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Keep up the good work! I can't wait to play this game!

I don't recall this sort of non linearity in adventure games at all though.

5 words: Indy and the Last Crusade.
Starting in Castle Brunwald, the game turn into a sandbox where you're given the goal to find, free and escape with your dad and you can tackle the guards that stand in your way the way you want to. You can fight the guards, if you don't want to fight, you can disguise, bluff, puzzle and bribe your way in, you can also avoid a lot of guards by sneaking in, waiting for guards to have their back turned to sneak past them, ducking in rooms to avoid patrols, if you didn't fight anybody, guards won't bother you unless if you walk straight into them when you wear the officer uniform IIRC, and you can find a couple of alternate roads that avoid some guards entirely. And if you beat all the guards patrolling the hallways, you could escape from the castle without being arrested. It's like an Hitman level.

I wish they had more than 6 months to ship that game, it could have been so much better. And I wish they didn't strip all of these options when they designed the Fists path in FOA.

Nice post, nihilyst!
I'd say worry about making the GUI as intuitive as possible, getting rid of as many bugs and glitch as you can, that the puzzles are just at the right difficulty and not too fiendishly hard, that the walking speed is not super slow, that the plot is great, engrossing and well told, that graphics and music are both stunning and fit the atmosphere you wanted to create, that the characters are interesting. If the game features lot of inventory items or manipulations, make sure the inventory isn't a tiny rectangle in a corner that show only 3 items at the time. In the case of a humorous adventure game, make sure that jokes are funny and aplenty, and throw in some visual jokes and funny animations too.

Don't worry about crap like hiding the HUD or first person view vs third person view, that's stuff is pointless and tend to conflict with good gameplay anyway. When a game is so fun, so engrossing, so polished, even if the HUD occupy half of the screen, I'll play it until I look at the clock to realise it's 7PM and I didn't eat since breakfast, or realise it's way past bedtime and I'm not sleeping yet.

[Aquaria]

In case any of you haven't noticed, Steam are having their holiday sale once again this year. All games are sold at 5% - 80% off, and discount for some games changes everydays. And it seems like everyone listened when Valve said they made 3000% more money last year selling Portal at 75% off because games are much cheaper this year than they were last year (like Stalker being sold for 2 dollars.) If you haven't done so yet, now is your chance to grab a copy of Machinarium and Time Gentlemen Please, which I'm sure you've heard about, the latter being without a doubt one of this year's AGS award winner.

Here's your chance to also grab:

Aquaria: A mix of Zelda and shoot 'em up. It features a huge open world explore, it has gorgeous backgrounds and music, the story is great, and it has at least 20 hours of gameplay (a lot compared to most indie titles). The game a bit too easy, I'd love to see an harder version with more frequent dogfights, but otherwise, it's a wonderful game. If you tried the demo before buying the game, savegames from the demo are compatible with the full game, so you won't have to replay the first chapter.

Braid: A puzzle platformer with time travel mechanics. The graphics, music and atmosphere are amazing, no puzzle repeat itself, each world introduce a new time travel mechanic and the story is very deep. And if you're allergic to platforming, let me assure you that it's impossible to die and the game is 20% platforming and 80% puzzle solving, so, you have no excuse to not play it.

Blueberry Garden: An exploration platformer where you must explore the world and eat fruits that grant you temporary ability in order to find objects and build a tower. The game requires you to play it at least twice and has about 2 hours of gameplay. Yeah, sucky description, but saying too much about this game would quite frankly spoil and ruin the whole experience, let me just say that if you like art games, you're doing yourself a tremendous disservice by not playing it, because like Passage, this game is art gaming at its best. One last thing, make sure you have a good PC before trying this game since the game world is constantly changing, and it can sometimes be heavy on the CPU.

World of Goo: We've discussed this game before, the goal is to guide a handful of goo balls in a pipe by building towers, bridges and other structures to cross any obstacles and traps set in between the goo balls and the end level pipe. A game where the gameplay, musics, story, atmosphere and graphics all synergize to create one crazy, original and artful experience. Play the demo: If you don't like it, don't buy it, but if you like it, the rest of the game maintains that level of joy and excitement you got during the last level and the cutscene that followed, and ramps it up.

Osmos: Become the biggest blob in the universe! Absorb small blob to get bigger, and avoid being absorbed by bigger blobs. Sounds simple, but propelling yourself requires you to leave a fraction of your size behind you, and later levels throw blobs with gravity fields, sentient blobs, or levels so tightly filled with bigger blobs that quickly turn this zen and casual experience into a frantic and difficult experience, or a very slow experience where every single of your move must be planned before hand. The last levels can be nigh impossible but overall the game is fun.

Crayon Physics Deluxe: A puzzle game in the same vein of Incredible Machine, except instead of machines, you must draw shapes, ropes, cogs and anchors to help a red circle to collect stars. The game is weird in the sense that it reward creativity instead of intelligence. Most puzzles are easy, you can very well find a trick that can solve every puzzles effordlessly, but that will just turn the game into a boring row of easy puzzles. If you want to have lot of fun with this game, you have to be creative with your solutions.

If you need some more convincing, youtube is full of videos for all of these games and most of them have playable demo. Just don't watch videos of Blueberry Garden, except maybe the official trailer.

Anyone else knows any games worth buying while they're ultra cheap?

I've never been into any of those fancy web 2.0 communication tools, I'm pretty old school and still using IRC. I think I hate Twitter the most since I now have to go through 10+ pages of insignificant updates every weeks just to find that one important news for every websites I follow that now prefer to post their news on Twitter rather than their main website. At least Myspace and Facebook didn't have this problem.

Make a fake BSOD screen saver, install it on your friend's computer and watch 'em swear out loud every 10 minutes.

I too think it's more than just a matter of cup rating. The way the game is presented, the screenshots, the persons behind the games, building a hype before the release, having a fan community, being the pick-of-the-month, winning AGS awards and more importantly, promoting your game outside this forum, on places like TIGSource, Indiegames.com or other adventure game communities... all this affect the number of downloads much more than the cup or user rating do.

Loom is easily the easiest of them all. Then I'd say Monkey Island 1 and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, both features puzzles that are fairly logical and not too fiendish. Day Of The Tentacle is a good choice too, puzzles not too easy, but not too hard, zanny puzzles yet puzzles that make sense in this Chuck Jones-esque universe.

After these games you will be ready to tackle harder titles like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island 2 and 3, Flight Of The Amazon Queen, Beneath A Steel Sky and Broken Sword. Maybe some of the Sierra's titles as long you remember Al Lowe's advice: Save early, save often (and not only on the same save slot!)

Don't worry, they're saving the Mandarin and Tony's fall to alcoholism for the third movie. They wouldn't have called the terrorist organization "the Ten Rings" if they didn't plan to bring the Mandarin eventually. The trickiest part to adapt will be his source of power I think. Ten magical rings found in a crashed alien spaceship is fine in comics where magic, aliens and superscience walked hand in hand for decades without people asking much questions, it might be harder to adapt on the big screen.

As for your question, I read 82 Iron Man issues in the last month and the first movie is aired for the entire month of December, of course I'm excited!

I prefer narrator boxes. But to make myself clear, I don't really care whether it's a third person narator or the main character who's the narrator, I just like the narrator boxes. Try to imagine Version C: You click on a door to open it, but you cant...a text box appears and says "I cant open this door...its locked!"

For one, narrator boxes tend to be easier to read than dialogues, they're easier on the eyes on backgrounds with lot of clashy colors and dialogues tend to disappears after a while, forcing me to read faster, while the boxes stay on screen until I'm done reading and click the mouse button.

I've also an irrational hatred for those dialogues that heavily rely on silent pause in between sentences, and nothing irritate me more than games where the main character pause in between every sentences while looking at its surrounding. Narrator boxes generally don't have this problem.

Except for games where the main character has a sidekick following him/her around and they both take turn at describing their surrounding or throwing some witty banter, I'd choose version C.

Until Nolan announces that he's working on it, or that he got the final script ready, everything you'll hear about future Batman sequel have as much truth in them as any news posted on April's Fool day.

As for being excited, the movie is just too far away for me to get excited. Iron Man 2 now I just can't wait! (Only 167 days, 7 hours and 37 minutes...)

I mean we have the Maniac Mansion game, a remake of that and then another remake in a different style. Is it really necessary? How does that advance gaming?

Not everything need to advance gaming. An original adventure games that stick to the tried and true formula of Monkey Island 1 without deviating by one iota does not advance gaming any more than a remake do, yet nobody complains about that.

Now, I dont begrudge the people who remake games or make the latest Indiana Jones game and I'm sure then end up being very enjoyable but I don't understand the appeal from a designer's perspective. Isn't making the story and the world the best part of game design?

There's still decisions involved in a remake. New interfaces need to be implemented, puzzles need to be adapted, backgrounds designed for 30 pixel high character need to be adapted to for 70 pixel high character, more details absent from the original game can be added, whole new atmospheres can be created, adding more text, creating musics for games that were generally completly silent... Dualnames probably spend tons of sleepless nights when designing his H2G2 remake.

It can also be a very good training ground before producing completly original games, not only on the coding, design, artistical and musical plan. Team managing, learning commitment, not giving up projects halfway, testing a game correctly... these are all skills that can be carried onto bigger, original projects.

Also it seems that remakes attract some of the best artists and talent. Why is this? Surely artists of all people would rather create something original?

But there's artists who like to draw fanarts too, it's not just limited to adventure game remakes (Look! I drew Zoidberg! ). And most artists, animators and musicians here now produce materials that rival the best materials remakes offered.

Myself, I've always wondered about the utility of remakes, how many of these projects, generally focusing on LucasArts and Sierra games, were basically just remaking games that were perfectly playable and enjoyable in their original version and didn't need to be remade compared to other, more obscures but none the less great titles that could benefit from a more user friendly design philosophy to reach a bigger audience. But a couple of years ago I realized that less than an insignificant fraction of all announced remakes and fangames reach completion and in the end there was really no reason to complain on the situation.

A link repost in case any of you missed this little gem posted on the Mixnmojo website, basically, while looking at the original game's source code, the MI1 SE developers found dialogues that were removed from the final game:
http://lucasartsworkshop.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/secret-of-monkey-island-–-the-deleted-extended-scenes/

I finished the game!

The bad news is when I got to Wizard level, I still had that bug where I couldn't study to get mana. I accidentaly managed to get around the bug one time, but it only lasted for one day. The good news is I didn't mess around this time, by the time I reached Wizard level, I had 3 villages, 2 forts and the biggest castle of the valley under my control. I was drowning under gold and all I had to do was buying blue mana pills and use the balance spell to duplicate all that mana and kill anything that opposed me. Conquering the remaining town and castles was a piece of cake.

I tried to use the creeper, but only at the end of the game, and by that time it was not very useful, always getting killed after every fight. For the 10 gold required to revive this 5 attack/15 defence creature, it was more effective to buy 20 blue mana pills and convert them into 20 attack with the Balance/Laws of Nature spell combo, or buying 3 health potions if I needed defence. Also, was there a way to change the stats of your creeper after its creation? To improve them when your food stocks are big enough to support a big creature or decrease them in case you simply can't feed it?

Anyway, great game!

No, no creeper yet. I guess I need to buy more spare body parts but there's always more interesting stuff to buy, when it's not castle upgrades, I buy skeleton mercenaries or something else. It's good to know Wizard is the last rank, monsters were getting pretty insane around the end. I'll give this second version a try.

I played it again this morning, couldn't conquer any new towns but I got a tiny bit further. Unfortunately I stumbled on some sort of game stopping bug, as soon you reach the rank of Wizard, studying blue or green magic no longer increase your mana and you're pretty much game over from that moment.

Another glitch I found is when you buy the spikes for your tower (-30 gold, +5 attack), another spike icon will appears in the shop. So if you buy the spikes 4 times, there will always be 5 spikes icons in the shop.

Another way you could improve the interface would be to put a "Steal" button on the merchant event as soon as you buy the book, this way you wouldn't have to go in the inventory everytime you want to use the book. The same thing could be done with the holy spear.

I think I'll stop playing the game for now, since the green spell scrolling bar issue and the Wizard rank bug are real game stopper but I'll keep an eye on this thread in case you manage to correct these bugs because it's a really nice game and I'd really like to finish it.

Cool game, got as far as conquering a town and a castle before an immortal, a wizard and a dragon came knocking at my door on the same day. Bastards being jealous of my fame!

For some reasons it was impossible for me to scroll up and down in the window where you cast green spells, it could have been because there was no other spells to cast but a couple times after I bought a permanent green spell it was immediatly replaced by new spell, which made me think I could cast more than 8 spells but the scrolling buttons didn't work.

Also, after a while the game become incredibly slow, the cursor starts to lag, and clicking works once every 2 or 3 clicks. Going in 320x200 resolution lowered the speed at which it became slow and saving the game once every while made the game smooth again, but none of these solutions solved the problem permanently.

Anyway, nice game, keep up the good work!

Nice computer! Sorry to hear for your data loss, that crap happened to me often.

Strange thread revival coincidence, my hard drive died a week ago, it ran 24 hours a day for the last 3½ years and went through an exploding power supply, I got my PC back yesterday. I was lucky as just before the hard drive died I managed to boot in safe mode and copy all my stuff on my external hard drives, and right after that the computer refused to boot in safe mode too. Not that it would have been a big loss since every 2 weeks I back up all my stuff while reading a comic. External HDs are easily the best thing I bought in the last couple years.

Anyone here played the game and care to tell me if the game features a giant open world or is it a more linear adventure taking place in a chain of closed area?

I'll certainly play the game, my only problem with adventure games with surrealist or abstract settings is that logic tend to be thrown out of the window when it comes to puzzles and progression happen more often by randomly interacting with the environment rather than actually thinking to find a solution, which isn't a problem as long as you are confined in 2 or 3 rooms at the time. Full Pipe had that problem but around the end it was 60+ rooms you had to re-visit and interact with when you were stuck.

If you want to make money out of freeware games, I'd suggest that you look and ask on flash gaming portals like Armorgames and similar. A lot of those portals actually pay the people who make flash games, based on the number of time the game was loaded rather than the time people spend playing it. But I'm not sure it would be very successful for an adventure game.