New adventure games

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Dizi
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New adventure games

Post by Dizi »

Monkey island, space quest, kings quest, full throttle, sam and max, all great adventure games of the past to name just a few.

But what about the new games, still life, the longest journey, ankh are they as good,better or is it a genre that needs to just go away. With the ever increasing popularity in FTP's, racing games will the adventure games die out?

With the "new style" adventure games such as fahrenheit and dreamfall is it now moving into a new direction? should it change and try to fit in to the console area. Games such as broken sword 3 and money island 4 both failed when it came to their console sales but had some amazing results with the PC crowd. So are adventure games meant to be played on consoles.

Also how about the DS style adventure games phoenix wright or another code. With this touch screen ability does this give the adventure games a new platform in which they could take advantage of and be highly sucessful?

I know so many questins but only one that needs to be answered...what is your opinion on the new adventure games that have came out over the past few years?
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Post by Monteque »

I played my first adventure game on my amiga 1200. Have been caught ever since

I will always support adventure games. Eventhough some of them are "designed" for consoles. Some of the new adventure are able to compete with the old ones. (Monkey Island)

Broken Sword 3 and Dream: Longest Journey 2 are both great games. Everything is perfect, the graphic, the story, the puzzles. I just love these games.

Don't think adventure are meant to be played on consoles. In my opinion a console game is a game, where you can play with friends or against friends such as halo, tekken etc. (spilt screen or lan)

Adventure games will never die imo. Adventure games have a wonderful gameplay and can be extremely hard to complete. In many new FPS games, there are no gameplay and you can complete them within 20 hours!
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Post by Scythe »

Dreamfall was good. It wasn't the most puzzling adventure game, but it had great atmosphere.

Still Life was horrible. It seemed promising, but never delivered on ANY of its promises.

Best surprise in recent adventure games: Heavily flawed, but quite entertaining, Runaway: A Road Adventure. It had cardboard characters, pixel hunting, insane puzzles, but I liked it anyway. :) It was very old style too. As in Monkey Island old style, not Adventureland old style...

Adventure games can't die out. They may decline to 3 a year, but die? Nope, never. They may go in new directions occasionally, but there'll always be returns to the roots as well. As for new styles, as long as the game maintains quality, it doesn't really matter whether it remains point 'n click or turns into something else.
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Post by Dizi »

I just got runaway:A road adventure, I saw a a review of it and then found a video and thought I must have this game, it came about two weeks ago :D Its amazing...so far. I know what you mean about tha cardboard characters but it still has a lot of charm to it. And there is a sequal coming out either this year or early next year I can't remember.
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Post by Scythe »

The real pity is, of course, that the main characters are the worst of the cardboard ones. Several of the supporting characters have oodles more personality.

I know about the sequel. It's supposed to come out in September, and is called Dream of the Turtle, IIRC.
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Post by Dizi »

yeah, I love the drag queens :D But haven't gotten much further then them, but the story is quite good...hoping the sequal qill iron out the problems.

As for dreamfalls which I forgot to mention before, I loved this game. Although the puzzles were a very few the story was amazing. It left me wanting more, so many questions need to be answered :p
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Post by Scythe »

Ok, now that I'm home, some more (fairly) recent adventure games...

Nibiru. I don't recall if it was made by the same people as Still Life, it could be. Man, was that a boring game... dull locations, uninteresting puzzles, no real characters to speak of, and after going through all those boring scenes, you get an ending that leaves you saying, "huh!?" I really hate that.

Syberia I+II. I don't know. They somehow felt like walking through a wax museum, if you know what I mean? Surreal rather than potent. But they weren't outright bad. I have mixed emotions.

Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude. How far you have strayed from your roots... But heck, I had good (adult) fun. ;) This scene in the gay bar where they're singing "Lesbian Nights", blatantly ripped and mutilated from Grease... hilarious! This isn't really an adventure game, just for the record, it merely had roots in those old Quest games.
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Post by Zyx »

Runaway was so bad that I had already almost forgotten it. "I don't know what to do with that". Illogical puzzles and the play mechanics (f.e. pixel hunting) were horrible.
It was a total pain to play it.
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Post by Scythe »

So, I just completed Dreamfall - The Longest journey, after having merely touched upon it at my first go. Heck, I hate giving spoilers, so I'll try not to, but...

What a beautiful story. Pity it leaves you with more questions than answers. I hope that guy gets a third part done that ties up those loose ends, though I hear that if you couple with the first Long Journey game, it *should* make sense. Maybe I've forgotten too much of it, but I don't think so.

Let me just say, bummer (!) of an ending... and... Did they make this game just to bring people down? Sheesh, this makes you wanna cry...

See, almost spoiler free. Go play if you haven't already. It's not exactly what I'd call an adventure game, but it's a great semi-interactive story book.
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Post by Dizi »

I love dreamfalls, I have played it twice and willl probably play it again after I have finished broken sword 4, as there are so many criptic clues about the story :D

I wanted to cry too, strange that I didn't as I am a big softy, yet I don't think that

I'm going to make a spoiler, but its not really a spoiler mor an observation that gives nothing away but a theory:p

A lot of people have speculated that Lady Alvane, was April Ryan, but I think that its Zoë Castillo...just think about somewhere Zoë ends up near the end of dreamfalls. It was never given away who Lady Alvane was in the first game and the only things that made people think it was April were Lady Alvane telling the story and her saying something like 'we'll meet sooner than you think'


As like you I wouldn''t call it an adventure, I got through it with almost no problems at all, only one silly little push the rocks puzzle got me stuck, but I like adventure games for their story as well as their puzzles so it never bothered me at all :D
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Post by Eric »

I just came across the following site which you might like (if you aready know of it)...

http://www.justadventure.com/
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Post by Scythe »

Ok, just spent a couple days completing "Fahrenheit" (AKA "Indigo Prophecy" for those of you on the North American continent). This movie turned somewhat game was a wonderful experience.

You play (or should I say watch) it for the compelling story, an occultish murder mystery, which does, unfortunately, take some rather inane turns and leaps near the end (why do so many adventures develop a lot of storytelling problems near the end?).

It's really an action movie with adventure elements, and all the action is played out... as a Simon game! Sounds weird, but works really neatly. One caveat: I wouldn't even try to play this on a PC without an analog gamepad. It must be close to unplayable with keyboard/mouse. I played it on XBox.

I recommend, though I'm sure that, as with all movies, it's not everybody's cup of tea.
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Post by Dizi »

I played fahrenheit on the PC and thought it was great, it took awhile to get used to the controlling it (without a gamepad :p) but it was a wonderful little game...a little short, I compleated it in one day and was a little disapointed that the different endings could be gotten by doing the last pert of the game different, rather than overall performance throughout the game.


As for me, yesturday I just compleated broken sword: the angel of death, like all the broken sword games the quirky sarcastic nature of george is still there, so is the complex relationship between him and nico. This is a PC only game, and gives you the option to play it point and click style or with a mixture of point and click and that awful control system they used for the third game. I played the third one on playstation, and if I had gotten it for PC chances are looking at this game I probably wouldn't have compleated it...anyway back on to the forth game. I found it a little short, and too easy, I don't know if its because I spend my spare time playing adventure games and I am used to the method of thinking or if adventure games these days aren't as challenging as they used to be.

The story is good, and lives up to the broken sword games, but is the only one that doesn't have Paris as a location. A lot of familiar characters will apear, a long with some new quite quirky ones.

It took me about 3 days to compleate, but I wasn't playing all that much. My biggest complaint is the controls of this game as they haven't got it right. The camera angles are horible, the mouse lags, tring to do it with two ways to move the characters about the screen is just plain wrong. I felt like I should be able to play this game like dreamfalls, being able to move the camera angle with the mouse, to be able to view different parts of the room. Even by the end of the game I found it really annoying to control, not difficult just anoying, even the menu system for item storage is awful.

But if you can over look this, and the quite simplistic puzzles that most of the games has to offer (some are medium in difficulty, but easy to figure out with some logic). I would reccomend this game :D


As for my next game, I have just installed the secret files: tunguska. I haven't started playing it yet as I have a project due soon and will have to do that, but I have watched the opening and for the first time in a while I am really looking forward to getting stuck into this game, lets hope once I get the chance to play it, it won't disapoint :D
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Post by Zyx »

I was greatly disappointed by the latest broken sword. It was just like Monkey Island 4. (Okay, some might say that the ending of BS3 was more like MI4's ending...)

The story was really shallow, and at points I didn't really know what was the motivation for the characters in the game. It just didn't make sense most of the time. I did like the puzzles and IQ tests, the map and the bomb thingies were just great, but all in all, it let me down story-wise. In the others you're told so well about all the history and you're in the story, but angel of death was just going around for no reason. The story was for you to read in the PDA if you wanted.

Controls were from hell and the dialogue system was stupid. I don't think I was the only one who got stuck because I didn't know how to make George climb ladder in the beginning of the game. No indication whatsoever that there was action tied to it. No way to skip dialogue you already had heard... really, this is 2006.

The inventory system was horrible in my opinion too, in the end, how many items were there that you actually never needed?

I have (way too) high hopes for Sam&Max.
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Post by Dizi »

I think its a step in the right direction for broken sword, I was very disapointed with the 3 one and wasn't going to get this one, but then I traded in some old ps2 games and got £160 (as a credit note as you get more money this way and there is always a game that I want) so after getting a DSlite and some other games I still had some money left over. And really the only reason I got it was because they had a special on of buy broken sword and secret files: tunguska for £30, when in the other game shop in my area broken sword was £34.99 and tunguska was £19.99, so the deal was good in my opinion :p

3 was awful (i thought it was trying to be like an adventure game meets tomb raider), but maybe that was because I played it on the ps2, the story I didn't enjoy as much as the first two and the control system was awful. I only got it for the PS2 because I knew the controls were the same on PC and figured it would be better as a console game. But the story was lacking and the puzzles were far to easy, plus controlling it was difficult. I will admit though that controlling the 4th one was a lot harder, but at least some of the puzzles (such as the PDA computer connecting, bomb) were a lot more entertaining. Nothing has changed with george and nico, and some of the chracters such as the Mark had their entertaining moments. But reading up the story on the PDA was a bit of a let down, but still I feel compared to what happened in the 3rd one it is a step in a better direction for broken sword...nowhere near as good as the first two but that is to be expected, in my opinion, why can't we just have the simple 2D adventures back...ohh wait that will cost more money these days, then I'll ask, why can't we have a simple 3D adventure game without all the awful camera movements. If the longst journey can get it right then why can't broken sword. Why do they have to try and change a format that works and try to add more to it when it just detracts from what the game originally was...a great point and click game with no other thrills.
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Post by Scythe »

I gotta jump on the BS3 (Bull Sh*t 3?) was good story but horrible game wagon. The whole idea of let's-put-in-a-puzzle-wait-let's-make-it-a(nother)-box-pushing-one got tired after just one of those, and they just kept cropping up! If it wasn't that, it was sneaking stuff. However, I loved the story, and thought it far superior to the first two, which had huge (or "huger") gaps in the plot and storytelling.

Anyway, since my last post, I completed Fahrenheit again (yah, in less than eight hours). :) Not only to explore all the conversation branches I had missed the first time around (now some parts of the story make significantly more sense, but it's really bad design to force you to play the game several times to understand the entire plot), but actually to find a lot of new content there that I'd missed the first time around. Not for the bonus points, though. I had unlocked everything after the first completion. Strip tease movies... Silly lads. :p
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Post by Dizi »

I like games like that, that don't make sense until you play them again, only because a lot of adventure games don't have the replay ability cos it only has one possible solution...I found I had to play dreamfalls again right after I had played it as I felt I could have missed a lot of clues to the story, same goes with longest journey. I have always felt that you get more out of an adventure if it doesn't make sense the first time around.

With fahrenheit I found it was more of an experimental game for the developers to try and push the adventure-type genre to a different level, in a lot of ways I think it was sucsessful, but like everythink there is some improvements to be made.
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Post by SGSW »

I am not much into adventures nowadays, so I'm replaying the old LucasArt Classics, like Monkey Island 1, Loom, Grim Fandango .... you get my drift.

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Post by Scythe »

Generally speaking, I have to disagree. It's all fine with me to give incentive to replay the game to pick up obscure parts of the plot/all the little side plots going on, but it's not kosher to make you replay to pick up on the main plot of the game.

Specifically in Fahrenheit, they goofed because lots of plot exposure came from making the correct conversation choices. If you chose poorly, it suddenly stopped making any sense at all, because you missed vital information. That was the bad design I was talking about.

Yes, it was an experimental game, with plenty of room for improvement, but thankfully a unique experience, and having me find enough interest to replay it at once is a very good, and rare, thing. More's the pity that most developers and publishers rarely take any chances, specifically in this genre.

Don't ask me what the plot actually was in either this or Dreamfall, though. :p
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Post by Zyx »

SGSW, I too have made a back-up of all the LucasArts classics on a DVD by myself. They fit so much better when you have optimized them for ScummVM (compressed audio to MP3/Ogg, removed .exes and other files that ScummVM doesn't need). No Grim Fandango though, as it does not run on ScummVM (yet), but I prefer its original CDs and the artful sleeve (it's the best!) they are in.

You have the MP3 version of the Loom prologue cassette too, right?
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