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I wouldn't call Telltale's success modest since they won millions of game of the year awards for Walking Dead, a game I personally have a lot of objections with. (I hate zombies)

Anyway, I've been playing through Larry. The design is fine. The humor is fine. The narrator sucks. After hearing Al Lowe's soothing voice in the tutorial, I hate this annoying typical narrator voice.

The animation goes from being all right at first to absolutely awful later. I wonder if they ran out of money. Lots of one frame animations, and replacing actual movement with movement lines to simulate movement. Female walkcycles are absolute shit. The map screen is atrociously ugly. Still, I do want VGA 2 and 3, and an 8. I just know to expect low-budget animation, or almost none at all. There was one puzzle that was illogical; well, technically a few, but a lot of them had hints or direction. One just didn't, and it had a completely ridiculous result, even with the hint. I understand where their reasoning came from, but I thought it was dumb. (The cat) I also despise slot machines in adventure games. The slot machine in Space Quest 1 EGA killed that game for me. I can deal with dead ends, and tricky timing, and pixel hunts. I can not deal with chance based gameplay in a logic based genre, sitting for two hours waiting on a result. If the idea was to put me off of gambling (this wasn't the idea), then they succeeded.

The difference between the success of a Lucas alumni and a Sierra alumni is pretty big.

Bill Tiller's failed.

That's a fair point, and he had A Vampyre Story and Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island in between, both immensely unpopular. However, there is one difference, that being how vocal the criticism of Tiller is. It's not very vocal at all. People tend to go, eh, I dunno, I wish him success but AVS was disappointing. Sierra on the other hand gets a mob with pitchforks and fiery torches. Hell, lots of people wish Bill more success, especially his fellow designers, like Ron and Tim.

Oh, and I forgot the Two Guys From Andromeda kickstarter, which did even poorer than Larry, with only 39k over its goal and 10k backers. That one almost didn't make it.

There are flawed LucasArts games too, and more than people would like to pretend. I don't care if what I say is annoying. Sierra games are both unfairly judged and hated, and their flaws make people overlook their design successes and innovations. In fact, most would say they had no innovations, but were only backwards.

Sierra might have made some hard games, and even had dead ends in some games, but their flaws never equaled the bottoms that The Last Crusade fell to, and Day of the Tentacle was a massive step backwards in design innovation from the game that coined the term cutscene. Replacing the original, unique Winnick art style with Chuck Jone's CalArts bullshit was a massive-enough disappointment. I can argue that Sierra games deserve to be equally popular or at least respected, and I will argue it. Maybe not Leisure Suit Larry in terms of innovation, and I personally don't like Space Quest, but Laura Bow, Gold Rush, Gabriel Knight, Police Quest, and Quest For Glory all have great design, and four of those series are overlooked or becoming overlooked because of current prejudices. Whenever people bring up Gabriel Knight, nowadays people tend to think about the article on Gabriel Knight 3 (which has good puzzles besides the infamous one), and go EWWWWWWWWWWW. People look at the timed gameplay in Colonel's Bequest, and the dead ends it can create in the narrative, and go EWWWWWWWWW, while ignoring how it fits murder mystery cliches and investigation into the design. Laura Bow 2 took it a step further and brought those cliches, investigation styles, and deduction into both mechanics and design, with things like relevant topics jotted down in a notebook, eavesdropping, finding and NEEDING evidence to pin down the culprit at the end, etc. but is overlooked and bashed because it hides items. Gold Rush has large, expansive, branching quests epic in scope, especially for the time, but "it's HAAAAARD wahhhh gonna soil my diaper and cry". Police Quest had interesting procedural gameplay with impressive attention to detail, but "that's tedious wahhhh I'm gonna moan and piss my pants". Gabriel Knight used its investigative gameplay and descriptions to paint the world, scenes, and story in a way very closely resembling how a novel works, and I loved that. At the very least the first two are still somewhat respected, but I have seen people go pish tosh to the whole series because of what they heard about three.

Hell, you can respect something without liking it. I admit I hold respect for Day of the Tentacle for its multiple character gameplay, animation quality, and memorable characters themselves. But if one can't look at the merits of something even when they don't enjoy it, then they're biased. And there is a lot of LucasArts bias, especially in terms of design.

Speaking of AGS, Ben Jordan did a great job of mixing the good merits of both design styles.

I do agree that I'd rather see Al Lowe make a new game. I would like to see LSL 3 given the VGA treatment, though. Mage's Initiation has gorgeous graphics and isn't filled with low brow humor. That helps. As far as I remember, Leisure Suit Larry barely made it, and it wasn't doing too well for a while. The Kickstarter only made 155k over the goal, and you have to take into account the fact that most Kickstarters get the most contributions at the beginning and end of the campaign. LSL had about 14k backers, while Broken Age had around 87k. The difference between the success of a Lucas alumni and a Sierra alumni is pretty big. Broken Sword had only 14k backers but it made over 300k over its goal. Jane Jensen and Tex Murphy did way worse, but in terms of big name, well known adventure games, I'd say LSL didn't do great. Larry is easily one of the top ten most recognizable adventure games. You also have to take into account that the people who backed it are probably not going to be needing to buy a copy, so I don't know how well it will do after the fact. Most of the Sierra remakes here were made during a time when, I personally, don't remember seeing a lot of criticism toward Sierra. It's really become more of a recent criticism.

What, again?
Did someone post something super offensive and then remove the post? Because there's some really unfounded frustration being vented here.

I'm horrendously frustrated by adventure gamers in general. Pretty much anything having to do with older adventure games is going to find some source of frustration in me. It really doesn't take much. But it's not very unfounded to say that most people hate Sierra games, or remakes of Sierra games, and Larry games especially for their low brow style. The game is just not going to do well, except maybe in Germany.

I was never a fan of Larry in the first place. In terms of silliness, humor, stories, and puzzles, it can't hold a candle to Day of the Tentacle.

I'm really not a big fan of Day of the Tentacle at all, but that's a different discussion.

Nobody here. I just see the sentiment shopped around various places, and I felt like venting about it. Adventure gamers nowadays don't have the patience for silly, dumb, low brow humor, basic stories, and traditional puzzles. That stuff is too low brow now. Also, anything that doesn't use LucasArts design rules to a tee is evil and should be avoided.

And really, though, who isn't a non-fan of Larry for these reasons anyway?

The game will do poorly unfairly due to these reasons.

I'm tired of adventure game elitism. Everything has to be innovative now. We're too HIGHBROW for Leisure Suit Larry now, too? Freud off with that bullshit.

There's too many mindless Lucasarts only fans out there for this to be successful.

Gee. I'm a nice guy. [grin]

That is beautiful.

That's an interesting take on it, and you could be right. But I always saw Gobliiins and Myst as adventure games. Bejeweled has no characters or story or areas. But on the other end, I think a game like Dear Esther can be considered an adventure game. It's really broad. Personally, for me, I'd like to see what the OP's blog post and games like Last Express and Maniac Mansion did explored more. It's not the easiest thing, but it's completely possible to continue exploring elements like real time, freedom, characters that move and live independently of your actions, etc. Things like that excite me even if they make a game difficult, although Last Express isn't that bad once you get into it.

I think you can show the "monster". Clock Tower is terrifying because you can't fight and you have to run for your life and hide, but even if you escape, the Scissorman will always come back again later. He's always around, and he's often hiding in unexpected places.

But I guess I find being chased scary. What I really think ruins the illusion of horror is a fighting system, or at least a good one. I love Eternal Darkness, but it never scared me because I could fight, and usually pretty well. The bathtub thing didn't get me either. Resident Evil lost me with the fighting somewhat, but the fighting was way clunkier and involved conservation of items, so that helped raise the tension. Dino Crisis and Silent Hill both had this as well, but Silent Hill 2 dropped the tension of the main monsters when I realized I could wreck them with a pipe. Then the tension became more about conserving my health fighting tons and tons of enemies.

Being defenseless is the way to go. As soon as you implement the ability to fight back well or at all, you're done. The monster or killer must always be more powerful than you, and relentless.

I'm not sure The Cave qualifies as an adventure game, but I agree mostly with your premise. For me, personally, the puzzle solving aspect wasn't ever really the main draw of adventure games, and if you ask me, a lot of puzzles (even in famous commercial adventure games) were pretty absurd and unfitting. I wouldn't mind if the gameplay mechanic for adventure games was switched with something else (which is probably why I still consider games like Another World or Flashback) to be adventure games.

I suppose, for me, it is the exploration aspect (solving some obstacle to be rewarded with some previously inaccessible area, exploring each thing in a new area, checking everything out, etc). A couple adventure games I enjoyed because of the excellent dialogue and humour, but I'm not sure that is restricted to adventure games, because you can get that from books and movies and tv shows as well, and the fact that it is a video game, or an adventure game doesn't improve on that.

PS: I love Grim Fandango, but I'd probably rate its puzzles and gameplay to be its weakest feature..

Maybe you should be playing different games then? Role playing games can offer the same emotional resonance and quality of storytelling without those pesky puzzles, or whatever. Planescape Torment and Mother 3 are up there for me with classic fiction, and I'm sure some pretentious asshole would love to come tell me I'm wrong, but I stick by that statement.

Personally, I don't mind taking adventure games in a new direction, but the idea of replacing puzzles altogether in every game and making it to where no traditional adventure games exist is bullshit.

Go play Grim Fandango for perfect, logical puzzles and characters you empathize with and build an emotional connection to. The Last Express was also probably the greatest instance of freedom in an adventure game yet implemented. The Colonel's Bequest also did a lot of interesting things since it was timed, although most people consider that bad. Gold Rush was filled with freedom and multiple paths, but most people consider it too hard because they're little wussies.

Oh, I never said I'd be good with another language. I'd be the shittiest ever. AGS is my only hope. I happen to believe ALL languages are shit to deal with, because coding is shit to deal with. NOT sitting on my couch, fat, hairy, and greasy- covered in chips and shame- that's shitty to deal with because it means I have to put out effort, and effort is haaaaaard. That's not a crack at you, btw. I still love to use code, though.

I completely agree that AGS script is shit to deal with....IF you're not Monkey, who could probably run his refrigerator with AGS script. Or I suck balls at AGS script. Don't worry. I'm sure you guys will get better at it.

You're not responsible for anything except iceygames having a series. You can't take credit for MY NUMEROUS successes, you TWAT. I'll hunt you down and cook up a Monkey-on-a-Stick.

No, it can't, you FRAUD. You TROLL. Only toasters make toast. Mario said so.

Whenever Scissorman is chasing you in Clock Tower for the SNES is enough to just get me to turn off the game.

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge and the ending with LeChuck in the underground maintenance tunnels STILL gets me to this day.

And the Dark World in Trilby's Notes makes me continually tense. Being chased in 6 Days as a cripple is insanity.

Broken Sword has a lot of tense moments, like Khan's hotel room, hiding in his closet. Pretty much every bad guy encounter is tense, especially thanks to the brilliant music.

Then there's the mummy chamber in Africa in Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, and the voodoo cult headquarters in New Orleans. The dude peering in your window after a couple of days is really freaky too. The whole game has a tense atmosphere.

Well, as someone who understands Lua, how IS the speed of Lua implementation? Could SCUMM be really fast simply because it's a custom language?

All right. Calming down. Look, no hard feelings. I just want to know about Lua from positive and negative sides. I'm sure if I spent long enough reading your analysis of Lua, which I WILL BE DOING, you would sell me on it. But I also want to know why a two-decade long programmer makes such a bold claim that it's not just a bad choice, but a bad language. It's a harsh statement.

And for the record, I AM CRAZY. I also have very strong feelings about the entire adventure game world, and many very, very angry feelings.