific names of the Amanita Design characters and the Goblin)

22 is Boston Low, sorry. My mistake. It's 24 that's unknown.

Just twigged;
20) George Stobbart of Broken Sword Fame.

A.A

Quote from: Steven on March 19, 2015, 08:57:38 PM
Yes my mistake, it's Monkey 1.

Anybody played the following, or can recommend something else?

The `A Vampyre Story' series.
Ghost Pirates Of Vooju Island
Kentucky Route Zero
Elegy
Gods Will Be Watching
Dyscourse
Catequesis

Didn't know there was a Duckman adventure game, worth a punt?

Book of Unwritten Tales 1 and 2 are what you should be going after (don't worry about the prequel, Critter Chronicles). Sheer joy, both of them.

Wouldn't bother with A Vampyre Story or Ghost Pirates. Nice looking, but that's about all they have going for them.

On the serious side, I liked Grey Matter too, but not many others did.

Steven

Quote from: A.A on March 20, 2015, 06:59:05 AM
Book of Unwritten Tales 1 and 2
Grey Matter

Kewl, will have a gander.

Another interview with David Fox about the early Lucasfilm stuff, Zak McKracken etc.

Quote from: gout_pony on March 20, 2015, 12:37:12 AM
Awesome. Think that just leaves 19.) 20.) 22.) & 25.) (and the specific names of the Amanita Design characters and the Goblin)

Isn't the bloke from the top middle with the Klaus Nomi type collar Foster from Beneath A Steel Sky?

Steven

Some great information and pictures from different stages of development for many Lucasfilm games, including the early incarnations of The Dig with the original 4 characters.

Brian Moriarty interviewed about Loom and The Dig.

A humourous lecture Brian Moriarty made in 1999 about the 'Paul Is Dead' mythos.

Double Fine's Broken Age adventure game documentary series has gone public, here's the playlist.

Phil_A

Quote from: Steven on March 16, 2015, 06:23:55 PM
I also wanted to expand on why exactly did adventure games fall out of favour? I sort of think it had to do with the move to 3D in a similar way to traditionally animated movies going out of favour at exactly the same time - was it really out of public favour or did the industry choose to only churn out ugly and non-intuitive games with 3D graphics? Ensuring the decline of the genre by default as it were?

I think it could also be least partly to do with the costs of making the games becoming more extravagant in adverse proportion to actual sales. At the height of the late 90s post-Myst FMV Hell era, it seemed like every release had to be a multi-disc extravaganza which was equivalent in production to a low-budget film(the most extreme example I know of was Black Dahlia, a game which came on eight CDs). The problem with the majority of these titles(aside from a few notable exceptions like Westwood's Blade Runner) was that they were essentially just dumbed-down interactive movies, maybe fun to play through once or twice but with ultimately little value as games, and I believe this was reflected in declining sales across the board. And also by the fact that many of them could be found clogging up bargain bins for years afterwards.

Sierra, one of the biggest players in the field, fell prey to this tendency in the worst way and ended up spunking away a lot of money on poor-selling titles like Phantasmagoria 2 and the awful King's Quest 7, with it's terrible sub-Disney soundtrack and sub-Filmation animation(courtesy of the studio responsible for the CDi Zelda games). I think this kind of overreaching was what ultimately led to the company's downfall, and the hollowed-out shell of a brand it is now.

Of course there's also the argument put forth by Old Man Murray many years ago, that the market for traditional adventures died because players no longer had the patience to try and figure out the absurd anti-logic of games like Gabriel Knight 3 and its infamous "cat hair moustache" puzzle. http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

Consignia

Quote from: Phil_A on March 20, 2015, 07:45:47 PM
the awful King's Quest 7, with it's terrible sub-Disney soundtrack and sub-Filmation animation(courtesy of the studio responsible for the CDi Zelda games).

Oh, was really that bad? I remember seeing it magazines at the time and thinking it looked pretty neat, but I never got around to playing it. Maybe for the best, after all.

Steven

Quote from: Phil_A on March 20, 2015, 07:45:47 PM
The problem with the majority of these titles(aside from a few notable exceptions like Westwood's Blade Runner) was that they were essentially just dumbed-down interactive movies, maybe fun to play through once or twice but with ultimately little value as games, and I believe this was reflected in declining sales across the board. And also by the fact that many of them could be found clogging up bargain bins for years afterwards.

Myst was the catalyst for all of this stuff, I remember many similar titles on the PC coming out after that which were carbon copies.

There were also a load of FMV streaming games that were essentially space invaders only with a moving background and better graphics - rail shooters I think they're collectively known as, Brian Moriarty and David Fox both moved from LucasArts to Rocket Science Games to produce this dreck with titles such as Cadillacs and Dinoasaurs. Understandably this stuff was innovative for the time with compression codecs and all that sort of stuff, but were terrible games that were more a novelty than anything else. Fox talks about it in this interview. Though LucasArts themselves moved in the same direction with things like Rebel Assault 1 and 2, there were a glut of these types of titles on the PC and platforms like the Mega CD, such as Loadstar: The Legend Of Tully Bodine etc, yuck!

It's probably a similar dynamic to the big 1983 video game crash, the market was so inundated with poor quality titles because of the CD format that it was a much surer bet to go with 3D 1st person action games where you knew what you were getting. At least back in the days of the floppy disk there had to be a real economy with what was necessary for the game, lots of graphics and animations took up a lot of space so if it wasn't necessary it would be cut. Though moving to CD was a necessary step for LucasArts because the amount of backgrounds and animation for adventure games meant they were getting crazy with the amount of disks, and of course it enabled 'talkie' audio dialogue, other types of games simply didn't need the space so padded it out with poor AmDram FMV to justify themselves.

madhair60


Phil_A

Quote from: Consignia on March 20, 2015, 08:01:13 PM
Oh, was really that bad? I remember seeing it magazines at the time and thinking it looked pretty neat, but I never got around to playing it. Maybe for the best, after all.

Yep, it was a stinker. I'm not that big on the KQ series as a whole, but I have to wonder what they were thinking with this:



The background art was nice, though.

Quote from: StevenIt's probably a similar dynamic to the big 1983 video game crash, the market was so inundated with poor quality titles because of the CD format that it was a much surer bet to go with 3D 1st person action games where you knew what you were getting.

Interestingly, Sierra in their latter years did attempt to make the transition to full 3D games with the final King's Quest, "Mask Of Eternity". But it wasn't a success(it was basically a poor imitation of the PSX King's Field series), and I assume the writing was on the wall by that point. I'm still mildly curious about that unreleased Babylon 5 game they were producing that never made it to the shops.

Steven

Also Blizzard almost finished their similarly cartoony Warcraft adventure game Lord Of The Clans and then cancelled it at the final hurdle because marketing thought the format was dated and the market for adventure games was deteriorating.



Very poor art for such a big franchise as Blizzard's cash-cow Warcraft, I'm wondering if game artists that were pixel-literate found it harder to move to the higher resolution and quality animation during the jump to CD and developers were drafting in animators and artists from the TV or movie industry, on the cheap obviously hence the terribleness of the Zelda CDi game and this stuff etc.

biggytitbo

I think the incredible poor quality tainted the genre both before and after the 3d move. Arguably the 3d transition was almost secondary to the vast glut of terrible adventure games that came out in the 1994-2000 period. 3d certainly didn't help as those early attempts were particularly bad, but the genre was in big enough trouble by then anyway.

Consignia

Quote from: Phil_A on March 20, 2015, 09:08:29 PM
Yep, it was a stinker. I'm not that big on the KQ series as a whole, but I have to wonder what they were thinking with this:




Yeah, I've never played any of the King's Quest series, but I always have liked cartoons, and it looked like an interactive cartoon. My minds eye doesn't remember it looking quite that shit though.

I've never been big on Sierra games, they always seemed to lack the fun of LucasArts.

Steven

Quote from: Phil_A on March 20, 2015, 07:45:47 PM
Of course there's also the argument put forth by Old Man Murray many years ago, that the market for traditional adventures died because players no longer had the patience to try and figure out the absurd anti-logic of games like Gabriel Knight 3 and its infamous "cat hair moustache" puzzle. http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

Brian Moriarty wrote a portentous article about the difficulty of adventure games back in 1990, he made Loom relatively easy, accessible and tried not to punish players as a result of this ideology. Though there's an obvious see-saw in how difficult puzzles should be to keep a game interesting versus frustrating a player, but another dynamic I think particularly for Sierra was difficult puzzles meant you could cash-in on hint phonelines, ker-ching! Lots of games did this back in those days, I remember even phoning up a hint line when I was stuck on Alone In The Dark 2 I believe and some exasperated French bloke was explaining this silly illogical puzzle that you couldn't progress past without doing. Monkey Island had a bunch of references to these lines and I can't quite remember if they were directly plugging them for cash or satirising them, probably a bit of both.

Phil_A

Quote from: Steven on March 20, 2015, 09:41:04 PM
Brian Moriarty wrote a portentous article about the difficulty of adventure games back in 1990, he made Loom relatively easy, accessible and tried not to punish players as a result of this ideology. Though there's an obvious see-saw in how difficult puzzles should be to keep a game interesting versus frustrating a player, but another dynamic I think particularly for Sierra was difficult puzzles meant you could cash-in on hint phonelines, ker-ching! Lots of games did this back in those days, I remember even phoning up a hint line when I was stuck on Alone In The Dark 2 I believe and some exasperated French bloke was explaining this silly illogical puzzle that you couldn't progress past without doing. Monkey Island had a bunch of references to these lines and I can't quite remember if they were directly plugging them for cash or satirising them, probably a bit of both.

Yeah, I've started to realise with hindsight that all those hintbooks Sierra used to sell were probably a nice little earner for them. Almost all their early games have at least one puzzle that is more-or-less unsolvable without outside help, so you had to either give up and hope one of the magazines of the time would print a solution, or fork out for a hintbook.

Incidentally, there's a dig at Brian Moriarty in one of the Space Quests:


Ooh, those grapes are bitter.


biggytitbo

All of this is why Broken Sword 1 is the best adventure game of all time. Great settings, great characters, great voice acting and best of all, tight as fuck plot - where you're the central character in a film unfolding around you. I don't think its ever been bettered even now. Never (well rarely) resorts to ugly inventory swapping or pixel hunting either.

Steven

Just completed Maniac Mansion, it's relatively short but had to look up hints a couple of times, not all of the puzzles are that logical to be honest. There's a couple of Sierra-esque dumb death things in there, a button that says 'do not press' which naturally enough you press and it blows up the house and kills everyone and you have to restart. The three character thing onlu has a couple of uses in the game but on the whole is a dynamic that just confuses things, they really made that work though with the DOTT time-travel thing.

Mister Six

Quote from: Steven on March 18, 2015, 07:47:38 PMIt's not like Grim Fandango shit the bed for the entire genre but something definitely happened to remove confidence in the format

I think it was more to do with Lucasfilm wanting LucasArts to shit out moneymaking Star Wars games ad infinitum.

syntaxerror

Quote from: Phil_A on March 20, 2015, 10:18:30 PM
Incidentally, there's a dig at Brian Moriarty in one of the Space Quests:


Ooh, those grapes are bitter.

Aren't they just. All those old Sierra games felt like they were written by a bunch of snide pricks, whether this was some "Oh you just died, you should have seen that coming lol HARD LUCK MATE" bullshit or passive aggressive copy protection built into the gameplay, it never felt like anything you could call 'fun'. Not that Lucas Arts was above making swipes at the competition, mind, but imo, point well made:-


Steven

Quote from: Mister Six on March 22, 2015, 10:21:57 AM
I think it was more to do with Lucasfilm wanting LucasArts to shit out moneymaking Star Wars games ad infinitum.

This has been mentioned many times, but LucasArts were still developing a couple of adventure titles well into 2000-2004, with ideas to expand into the episodic release strategy. It's likely that noticing the lack of money-spinning titles of this genre in the rest of the industry is what made the heads at the company cancel Full Throttle 2 and Sam & Max 2, so money could be invested in, as you say, likelier bankable Star Wars titles.

Though LucasArts were the industry leader in the genre other than say Sierra, who as we've discussed started churning out poor looking 3D titles that were ugly and difficult to play. It was probably an intelligent move as Tim Schafer had left the company in 2000 so I don't know how well Full Throttle 2 would have worked out, though the concept art looked pretty good:



Though this was cancelled and effort was put in to develop an action game for the PS2 called Full Throttle 2: Hell On Wheels, which went with awful 3D graphics instead, before being cancelled too:



Sam & Max 2 was cancelled in 2004, but there were a few previews, it's 3D but doesn't look that bad and having Steve Purcell involved was a good sign, certainly no worse than the later Telltale incarnation. Canning that one was probably a mistake, especially if they were going to include downloadable episodic content as has been surmised, but with the migration of Gilbert, Grossman, Schafer, Fox and Moriarty it was disingenuous to churn out sequels without the collaboration of their original authors. Telltale's Tales Of Monkey Island at least had Dave Grossman involved who did have Ron Gilbert come in to swap ideas.

Phil_A

Quote from: syntaxerror on March 22, 2015, 04:16:33 PM
Aren't they just. All those old Sierra games felt like they were written by a bunch of snide pricks, whether this was some "Oh you just died, you should have seen that coming lol HARD LUCK MATE" bullshit or passive aggressive copy protection built into the gameplay, it never felt like anything you could call 'fun'. Not that Lucas Arts was above making swipes at the competition, mind, but imo, point well made:-



The first three Space Quests are pretty decent games and fairly amusing in places, but from IV onwards it's downhill all the way into Smugtown. The fifth one even opens with a Star Trek parody, for fuck's sake.

The other dick move Sierra used to love to pull(and Roberta Williams' games were the worst for this) was to make it really easy to get the game into a "no win" state by including some crucial item early on which you would normally overlook in the course of a normal play and which was only obtainable at a specific time, but which was also impossible to progress without. Naturally, you wouldn't find about this until three hours later giving you no choice but to either go back to an earlier save or start the whole thing over. If this had just happened once or twice in their early games it might be forgivable. But it kept on happening. Urgh.

Steven

Did anybody like Sierra games because of playing them BEFORE Lucasfilm titles like Monkey Island, though? Thankfully Monkey Island was my first adventure game other than dicking about on a couple of earlier text adventures, but after that whenever I touched a Sierra game I'd be instantly turned off, and the humour was cheesy. I remember buying an Accolade game called Altered Destiny which was very similar to Sierra, played it a few times before fucking it off from frustration as it wasn't fun at all.

A.A

Hmm...i thought SQIV was the pick of the bunch, and I don't think Sierra were all bad. I enjoyed the Gabriel Knight series as well as the Leisure Suit Larry games (well, the point-and-click ones; never could really get into any typing ones, of any series). Leisure Suit Larry 7 in particular is an excellent, excellent adventure game. Freddy Pharkas was pretty good too.

Phantasmagoria had its own particular charm for me, too.

syntaxerror

Quote from: Phil_A on March 22, 2015, 06:42:52 PM
The other dick move Sierra used to love to pull(and Roberta Williams' games were the worst for this) was to make it really easy to get the game into a "no win" state by including some crucial item early on which you would normally overlook in the course of a normal play and which was only obtainable at a specific time, but which was also impossible to progress without. Naturally, you wouldn't find about this until three hours later giving you no choice but to either go back to an earlier save or start the whole thing over. If this had just happened once or twice in their early games it might be forgivable. But it kept on happening. Urgh.

How is that even fun? Its bad design, and if that happened in a game now, it would rightfully be described as 'broken'. Every item and interaction had to be approached with a sense of trepidation and anticipated risk, which meant constantly saving and loading, or in the olden days, ENDLESS FUCKING DISK SWAPPING.

Steven

Yeah but all that crap gets them more cash via hint books and hint lines. They probably even justified to themselves because of the rife pirating of software back in the day, that they could even make money from the rip-off merchants via this masochistic game design.

madhair60

Quote from: Steven on March 22, 2015, 07:07:17 PM
Did anybody like Sierra games because of playing them BEFORE Lucasfilm titles like Monkey Island, though? Thankfully Monkey Island was my first adventure game other than dicking about on a couple of earlier text adventures, but after that whenever I touched a Sierra game I'd be instantly turned off, and the humour was cheesy. I remember buying an Accolade game called Altered Destiny which was very similar to Sierra, played it a few times before fucking it off from frustration as it wasn't fun at all.

I played them after Lucasarts, and vastly prefer Sierra.

Steven

Quote from: madhair60 on March 22, 2015, 10:58:18 PM
I played them after Lucasarts, and vastly prefer Sierra.

I knew you would, but I think you're in the minority. But can you articulate why? Lucasfilm stuff was too easy or something, which is a definite criticism of some of their titles?

madhair60

Quote from: Steven on March 22, 2015, 11:01:40 PM
I knew you would, but I think you're in the minority. But can you articulate why? Lucasfilm stuff was too easy or something, which is a definite criticism of some of their titles?

I think the Lucas 'uns are great, and Full Throttle is my favourite of the lot, but I do prefer the jeopardy of the Sierra games, I like how archaic they are, and how utterly demanding they can be.  I like the storytelling more than the comedy in the LA games.  I don't find them funny, so they don't really offer me anything.