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Old style looked great! New style looks better!

What hath god wrought?

They only have a few flavours at my local store, but they're all good!

You'll always be in my caramel milk, though, Ponch.

The puzzles in this are pretty tricky! I did really like the one with the combination for the door panel, though, that felt really clever and fun to solve.

Also, great graphics! I especially love that cool spinning fan.

I played The Slaughter: Act One the other day, and it's pretty cool! Pixelly point and click based on the Jack the Ripper killings!

It's not out on Steam yet but it will be soon.

I thought Dustbowl was very cool, and a really great foundation to build something a bit more complex on. I really look forward to seeing more of this!

This looks so cool Arjon!

I've missed your awesome arts, Vic. Really nice to see this, dude.

Except, perhaps, in the case of Don Woods and Colossal Cave Adventure, in which case he totally completed it.

I should clarify that of the games mentioned/linked to there, only A Mind Forever Voyaging is by Infocom - I threw in titles by other folks to show that it wasn't just one group that thought this way, it was an element seen in numerous works by numerous people. But yeah, if you missed out on that era, there's plenty of wealth to be found in the works of the time.

[Edit:]

It seems to me to be a recent development that games exist as delivery mechanisms for stories.  It's telling there are adventure games nowadays that get labeled, by both creators and players, as "interactive novels", "visual novels" or "interactive fiction".  Point-And-Click Adventures PERIOD.  Dropping the "game".  This wasn't a thing 20, 30 years ago, as far as I know.

You may be interested to hear about some of the stuff happening back in the 80s that mirrors some of the "modern" notions we're so enamored with today. Infocom was particularly focused on the narrative aspect of computer games; see The Implementor's Creed written by Stu Galley back in 1985 and see how lofty his goals are there. See Portal: A Computer Novel which was released the very next year for a project which is literally a novel that you "play" (for a certain definition of the term). I finished it earlier this year and can promise you it's more like a "virtual novel" than I'd ever imagined would come out of 1986 - in fact it's so much like a novel that Rob Swigart would later convert the entire game into book form. See Alter Ego for another 1986 title that steps beyond being "A game" and becomes a simulation of the narrative of a person's lifetime, with outcomes entirely decided as consequences driven by player choices. We talk about choice and consequence all the time, but rarely do you see a game so purely driven by these considerations as Alter Ego is.

So, yes, while some of these developments are "fresh" in feeling, there was incredible levels of focus on this sort of thing 30 years ago - it's just that sometimes we don't hear so much about them. Definitely worth looking at to be inspired by just how ambitious some of these designers were before I was even born.

Edit: Also, while Infocom definitely had a range of descriptions for their products, including "Computerized Fantasy Simulations" and "Prose Adventure", they were also using the term "Interactive Fiction" back in the 1980s.

Oh gosh, a game by Gnome! How splendid!

Here's an interesting writeup of the genesis of King's Quest: http://www.filfre.net/2013/07/the-unmaking-and-remaking-of-sierra-on-line/

If you dig further into the backlog you can find the very roots of Ken & Roberta, back to before Mystery House here: http://www.filfre.net/2011/10/ken-and-roberta/

This discusses many of the technical aspects of the game's development, including the suggestion that the engine was fully intended to be re-usable for future games.

This looks so good.

A quick idea of what might help to allay the "noodle tentacle" arm thing:

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/wMzGpyb.png[/imgzoom]

Shading her torso with some sensitivity towards depth and a light source that matches his arm in shadow helps gives the appearance of a more believable body, I think.

To be fair, it was an incredibly odd (and dishonest, heh) method of getting them! But it seemed to have worked. I wonder what the hell a themed restaurant adapted from that IP would even be like...

The explanation for the monkey grammar is fine! The problem is that I needed clues to solve the puzzle, and there was no clue that the monkey talked like this in the game. It was the only puzzle in the game without a clue or a visible element to help me solve that bit, so it made it seem like an unfair puzzle among all the fair ones.

This game made me laugh loudly, it was fun! A couple of issues with puzzles, mostly:

Spoiler

The monkey puzzle would have worked better if the phrases were put together in a grammatically correct way, I think.

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Other than that, some of the stuff was very cute and interesting (particularly the wishing well stuff )

Thanks!