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Although I hate Ubisoft's PC DRM madness, it's the kind of game I'd be ashamed of pirating. I'm gonna wait 'til it's out, then I'll buy it... and then I'll pirate it.

-edit-
Dang! Turns out I'm living under a rock!

Oh, Mark, stop being such a tease and show us your High Steel!

I'm a guy who clearly played ways too much Space Quest for his own good as kid unfortunately.

I'm sure some of you have probably heard about it or discussed it in the chatroom but for those who lived under a rock in the last few days, get ready to shit bricks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dofacvjRkc

Back from reading the thread, and that got me thinking, you know, time, just like money, is a resource too. Should a game that took eight years to make be allowed to compete with games that took eight months to make? It ain't fair for the eight months games because the eight years game probably got more effort poured into it. Same goes for games made by one person competing with games made by teams. And what about commercial games that have to compete with Kickstarter backed commercial games?

No, the solution isn't in more categories, it's in valuing up nominations and runner-ups, like some suggested.

Also, I disagree about the redundancy of Best Puzzles and Best Gameplay. Best Gameplay to me encompass interface, intuitiveness, learning curves, the way the game plays, that sort of thing, while Best Puzzles is more about creativity, originality, logicality (I can't believe that's a word), the way hints and puzzles are presented... To take an action game example, in the Action Game Studioâ,,¢ Awards there could be a Best Gameplay award, but also, Best Level and Best Boss Fight. To me it's not redundant.

And now I'm going to bed, I keep finding typoes, misplaced words and badly syntaxed sentences, my brain's just not following anymore.

I haven't read the entire thread, and I have not nominated nor voted for the AGS competition for at least three years I believe (I can't vote when I haven't played all games and when I don't fully remember the games I played during the first half of the year what can I say) so feel free to take my opinion with a pinch of salt.

But...

Didn't we have this conversation several years ago? Where someone proposed that remakes and/or fan games should get their own category, I am guessing because some were fearing awards swept, and we agreed that, you know, a game is a game is a game, whether it's made by an hobbyist during a couple months, or a professional who puts forty hours a week for a year in their commercial venture, or a passionate who puts five hours a week for eight years in their epic scale game, whether it's made by one person or ten, a game is a game and all games are worthy of competing in all categories, and we didn't need pity prizes and trophies that meant nothing because not every games could compete.

I say no special treatment. It is great to receive recognition among your peers, but:

I still want the AGS award to mean something, it's not just a fun ceremony among us anymore, indie news outlets repost the results and players use these results to decide which games to play or not, it's serious,

Maybe the winners of a sweep truly deserved to win these awards,

And maybe we need to focus less on the winners and more on the nominees, I mean, out of the one hundred or so games released that year, being chosen to be one of the nominees for that year still mean that you're one of the best five or ten games of that year, if that doesn't mean anything, if that ain't recognition among your peers, I don't know what that is.

Just saying.

DISCLAIMER: This poster is so damn behind in catching up with AGS and adventure games released in the last year that his opinion may not even matter if you disagree with him, everything this curmudgeon says, feel free to not take into account when you design your games.[/disclaimer]

Typically, when I can't pick up something, I flag it in my brain as not pickable and then I proceed to forget about it.

Under such proposed circumstances, not only I'll need to figure out the solution to a puzzle, not only I'll need to figure out which object can be picked up, not only I'll need to figure out which object in my immediate surrounding can act as a replacement for the tool or item I am looking for when I can't find it, but I will have to magically figure out the chain of seemingly unrelated actions that will pull up the flags that will allow me to pick up an item I already tried to pick up in a room I explored an hour ago... Can this be any more obtuse?*

It may even be an object I tried to pick up several times in the past to solve three or four other puzzles, how will I know which of these three or four puzzles is the one that will let me pick up an object, will the game tell me why I couldn't pick up something for the four other puzzles? Or you know, sometimes you can solve a puzzle before your character does, I think Dave Gilbert toned down clues combination in recent Blackwell games because his players were figuring stuff on their own but the game didn't let them move forward because they had not made Rosangela piece out the clues herself. Let's not forget the backtracking that involves too.

Nah, it's a bad idea if you ask me. Realism is nice and all but at some point one got to decide what is more important between maintaining the seriousness of one's plot and keeping the immersion intact or not pissing off one's players. Senseless gratuitous deaths, dead-ends and walking deads are realistic too, you know.

Although, feel free to have the character mentally pick up/commit to memory items as much as you want, if the gameplay remains intact, if there's no backtracking involved, if you don't mind explaining time and again the idea of committing items to memory and keeping track of what can be accessed and what can't at anytime.

Also, nice point, Stupot! The ginormous amount of clutter you can carry in Monkey Island games, especially in Lechuck's Revenge, and having to figure out which item in your pile of hubcaps and Elvis plates was needed to solve some puzzles late in the game was certainly part of the fun for me. The game wouldn't have been as fun if Guybrush kept on discarding and cleaning his pockets from useless clutter.

* Yes, text parser and guess the verb, I know.

Thanks for sharing that video, I'm so backing this Kickstarter!

I think is better that the adventure games not get to be "the next big thing". If if gets bigger companies will take notice, and little indie will not be able,to compete with them.

As long as you guys talk, share insights, listen to one another and have these lengthy discussion about game and puzzle design, plot writing and interface intuitiveness, you guys have a head start. It is easy to ape someone else's work, it is harder to understand what makes a game or setting good, what ticks with the players, understand why some game design are clearly better than others, figure out the pitfalls a design can fall into when one apes rather than creates.

Which is why I am always skeptical when I see newcomers appears out of the blue with a commercial project or a fangame when they have no apparent prior experience other than "I liked game X and wanted to make something similar."

My flatmates got some sort of hub for RCA cables and plugged all of our consoles on it so we can switch from one console to another with just a button press. A couple months ago, one of them said "Hey, come play Zelda" I asked which one and they said "Link's Awakening" which I bought last year to play on the Super Gameboy but never got around to. Three days full of laughter and tears later (that game was so awesome), I fell in love with my SNES again.

In the last weeks I've bought a Gameboy Player to plug underneath our Gamecube to play them GB, GBC and GBA games on a TV screen and played Pokemon Red, Return Of Samus, Super Metroid, Super Mario Advance 3: Yoshi's Island and Link's Awakening DX. And I've ordered a ginormous batch of GB, GBC and GBA games to complement my SNES library: Zelda's Oracle series, Minish Cap, Four Swords, Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission, all Mario Advance, Mario Kart Super Circuit, Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga and both Mario Land, Final Fantasy IV Advance, Advance Wars (thanks, Technocrat!) Kirby Dream Land... With the GOG and Steam sale and that Gameboy shopping spree, I believe I spend more money on games this month than I did on my rent and food and electricity bills.

I'm still wondering which game to play next week.

Funny thing is, I still don't think of it as picking up a new console. Due to the graphical similarities, the lack of stylus or analog sticks, the games' gameplay similarities, and the abundance of SNES games ports, I'm thinking of it as completing my SNES collection. Looking forward to see what are your favorite games on that system.

Those were different times, back then, when you bought or your parents bought you a game, it would be the only game you'd have in a while so you played the crap out of it, no matter how bad or difficult the game was. Nowadays, between Steam sales, humble bundle and freeware games, not to mention everything that's happening outside of the PC world, there are more quality entertainment out there than a person can consume in their lifetime. So if the difficulty curve kicks in before the plot or fun gameplay stuff does, or if anything in the graphics, voice acting, interface, controls or game rules rub them in the wrong way, your players will switch to something else.

And while I love good puzzles and certainly don't want to see them disappear from the genre, I won't hide that there have been some AGS games where I did just that. When I'm swamped in puzzle after puzzle before the plot kicks in, or when I'm faced with one bizarro situation too many (bizarro as in "to solve this puzzle I've got to fly back to L.A. to pick up a pencil I forgot in my office" bizarro), my brain starts thinking "Man, look at all those Steam and GOG games you could be playing right now" and that's it, you've lost me.

Dear Baron,
I know I am a bit late to the party but thank you for having me reach for my security blankets and my plushies.

-blueskirt, whose last Yoshi's Island playthru has turned into a big scaredy-cat.

I recall playing a couple spin-offs on the classic Oregon Trail gameplay, Thule Trail where you ride from the east to west coast to attend a concert and Organ Trail with a zombie apocalypse flavor.

If you like the classic gameplay, there's plenty of directions you could take it to, from the conquest of the new world, to a different country and era, to fantasy adventuring party, to biker gang, to mountain climbing, to space travel... that wouldn't thread on anyone's copyrights or trademarks and would allow you to flesh out the rules some more to make the game more interesting, tell stories and profit from your work.

The problem is not guns. The problem is the underdevelopment of empathy in a majority of kids and teenagers. School shooting are just the tip of the iceberg of what I would call "all the bad shit a kid can afflict to another living being". Even if you remove the guns from the equation, kids will still find ways to scar or screw up someone else' life because it's just for lulz and they don't give a shit.

It's the whole bus bullying that old lady in that vid, or all the kids bullying the crap out of each others all the time, every time, in every schools in the world, kids pushing other kids to suicide on facebook or sexual abuse of kids by kids their age, some case happening as early as primary school (I kid you not, I've heard news report of that)...

This whole mess that happens because we all leave kids to their own devices, thinking "Kids their ages, we've been there, it will pass..." 'til some bad shit like this happens. It's this whole mess, that is wayyyyys bigger than gun control, that needs to be fixed. And this is coming from a pro gun control guy. If you think guns are the problem here, you're trying to fix the wrong thing. The real problem is the crazy slow development of empathy.

I am happy we might get the original trilogy in its glorious unedited form on sale again, and maybe the Thrawn trilogy filmed by a competent director, but I am damn scared for Indiana Jones and the Fountain Of Youth. :<

All I can say is don't give up. Don't hesitate to re-read all your notes and revisit the entire place all over again when you're completely clueless, in case maybe one of these note will fall into place, in case you missed or forgot something the first time around or in case a puzzle you solved before changed something in the dungeon, that certainly helped me a several times when I played the original. Also you're certainly having it harder than I did with the added difficulty of more and harder monsters and insta-death traps everywhere in the remake.

Awesome! You are the best, Frodo!

This has probably been asked before but is there a way to sort AGS games by release date? With the most recent games on top? Ever since the site got updated I haven't been able to do that.

I believe your two arguments are not mutually exclusive.

Darth is right, Kickstarter is for the tiny unknown guys. But ktchong is right in a way too, you don't need to be Tim, but you need a reputation, you must prove that, time and again, you're capable of bringing a project to completion, tested and polished, even if they're just small indie titles.

I can't speak for everyone but I've far too often stargazed and got emotionally involved with games on the WiP forum in my earlier years only to get burnt when the project got canned or the developer simply dropped off the face of the Earth. Nowadays, if you don't have a respectable track record as someone who can deliver a product from start to finish, chances are I'm not interested in your WiP.

Making a game from start to finish requires a passion of epic proportion, money help staying motivated when things get grindy and crunchy and the early fun part of game design is over, but money is much easier to give to people who proved they've got the passion than it is to people who have yet to prove anything about themselves.

All I remember from Norton is the two or three times my license expired and I uninstalled it, it took some vital system files with it and the following weeks were downward spirals of oddities, glitches, freeze, crashes and BSODs until the computer would no longer boot. I've last used it in 2004.