Messages

The Dark Eye

Bad Day on the Midway

Those are not traditional adventure games, but are as good as it gets in regard to psychological edge.

Le Taxi!

Le New Wave!

'Allo 'Allo!

I have a lot more fun playing Choose Your Own Story games than playing Interactive Fiction.

Then you just have to play Lost Pig. It will tramp all your ideas of CYOS superior funness.

[EDIT] Ruh-roh, more fuel for the fire - "adventure games deserve to die", says whatgamesare.com: http://bit.ly/npbcKu

I think we are in great part responsible for this kind of treatment of the genre. There hasn't been a single well-known adventure games designer that voiced support for the adventure game mechanics since the 90s (except for possibly Dave Grossman and his team). Everyone just gave up, pretty much admitting that adventure games are too old-school for people from younger generations.

Meanwhile the majority of adventure games players keeps saying that adventure games are that one genre that's entirely about storylines. Gameplay quality and creativity seemingly doesn't matter - for most it's enough to have interactive stories with accidental gameplay.

No wonder no one respects this style of play, if pretty much zero people have anything good to say about puzzle solving. We all hate that part of playing adventure games too, don't we?

@Eggie - you can download a fairly stable release of AGS 3.2.1 with widescreen support from here. It's the latest Skygoblin build, and inside the /bin/ folder you should find what you are looking for. I tried it myself yesterday and so far zero problems with my new 1280x720 game.

Yes, it works fine for me too. Except no working full screen.

EDIT: Actually I got it working finally, so everything works alright in this release as far as I know.

Cool find. Maybe I'll finally learn how to do it right.

Hey, why so many George Lucas fans all of a sudden!?

I love the new sprites, but I'd prefer the older games to stay as they are.

Cannibal Bags From Outer Space

Hey, that's a cool sounding party!

Even PETA is starting their own porn website, not to mention they ripped off Super Meat Boy a while ago.

Porn, indie games and pirates are simply in vogue right now.

EDIT: To be clear: I didn't read through even one page of this thread.

Ali, you bastard!

Also I find the first joke hilarious as hell!!
I find the second one a bit meh, but definitely the first cracked me up

Damn you, Dualnames. 'Meh'?  At least do me the honour of being offended and/or outraged when I tease your nation about the Elgin marbles!

Never heard about these marbles before. Very interesting how some Earl just went to Athens and "borrowed" them.

The Blue Baggie?

The Punisher maybe?

So it wasn't The 5th element!?  :o

I'm just sayin' Lego sells, usually regardless of quality.

Also, if mainstream isn't the games that most people are buying (and, we can infer, playing,) then what is mainstream?

You provided a chart of only a few titles on the market, and not very representative of the rest to boot.

In 1997, when most adventure games were bringing losses, the charts of highest-grossers were being topped by Myst, Riven and Blade Runner.

In other words, franchises are not a great way to show what types of games are currently selling the best. Lego Harry Potter is not selling great because of it's gameplay, but because it's Lego and Harry Potter. Same with Pokemon and the rest.

In 1997 Riven sold amazingly because of being the sequel to Myst. Nevertheless, the great majority of Myst buyers never solved a single puzzle and never looked at another adventure game besides it (so even buying and playing don't always go in hand!).

If you want to have the big picture of mainstream sales and trends, you'd have to provide something like a chart of most profitable/popular genres and styles of play.

Yeah, the infamous 4 hours long flop by Deer Hunter's director that might have single-handedly finished the era of director-controlled movie productions in Hollywood.

Your turn, Ponch.

There is some kind of assumption that FPS games are the 'mainstream', and that they are the sole genre dominating the medium of video games, so I dug out some games sales figures from 2010 to see how true this was:

Of course (most) FPS games are part of the 'mainstream' and even your chart shows that very well. I have no idea where did you get the idea that connecting FPS games to mainstream makes it the sole genre that should top the charts.

Why do you obsess about the highest grossing games anyway? It's hardly the big picture of mainstream.

No, sorry. What I mean is that I might've got the impression that you're really against callofduties and such and said "hate" but I didn't mean it in a nasty way;)

Well, yeah, I'm not personally attracted to callofduties (which I don't think has anything to do with them being mainstream), but I don't have anything against them being made and I enjoy quite a few other mainstream games.

If anything, the fact that such series as CoD represent the mainstream right now adds meaning to making totally different small indie games of my own.

Btw:

http://ludusnovus.net/2011/08/15/why-so-few-violent-games/