i'm just going to bow out respectfully and acknowledge that I was doing was I honestly believed was a laughably obvious wind-up
Laughably obvious compared to your usual style of abruptly jumping into a thread to post a terse, brusque opinion in a "fuck you, I'm right" attitude? Hard to read satirisation of your usual behaviour by just repeating your usual behaviour.
madhair sitting down to play a game hoping he's going to have an absolutely fucking miserable time, literally rubbing his hands together with glee at the prospect he might play for six hours and have all his progress wiped out for some impossible-to-predict reason, that's his idea of pure bliss that is
I bet he rigs up the emulator so he has to actually physically swap floppy disks every 5 minutes and sit through loading screens, the more disks the better, even the later CD-Rom games, bring them in on punnets of floppy disks! They are his bread and butter, literally, ham and cheese between wedges of floppy disks, he's gone disturbed.. further disturbed.
Thimbleweed Park is easily one of the best adventure games of the last couple of decades, so you're in for a treat. The ending is shite though, so be prepared for that.
After the Monkey Island 2 ending debacle, Ron Gilbert should have learned. He then back-tracked and said he had the real Secret Of Monkey Island worked out all along, though conveniently he can't tell you that now because Disney own the rights, and since they also own the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise, not much likely they will launch a third proper Monkey Island based on the franchise their franchise rips off based on their original theme park ride.
Saying that Broken Age is the best adventure game is like saying that Chex Quest is the best FPS game. I find it difficult to comprehend that anyone who's played all (or even the majority) of the oft recognised classics of the genre would name Broken Age as being the best of the lot.
I backed Broken Age, but then didn't much like the art style in the updates, so I took a while to play it once it came out.. Meh it was alright, the two character in opposing worlds dynamic was sort of DOTT again but there wasn't much interaction between both characters aside from flipping between them in 'chapters' it would have been more interesting having puzzles that spanned between the two necessitating the character switch or at least clues appearing in one world helping you in the other like in DOTT. The 'twist' I honestly didn't see coming but it was probably obvious, I thought it was a nice detail. And yeah, that puzzle where you had to physically write shit down was super annoying, there should have been a thing in your inventory for putting down the details, the puzzle itself was obvious and easy, just you had to remember a load of information because the computer would ask you for random details. That really wasn't on for a modern puzzler.
moon logic wank.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzleBasically there can only be two types of puzzles, logical puzzles, like use the key with the door, or puzzles that make sense in the logic of that world.. use rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle on rope. The second one I only got from faffing around because at the age I played Monkey Island I didn't know what a pulley was, and I still don't know if it was some kind of French pun on chicken being poulet. Puzzles that don't lead you along with some inherent element of logic are just arse though, I remember I got stuck getting past the troll on Melee island and having to pay the 'troll toll' I just kept handing him things, eventually he accepted the red herring, in fact if I paid attention he did ask for something "that would attract attention, but of no real importance". As has been said though the monkey wrench puzzle is wank because there's no clue like that.
I have a theory that Grim Fandango inadvertently killed the genre.
It most certainly did, it was because at the time it came out all of gaming was going through the problem that 3d Gfx cards were becoming the standard because of Quake et al and those types of 1st person games were obviously selling like hot cakes. So developers started trying to all change to 3d even if it didn't serve the game, having a 3d engine for a static camera adventure game is just insane, replacing all that nice hand drawn art with flat textures and simplified character models. Full Throttle sort of had it right in that they used elements of 3d for vehicles and things like that. It was a stupid decision to go 3d but what was even stupider was ditching the point-and-click interface, I literally don't know what possessed them. It was the first Lucas adventure game I didn't buy based purely off that shitty interface and I really wasn't keen on the sharp-depature overly cartoony art on Curse Of Monkey Island and a lot of the humour seemed to be missing, I never played any of the later Monkey series but on seeing bits of them years later they looked fuck-awful.
Anyway, what with sales of Lucasarts adventure games going down the pan, Sam & Max 2 and Full Throttle 2 were cancelled, and with them being arguably the best producer of games of the genre obviously a lot of smaller developers and publishers thought it would be a lost cause shoveling any money into an adventure game when 1st person shooters was where it was at.
Exactly the same thing happened at roughly the same time in the movie industry with animated features all moving to 3d after Toy Story, it pretty much killed the chances of any smaller studios creating a big hit with a traditionally animated cartoon because all the kids liked 3d now. I think adventures were also hampered by the console market as a controller just isn't a good interface for point-and-click obviously, and they've all but taken over the games market.
It was exactly the same as when games jumped to the CD medium, every game had to shove in FLV now, adventure game characters have to now feature a badly bluescreened and cut out actor walking around a set like in Knightmare and every 2 minutes we need a full FLV cutscene, because y'know, we NEED to fill up the disc. Just because the technology is there doesn't mean you have to abuse it.
Discworld was alright I suppose, helped immensely by the voice cast obviously but I didn't get on with the puzzles and I thought maybe you had to be a Pratchett fan to really get it, I'd never read anything by him.
A few games that haven't been mentioned, Darkseed and Darkseed 2, any fans of those? I never played them beyond the demo but even though I liked Giger's art I was put off by how monochrome it was. There was also a few HP Lovecraft one sThe Shadow Of The Comet and Prisoner of Ice I never got round to playing, seemed a similar atmosphere if you're into that kind of thing.
There was a game called
Dylan Dog (think there might have been more than one) based on an Italian comic book that I got off some bloke at a carboot sale when I was a kid, it was a noir detective type deal, though I got to a certain point and it asked for disk 2, there was no disk 2.. rather than being a Ron Gilbert style ending I think the carboot guy had just fucked up.
I remember quite liking the original
Dune game, I played it years after it came out though, Dune 2 is another story as that pretty much started an entirely other genre of game.
There was the first adventure talkie I played on CD-Rom,
Companions of Xanth, I got it on some magazine cover after I got my first CD-Rom in the mid-90s and thought it was just a demo except I kept playing longer and longer into the game until I completed it and realised it was the full thing. I think it was based on a book series, it's very much bloke gets sucked into a computer fantasy land of Dungeons & Dragons, but it's all a bit wacky but I remember the puzzles being pretty logical.
Incidentally having just got through Hollow Knight (aside from bits and pieces of the DLC stuff I'm still tidying up on) I think the world it inhabits would make a good adventure game, solving puzzles deep underground amongst a dark world of bugs and weird Lovecraftian insect Gods etc.
Anybody played
Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure? Looks like a nice noirey art style and seems to be parodying Monkey Island a bit:
“Gibbous includes everything I love about classic point-and-click adventures.”
Kotaku
“Thanks to its witty writing and engaging puzzles, Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure stands out as one of the best point and click games of recent years.”
8 – Gamespew
“I haven’t shouted, cheered, or laughed this much at a point and click adventure in a very, very long time.”
9.2 – Powerup Gaming
