Retro Adventure Gaming is Better

Given that games nowadays generally speaking, seem to be dumbed down and getting
dumber all the time - I mean if you look at E3 game screenshots -99% of the games
are just endless variations of either a guy or a female clutching a gun.

Whatever happened to 'a good story'? And its no use pointing to the products out
now that are carefully geared towards a bright 13 year old with ADD, and saying
'Oh but the story behind (fill in game title here) is really clever/interesting'.

The story part of gaming, with a few notable exceptions - seems to be almost entirely gone.

Games now are mostly eyecandy, high framerates, big guns, bigger engines - and so what?
It's great if you're a kid or a retarded adult, but whatever happened to games that were
story-based, that had the same depth as 'books'? I remember spending a long time
absorbing the story and working my way through gameworlds and storylines.
No 'shoot everything' required. Some 'brain' and 'patience' and 'puzzle-solving' required.

So I've got back into 'retro' gaming. Specifically adventure games, story-based games
that worked on the idea that I've got a brain, and am able to focus on a subject for
longer than a minute or two. Games that even require some lateral thinking, in order to progress.

Here's a list thus far, of the adventure games I have loaded up. (Some required some major tweaking
in order to run) - but unlike the bloatware eyecandy of modern games, all of these are
installed and run nicely, on a 90 gig 1300ghz laptop:

Phantasmagoria 2 'puzzle of flesh'
Blade Runner
Grim Fandango
Sanitarium
Gabriel Knight The Beast Within
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream
(Gabriel Knight 3 - deleted - still hate that damn game engine)
The Dig - deleted - can't cope with such lousy in game graphics
('Obsidian' - deleted - quicktime clip gaming, ew)
The Longest Journey
Shivers 2 Harvest of Souls (still a bit dodgy to run)
Syberia
Deus Ex
Lighthouse

What adventure games do you remember from 'the old days' - which worked for you?

grim fandango is one of my fav's of all time ... no monkey island in that list ... wish they make a sequel...

EDIT: playing monkey island i could always smell the sea breeze ... ... and the grog also ... hehe

re Grim Fandango - yeah, previously I played up until disk change, now I've got it again,
nicely installed to be just one game without needing to swap disks (one of the big advantages
to playing with retro games - minimal security on disks. Nowadays there's insane spyware-level
appz installed with games to control copyright)

Monkey Island - never played it - I see it 'around' if you know what I mean.
At the moment I'm bouncing between about four different story games..
and if my ADD increases, might grab it and store it to try it out - which one
would be the best to try out? (I think there were a couple in the series, right?)

The Longest Journey has easily the best story in any game I've played. It's so good. I loved Grim Fandango and Deus Ex as well.

Monkey island 2 and 4 LG! They were awesome, as i recall... mmm.... Can't seem to remember 4 all that well though, but two was definitely the awesomeness!

Space quest, police quest, both awesome! Grim fandango was also brilliant, wanted to buy it the other day, but alas, my pockets, they were empty... will go buy it next week! Just loved that game! But unfortunately I never finished it, and I seem to have lost the discs. I need to play it again.

Apparently day of the tentacle is also awesome, I never really got that far in it though.

Gotta be DOTT (Day of the Tentacle)

I replayed it about a year ago and it was still as good as when I played it 10 or so years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Tentacle

Lighthouse
Zork Nemesis

throwback to text and text/grafix

The Hobbit
Adventures A,B,C
Zork
Journey

re Longest Journey, yeah - haven't got too far in that one previously, hoping to get further this time round.. (assuming my Beast Within and Phantasmagoria 2 don't take too long to get through

I played one of the Zork's - dont remember which though - sometime in the mid 90's..

Everyone always mentions Day of the Tentacle - yet I never saw it, might well tag that one for closer looks..

Another one I dimly recall, that I must try hunt down, was 'Toonstruck'..

Also, getting Journeyman Project 3 Legacy of Time, which I vaguely recall being fun. Ditto the game version of Arthur C clark'es 'Rendezvouz with Rama' (AKA 'Rama') Didn't like it back then, but I'm willing to give it another go. And also 'Ripper' is another one that I tried 'back then' and am gonna give it another go.

Mostly agree with you. Though as a severe ADD case, I have to admit I like the eye candy and blowing **** up as well. But would be really nice to see a bunch of quality games come out that weren't a reskinned FPS or RTS for a change.

It's at least partly a result of games becomming mainstream. It's always been hard for corporates to package creativity for an orderly scheduled distribution in line with the financial year end. And even then, they want to reach the broadest possible audience etc. So it all gets watered down and designed by comittee. Grapics are easy to do. Stories are much harder. Even Hollywood are really struggling to do the story thing and thats (supposedly) their main business.

To add to your list ...

Early Kings Quests (before they got dumbed down),
Baldur's Gate (No why can't we have a BGII instead of Neverwinternights).

Grim Fandango is without a doubt one of the greatest games ever created.

It answers the whole "games as art?" with a resounding yes!

DOTT is the best game ever - played it last year and it still rocks.
My 10yr old daughter (who was not even born when I first played that game) also enjoyed it.
Awesomeness++

Since it is a DOS game, try download Dosbox, and play it in there.

GougedEye said:

Baldur's Gate (No why can't we have a BGII instead of Neverwinternights).

Click to expand...

You mean III? There was a BGII, superior to the first, but still not as good as Torment.

If you want good midschool (not as old as Zork, but not new) gaming, you must play the Fallout series. Open-ended, from a time when roleplaying meant roleplaying and not just questing, and good story.

GK Beast Within burying a freaking clock so it could not be heard and applying face make-up on a mirror so the guy could not see you behind him when he walked in took me forever to figure out those things good game tho.

Can say I enjoyed GK3 and did not even think about the game engine, but I didn't get too far. Wonder if I still have that game lying around

Hey btw I think your post makes for a good NAG or PCFormat letter funny how I thought that when I read it. Perhaps because I was reading those last night

I really enjoyed broken sword 1 and 2, got 3 and 4 lying on the shelf, havent got to them yet .

The Zork games are really good, and funny. Ive played Return to Zork and Zork Grand Inquisitor.

I enjoy some of these great older games and the sense of nostalgia they introduce but are they better? Not imo.

The problem is that the new games tend to be derivative, it's the same problem with music (and people complaining about Halo PC ) So if you go back they don'thave that uniqueness any more.

I think the thing that makes a lot of these older games 'better' - is that they have something that the current games don't have - namely 'depth' and storylines.

If you had to do loglines (a one->two sentence synopsis) of most modern games,
you'd notice real fast that they're pretty much the same kind of game, over and over.

But adventure games, mostly the older ones, were story-driven, and also were often targeted at the adult head space. Most of the games now, you can feel that they're designed for a 13 year old - they look utterly awesome, but as for a story? I don't think so.
They're being made for an audience with a low boredom threshold and short attention span. Nothing wrong with that - but geez, what if you're a gamer who wants some depth and thoughtfulness in the game you're playing?
Even 'recent' adventure games like Syberia, story-wise, lacked that certain 'oomph' of say the Phantasmagoria series, or the GK games. I don't remember when I was last creeped out by any game, whereas Sanitarium for instance, slowly but surely, still becomes weirder and weirder - like a visual Stephen King book. Or the concentration camp experiment scenes in 'I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream' - have a yummy nastiness that you just don't see in modern game stories.

Its all kind of about 'good stories' - thats why (for me anyway) Max Payne 1 actually worked for me, and I played it right through - whereas many other games, boredom sets in - as I couldn't really be bothered to dumb down to the point of spending so much time on a flimsy premise for a game.
(I'd rather micromanage peasants and go to war in Cossacks series, or American Conquest series, and spend hours fighting battles which require some strategy - rather than run around with a big gun, supposedly defending some distant Empire..)

I guess that's what sets 'adventure gamers' apart from the 3D gamers - the former wants a bit more substance, more bang for their buck, mentally speaking.

I'm not saying one is better than the other - just that the adventure gamers, aren't being catered to, anymore, which is sad. And the few story-based games that do emerge, are often pretty lame in comparison to the older classics..

/200 cents mode off

Full Throttle i liked alot. Not the greatest storyline but something very enjoyable. My problem is that (i like RPG's) i mess around with mods on the game before i finish it.

LoneGunman said:

If you had to do loglines (a one->two sentence synopsis) of most modern games,
you'd notice real fast that they're pretty much the same kind of game, over and over.

Click to expand...

Oh dear, LoneGunman has been assimilated.

Yep! stories make a game not graphics!

BTW! you forgot...

PLANESCAPE TORMENT - BEST RPG EVER MADE!!