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but isn't Monkey 3 the best game in the series? Why? It had top 2D graphics and an amazing sound score and voice-overs!

You'd be surprised by the number of people who prefer the first or the second one.

Personally, I have no preference when it come to music, a good music is all I ask for, no matter what instruments were used. I have fond memories of the CMI soundtrack, with its banjo and its accordion, just like I have fond memories of the MI2 soundtrack. I have game soundtracks on my HD that range from the C64 era all the way up to recent games.

The only thing I have a problem with is when someone change the sound of a music I grew up with. Generally, I don't like MT-32 or orchestrated versions of soundtracks that I grew up on the Adlib/soundblaster versions, just like I wouldn't like midi or C64 rendition of the CMI soundtrack. There are of course several exceptions to that, but in general, I prefer the sound I grew up with, no matter how bad people might say it is.

The sole ending musics I can remember right now are the ending music of Monkey Island 1, which became Elaine's theme music in MI2, and the begining of the ending music of Indy and the Fate of Atlantis, the calm music on the sunset, and then Indy's theme kick in and the credits roll on, just like in a movie, the rest of the music is so-so but this part is awesome. I'll see if I can remember more tomorrow.

Oh, of course, Portal!

Edit: I searched but the only other memorable ending music I could think of was the ending music of the Machine level of Knytt Stories. It's not an adventure game, but it's in my opinion what every video game endings should aspire to be.

I don't think the problem of recent commercial adventure games is the 3D graphics and in my opinion commercial adventure games have far more important issues to solve than the real 3D environment vs 3D rendered two dimentionnal graphics debate. I haven't played a lot of recent commercial adventure games, but from the handful of games I played:

For one, all the good people from the golden ages, those that moved this genre forward, have all been fired, retired or moved on different genres. People who make adventure games nowadays only copy the Monkey Island 2 and Myst formulas but with more recent graphics and different stories. You can't blame people when they say this genre hasn't evolved a single iota in the last 10 years contrary to the other genres out there.

For two, there's simply not enough details and writing except when it's revelant to the story, you will hardly see mountain of jokes and injokes hidden in adventure games anymore, something LucasArts and some designers at Sierra were champions at. There used to be a time where you'd type something silly or use the zipper icon on everything just to see if Al Lowe planned a funny message to this action. There used to be a time where you'd still have fun, even if you were stuck on a puzzle for hours, just by fooling around and finding these funny messages. Nowadays if an object is not revelant to a puzzle, you won't even be able to interract with it, that's just not right. And if someone say it's because it would ruin the mood of the stories, well, maybe it's time they learn to write something other than murder or paranormal investigations.

For three, the art of puzzles designing has been completly lost after all these years. We're very far from the witty and original puzzles from the good old days, those that made you feel smart and creative. Nowadays makers can design 3 kind of puzzles: nonsensical Myst-kind of puzzles, far-fetched combination puzzles you cannot guest without a walkthrough and no brainer puzzles that are either fetch quest, either clues collection, either involve the cliché keys, sticks, rocks, ropes, credit card, crowbars, knives and screw drivers.

As long these issues remains unsolved, the real 3D environment vs 3D rendered two dimentionnal graphics debate will be entirely pointless in my opinion. They should first learn to make adventure games good again, then they should concentrate on this problem.

I mentioned the graphics ageing better than midi because it is really a fact that we all agree. Ok, some of us will say no, they love the sound of midi sound effects on Loom, or Indiana Jones, but they sound like crap.

You forget that even nowadays iMuse is still praised by the people working in the industry and that the Monkey Island 2 soundtrack is still considered to be one of the best use of music in video games.

Who gave this game a 4 cups rating? :o Anyone in the Panel has an idea about the insane amount of work this game's backgrounds, animations, coding and testing required? On several Top X list of best adventure games ever, the original game often competed and managed to beat some of the best games LucasArts made, the Panel says the remake is an improvement on the original game in many aspects and it only achieve a 4 cups score?! Man, I am seriously questionning the credibility and usefulness of the Panel rating.

Dualnames: You are reassuring me with bringing the game difficulty to normal instead of insane and mentionning the game will feature a text parser for some puzzles, I will most certainly try your remake.

Jared: Well, if you still happen to give a look at this thread:

And agree... but this is in conflict with what you said just a moment ago about a remake needing a text a text parser. There's no way to really make a parser interface easier to use, especially if we're talking Infocom, and I think the parser is hard to see as anything but a step backwards in design. I know that old-skoolers are frequently dismissive of 'point-and-click', but there are plenty of ways to stump people in puzzle design (legitimately and logically) with a nice, easy-to-use interface.

Like I said in my first post: text parser, or a mix of point and click and text parser not unlike LSL7, or point and click except for some classic puzzles that should be solved with text parser. It doesn't have to be absolutly text parser.

Also, I would be fine playing the flash version on the BBC website if it wasn't for the fact it include all the dead-ends, walking deads and timers that prevented me from enjoying the original in the first place.

Anyway, I'll be leaving that thread alone too. Good luck with your remake, Dualnames!

This thread is starting to be hard to follow, anyway, to reply Jared and Dual:

But from this comment... do you really want graphical remakes? You're placing all the emphasis on text - gameplay through text, jokes through text. Surely graphics and text are akin to television and radio - one shows and the other tells. If most of the weight is being put on text, rather than graphics... surely it should be just text?

A good remake in my opinion should make an older gem playable to a broader public, it should mix the greatness of older games, with the accessibility of recent games (easier interface, less dead-ends and less unforgiving timers, etc.). Since the greatness of a lot of these older games was the writing, there should be as little text as possible lost in the conversion. Who in their right mind would want less Douglas Adams or less Steve Meretzky in their game, tell me? Same with the puzzles, they should be as rewarding as they were in the originals.

to me that doesn't mean having a few sprites standing around on screen while the player reads all of Douglas Adams' prose - it means looking at what the prose tells you, what the character thinks and how to work that into the game as dialogue and cutscenes and animation

But a graphical adventure game doesn't have to be absolutly in 3rd person perspective or features animations.

Because, surely, the idea is to make a fun graphic adventure that people who have never heard of the original will enjoy? People who like the original can just play that easily enough and will probably prefer it anyway, so trying to make it form them seems like a bad idea..

There's the persons who played and liked the original, there's the persons who never heard of them and there's the persons like me, who heard of the original but simply cannot play the original because of the bad design decisions that plagued this era, namely constant dead-ends and timers that not only become dead-ends or just outright kill you, but also remove the pleasure of exploring the game. And it's because I heard a lot of good things about the originals that I would like to play a remake that would be as close as possible to the original experiences yet accessible to a broader public than the hardcore IF players.

If walking deads is what i understand as dead ends, no really that has to stay in, it's were this game's based off, trial and error.

I still think dead-ends and walking deads are bad design desisions. When I fail I want to know I failed, I don't want to wander aimlessly looking for a puzzle solution that doesn't exist, nor do I want to keep on walking just to die several days later because of a mistake I did 3 days ago. Like Ron Gilbert said, if I need a jar of water on a space ship, and the jar of water can only be found on the planet, make sure a puzzle on the planet require me to take the jar of water before I board the space ship, or make sure someone on the planet hint me I'll need a jar of water later on. But if you want to keep dead-ends, so be it. I will probably try the game but it risks to face the same fate the original game faced on my computer.

Personally, as a gamer, what I want to see in such remake is the same game without all the bad design associated to those days.

Walking deads are a vestige of the past should be removed entirely. Same thing with timed sequences, which are directly counter productive to the exploration aspect of adventure game. And when the situation is critical need a timed sequence, it should be done with a real time clock rather than a "one action = one minute lost" clock where every useless actions play against you.

For the interface, you must understand that I don't want to solve dumbed down version of the most famous puzzles from the text adventure era. I don't want to click my way through the Babelfish or the Tea/No Tea puzzles, I want to solve them like people solved them back in those days. So, the game should feature a text interface, or at least a point and click interface with a text interface not unlike Leisure Suit Larry 7, or if a point and click interface is used for the entire game, a text parser GUI should be featured for such puzzles.

Very few line of text should be lost in the translation. A lot of these games selling point was their lengthy and humorous narration, reminiscent of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I don't want the animations and backgrounds to replace the narration, most if not every lines of narration should be featured in the remake.

These are the guidelines a text adventure remake should follow for me to play it. Anyway, good luck in your projects, there are so many adventure games out there that actually deserve remakes and so few actually get one.

And Squidi strike again with yet another adventure game gameplay idea:

http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=90

Squidi posted 2 adventures gameplay ideas on his Three Hundred website this week. Here they are:

http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=87
http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=89

In case you don't know what Squidi's Three Hundred project is, the project's premise was to post 300 unique gameplay mechanics in 300 days, and while it failed after 50 days, Squidi still updates his website from time to time with new gameplay mechanics.

I see your point, but if you're changing the game to fit the UI, you're doing it wrong. The UI must be designed to fit the game, and not vice versa.

My bad, I had trouble finding the right words for that sentence, I thought these would works but obviously it came out all wrong. What I meant to say was: we should encourage people to take the high road rather than the low one, to come up with insightful/funny messages that add to the experience, rather than avoid the problem entirely with a 2 buttons interface. While a 2 buttons interface at full potential is better than any UI that isn't used to its full potential, a LucasArts/Sierra UI at full potential is better than a 2 buttons interface at full potential IMO.

Vince: I was kind of tired of all those game articles that focused exclusively on storyline, narration, story structure and characters development. It's good to see articles that kick the adventure gameplay design in a direction which test our positions and open our eyes to the flaw of today's games. May we be 2 buttons UI proponents or multiple verbs UI proponents, it is quite true that a lot of indie adventure games don't bother to use the Sierra/LucasArts GUIs to their full potential. I hope you will keep kicking the adventure game gameplay design in new directions, maybe touching the subject of puzzles, death or the importance of breaking new walls in term of gameplay.

While I don't deny a 2 buttons interface would be better for the 90% of adventure games that do not use the LucasArts and Sierra GUIs at their full potential, I don't think the Sierra and LucasArts GUIs are not at fault here, what is at fault is the game makers. Ideally, all verb interactions should result with either game progression, jokes or comments that tell something about your protagonist's personality or the situation.

We should encourage people to raise the game experience so it fits their GUI rather than lower the GUI so it fits their game experience, to work harder to come up with funny or insightful reactions to useless interactions, to open the door to new puzzle possibilities by coming up with new verbs, something most LucasArts and most Sierra designers, with their text parser roots, weren't affraid to do.

I really don't see the point in this discussion, sorry. Why SHOULD adventure games be serious? Surely it's the player's choice when they buy/download a game as to whether or not they want to play a serious or funny game? There's a whole spectrum of games out there to choose from.

The same could be said for the Cursor Confusion thread. It's not a useless discussion. The future of this genre rests in the hands of the game makers rather than the players, but I think we should be free to state our opinion on the current state of adventure games, what turn we hope the community will take next and what would be better for the genre, in hope it will inspire someone to try something different.

Also, this player's choice argument works for books, movies and other medias that actually have a whole spectrum to choose from but we don't swim in enough in serious games for this argument to apply. When it come to serious game, I can remember Passage, Hush, Virtual Silence, Cloud, The Graveyard... that's pretty much it. The last one is not really a game and none of them are adventure games.

Adventure games are more or less interactive novels. Why couldn't be content as various as in novels?
A story is a story. A book is a book. There could be anything written there. How is adventure game SO different?
And what could be BETTER way to address "those kind of things"?! A RPG or shooter or fighter where immense is broken when player delivers his attention to stats or equipment or damage bars instead of diving into plot?
Or... what else? I really don't understand this. What could ever work better than adventure genre?

Totally agree with InCreator there.

I would love to see a political game - why does it all have to be sf and non-realistic detective settings?

First, you are confusing adventure games with visual novels. Adventure games aren't interactive stories. Adventure games are a blending of puzzle solving and stories telling. You talk about immersion, but tell me, how would adventure game genre, in its current state, with its puzzles that stick out of nowhere, dialogue puzzles, fetch quests, downtime when you are stuck and what not would be any different from action or RPG genre, tell me.

You talk about immersion but if most adventure games nowaday have unserious, comical or investigative stories that's because the current puzzle solving gameplay mechanics blend more in that kind of stories, just like the mechanics of RTS or FPS blend more to action, war or violent stories. Games aren't books. In a game, the story and the gameplay must go hand in hand.

I am tired of this self brainwashing that the adventure game community in general did to itself in the last decade by repeating the magical sentences that "Adventure games are interactive stories", "Adventure games tell stories" or "If it tell a story, it's an adventure game" in a vain attempt that it become the definition of an adventure game. Do adventure games have the monopoly on featuring interactive stories? Last I checked the magical "interactive/telling stories" definition also applied to RPG, it also applied to recent years FPS, it also applied to countless of other games in countless other genres. Adventure games are not interactive stories, they're a blending of puzzle solving and stories telling, they're games where you use your brain to overcome the various problems you are facing and progress in the story.

If adventure games were about telling stories, why the heck did they add all those puzzles to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, why not just take the book and add interactions to it? If adventure games is the best genre to tell stories, where are the full blown action, violent or war stories? Has it ever occured to someone that "use gun on guy", "use gun on other guy" is probably the stupidest puzzle out there? You don't see that kind of stories because adventure games have this whole puzzle solving aspect which totally conflict with the story itself. The mere fact that lot of stories cannot be told in adventure games because they conflict directly with the current gameplay mechanics should be enough to destroy that silly idea that adventure games are the best video games genre out there to tell stories.

Where has this brainwashing gotten us to? With all this emphasis on stories, character development, narration, people have completly forgotten or ignored the gameplay aspect of adventure games, that puzzle solving is still the bread and butter of adventure gaming. When was the last time you played Day of the Tentacle or Monkey Island 1 and 2 and paid attention to the brilliance of the hints and puzzles instead of the story? It's because we spend so little finding new puzzle solving mechanics that we're stuck in unserious, comical or investigative stories in the first place. If we want to move this genre forward, if we want to stop telling comical, unserious or investigative stories in adventure game, we need to update the puzzle mechanics, we need to find new way to present puzzles so they don't completly stand out like a tree in a field and so puzzles aren't completly stupid and unimaginative like "This object is out of reach", "This door is locked" or "I need to bake cookies for my dad, let's decypher my mom's recipe!" that generally involve keys, rocks, sticks, ropes, tools or following the police procedures.

That's the problem serious stories in adventure games are facing. Either the puzzles are imaginative and creative but completly stand out of the story and feel tacked on. Either the puzzles fit in the story but are so stupidly unimaginative they aren't fun at all to solve or just plain too easy. And in many cases, they're both unimaginative and completly stand out, like those Myst kind of contraptions used as a crutch to slow down the player progression or add some difficulty to the game. Heck, I played some indie "adventure" games where so much emphasis was put on the story that the games featured no puzzles at all. Is that were people want this genre to go to?

That's pretty much it. I could go on and point out how Full Throttle, with its special action verbs and its puzzles subtly hidden in its action sequences, is a shining example of how new puzzles mechanics would greatly improve the range of stories adventure games can tell, but I think I am spending far too much time voicing my opinion for a genre I barely play or care for anymore these days, plus I'm out of forum post typing juice.

It doesn't really change my opinion on the Cup Rating Vs User Rating debate, but I can't help but applaud your efforts, bicilotti, that was certainly an interesting read!

A friend and I once rented a JRPG. On the back there was "2 players co-op" written. Feeling like playing a 2 players co-op RPG, we rented it. The first 25 minutes of the game was anime portraits with text and story exposition. After that there was a 15 minutes single player tutorial to the battle mechanics, which was again lot of text and anime portraits. Once we were done, there was 15 more minutes of characters talking. After that we decided to stop reading what these portraits were saying and we just skipped the dialogues. After 10 minutes, as they weren't done talking yet, we found it faster to just check a FAQ to see when the co-op bit would start, and as it didn't start until halfway in the game, we just headed back to the store and rented another game. I'll forever remember this as a shining example of how to screw up a game introduction.

I don't know if that will apply to your game, as you didn't give much details about it, nor if it's going to be an adventure game, but my thought on intro, cutscenes and outro in games in general (careless of the genre):

I play games. I do not play stories. Sure, games can have stories, and it's generally better when they do, but first I need to make sure I'll love what I'll play in between the story, because if I don't like what I play, I won't care for the story. The sooner I start playing, the better. If I like the introduction's visual aspect, I might be willing to wait a little bit more, but as a general note, adventure games have 2 minutes before I get tired of the intro and want to play. That's 2 minutes to introduce the setting, mood, protagonists, their motivation and give me a glimpse of what the story's going to be about. After that, I want to play. Follow GarageGothic's tips there, trim it down, keep the essential, use pictures instead of text (a picture is worth a thousand words)...

Long backstory of events or characters should be revealed later, either one info at the time during the conversations or item descriptions, either during a long exposition once I am fairly sure that I am enjoying the game.

As for endings, when it's possible, endings (or part of it) should be playable. There's a huge potential for that in adventure games. When I care about the world I'm in, about the characters and the place (which happen often in adventure games), I should be able to witness the effect my actions had on this world's and people's everyday life. If I meet several interesting characters on my way to slay a tyran that's terrorizing a valley, once my mission is accomplished, it should be possible for me to walk my way back home, talk with the characters I met and saved earlier, see how my actions affected their life. Knytt Stories is a champion in that domain.

[AH! Production]

I'd say Ponch is hands down the most underrated AGS game maker out there, with many
great AGS games under his belt and still managing to be virtually unknown. Kinoko too I think is underrated, Cirque De Zale was a great AGS game that managed to win no AGS award, and since the download link has been broken since July 2007, I am begining to think it is the most unnoticed game too. How come nobody reported that to Kinoko?

The next few names, I am unsure if they are truly underrated of if it's simply because they posted 1 or 2 great games and left the forum long ago (or just don't post on the forum very often) that we don't seems to talk about them as much as we talk about other makers. Underrated or simply forgotten, you decide!
AH! Production (Tiltor)
IceMan (Da New Guys)
Duzz (Grrr! Bearly Sane and many others)
aussie (Chick Chaser and many others)
Greg Edwards (Jessica Plunkenstein and the Düsseldorf Conspiracy)
Logan (Emily Enough)
Michael Evans (Perils Of Poom)
Wretched (Magsic, Crave and many others)
CMonkey (Just Another Point n Click Adventure)
Mordalles (Duty and Beyond, Hallway of Adventures, Mordy)

ProgZ: I am not sure if you are underrated or simply too discreet for your own good. You've spend the last 2 years working on other people's games and the few games you released weren't promoted a lot. I found Ace Starkiller in the VGNG competition thread, it's because I decided to check the MAGS website this month if I stumbled on Our Finest Hour, and I had to search real hard just now to find the Drug Bust and Boyd Quest demos. I think submitting your games to the database/completed games announcement forum would help you a lot since your latest game there is Wooly Rockbottom.

PS - This little searching in the database made me notice Buloght's games have even been removed from it, sad day! :'()

Also, the fact that ProgZ's Hillbilly Burger Bastards was not considered superior to ROM Check Fail made me confused. How is a practically unplayable game that relies on the novelty of the Worst Gimmick Ever (tm) considered an example of what we should be praising?  HBB was so good that I've played it through 3 times (I never play adventure games more than twice). I don't mean to offend any RCF fans, but the novelty wore off very quickly for me in this game.

For 2 reasons:

The politico-voting-analysis reason: action games are more mainstream than adventure game, RCF would please to all fans of reflex based genres, HBB would please mostly to adventure game fans (who aren't that numerous in the first place), people who don't like adventure games won't like HBB. Also, unlike HBB, RCF and many other games in the competition were advertized on Indiegames.com prior to the voting, which gave them a visibility advantage over the rest of the competition.

The brilliantness-factor reason (which explain its victory over My First Skydiving Academy): RCF was bloody unique, and that's something that can be recognized by much more people because when a game feature something that is unique, you don't have to be a fan of a game or its genre to recognize the genius behind it, just like you don't have to be a fan of shmups to appreciate Joakim Sandberg's Chalk. The game also brilliantly handled the title "ROM CHECK FAIL", which was probably the most abstract and difficult title to envision gameplay speaking.

I am not an hardcore fan of RCF, I didn't play it more than 20 minutes, compared to the 3 hours I spend on HBB, but I instantly recognized there was something great in it and it most certainly deserved that award.

-edit-
Complete rewrite

Wow! What's going on? Has Quest for Yrolg become a collector?

This version is indeed much better, I scored a nice 4000 points on my first run while on the earlier version I don't think I scored higher than 2000 points. I also unlocked the minigame! There are some things however that would be great improvements:

During the treasure collecting phase and the gauntlet minigame, there should have a shadow at the Thief's feet, to show where the monsters, fireballs, traps and holes need to touch you kill you, and where treasures need to touch you to be collected. The same shadow could be put on the treasures and monsters to show where you need to touch them. It would greatly help at dodging monsters, collecting treasures and squeezing in tight spots.

During the bridge jumping phase, at some point when you reach the left castle, fireballs should stop being fired just to give you the chance to enter the castle. There's nothing worst than jumping and ducking your way to the castle just to be burned right in front of it by un-dodgable fireballs. Old games were often frustratingly unfair, I'm all for tribute and nostalgia, but I don't think bringing back the old games' flaws is a good idea.

Also in the bridge phase, to add more fluidity to the controls, the player shouldn't have to stop walking to duck. Just like you can jump while the Left or Right arrow are pressed, it should be possible to duck while the Left or Right arrow are pressed.

What do you do when both fireballs flies one above the other? (other than hiding behind the right castle)

Two issues in the minigame:
If you score incredibly poorly, it is possible not only to lose the points you earned in previous games but also get a negative point balance. Right now I have -7 points. I don't know if it's a bug or a feature, but it's not cool.

When the dragonball turn completly yellow, the character stops walking entirely and you need to re-press an arrow to move again. It sucks royally when it happens in front of a fireball or in the middle of the monsters.

I really don't know what my opinion is on that matter. I like serious games as much as the next guy but if Portal proves us anything, is that you don't have to discuss about sex, love, drug, life and death to be successful, well written games that mesh with innovative gameplay mechanics are still awesome. Also, a lot of scifi novels discuss about serious subjects or philosophy, you don't need a modern days setting to do that.

Indie adventure games' graphics, musics and writing have been pushed as far as what Sierra, LucasArts and the other giants offered in the golden days of adventure games. Before we move the story aspect to the next level, I'd rather if we moved gameplay to the next level, by designing new ways to solve puzzles (not unlike what Dave Gilbert did with The Shivah), trying new verbs and interfaces (not unlike Loom and Full Throttle), blending genres a bit or by trying completly new things (Uplink, Portal, Penumbra...), because if the folder with 50+ unplayed indie adventure games that is located on my hard drive tell me something, it's that after 6 years of indie adventure games, I'm tired to be fed stories bundled with gameplay mechanics that haven't evolved a single bit since Monkey Island 2 (and sometimes with no gameplay mechanics at all), save for a few exceptions, which remains what they are, exceptions.

There's nothing wrong in making a traditionnal point and click adventure game that play just like Monkey Island, but if all that is done is traditionnal point and click adventure games that introduce nothing new gameplay speaking, this genre will never go anywhere.

More importantly, adventure games are about using your gray matter and creativity in order to overcome problems and situations, if we can find new ways to replace or reduce this "item on other things", "clue collecting" and "dialogue tree" gameplay mechanics, with mechanics that still require gray matter and creativity rather than reflexes, we'll open up new story possibilities that were incompatible, or didn't fit well with only "item on other things", "clue collecting" and "dialogue tree" mechanics.