Messages

Thanks for your suggestions and sorry for missing the previous thread on the subject. Must have used the wrong search terms.

As my game playing experience is almost completely limited to the PC, I was wondering if there were any good point-and-click adventure games made for other platforms, such as the Commodore Amiga or the Atari ST, but never ported to the PC, that might be worth checking out. Any suggestions?

Short and silly?! Short and sweet, rather!! A wonderful game in its minimalism! I found the puzzles and the overall presentation very clever and the interface very fitting! The graphics were also nice, even if I'm normally not a big fan of radically limited palettes! They certainly contribute to the game's uniqueness, though!

My only, extremely minor irritation came early in the intro when Count Can't uses two (!) different styles of emphasis, namely "*vision*" and "REALITY" within two lines! Other than that, I really can't think of anything! Great game, thanks!!

Great production values and very polished, especially considering the time constraint. I really like the art, the music, the puzzles (both of them, although, as previous commenters suggested, the final dialogue might have been a missed opportunity for another one), the font and the interface (except maybe for the fade-in effect of the hotspot description which IMHO overdid it a bit). Amazing at what rate some people can churn out awesome backgrounds like that!

Unfortunately, I didn't like the story at all. I found it kinda clichéd and also agree largely agree with what Sythe had to say about it. I probably wouldn't have kept on playing much longer had it not ended when it did, but as it is, I still found it entertaining and I'm actually glad that it was such a short game. Thanks a lot!

[Teddy Murder]

While it doesn't seem to be an adventure, it should be an AGS game, so I hope posting in this thread is OK. I'm looking for Teddy Murder, apparently made by Yahtzee back in 2006, see http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/archive/20060203-0419.htm

[5 Days a Stranger]

I played the game during the forum downtime, after having it recommended to me by bicilotti on IRC, thanks for that BTW (and of course big thanks Ghost for making it and releasing it for free), but didn't get around to submit feedback as neither the game, nor the readme, nor the website seem to include any contact information? Is that intentional? Or did I just overlook it? It just seems kinda strange for a self-declared feedback addict not to provide a means to send him feedback.

While I'm on the topic of the readme.txt, I'd like to add that I didn't like the layout at all. The lines are so long that they didn't on my screen when opening the file in a maximised notepad with the default font at the default size and turning on Word Wrap just makes it look ugly due to the lines not having a uniform length. While this may seem extremely minor and nit-picky, it did give me a less than optimal first impression and I would really appreciate it if you could limit yourself to 72 or 80 characters per line in the future.

The game also crashed on me a couple of times with

Code: ags

Error: run_text_script1: error -6 running in function 'on_mouse_click':
Error: Null pointer referenced

I got several different versions of the crash, all the above message, but different line numbers, namely

Code: ags

in Global script (line 319)
in Global script (line 357)
in Global script (line 371)
in Global script (line 387)

One of them (line 371), I can even reliably reproduce.

Spoiler

Just talk to Mr. Smee and then, on the Three Shells screen, use an inventory item upon another inventory item (which ones doesn't seem to matter). Note that the cursor doesn't change back to the default. Left-clicking on any inventory item now will crash the game.

[close]

The other crashes also seemed to happen while I was interacting with the inventory in some way, but I can't reproduce them. Those crashes were annoying, but I probably got more of them than a player would expect to encounter during a normal playthrough, because I was actively trying to find a way to reproduce the crashes after encountering my first one while still on the scene of the crime.

Partly because of that, I think it would have been nice if there was the possibility to load a saved game (for example by having a button on the title screen or having keyboard shortcut for the system menu) without having to skip through the intro, like Anonymous already suggested.

FWIW, I was playing v1.3B in windowed mode on Windows XP SP2 and without any mouse wheel emulation software.

I also noticed that at least one of the typos already mentioned in this thread was still present, namely

Spoiler

that there's a "); that shouldn't be there when Granny Smith says: You'll need to keep your eyes peeled, and remember, it must be no larger than 2 inches!");

[close]

While I don't have any experience whatsoever, I think releasing a new versions with improvements, no matter how minor, is always worth it. Sure, a skip key won't make me replay the game immediately, but I will give players that haven't played the game yet even more of a polished experience. And it's not like other games didn't release several versions, each with minor improvement over the last, in quick succession, 5 Days a Stranger or Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment, for example.

Now, after so much "preface" some comments about the actual game itself:

The graphics are absolutely gorgeous, the setting was interesting and the game used the borrowed characters in interesting ways and in a respectful manner. I really enjoyed the first two thirds of the game, basically until

Spoiler

the Bogey Man makes his appearance. After which, the game made a turn for the worse IMHO. I found the "resolution" of the original murder mystery and the ultimate ending extremely unsatisfying and having the Bogey Man break the fourth wall and the introduction of modern techonology didn't sit to well with me either. Those seemed very out of character to the game up until that point. Even the graphics seemed to get uglier, especially the altered versions of the pig's home and the world map.

[close]

Most of the puzzles were well done and logical. I was a bit disappointed that most (all?) items in the game only had exactly one use, especially true for those in your PI kit. Even if they had only one proper use, I think it would have been nice had you been able to check all kinds of surfaces for fingerprints, which might have also been a great opportunity for more funny messages.

Spoiler

On a similar note, I feel that the "default" messages were used a bit too frequently. For example, trying to "Get" the molasses yields the default "waste of storage" message rather than something more appropriate considering that Red will happily use the sample glass on the molasses (twice).

[close]

Another thing I didn't like about the puzzles was that some things seemed to happen randomly, witout reason, like

Spoiler

Gepetto's tools only appearing when you need them or the blue cup transforming when you visit a specific location.

[close]

On a positive note, I didn't have any issues with pixel hunting of any kind. Finally, there were two puzzles I found downright illogical and rather frustrating, namely

Spoiler

using the fuse on the cherry and using the muck on the magnet.

[close]

The rest of the puzzles was fine.

Another thing, that's probably just a minor gripe of mine (like the readme.txt thing above), was the use of *asterisks* for highlighting. I think it looked really odd. You wouldn't use *asterisks* in the speech balloons of a comic, would you? Here I think CAPITALS might have been a better choice.

Overall, I enjoyed the game, but would probably had enjoyed it even more if it had ended after the first two thirds as the last third effectively worsened my impression of the game as a whole and if it didn't crash on me so often. The positive did outweigh the negative though, even if I spent more time detailing the stuff I didn't like than the stuff I enjoyed in this message. Sorry about that.

Judging from the parts of the game that I liked, though, I'm confident that you can avoid some of the negatives in future releases and I continue to look forward to Daemons in the Attic.

Please post calls for help in the Ben Jordan 6 thread on the Hints and Tips board. If you feel stupid, it should be for not reading the forum rules and not for being stuck, which is something that happens to all of us from time to time.

[RLBAT]

While not all that popular, RLBAT was the highest-rated non-Trilby, non-remake AGS game (with three "votes").

AITD certainly has some adventure elements, but I'm still hesitant to call it an adventure, rather than an action-adventure or a survival horror game. Of course, the definition of what constitutes an "adventure" is vague at best, but a definition that includes AITD would IMHO also have to include games as diverse as Another World, Planescape: Torment and Legend of Zelda.

Joseph DiPerla, sorry if this sounds a bit harsh, but if you wanted your polls to be taken seriously, you might have wanted to put a little more effort into them, like using a script that allows for more than twelve different options in a single poll and that allows users to suggest additional options, especially as the current selection of games is a mixed bag. There are redundant entries (The Dig), misspelled (Phreddy Pharcass) and mis-titled entries (Secret of Monkey Island 2), non-existing entries (LSL4), arguably non-adventure entries (Cyberia), lots of missing entries (for example any of the adventures by Coktel Vision, Cryo or Yahtzee, but also many Sierra titles) and no discernible (alphabetical, chronological, by company) way of ordering the options to find what you'd want to vote for. Also, good luck with getting anything near 280 votes by the end of October.

[MI2]

I can see the point for MI2 being liked better, because it was larger. It probably offered more value for you money back in the day. I stand by statement that it sacrificed plot development and pacing for puzzle depth, so it's probably down to which of those aspects of an adventure game one deems more important.

I agree that MI3 seems overrated at fifth place. Maybe because people were lumping it together with the rest of the series (although many explicitly excluded MI4), but I wonder if availability is a factor, too. Is MI3 the most easily available game of its series? Are people more likely to have played MI3 than Indy 4 or GF?

I don't think I can attribute LSL1's (relatively) strong showing as the highest rated AGI game to anything but nostalgia. If it's just the "mature" humor LSL6 or LSL7 from the same series seem to be superior in almost all aspects and the best that can be said for LSL1 is probably that it's better than KQ1. It's short, deaths and dead-ends are gratuitous and the puzzles are a bit on the unimaginative side. I have very fond memories of LSL1, dating back to the time when my English was so bad that the age check questions were a serious obstacle, but among the greatest of all time it isn't.

While I expected The Dig to be one of the less popular LucasArts games, I can't say I really understand it. I know that many people and some reviewers didn't like it, but personally, I much prefer it to S&M, for example. I think it has a though stand as LucasArts' most serious adventure game, but that can't really be the gist of it, seeing that serious titles by other companies also did respectably, despite (or maybe even because) the dominance of humorous titles in the genre as a whole.

Blueskirt, I'm sorry to say, but I don't think AITD even got a single "vote". Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and the non-existing LSL4 (two "votes" each) got more than that! It probably didn't feel enough like an adventure for it to be considered by most people. If we extend the genre beyond what's commonly accepted, though, I really would have liked to see Star Control II (The Ur-Quan Masters for you open-source types) on the list as well. Come to think of it, what do you call adventures, which clearly are adventures, but are neither parser-driven, nor point-and-click? What's GF? A walk-and-click?

I totally agree with the list insofar that I think Revolution Software was the second best adventure game maker, ahead of Sierra and Adventuresoft and the others.

I think she looks fat rather than pregnant, because pregnant women mostly "bulge" (excuse my poor choice of words) only to the front, rather than to the sides (and back) like your sprite does. There as some front/side pictures about halfway down on http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pregnancy (contains nudity, probably NSFW) which might be useful as a reference.

Also, her ponytail swings a bit too vigorously. I do like her face though.

Did you use some sort of 3D modeler for the initial version?

[Loom]

Loom and KQ6 both narrowly missed the cut, being tied for 16th place with about 8 "votes" together with nine other titles (Dig, LSL3, LSL6, MI4, PQ2, QfG2, QfG4, SQ3, StS2), but as Radiant pointed out, the numbers are losing significance quickly at this point and different ways of counting would probably yield different results as Snarky pointed out.

The LucasArts dominance (especially compared to Sierra) shouldn't surprise anyone in the least. After all, just think what is usually considered to be "good design" (no dead ends, no random deaths, hotspot highlighting,...) around here and check which Sierra games fit the bill. In fact, several people (which I didn't count as valid votes) declared the entire LucasArts catalog as the "greatest Adventure Game of all time".

Indy 3 and Maniac Mansion only received 5 respectively 4 "votes" (of which at least one was actually for Maniac Mansion Deluxe rather than the original) and thus would have needed about twice as many votes to make the top 15, maybe because those two early LucasArts titles share some of Sierra's perceived "design flaws". Maybe the fact that DOTT came in third is a little consolation for fans of the original. BTW I just realize that every vote for MM should probably have counted as a vote for DOTT as well, seeing that the latter is a superset of the former, thus widening the DOTT's lead over Grim Fandango.

I did find some of the nuances a bit surprising though, like MI2 beating out MI1 (albeit so narrowly that it might as well be considered a tie) and DOTT (and to a lesser extent MI2) beating GF. Even though I played MI2 first (so hopefully it's not just nostalgia) and liked it very much, I always considered MI1 to be the better game. As I've stated my dislike for unbacked statements in the initial post, I'll try to elaborate that a bit, although probably not entirely on objective grounds.

For example, the plot in MI1 seems much tighter in comparison, you always know what to do and what the character's motivations (first you want to become a pirate, then you have to save the girl you love) are whereas parts of the second game, while nice for their puzzles and dialogue, felt a bit like "filler" (find the four plot coupon map pieces to continue). With regards to the games' endings, I thought there would be no competition which one was more satisfying until I saw people actually pointing out MI2's ending as a positive aspect of that game, which I found surprising to say the least. The quality of the puzzles was of a high standard in both games, but I can't think of one as good as the first's "insult sword-fighting" in part two (although "spitting contest" comes close) or one as silly as the second one's "monkey wrench" in the first one. It's all just minor stuff and MI2 is a very good game in its own right, but all in all I think it falls short of beating its predecessor in terms of sheer greatness.

As I haven't played KQ6 and didn't like MM and Indy 3 as much as later LucasArts games, I'd really like to hear what you think they did better than the fifteen games listed above. Note that being good (or as the thread title unfortunately put it "great") isn't the same as being influential. CC, KQ1 and MM were all milestones in the evolution of adventure games, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are still the greatest EVAR!!1! Like I said in the original post, I'd like to see some discussion in addition to just naming titles that should also be on the list. After all, there are only fifteen spaces on a top ten list.

Finally, I'd like to point out that my votes for the "greatest Adventures game of all time" for GF, MI1 and Loom would incidentally be enough to push each of them up by one place in the above ranking.

Intriguing! Is it going to be in English as well as German?

[Grim Fandango]

While compiling this thread into a top ten list (with fifteen entries), I realized that I'd never actually posted here myself. Therefore, I now nominate Grim Fandango, The Secret of Monkey Island and Loom, in roughly that order, as the greatest adventure games of all time.

[Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge]

Out of curiosity, I tried to compile all the opinions in The greatest Adventure game of all time... into a ranking, partly because I was a bit disappointed with the contents of said thread when reading it, because it contained little discussion about the relative merits of one game or another and everybody was just posting their personal favourites. Of course, much of this is very subjective, but as it is, I find it almost redundant with the What's your favourite GAME? thread, where many people are also posting their favourite adventures.

Compiling the data was a bit more confusing than I thought, with everybody nominating a different number of games or even entire series of games, rather that just the one greatest of all time (in their opinion), people posting more than once and people referring to the same game by different titles and strange acronyms, people voting for non-existing and non-adventure games and whatnot. I decided to take a rather liberal stance with counting, meaning that I counted every positive mention of a game, unless the poster made a clear distinction between what they liked and what they considered even greater, and counted a mention a series as a point for every game in the series, with every poster basically giving out as many or as few points as they wanted to, but no more than one per game, even if it was a ranked listing or something. Obviously this will skew the results a bit, but it seemed like most sensible thing to do (to me at least) considering the raw data. The only stuff I ignored were obvious joke posts, posts that were too vague and post nominating a company entire catalog. Another factor that might have skewed the results is that some people  were deliberately not mentioning titles which had already mentioned, but that can't be helped and me never knowing if people were referring to a single game (probably the first of its series) or the entire series in some cases. Also, I didn't do a recount. But enough about the methodology and on with the results:

1. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (about 56 "votes", including many for the Monkey Island series as a whole)
2. The Secret of Monkey Island (55)
3. Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle (34)
4. Grim Fandango (33)
5. The Curse of Monkey Island (29)
6. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (26)
7. Beneath a Steel Sky/Sam & Max Hit the Road (19 each)
9. Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (18)
10. Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (16)
11. Full Throttle (14)
12. Hero's Quest: So You Want To Be A Hero (12)
13. 5 Days a Stranger/The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery (10 each)
15. Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (9)

So, what do you say? Is it a consensus you could agree to? Is it the way you expected? Too many/few LucasArts/Sierra titles? Discuss!

A very nice game! Better than part 5, but not as good as part 4 IMHO. The puzzles were all fitting and logical, although almost too easy and too linear. No alternative solutions, few items with more than one use, few things you could do in parallel and hardly any red herrings, which I, perhaps unfairly, found all the more noticeable because of the high quality of the rest of the game.

Spoiler

For example, not being able to get fresh water anywhere except by distilling it yourself or not being to take the mirror off the wall again once you've placed it there.

[close]

I never found the walking speed too slow or too annoying, which might be related to the above point, as I never found myself walking around aimlessly not knowing what to do. I really did enjoy the animations and the audio.

I'm not sure how I feel about the storyline, both of this game in particular, which seemed a bit less exciting than what we've seen before, although the game can hardly be blamed for not surpassing every other title in an altogether great series, and, besides, my memory might be a bit off, and of the series in general at this point, which really might be up to something cool. I don't have any theories at this point and I guess I should replay all the cases to form a clearer opinion on that. I have to admit that I'm a bit worried that too much foreshadowing might spoil a twist or two.

Spoiler

Betrayal by someone close? Doesn't leave that many options (at first glance). I hope it will still be a surprise when we see it happen.

[close]

Something that might be a mistake, but not being a native speaker I can't be sure (emphasis added):

Spoiler

When trying to talk to the woman standing by the exit of the airport for the first time, the game tells you: "The woman shrugs and shakes her head. She must not speak English."

[close]

Somehow, I always seem to emphasize minor gripes, rather than the stuff that I liked, sorry for that and please don't get me wrong. It's a very nice game, I really enjoyed it while it lasted and I'm eagerly awaiting the next installment. 8)

I very much like Greg Costikyan's definition in I Have No Words & I Must Design in which he first distinguishes games from puzzles (static), toys (no goals) and stories (linear) before stating:

A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal.

And then going on to explain what that entails. If the definition sounds a bit wobbly on its own, it's because of some assumptions made in the rest of the document not explicitly stated here. Nevertheless, I find it an interesting read and recommend it to everyone.

Note that according to this definition most adventure games are just a combination of a (linear) story with lots of puzzles and not games, like scotch already suggested. Not that there's anything wrong with that. An adventure game probably has more in common with a movie and a sudoku than with chess, but that's OK since those things can also be enjoyable.

Of course, one might argue that if something is constantly being referred to as a game that doesn't fit the above definition of a game then the definition should be changed rather than the use of the term. On the other hand, most adventure games can easily be described as "story with puzzles" without having to use the term "game", something that's much more difficult to do for other games like chess.

I also like scotch's definition, which sounds more natural, but I think is overall very similar to the above one with "challenging" being implicit in (non-trivial) decision making, "agreed rules" implying a goal (and a goal in turn implying a set of rules) and "reactively adversarial" being largely equivalent to what Mr. Costikyan broadly refers to as opposition (what it is that forces the player to make decisions to achieve their goal).

Regarding space boy's definition I'd also say that it's too broad as it's lacking those attributes. Furthermore, I'm not happy with the set of fun activities summarily labeled as "toys", because many fun (reading,...) can hardly be labeled as such and because games aren't be a subset of toys (see above).

Is there a way to win...

Yes.

...or is it part of the game to be killed by the prince?

No.

so i just have to die?

Yes.

Is there something like the AGS community but related to the text adventures?

Actually, there's much more!

There are lots of game engines: Inform, TADS, Hugo, ADRIFT, Alan, ...

As for a games showcase, I suggest you check out the past winners of the Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (since 1995) and the Xyzzy Awards (since 1996)

As for "forums", there are the two interactive fiction newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction (about playing text adventures) and rec.arts.int-fiction (about authoring text adventures)

For more detailed answers (and links to further information) check out: Ifaq and the Interactive Fiction Wiki

Tricky. All I managed to find out was that in the French original, his name appearantly was "Docteur Méduse" (which would translate to "Doctor Jellyfish"), and that there was an episode entitled "Doctor Jake Eel and Mr. Crab" (which is probably just a pun and/or a reference to a different character). So, if those names don't ring a bell, I'm at a loss.

This? http://www.filespace1.narod.ru/scistudiovga-dev.zip