Recommend me some Adventure games from 2000 through this year

Started by Fleshstalker, Fri 16/03/2007 05:27:13

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Fleshstalker

I'd like to know all the great Adventure games from 2000 - 2007.

The first Adventure game I bought was Grim Fandango (beaten yesterday) and I need another great game. I chose to limit from 2000 - 2007 because I want no problems running the games on XP.

I forgot to mention I'm not into 1st person Adventure games, like Myst. Only 3rd person.

BOYD1981

a lot of the older adventure games that are worth playing will work just fine with the use of scummvm, classics like Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit The Road and Beneath A Steel Sky all work fine, and you can get Beneath A Steel Sky for free from the scummvm website http://www.scummvm.org and there are always DoTT + S&M double packs floating about, i'd also recommend The Longest Journey, although i'm not sure about XP compatibility i know it works fine under Windows 2000, and there is it's sequel Dreamfall released last year.

Limey Lizard, Waste Wizard!
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Mr_Frisby

The have recently released all the sierra quest games in collectors packs with a dos box that makes them kool to use with xp - pretty good prices too. You can even get them from Amazon. I got the space quest series and it's all cool - except the sound is wierd - but my sound card never works so it's probably my driver or somethin'.

Anyway - for reference - in my opinion you just played the last great adventure game ever made(grim fandango) - all the rest that I have played since that release have been crap or not stricktly adventure.


Still haven't ever re-played MI4 but have played the first two religiously over and over, didn't even mind the third so that says alot.

Myst series are good. And the last broken sword wan't too bad.
Also if you haven't yet played Full ThrottleÃ,  - do as it kicks the sh#t.

F.
Hey! All my awesome trophies dissapeared in the year since I was here last. CONSARN_IT! with an underscore!!! I earned dem tings!! Oh well. Hope your Monkey floats.

Rui 'Trovatore' Pires

#3
My advice - Gabriel Knight.

Gabriel Knight 1 Sins of the Fathers - it's iffy to run in XP... but with the patch found at http://www.gabrielknight2k.tk/ all bugs get fixed and you can install the whole game onto your hard drive!

Gabriel Knight 2 The Beast Within - it's not all that iffy to run in XP... but there's a patch at http://www.gabrielknight2k.tk/ that might help you too!

Gabriel Knight 3 Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned - It should work in XP, period. If it doesn't, then you probably need to create a small batch file, whose contents I can share with you whenever you like.

That's my advice. Play 'em. Love 'em.

EDIT - "Black Dahlia" is very good, too, but be warned that it's 8 CDs filled with a great story, a great narrative, a brilliant ending, and more gratuitous, needless and frustrating puzzles than you can shake a stick at.

Mind you, I don't know why you'd want to shake a stick at a puzzle. What's wrong with you, anyway, shaking sticks at puzzles? You could put some puzzle's eye out with that thing! Honestly, the youth of today, as if stalking flesh wasn't bad enough...

Ok, I'm done now.

EDIT 2 - Ok, so I wasn't done. Phantasmagoria 1 and 2 are arguably great. They're also arguably bad. But they're unarguably fun to play. However, I doubt they'll work well with XP. My bad, sorry to have trespassed on your time.
Reach for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.

Kneel. Now.

Never throw chicken at a Leprechaun.

Nostradamus

As you asked, some recommended commercial adventure games from the 2000+ era:

The entire Broken Sword series (1-4)

Secret Files: Tunguska

Atlantis Evolution

Return to Mysterious Island

The Egyptain Prophecy


The last 3 are first person, but they are NOT like Myst. Theyre not just random puzzles, they have epic rich storylines and interesting puzzles.




GarageGothic

There's hardly been any adventure games worth your time released since 2000. None whatsoever if you expect Grim Fandango standard. And even if there's been a few decent methadone kind of games to keep the adventure junkies from going cold turkey, they're all mind-numbingly derivative. And the couple of game that actually tried to improve the genre such as Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy or Dreamfall usually suffer in the gameplay department.
You'd be better off getting some of the classic adventures from the 90's that still run on XP - possibly after patching - like Rui suggests. And for newer games, buy a few truly excellent games from other but similar genres, such as Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, GTA: San Andreas or Hitman: Blood Money. In my opinion they are closer to what adventure games would have been like, if adventure fans weren't a bunch of whiny reactionaries.

Rui 'Trovatore' Pires

Oh, oh, oh, I have it - Beyond Good and Evil. It's not pure adventure, but it's extraordinary, and a game any adventure-game-lover can fully enjoy and appreciate.
Reach for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.

Kneel. Now.

Never throw chicken at a Leprechaun.

Ali

Syberia isn't particularly popular on these boards, but I love it. Syberia II is good as well. It has some of the qualities of Myst, but it is third person.

Beyond Good and Evil has similar qualities to psychonauts, in that it's principally an action game with adventure elements.

EDIT: Rui beat me to reccommending that by mere seconds!

The Longest Journey is the precursor to Dreamfall. Again, they're not hugely popular 'round these parts. They both have terrific graphics and, I think, engaging characters.

I also suggest that you play some first person games that aren't Myst. Not all first person adventures have the same sense of melancholy alienation (which I like and many people hate). Take Rui's advice and play Black Dahlia. It's first person but you play as a character.

I'd also say that you should take BOYD's advice seriously. There's a whole wealth of terrific adventure games you'll be missing out on if you limit yourself to post 2000.

Rui 'Trovatore' Pires

And then there's the action-adventures or FPS-adventures that appeal to adventure gamers because of the story and characters and atmosphere. System Shock comes to mind.
Reach for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.

Kneel. Now.

Never throw chicken at a Leprechaun.

FSi++

And speaking of System Shock, there are also System Shock 2 and Deus Ex. Frankly speaking, from that list I've played only Deus Ex. So let's talk Deus Ex.
It's ugly as hell and may look kind of tough at first (but again, may not, depending on your style). It's also long and paranoid-story-driven as hell, and with somewhat nice setting. Though most of actual puzzles are "hack that terminal to steal the password to open that door to advance further", the real thing is reading all in-game texts (there's plenty) while playing meanwhile discovering one beautiful conspiracy, sending nuclear rockets to evil villain bases and that sort of stuff.
Worth couple of weeks spent on it.

Rui 'Trovatore' Pires

Naturally enough, when I said System Shock I meant the series. Though I much preferred SS1.
Reach for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.

Kneel. Now.

Never throw chicken at a Leprechaun.

ManicMatt

Still Life. Made by the Syberia folks, I quite enjoyed it. Murder detective type game, except that the killer is copycat killing, so you play two people, one in the present, and one in the past.

I found Gabriel Knight 3 too pedestrian, imo.

Deus Ex is one of my fave games ever. (And it's sequel which was shorter, but had nice graphics and made me buy an xbox just to play it)

Pushing my luck, The Nomad Soul made in 1999. It's made by the fella's who did Fahrenheit (Another game I reccomend), Quantic Dreams. It works on my XP, although the inventory screen judders, but the game has an ultra smooth frame rate, something a lot of people didn't get to experience when it first came out, apparently. It's graphics have aged to being only a bit better than PSone standard, but I bought it because it intrigued me, and it's quite fun! You have a big city to walk around in, and you solve puzzles, in a fully 3D world.
They put shitty FPS and beat em up sections in it, that occur about 25% of the overall playing time, but a cheat enabled me to have infinite energy to stop me from dying. (Because they're too crap to even want to be challenged by)

LimpingFish

I agree with Matt (strangely enough :P).

Gabriel Knight 3 is an awful game, horribly to look at and horrible to play.

And, yes, The Nomad Soul is indeed a fine game and quite adventurey.

Most of the other titles have been covered, with the exception of:

The Black Mirror
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
The Moment of Silence
Post Mortem
Echo: Secrets of the Lost Cavern
Voyage: Journey to the Moon

I won't comment on their quality, as the term "bad adventure game" has become a bit of an oxymoron.

As for pre-2000, a number of older LucasArts games have been fixed to run on XP by LucasArts themselves. The Dig, Full Throttle,and Sam & Max are the only ones, I think. Escape from Monkey Island runs fine on XP. I'm not sure about The Curse of Monkey Island. Simon the Sorceror 1 and 2 have also been fixed to run on XP.

Make sure, if buying these games at retail, that the box states "Now compatible with Windows XP" as the boxes for the fixed versions and the boxes for the unfixed versions are otherwise identical.
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Rui 'Trovatore' Pires

Mind you, the quality of Post Mortem and Still Life is pretty much as arguable as the quality of Gabe Knight 3. And Black Mirror I'd advise against, same for Moment of Silence.
Reach for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.

Kneel. Now.

Never throw chicken at a Leprechaun.

GarageGothic

Quote from: LimpingFish on Fri 16/03/2007 23:42:11the term "bad adventure game" has become a bit of an oxymoron.

Don't you mean "pleonasm"?

And I totally agree with Rui's latest post. GK3 is a flawed masterpiece whereas Post Mortem, Black Mirror and Still Life are just plain flawed.

Edit: And in response to LimpingFish's comment on the gameplay, I seem to have been one of the few people who solved the cat moustache puzzle without a walkthrough in about 10 minutes. My only major grievance was that disappearing bridge at the end.

LimpingFish

Quote from: Rui "Trovatore" Pires on Sat 17/03/2007 00:34:37
Mind you, the quality of Post Mortem and Still Life is pretty much as arguable as the quality of Gabe Knight 3. And Black Mirror I'd advise against, same for Moment of Silence.

GK3 is an abomination of design and graphical ineptitude. People who like this game are either blind to these things, or simply delusional. In my humble opinion. All offence to those people intended.

As to Post Mortem, Still life, Black Mirror, Moment of Silence, and, indeed, all the games I listed, I wasn't recommending them. I was simply listing them as possible choices to fit a criteria.

My hatred of most modern adventure games is well documented.

But the abortion as interactive entertainment that is Gabriel Knight 3 should be eradicated from this world.

EDIT: Flawed masterpiece?! FFS. Jane Jensen should be forced to play through it sometimw. She obviously didn't before it was released.

EDIT: Yes, pleonasm indeed. My error.

EDIT: Just to be clear, if you like GK3 and enjoyed playing it, that's grand. Some people like hooking their genitals up to a car battery for fun, so liking GK3 is fairly tame in comparison.

I still wouldn't shake either person's hand, though. :)
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Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens

I agree that GK 3 was a mess, not only because the graphics looked like they hired some kid out of high school to do them but because the story was such a mishmash of better ideas by better authors, and the historical relevance in the story is very slim.  GK 1 was leaps and bounds above both of its sequels in both presentation and story, but then most sequels do tend to pale next to the original.

Some of the games listed I really wouldn't recommend at all because, coming from a person who enjoys a game for the story more than anything else, many of these were sorely lacking in that department.  Included in this statement are:

Gabriel Knight 2 (like I want to watch a movie when I play a game)

Gabriel Knight 3 (You don't sound much like Mark Hamill, Moseley...)

Post Mortem (dodgy story and a buggy engine)

The Longest Journey (boring, boring, boring)

Syberia (boring...super boring)

Sherlock Holmes (the one with a pathetic attempt at a Cthulhu mythos tie-in without ever actually just coming out and saying it.  No really, play the game.  I did.  Especially annoying was the Poirot cameo...I mean seriously, Agatha Christie is not in the same league as Conan Doyle).

Murder on the Orient Express.  What an insulting, inane excuse for a game, but then again it was made by The (Mis)Adventure Company.

And Then There Were None:  Only The (Mis)Adventure Company could think they could improve on an Agatha Christie story.  They were mistaken.


One GOOD game with adventure elements that I haven't seen listed yet was
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.  It got rather boring near the end, but the scare sequences were really fun imo.  It also did a fair bit of justice to the mythos which was refreshing.

LimpingFish

Yes, all points I would agree with, ProgZ.

I actually enjoyed GK1, both it's story and it's atmosphere. But the sequels are definitely execrable.

Rule of thumb for modern adventure games: All of them are bad, but some are worse than others.

You can't rate, say, Niburu above Secret Files: Tunguska (or vice versa) because, when get down to it, both are pretty awful. It's just a case of how awful and how much pain you will suffer playing each one.

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Postmodern_Boy

Sanitarium has not been mentioned yet.  I remember playing it sometime around 99 or 00 and thinking it was cool.  Didnt complete it though because the friend I borrowed it from asked for it back. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitarium_%28videogame%29

Also wanted to agree with the person who said Sam & Max!  Funniest adventure game ever.     My favorite of the serria Quest games is the heros quest series, but it has some rpg elements thrown in the mix so its not pure adventure.
 

Fleshstalker

So I guess I should stick to the older games then. I noticed these 2000 and up titles don't have the wacky characters and cartoony art I so like. I'm not much into realistic settings. Ah well...

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