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(Disclosure: this joke is already half-made in the article.)

Adventure gaming is dead. Editorialists speculate it killed itself.

I just wish that someone would make something that seemed interesting like they used to.

Get a DS and buy Another Code (may be called "Trace Memory" or something in the US). It's clearly too short (I finished it in under 5 hours), but it's still worth it. The story is amazing, and some of the puzzles are nothing short of astonishing. Also, it has no weird Gabriel Knight style puzzles. The puzzles are all logical and can be solved by thinking rather than randomly trying to apply items.

Why the hate for Sokoban on page 7?

Nope, that means nothing. But This does

No update here:
http://www.oldmanmurray.com/

so I do not care!

Lot of black clothing.
http://www.xbox.com/NR/rdonlyres/73264CD0-D646-439 2-880C-CF5F4239F8FF/0/ilmmtvshoot003.jpg

Micro$oft Windozs Media Player Required.
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xboxtv/default.htm?t=528 4&v=94031&bw=hi&

I hear Quake4 will be better than Quake1 and Quake2 and Quake3 combined.

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/
http://effclan.us/

I won't attribute to malice, because that type of bad game design was ubiquitous in 1980s (save for a few developers as progressive as the aforementioned Infocom). But as the rest of the world moved on, Sierra refused to improve. It's sad that they were always the most successful adventure game developer, because arguably, it was their persistently unintuitive and ridiculous puzzle design that killed adventure games.

And the infamous Asheron's Call Beta Log. This was amazing. Pretty much sums up MMMMMPORPPRPPRPPGS.

And the infamous Asheron's Call Beta Log. This was amazing. Pretty much sums up MMMMMPORPPRPPRPPGS.

I've always said that video games don't affect people in real life, but now I'm not so sure. People sizing up cars and thinking, no matter how briefly, of jacking on? Picking "human shaped targets" out when you are at the park? Actually reaching for the parking brake before entering a high speed corner with your wife and kids in tow before you "catch" yourself?

I have never, not once, in my 25 year gaming career ever confused a gameworld with reality. I mean, I've said jokey stuff with my friends about "failing a save" when I do something embarassing, but I don't actually think that.

I remember this Old Man Murray article making fun of a guy who wrote an alarmist article about how playing FPS games made him see the games "morbid reality" descend upon him "like a grid of hyper-real euphoria." It was funny because the conceit was that surely only someone off his psycho-meds would experience such a thing. Maybe you guys "blurring the line" a bit should lay off and stop playing, before you don't "catch yourself" and slide through an intersection and kill some other poor slobs family.

Next time slashdot runs a "parent sues video game developer" over their kid blasting someone, maybe there should be a link to this story.

Aaaaahhh... Trespasser!

Oh, how even now, years later, my skin rankles with cold chills at that awful, awful game. I was trying to talk about it a few weeks ago (perhaps even here) and I had completely blocked the name of the game in my mind. I looked for it online but could only find links to Turok.

For people who don't remember the game, you play the part of a pale disembodied arm which is either drunk or suffering from a loss of coordination caused by earlier methamphetamine abuse. Your goal is to push around crates. To call this a "hand sim" is being kind. (See OMM for more info).

i wonder if we will be able to apply the Start To Crate rating system to the movie like we can to the game.

Only people who do not like the game Sokoban can trust such a rating system. Avid players of Sokoban and similar games (such as FCI's Boxxle, which was slammed on page 7) believe that the "start to crate" review system unfairly penalizes their favorite game, which doesn't try to hide that it's about pushing crates around.

I wonder if we will be able to apply the Start To Crate rating system to the movie like we can to the game.
The the game (or movie) can be compared to the length of time before you see a crate, the longer the time the better the game or in my theory a movie.

Rusty metal, yellow caution stripes, radioactive sludge? Could be any of a billion computer games. For some reason, rusty metal, yellow caution stripes, and radioactive sludge (always green and/or brown) seem to be staples of computer game art. Almost as much as crates and barrels.

Barrels (and their sister containers, the crates) are an essential part of any FPS.

One of the canonical pieces of FPS review literature is the Crate Review System, which measures the time in game until the appearance of the first crate or barrel (StC: Start to Crate).

They've broken the sacred bond of trust between gamer and gaming mega-corporation: that there is actually a game in the box you're purchasing.

adventure games

I hate most adventure games. The only ones I can stand are the Lucasarts variety. This article pretty much sums up why. For those who don't want to RTFA, it's basically the frustration factor. In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom adventure, as well as several others, you have to do a couple things in the beginning of the game in order to win it. If you don't, you will still be able to progress to the critical point where you need them, at which point you will have to RESTART YOUR GAME FROM THE BEGINNING. The seriously destroys the fun factor. Also, many puzzles are needlessly arbitrary, such as the disguise puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3 pointed out in the article. They're simply puzzles for the sake of puzzles that have solutions that no sane person would actually guess. The solutions to these puzzles can only concievably be attained by randomly clicking on everything and seeing what happens, which seriously ruins your suspension of disbelief.

"When I saw that Interplay had seemingly started selling off IPs, rather than see the Freespace IP fall into the WRONG hands, I thought it would be nice to TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT and which is totally BELOW my current skill levels and experience."

"I'm used to developing and coding high-end migraine inducing modules for my games, therefore, going to a streamlined and less hardcore game, just gives my brain some breathing room...After the Battlecruiser series, believe me, anything else not even closely related to its complexity, will be like programming tic-tac-toe to me."

You can see some rare concept art for "Sid Meier's Dinosaurs!" here.

I'm personally waiting for the Old Man Murray version. His strong opinions and insights could lead to the greatest GPROMMMMMMORPG of all time.

Someone need to kick Old Man Murray out of retirement. The video game world needs that hot, steaming cup of bile to wake it up from its gross, self-congratulatory stupor.

Then we'd know if World of Warcraft was really worth its salt. And be entertained at the same time.

And, in fact, other than DX 1, his contributions to many games he's worked on have been much more on the management side of things, not the development side of things, so I wouldn't over-attribute the things you like in "his" games to him. (Half Life may have been influenced by System Shock, but influenced by Warren Spector's work on System Shock?!)

To quote a very old news item from oldmanmurray.com:

The first sentence of a recent Deus Ex 2 preview on pc.ign.com:

"There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.

(Full disclosure: I worked on Thief and Terra Nova.)

I believe that was Old Man Murray (site may be dead) talking about Gabriel Knight 3.

...what can I turn to get over the pain I still feel when I remember the tragic death of my virtual tiger, Rainbow?

The checked the VIN on the Internet

This is getting a little off-topic, but you should always, *always* do a VIN check before buying a used car. You will have to pay a little bit, but it is worth it to save yourself the trouble of getting a deathtrap or a vehicle like you describe.

About six months ago I was ready to buy a car, then did a VIN check and found out that according to the DMV records, it wasn't even legally allowed on the road anymore - meaning that either someone had bought it wrecked and fixed it up with substandard parts, or it was stolen and had its VIN tags swapped with the car that really was wrecked, Gone in 60 Seconds-style.

I used Carfax, because you can buy an unlimited use account for a month for about $20, but there are cheaper alternatives if you just want to run a single VIN.

Back on topic: if you google for my name, you get some technical documentation on Soul Reaver and a link to an Old Man Murray screenshot contest from 2000 where I submitted a picture of John Romero's head on Marilyn Monroe's body. Ladies, you may form an orderly queue - please, no shoving or cutting in line.

X does not follow Y. Deus Ex 2 (and presumably Thief 3) sucked. It sucked because of what Ion Storm did. As others have pointed out, it is possible to make a release for both the Xbox and PCs that doesn't suck. Therefore, if it sucks, it must be Ion Storm's fault.

Of course it is Ion Storm's fault. But why the change of heart in Ion Storm? Why the sudden love for the console market, represented on a symbolic level, perhaps, by the shift of perspective from first (traditionally PC) to third (traditionally console)? That's what I'm attempting to address here. KOTOR will be, no doubt, the shining example for your statement. And yet, it was released first for the Xbox. Moreover, Bioware's next game is Xbox exclusive, and this is one example among denizens. I would also assert that the exceptions, Half Life 2 and Doom III, are being made for the PC largely out of nostalgia or loyalty on behalf to the PC. Even companies that are capable of made excellent PC/Console games are focusing on the console.

Pirating "comes from any of" my discussion [sic] because I believe it's a significant reason why the PC industry is hurting. Actually, I didn't say "suck it up and buy the games." I said don't pirate, and don't buy games that require complicated patches and installations (which to say, nearly all PC games save the Sims; coicindence that it's a regular top ranking seller on the PC charts? I don't think so). Companies are in business to make money, and good games (usually) make money; at this point though, those good games are being made for the console instead of the PC because that's where the money is. While there is a dynamic between the consumer and the publisher, like any industry, it is mostly driven by how we spend our money (or don't). Inevitably, we shape it with the monies we spend. This is a Frankenstein we've created; this pirating, patching beast that lumbers into walls (and, most likely, crates) while a speedy Sonic/Mario/Crash zooms by, collecting floating dollar bills that could have been our's.

If it isn't our fault as consumers, for pirating and allowing (and more importantly, buying) unfinished products, then why the mass exodus to the console industry? I personally think that this is a good thing as I hope we'll see the burgeoning indie PC market thrive, and what all this will eventually mean though is far less flashy productions ala Blizzard and Valve. I'll save that, though, for another post.

Long enough for Old Man Murray to have done a story on it, even...

Heh, heh... Derek Smart... Heh, heh, heh...

Derek Smart's Desktop Commander has to be the second drop-dead funniest thingy about gaming ever done, right after OMM's absolutely perfect Crate Rating System.

You can have my crates when you pry them from my cold dead hands.





(Miss you, OMM!)

American game developers are too chickenshit to touch a violent, button pushing property like The Warriors. I guess they're afraid it might inspire fights outside Electronics Boutique. Fine, we say, make your goddamn KISS games. We'll see you in bankruptcy court.

American game developers are too chickenshit to touch a violent, button pushing property like The Warriors. I guess they're afraid it might inspire fights outside Electronics Boutique. Fine, we say, make your goddamn KISS games. We'll see you in bankruptcy court.

American game developers are too chickenshit to touch a violent, button pushing property like The Warriors. I guess they're afraid it might inspire fights outside Electronics Boutique. Fine, we say, make your goddamn KISS games. We'll see you in bankruptcy court.

American game developers are too chickenshit to touch a violent, button pushing property like The Warriors. I guess they're afraid it might inspire fights outside Electronics Boutique. Fine, we say, make your goddamn KISS games. We'll see you in bankruptcy court.

ROFFLE

Every FPS has crates. Just like every mammal has breasts. You can't have one without the other.

The only question is, how long is the Start-to-Crate?

their benchmark "time to crate" (the time it takes from when you start a first person shooter to when you see the first crate or barrel) is still a good indicator of at what point the developers ran out of ideas.

And, from this revolutionary idea, we have the following review:

In the interest of scoring some points with our peers in science, such as our new colleague Dr. Jonas Salk, we've utilized all of the components of the very popular scientific method, including the notion of a control group. Our initial control group was this picture of Paul Steed's head digitally imaged onto the body of a chubby waiter at the Lebanese Hooters:

[image]

We asked a fellow scientist at Case Western Reserve University here in Cleveland to peer review our experiment. He had some difficult-to-understand, but serious-sounding concerns regarding our control group. In response to his generally negative tone, we put Steed's head on a much fatter body and gave him a little cowboy hat:

[image]

With our control group finally in place, all we needed was a research assistant and a microscope. After a brief search, we narrowed the field of potential assistants down to two candidates: Dr. Stephen Hawking and our friend Kevin. While Hawking is a TV star like Allie McBeal, owns his own microscope, and sounds like a robot, Kevin is the only one of the two who talks to us, making him the winner by one degree Kelvin.

That still left us without a microscope. Kevin validated our choice of him over Dr. Hawking by helpfully suggesting that we eliminate step 4 of our scientific review procedure, "Look at the game through a microscope", and we were off.

Their "Start to Crate" measure is assinine and doesn't measure anything remotely close to gameplay. It's riddled with juvenile humor (see above for a small sampling or the link above for the full crapola) and doesn't make any sense.

old man murray, while probably not being so much of a video game journal itself, was much more of a meta-video game journal, in pointing out the whoring practices of most of the press out there as well as everything that is wrong in the video game software industry. their benchmark "time to crate" (the time it takes from when you start a first person shooter to when you see the first crate or barrel) is still a good indicator of at what point the developers ran out of ideas.

sadly, these days it is just an archive of old articles. still pretty funny, though. you gotta love a site so dedicated to taunting john romero.

Perhaps the greatest disaster ever witnessed by man...

You obviously never played Tresspasser.

The reason that these things are getting ported is that no one is making adventure games anymore.

I think Old Man Murray explained it best.

Oh yeah? Uh... MICROSOFT SUCKS!!! OPEN SOURCE FOREVER!!

Dammit... PC game comedy died with Old Man Murray.

You may as well at least link to the original Start-to-Crate article on oldmanmurray, which is here. The first page is kind of so-so, but when they actually get to the games on the second page, it's pretty good. Interestingly enough, a lot of games start you out staring at a crate.

This, of course, was back when OMM was actually funny and updated, er, more than once every two years, but it does have a reference to DX at the end.

From the Unreal Engine License Page: "...Unreal Engine licensees starting from version 829. It allows you to simulate solid objects such as crates" OMM needs to take care of this now that they are back!!

Roberta Williams is an elitist snob.

She was once quoted by Old Man Murray, when talking about why adventure games aren't popular anymore, as saying something along the lines of, "Well, back then, you had to be at least somewhat intelligent to use a computer. Nowadays, a lot more average people feel they should own one."

Besides, everyone knows that the old Sierra adventure games sucked. LucasArts' adventure games were 100x better.

was by Erik Wolpaw at Old Man Murry. Click here.

And whaddaya know, they're back online!

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/374.html

Somebody tipped them off. Back in the day, Chet and Erik had a nice meeting with the Secret Service because somebody tipped them off that OMM wrote something on their website to the effect of: "with this free e-mail, you can write threatening letters to the president"... They didn't get in any real trouble. People are dumb.