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The short demo shows some pretty impressive graphics, with an amazing level of detail. As the camera zooms in, you can clearly see imperfections in the skin, along with glistening effects from areas where the face is wet with either tears or water

The style of the article reminds me of an Old Man Murray new article, featuring a glowing description of the rendering power of the (then not yet released) PS2 (article at bottom of page): Playstation 2 To Usher In New Era Of Underage Girlfriend Simulation

Whatever it is.

Yes, who cares what it is? If it's easier to avoid the crate and hit the child, that's the chosen manoeuvre.

Old Man Murray made a compelling argument explaining the decline of adventure games:

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

To appease/incite Fox, EA should have brought up Alien vs Child Predator. That would have given them weeks of content.

What the hell are you talking about? The only reason I play UO is for all the "Britishing": paying real world dollars to people for cyber-sex, then player killing them as I climax. That's the only reason anyone plays UO - all the violent sex. Jesus, man, where have you been?

Remember Old Man Murray reviews? Coined the term "Britishing":
http://www.oldmanmurray.com/shortreviews/sr5.html

The lack of comedy in games isn't confined to games. Most mass media that's intended to be funny really isn't. I can count on one hand the number of funny sitcoms on TV (in the US, I don't watch much foreign language TV.) You could do something similar with comedy movies, or the light moments in otherwise serious movies. It's a general failure to which games are also susceptible. I agree with some of the assessments from others in the thread, too, especially about timing being key.

However, I would like to add that things aren't that funny when you've seen them before. Bones3D said in an earlier post that comedy occurs when something happens that the audience didn't expect. The more games we've played, the harder it is to surprise us with game events or plot twists. So we're left with comic dialogue which is not so easy to write or deliver.

By the way, those of you who mentioned TF2 and Portal should read some Old Man Murray, as one of the two guys (Chet Faliszek) from that site is responsible for much of the comedy in Valve's games.

Finally, I haven't seen these two games recommended as funny, so:

• Giants: Citizen Kabuto is a 3rd person action game that's very funny
• Anachronox is an American made JRPG that's hilarious

This. Also, let me remind you of the scientifically objective Crate Review System for videogames.

The point of the article isn't that puzzle games don't exist, they just aren't mainstream anymore

What the hell does mainstream mean, if Professor Layton, advertised on the divider panels when you walk into Walmart doesn't qualify? This whole article is bullshit and equates "adventure game" with puzzle. It is well known that adventure gaming killed itself.

So in order to even begin formulating your strategy, you have to follow daredevil of logic Jane Jensen as she pilots Gabriel Knight 3 right over common sense, like Evel Knievel jumping Snake River Canyon. Maybe Jane Jensen was too busy reading difficult books by Pär Lagerkvist to catch what stupid Quake players learned from watching the A-Team: The first step in making a costume to fool people into thinking you're a man without a moustache, is not to construct a fake moustache.

not gamers. Read this: http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html Unless you mean puzzle games as in things like Peggle, or Puzzle Quest etc etc. These games live on in budget form and web/flash games.

.. as Old Man Murray points out. Some puzzles may have been great, but I remember plenty of horrible ones, such as the Gabriel Knight one above, where you had to construct a false moustache using cat hair and syrup, in order to hire a moped.

Yes, and following the link to "the Gabriel Knight one" above, you would learn Jane Jensen had nothing to do with that particular puzzle.

Heh. I was going to link the same article. You linked page 3, btw. Here is page 1 It's probably the best thing on the site, and the site has many quality articles.

I think this explains perfectly well why the "old-school" style of puzzle game, ala Sierra and Lucas Arts, have gone by the wayside and it'll be a while till they come back.

I say "think" because my proxy blocked the link. Basically, if it describes a puzzle in which you have to create a disguise by using cat hair and scotch tape to make a mustache in order to imitate a guy who doesn't have a mustache, then you're at the right place. :P

I think it was Kings Quest 6 that basically broke my brain for puzzle games. At least Space Quest made me chuckle while making me do random retarded things.

.. as Old Man Murray points out. Some puzzles may have been great, but I remember plenty of horrible ones, such as the Gabriel Knight one above, where you had to construct a false moustache using cat hair and syrup, in order to hire a moped.

The guy who runs donotreply.com is Chet Faliszek, one half of the "Chet and Erik" who ran the gaming humor site Old Man Murray and then went on to write the dialogue for Portal.

Incidentally, they never did send me a prize for winning that CrateMaster contest. Bastards!

Plan 9: Plan 9 was not always open source. It was originally a research project at bell labs, and released to the public sometime around 1995. The first open source release was ~2000ish, iirc. It was not developed as an open source project, anyway.

Portal: Portal was not in any sense of the word a Mod. The authors of an independant (closed-source) game called Narbicular Drop were hired by Valve, and wrote Portal while employed. Aside from the gameplay development, it was written and voice acted by professionals[1], and was sold at retail.

Multitouch: While Multitouch hardware is obviously not free, the software to intepret and build interfaces for them is Open Source.

[1] It's not often you get to refer to OMM staff as professional.

Pfft. Everyone knows that the quality of a game's levels depend entirely on how long you have to go before you see a crate.

I recommend Quarter To Three, and I would recommend Old Man Murray and fatbabies.com but those two no longer post new material. It's worth reading Old Man Murray anyway, especially their interview with Croteam, developers of Serious Sam.

These days I tend to pirate everything to decide who deserves my money. Then I try and skip as many layers of retailing as I can to buy it. Somehow I think the developers get a bigger cut that way. I'm probably wrong.

I entered the Valve reception area and the first thing that struck me was the sheer number of awards lying around the place, ranging from simple perspex trophies along the window sill and shelves of framed certificates to a big golden crowbar and a wooden crate lying on the floor

I would be sadly disappointed if they hadn't made a crate a sidekick. Especially considering who wrote the dialogue.

Eric still gives some of the best interviews I've ever read.

If you've never read any of his and Chet's stuff from back in the day on Old Man Murray, you owe it to yourself to check out some of their features and reviews.

Give Anachronox a try if you haven't already.

As long as Erik Wolpaw from Old Man Murray is still involved, any sequel should be good. For those who don't know, Old Man Murray was one of a few honest game review sites. In days when most websites would gush over upcoming games to secure future access, Chet (Faliszek) and Erik applied their knowledge of what was wrong with games in general to their review of each new game. Read their preview of Serious Sam (linked below). It's hilarious on many levels, and very incisive besides. So it's easy to see why Psychonauts was fun fun fun.

• Erik Wolpaw
• Chet Faliszek
• Serious Sam: The Interview

Yeah, but a lot of the appeal of Portal is the storyline. Without it, it would have been fun, but not half as good.

Yeah, Valve hired Chet and Erik of the hilarious and much-missed Old Man Murray (remember them?) to do the writing for Portal, and it shows.

You forgot the STC factor. http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html

Everything I know about adventure games (and their death) I learned from Old Man Murray.

No discussion of adventure games is complete without Old Man Murray.

I miss Old Man Murray.

What's the StC (Start to Crate) of Resistance: Fall of Man?
The first crate is when the developers ran out of ideas.

http://oldmanmurray.com/

Or you could really go nuts & try http://oldmanmurray.com/

-BbT

erik: Die Hard Trilogy 2 just keeps getting better. It defies logic.
Chet: I can't believe it's so much better than Doom.
erik: Science is not about your feelings.

That's from this article about the death of adventure games at the long neglected oldmanmurray site: http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

You mean the Crate Review System? Yes, hilarious.

Crate Review System

Planned comedy is very hard to pull off unless you've already got a lot of skill in setting up jokes and comedic timing. Unfortunately, those aren't skills people acquire in the normal day-to-day of game development. You really need someone who developed their comedic skills on their own and also loves and understands games.

Can you imagine, with all the rushed art and programming that goes on in game development, how well humor would fare? Not well. You may have a joke that works well with the development team for some reason, but just completely falls flat on the audience. In the end, the publisher is going to want the game done and not really worry about whether it's funny or not.

The best example of a funny game recently is Psychonauts, by Double-fine. The dialog in that game was from Tim Schafer (Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle) and Erik Wolpaw (from Old Man Murray - http://www.oldmanmurray.com./ The game was often delayed and was even cut from Microsoft's lineup because Schafer was hard to work with. It was eventually released by Majesco and despite lot's of great reviews, it wasn't exactly a smash hit. The humor is top-notch, but in the end, if people don't like the game and it doesn't have a huge publisher backing it, it's not going to sell.

StC tests are tailored to FPS and sidescrolling games, and attempts to use them as a meaningful measurement outside that domain carries no statistical significance.

So why did a page of the seminal StC article mention Boxxle, rating it -273? (Or was it a joke?) I agree about first-person shooters, but I've played games that resemble Sokoban-with-gravity, such as parts of some Boulder Dash derivatives such as Wisdom Tree's Exodus. Would those be considered a side-scrolling game under the domain restriction?

Let's hope the website makes proper mention of the all-important crate. ^_^

On a side note, notice how all of those games are FPS?

Cellfactor seems to really take advantage of the idea of using physics as

The ghost recon videos could easily be replicated by using non-colliding particle systems which simply transpose through geometry before wearing out. Heck, add a dirt-cheap ground level collision plane, and you're all set. In the heat of an explosion, it would look just about as realistic, and without the additional hundred dollars in hardware to upgrade every year. As is they disappear after about 3 seconds anyway.

And Bet On Soldier's glowing particle systems are neat, but the gameplay doesn't change one bit.

Cellfactor seems to really take advantage of the hardware, and is a game I'd buy at launch to boot (Even though the time to crate is about 1 second). The rest of what they're showing is nice, but not what you would want physics for. Realistic debreis? Come on, we can do better.

They had some kind of weird video RPG story game (it kind of looked like the 80s dragonslayer)

Adventure game. Adventure game. You know, like Final Fantasy but with all of the statistics and weapons and random encounters and combat and shit replaced with impossible logical-after-the-fact puzzles and pixel-hunting problems. Just as many cutscenes (no FMVs, though ones that included that tended to suck even more) and as much aimless wandering. If you want a good example of the genre, check out ScummVM - there's at least two freely downloadable games of this genre out there. Beneath the Steel Sky and something else.

They just figured it wouldn't sell on this day and age - and I kind of figure out why, people just don't have the patience to do some of the stuff. The genre is pretty much dying with RPGs stomping them out. Some say it's a bad thing; personally, I say good frigging riddance, though I think of this mostly as a gentle send-off, not a vehement condemnation. =)

So the designers just got really bored?

Or at least, that would be your first guess.

Of course, as it was Old Man Murray, what actually happened was that if you clicked on a flag, you would see the review again in English, but after it had been translated from English into that language (e.g. Spanish) and back again, all via BabelFish.

Anyway, those resultant mangled reviews are mostly what this headphone review reminds me of. I half expected to read that the headphones were disrespectful to dirt. Very poor.

Plus, there were no talking submarines.

Or at least, that would be your first guess.

Of course, as it was Old Man Murray, what actually happened was that if you clicked on a flag, you would see the review again in English, but after it had been translated from English into that language (e.g. Spanish) and back again, all via BabelFish.

Anyway, those resultant mangled reviews are mostly what this headphone review reminds me of. I half expected to read that the headphones were disrespectful to dirt. Very poor.

Plus, there were no talking submarines.

I'll just let Old Man Murray do my talking.

Or just read this - I challenge you to make it past the first page.

Or CrateMaster.

With the way things are currently going, by 2010 all games will ship in miniature crates.

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/71.html

I like this rant. Skip to the last page for a summary of the most absurd adventure game puzzle I've yet seen. This kind of asinine excuse for problem solving did not help the genre.

How about no more boxes?

The Start to Crate time has been established as a measure of the quality of a game--the sooner you see the first crate or barrel in a game, the poorer its quality. The overuse of crates is a symptom of the dearth of creativity suffered by game designers.

Oh -- and a while back, there was someone who had a ranking system for computer games, based on 'crates'. Basically, the more crates (or sooner you ran across them in a game), the greater the lack of originality in the game. I want to say it was done about the time of C&C2

That would be Old Man Murray's Crate Review System - arguably the finest metric of game originality ever devised:

"To test our theory, we installed and played the twenty-six games we had within easy reach of where we were sitting. To our scientific delight, all exhibited crates within the first one hundred and twenty seconds of play. Please note that by crates, we mean both crates proper and the circular crate, the barrel."

It's a shame that Old Man Murray stopped updating a while ago - the site possessed a unique sense of humour. I still can't help thinking about the Death of Adenture Games whenever I hear the name "Gabriel Knight".

Oh -- and a while back, there was someone who had a ranking system for computer games, based on 'crates'. Basically, the more crates (or sooner you ran across them in a game), the greater the lack of originality in the game. I want to say it was done about the time of C&C2

That would be Old Man Murray's Crate Review System - arguably the finest metric of game originality ever devised:

"To test our theory, we installed and played the twenty-six games we had within easy reach of where we were sitting. To our scientific delight, all exhibited crates within the first one hundred and twenty seconds of play. Please note that by crates, we mean both crates proper and the circular crate, the barrel."

It's a shame that Old Man Murray stopped updating a while ago - the site possessed a unique sense of humour. I still can't help thinking about the Death of Adenture Games whenever I hear the name "Gabriel Knight".

Oh, for god's sake. Look, just because you happen to think Carmack roxors your video card's soxors doesn't make him the be-all end-all of game development.

This article is about creativity in game design. Carmack doesn't have much to do - indeed, doesn't want much to do - with game design. He writes the engines, and lets other people handle the gameplay.

Oh, and incidentally, the last three games id software published were, what? Doom 3, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Quake 3. In those three games, the most innovative feature offered was the ability to blow up Rob Zombie.

And I quote...

"Games can be rated and compared based on the shortest amount of time it takes a player to reach the first crate, which represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas."

Create Review System