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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Naturally enough, when I said System Shock I meant the series. Though I much preferred SS1.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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...
You could give Telltale's Sam & Max games a try. Most people around here found them shorth and lacking compared to the original, I rather liked them as did a lot of other reviewers.
QuoteRule of thumb for modern adventure games: All of them are bad, but some are worse than others.
Rule of thumb: take these statements with a pinch of salt. It's obvious that most people can agree to disagree about games. It's also fairly obvious that rules such as this may apply to some people but not other people.
All in all, rule of thumb - play a LOT of adventure games, be them good or bad. You're new to the adventure genre, right? Try everything out. Then make your own opinion. Then read reviews, see the ones you agree with, and you'll know you can trust THOSE.
THERE's a good rule of thumb.
Agreeing to disagree is redundant when dealing with GK3. The flaws I see in it aren't simply down to taste.
Take The Longest Journey. I dispise that game, for reasons different to GK3, but I understand that some people like it. That's down to their tastes differing to mine.
GK3 on the other hand is inept. Being boring or bland doesn't enter into the equation for me.
It's technically stunted, its design having absolutely no redeeming features. I've stated in the past that adventure fans as a whole have a tendency to be very forgiving of their chosen genre, and people who "like" GK3 have taken this failing to the extreme.
As to Fleshstalker, if Grim Fandango is the first adventure you've played, you would be better off sticking to pre-2000 adventure games, as GF was the last of the great LucasArts adventures. TellTale's games ape this style, so you may get some enjoyment out of those also.
Game published by The Adventure Company are, by and large, po-faced and substandard. I'd make sure you really wanted any of them before parting with cash.
Play demos of everything that interests you.
Most adventure games have a demo to try. I get most of my adventure demos from GamersHell (http://www.gamershell.com/demo_download_archive.html).
They have demos for Niburu, Syberia, Still Life, The Delaware St. John games, TellTales stuff, and the like.
For demos of pre-1998 LucasArts and other games just go to the ScummVM (http://www.scummvm.org/demos.php#lec) site. You'll also need to download ScummVm itself to play most of them.
Heh. I said "agree to disagree". I actually meant "agree OR disagree".
QuoteI 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.
If this is true yeah, you should probably look for older games. I can't really think of any modern adventure games (aside from Bone and the new S&M episodes which aren't really that good) that fit your interests.
And maybe Beyond Good and Evil. Not a "straight adventure", but it does have that cartoony feel.
Runaway 1 and 2 are definately worth checking out, they're great modern lookin' point and click adventures.
Quote from: ProgZmax on Sat 17/03/2007 07:33:43
Murder on the Orient Express.Ã, What an insulting, inane excuse for a game, but then again it was made by The (Mis)Adventure Company.
And Then There Were None:Ã, Only The (Mis)Adventure Company could think they could improve on an Agatha Christie story.Ã, They were mistaken.
The Adventure Company merely published those games. They were made by AWE Productions.
Quote from: Ravey on Sun 18/03/2007 14:26:47
Runaway 1 and 2 are definately worth checking out, they're great modern lookin' point and click adventures.
Great-
looking modern point and click adventures, more like it. They suck in pretty much every other respect (far more than most games listed so far).
QuoteThe Adventure Company merely published those games. They were made by AWE Productions.
Oh no! This was certainly an important point! ::)
I would check out review sites if I were you, rather than listening to our oppinions. I only say this, because, in general, we seem to be crotchety old men pining for the golden years of adventure games, and not too many of us have been happy with the newer games. That isn't to say that there isn't truth in our dislike of newer games, just that if a game doesn't fit exactly into our perception of adventure games, we automatically write it off. Or so it seems.
The problem you'll find with the newer games, is because not as many of those games are being made, there are a lot less good ones. Just as if you looked at all the old games in the 90's you'd probably find a hell of a lot of bad adventure games, too. Just everyone seems to forget the bad ones over time.
-MillsJROSS
Heck, just go on over to the underdogs, download all the aventure games you find and play the ones you can get to run. That should slake your thirst. Also, it proves Mills' point about the number of bad adventure games in the 90s.
Quote from: ProgZmax on Mon 19/03/2007 03:49:16
QuoteThe Adventure Company merely published those games. They were made by AWE Productions.
Oh no! This was certainly an important point! ::)
Well, if you're going to take cheap digs at a company, you should at least get your facts straight. Not that TAC doesn't deserve some flak, but
most commercial adventure games in recent years have been published by them (everything from
Darkfall to
Syberia and
Still Life to
Return to Mysterious Island). If the TAC games suck, maybe that's just because it's difficult to find good adventure games to publish.
But yeah, it wasn't a terribly important point. Just a matter of giving blame where blame is due.
Quote from: LimpingFish on Sat 17/03/2007 22:28:30
It's technically stunted, its design having absolutely no redeeming features. I've stated in the past that adventure fans as a whole have a tendency to be very forgiving of their chosen genre, and people who "like" GK3 have taken this failing to the extreme.
I won't dispute that GK3 is poorly designed in terms of interface. I feel most of the puzzles, with a few well known exceptions, are well excecuted.
The problem is not that you shouldn't use cat fur and sticky tape to make a fake moustache, it's that you shouldn't do that in a predominantly realistic game. That puzzle is particularly misconcieved, but it does suit the light-hearted mood of the game's opening. The later puzzles are more inkeeping with the style of the game and the tone of the narrative.
I'm not interested in being overly forgiving my favourite genre; I didn't enjoy Gabriel Knight 2 at all, the puzzles, the graphics, or the performances. For these reason I suggest that to a significant extent, the flaws you identify in Gabriel Knight Three
are down to taste.
QuoteBut yeah, it wasn't a terribly important point. Just a matter of giving blame where blame is due.
Certainly you don't believe that they just sit back and let developers make a game? Publishers are increasingly getting their fingers into all aspects of production, from schedules to quality control. They are the ones who ultimately decide if the game will be released, so yeah, I think they deserve plenty of blame.
Actually, I think TAC tends to pick up games either after they're completed, or at a late point in production. For example, they only announced that they would publish Broken Sword 4 in North America after the game had already been released pretty much everywhere else. I don't know exactly when they signed the contract, but I'm guessing they didn't get to have a lot of input on the design. And Dark Fall, just to take another example, was independently distributed before TAC picked it up.
To some extent this is probably because TAC is a North American publisher, while many of the games are developed elsewhere for a local publisher (see, for example, the recent HC Andersen adventure). In some cases TAC make changes for their release (Keepsake got a patch, a map, and one of the voices was re-recorded with a different actor), but usually they just seem to be acting as a distributor.
Quote from: Ali on Tue 20/03/2007 10:32:08
For these reason I suggest that to a significant extent, the flaws you identify in Gabriel Knight Three are down to taste.
Apparently my taste doesn't stretch to incompetently designed and executed white elephants. ;)
QuoteActually, I think TAC tends to pick up games either after they're completed, or at a late point in production. For example, they only announced that they would publish Broken Sword 4 in North America after the game had already been released pretty much everywhere else. I don't know exactly when they signed the contract, but I'm guessing they didn't get to have a lot of input on the design. And Dark Fall, just to take another example, was independently distributed before TAC picked it up.
To some extent this is probably because TAC is a North American publisher, while many of the games are developed elsewhere for a local publisher (see, for example, the recent HC Andersen adventure). In some cases TAC make changes for their release (Keepsake got a patch, a map, and one of the voices was re-recorded with a different actor), but usually they just seem to be acting as a distributor.
Fair enough. I was just making a point that most people tend to level hate towards developers rather than publishers, which is what publishers want you to do, really. They look good if the game does well and nobody really cares about them if the game doesn't.
Clearly not working so well for TAC... ;D
To go even further off topic, this debate reminds me; didn't someone (might have been me, but I don't think so) once suggest that there's a niche waiting to be filled for an AGS "publisher"? Someone who would pick promising games-near-completion, set them up with beta testers, find a server to host the download, make a nice-looking thread in Completed Games, send off an email to indie adventure game sites and bloggers, and basically take care of the hassle of releasing a game? Seems like this would serve a useful function for developers who just want to focus on making the game.