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Thinking about it. It's pretty close to Holland, anyway.

The Martrix trilogy: Why? I just don't like it. 

Good point. The Matrix is a very good movie, but almost as much ruined by its sequels as Highlander was.

[Song:]

Song: Grendel, by Marillion
Comment: It's nearly fifteen minutes long and covers a variety of styles. It depicts the story of Grendel (of Beowulf fame) from the monster's point of view, and is none too kind about the humans in the story.
How I discovered it: I got one of their CDs as a semi-random birthday gift and started buying all of them.
Fun fact: The band was missing a vocalist when they wrote the song, and the lyrics were added later by the vocalist (Fish) after they joined up.

1. The art styles of sprites and backgrounds are TOTALLY different from one another, and it would be really hard to find stuff that matches. Venus' entry, for example is a lot like buloght's except there is more texturing- it won't fit.

Well come on, if I can fit five years' worth of MAGS contest rules into a single game, it's also possible to use such a diversity of styles in coharmony

[Spooks]

Okay, in no particular order,

Spooks, for the atmosphere.
Larry Vales, for the humor.
Snail Quest, just something everyone should play.
Cirque de Zale, for the overall design.
And META, because you can't say you know AGS until you've played it.

Hasn't anyone mentioned D&D yet? The movie, not the roleplaying books. Lousy acting, a character more annoying than Jarjar, weapons that are so obviously made of foam, lame cliched plot, several scenes ripped from Star Wars, stereotypical bad guys ("you promised you'd free us!"  "Ha hah! I LIED!") and for the geeks among us, it breaks the D&D rules!


(oh yeah, and they apparently cut "clerics" from the movie for religious reasons)

Being chased by fluffy pink bunnies?

I was under the impression that gaming's oldest genre was Pong?

Also, Jane Who?

Also, if you run an AGS game full-screen, the print screen button should grab it fine, and if you run it in desktop, try alt+print screen for a screenshot of this window only.

Anyone remember the Alicante Goat Society?

Yeah, it's a plain text file, you could copy/paste it into a single forum message, or upload it on whatever free web hosting you have in mind

Now the challenge of course is incorporating all ten of the ideas into a single game!

Actually, when I was playing The Colonel's Bequest last year, I ended up referring to a walkthrough for every second puzzle, and not once did I find myself reading a puzzle solution thinking "Damn, that was so obvious, why didn't I think of that?" but rather "Man, this game is horrible". Games are entertainment products, and if they frustrate you for a majority of the time rather than entertain you, the creators have failed.


I think that the point is that walkthroughs can make a good game boring since they take away the challenge, and they can make a bad game reasonable since at least you'll be able to see how it ends.

And do you have any practical skills yourself, e.g. art, music or coding?

*Preventing Zak from picking up every random object without having a use for it yet would make the puzzle solving process much more fun and logical.

I disagree with that. In adventure games, you pick stuff up, and most of Zak's stuff is just ordinary items anyway. Blocking players from doing something logical because the character thinks he does not need it yet is simply an artificially increase of playtime, forces the player to retrack later for no good reason, and is rather annoying.

You're comparing apples and oranges. LucasArts made a few games that are linear and have a minimalistic interface. This is not one of those games. It is nevertheless a good game, and this is in large part due to its sense of freedom which comes from both the wide variety of verbs, the non-linearity, and the optional sidequests.

The non-linearity of Zak McKracken is one of its strengths.

So did anyone play "I'm O.K."  (the murder simulator inspired by Jack Thompson's modest proposal)?

Well, this is basically a three-man project aiming to do a full bottom-up rewrite of four full-length computer games. And the last update is a minor news item from last may. At a guess, the project fizzled out.

Perhaps those gnomes are from some existing fairy tale and both drew inspiration from the same?

MI (for god's shake why is everyone so obsessed with this series?)

It's easier to make a silly game than to make a serious game. The two most famous series of silly games are Monkey Island and Space Quest (incidentally, SQ also has a lot of fangames). Furthermore, whenever lists of "Best Adventure Game Ever" are decided upon, the two games that invariably turn up are MI2 and King's Quest VI.

Comparing Sierra to LucasArts, the latter has a greater overall approval rating (in that people love Sierra, but most everybody has a couple of Sierra games that they thoroughly loathe; whereas people also love LucasArts and generally like all their games without exception). So MI has broader appeal than KQVI.

And finally, the Monkey Island series has a lot of actual characters that are funny and many-sided enough to base an actual "sequel" on (Stan, Kate Capsize, Largo, you name it), especially considering most classic adventures don't really contain all that much characters or dialogue (e.g. most Sierra games don't particularly focus on characters, and don't have a lot of dialogue, or dialogue trees; I can't remember if that KQ6 shopkeeper guy even has a name, and he's one of the semi-biggest characters).

So MI gives people a lot of fun material to work with, and a lot of appeal to fans. No wonder it's popular, it's simply great! Too bad Ron Gilbert retired.