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Why First Person Shooters Beat Text Adventure Games
einstein writes "Old Man Murray has this commentary on why the adventure game genre lost out to titles like Doom, Quake, and why players would "rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories..." also provides an interesting look into the eyes of an adventure game writer." Ah, Old Man Murray - some of the funniest reading out there, in my book.
If I had several hours to spend at my computer, text adventures would be fun. But when I sit down at my computer to play a game, I want instant gratification. Who has time to sit and think? I want to blow people away, or race down the road at 150mph with reckless disregard for the safety of others. Zork was a blast, but it just doesn't pump the endorphines as fast as Quake. Nevertheless, I still believe that text adventures could have a huge market. People still read books, right? Get some super-famous author (say Stephen King, Anne Rice, Michael Crichton, etc.) to write one. Don't make it software for people to buy. Keep it on the Internet (i.e. make money via advertising), throw in some new twists, and you are on your way to making tons of $$$. This seems to obvious to me. People would be playing it at work, etc. Nothing to download, except web pages. I really believe this could work.
What most people don't realise is that there's the address range #D9C0-#DABF reserved entirely to provide the address space for 256 large, jiggly breasted, pictographs.
Silly me, I thought it was somewhere in the #BABE range.
FPS games, unlike adventure games, are growth experiences.
Those who characterize FPS games as "mindless" clearly have very limited experience with them. They ignore the vibrant communities that have sprang up around the id Software games, and focus on the "difficulty" of the silly puzzles that seem to be the sole reason for existance of adventure games. Frankly, I need more than puzzles to hold my interest. I need people.
1. FPS games are easy to play, and very hard to play well. Ever seen a professional adventure game player? Playing Quake3 well means practice, and lots of it. You must master aim of course, and also movement and tactics as well, if you hope to beat the best quake players.
2. FPS games, as a result of interconnected online play, often create entire communities of people - people that play together, talk together in IRC, and travel far to attend lan parties like Quakecon 2000. As often as not, regular FPS afficianados develop an identity that transcends the game itself.
3. FPS games are competitive experiences - in other words, sport. People like sports. Hundreds of thousands of people compete regularly in leagues like the Online Gaming League, Cyberathlete Professional League, etc.
There are other reasons, of course. But the bottom line, is that immersing yourself in the FPS scene is a far richer and more fulfilling experience than anything a solitary adventure game can ever offer. And that's the real reason FPS games are proving to be the more popular genre.
Actually, IIRC, if you follow step by step (this happened, block it with this, now this happens, block it with this), the dispenser runs out of fish just before the last one. You have to think ahead a bit.
Teach your kids: "C++ made baby Jesus cry."
I'm coming at this from the stance of a long time gamer. What's been seen in the last few years with DOOM et al. is simply the prevalent choice of the bulk of the users coming in now, who on average, just are not as smart as those people starting out in the '80's.
I was going to compare the difference in setting up a Win box and a DOS box, particulary as the things like Autoexec.bat and Config.sys drivers got to be more complex. Suffice it to say, it took a certain breed of individual to shell out 2-5K and then have a steep learning curve as well.
Anyone able to get to the point of having there 'EGA 286 640K blah, blah' system running "Starflight" in 16 vibrant colors would have some mimimum smarts.
Generally those that don't want to think didn't buy home computers. NOW you can brainlessly install 'Unreal' and go at it. Those that don't want to THINK after work (most of the world) can buy computers and use them for games.
The shift in games to less cereberal is obvious when you stop to think that the point of W9x GUIs is to make computers usable to the less-clueful.
One final note: Thinking games ain't going to die - they just ain't going to be big sellers COMPARED to the mindless games - simply because the common consumer now using computers has swamped out the (generally) smarter pioneers of yesteryear.
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
How about this? Single-player Quake is a game. Multi-player Quake is a sport. Single-player Quake III is a sport the way NBA Live is a sport.
There is such a thing as Quake skill or ability. It's how Thresh got the money to buy himself not one, but two dweeby web sites and I'm just posting on Slashdot. I think it's different from getting to the end of Pac Man or Dragon's Lair. Same thing for driving games. The spread of lap times at GPLRank convinces me that there's such a thing as sim racing talent.
In FPS, the game development is done by a Cathedral, made up of an exclusive bunch of high-tech priests, and professional wizards who are treated almost as Gods (e.g. John Carmack). Tha game advances through their implementation of ideas, and releases of games are few and far between. Especially innovative ideas.
In Text-based MUDs, the game is developed by a Bazaar of developers (called Wizards, Imps(?), Admins(?), Gods(?)) and players. In a genre like LPmuds, players suggest ideas all the times as they progress up levels. When they reach the top level, they are given a wizard/development character where they can implement their own ideas into the game, based on their experience. The game evolves through the rapid development of small ideas from players suggestion, or from wizards implementing ideas on-line. Releases of these ideas happen early and often. There are a lot of bugs using this method, but once all these are ironed out, you have a game with much more depth, and breadth to its gameplay than the equivalent PC/console FPS. The development model is also a lot faster because there is no need for artist to render each new object which you want to place into the game. The MUD libraries (i.e. code) are often made available as Open Source and can be used to develop other games based on the same theme.
As a result, there are 1000s of different games out there. On the one extreme are the hack-n-slash MUDs including ones like DOOM (called PKmuds), which PRE-DATE DOOM. And the other extreme are games which require loads of puzzles, and quest to solve. In the MUD world, multi-user interaction is the NORM, not something tacked on add at the end to take advantage of the Internet hype.
The lowest from of these type of games (interactive wise) i.e. PKmuds, has much more greater depth than the highest form of the FPS equivalent. There is TEAM-work in PKmuds. This naturally follows on from the fact there is TEAM-work in ALL MUDs. The depth of TEAM-work far exceeds anything on DOOM-look-alikes (which, as already has been mentioned, is a late comer to this field).
"The height of cultivation tends towards simplicity. Half-way cultivation tends towards ornamentation" - Bruce Lee.
FPS are half-way cultivation. They spend more times on getting polygons into their scenes than on things which make a difference to GAMEPLAY. What is gameplay?
As a game player matures, he will instinctively recognise what this is. Ask yourself this, why is a game like Chess so enduring although it is so simple?
The MINIMUM characteristics which define a game, thats it gameplay. It does not matter how many polygons you have in your explosion. So long as someone can tell the difference between an explosion and a puff of smoke. This is why a mature player will recognise that a game like Nethack or AngBand is head and shoulders above Tomb Raider.
Yes! The new comers to the field wont recognise the subtle differences. But they wont remain new comers for long if they keep playing. And if they do not, who cares what they think.
I think the most compelling aspect of this entire idea is that since it is a full multi-player environment set within realistic bounderies the players will in fact create the story. Since it is not real which really in this conversation boils down to the fact that you don't die by screwing up, people will be less hesitant to try out new things.
Obviously some would turn to the criminal aspect, at the same time, think of how many wouldn't mind being a detective solving big crimes. I think it would slowly balance itself out, and create interesting stories all by itself due to the nature of human creativity, freed from survivalistic fears.
So, you really would be able to enter the book/film/theatre/comic world that is so intriguing, without being limited to that book at any time. If you grow tired of whatever line of duty you are in, you can at least attempt to change it. If some person attracts you, you could run off with them. Things that the preset story type game would not consider or allow for.
As far as perfection goes, I never suggested that the word Ultimate should be synonomous with Perfect. I suppose the two can be confused, but they do have their own quirks. I use the world Ultimate, because while it wouldn't be perfect, it could literally become whatever you wanted the Game to become.
It would be interesting to see how research could be programmed into the Game, so that realities could become morphed over time.
If you ever have the chance to pick up The Golden City (author escapes me at the moment, I'm not even 100% sure that is the right title for the first book in a series) it covers this very well. The book contains a alternate virtual reality world that people have access too. It isn't as comic book as Snow Crash, which to me is a good thing. I find the alternative to be much more interesting.
V
Oh yeh, this is flamebait.
In the sense that people would rather believe the comforting lies that they've grown up with, yes I suppose it is.
Oh... come on now... this is so clearly a troll... There is absolutely no basis to support this claim... Which peasants fled? from whom? why? what smelly hole did you crawl out of...
There are several historical sources for this information, compiled in a historical book called, IIRC, "The Myth of Native Americans", although I can't remember the names of the authors. Try reading it sometime, it isn't prejudiced by liberal revisionists.
You also said that the country was built on the "christian priciple" that hard work is its own reward... sigh... first of all, its called the "protestant work ethic".
Which is what I called it in my original post.
Its not a christian principle. Its protestant apologetics that allows for individuals to gain wealth, and still feel like they are going to heaven. It was an excuse... Its also a large reason that lutheranism and protestantism caught on as quickly as they did. They allowed people to accumulate wealth without the guilt that the catholic church placed on them. And yes, I realize that the catholic church is ridiculously wealthy, and abused their position causing the reformation.
Wealth creation is not against any of the tenents of Christianity - where does is mention that being wealthy is a sin? The idea that wealth is a sin is a blatent lie spread by atheists and liberals intent on damaging the reputation of Christianity. Wealth creation is in fact fully supported by the Christian faith, have you ever read the parable of the rich man?
And don't talk about Catholics as if they were Christians. They are most definitely not.
My take is that it's a puzzle if you can detect/develop a set pattern for which the program can be beaten. When the program can detect that you've found its weakness, and evolve/change to beat you by anticipating your exploit of it, it'll be a game again!
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Subtitled foreign films have more text than your typical action flick. That doesn't make 'em novels.
Metaphors aside, LucasArts and Sierra games use a graphic interface rather than a text parser. This necessarily reduces the number of things that the player can do, and leads to cartoon-logic puzzles.
Job #1 at OMM is to amuse you. Their example is amusing because Gabriel Knight's puzzle was so atrocious. And at the same time it makes a point. The rest of the puzzle one trudges through are less absurd, but they're still extremely one dimensional.
How do you know that wasn't a female talking? I know loads of females who hate games produced in North America because all the men are repulsive.
Have people completely missed Bladerunner (the game that is), or? It's probably one of the best games I've ever played, just because it's not the "use fish in keyhole" style, but what matters is your decisions. Do you help the replicants or not? Is it morally right? Should you run away with the 14-year old replicant girl, leaving the others to their destiny? Should you hunt them all down? And so on. Basically, it's really a challenge for your intellect, not so much as your puzzlesolving abilities.
I just wish some more companies could create games like this, because it's really the future of adventure gaming (i.e not puzzlegaming). I never think I've played a game that enthralled me quite that much (with the possible exception of Outcast).
Miriam Webster (http://www.m-w.com) defines a game pretty well as an activity engaged in for diversion or entertainment. Soccer is a game, Fuzball is a game, and so is Nintendo World Cup Soccer, even single player. (hell even Solitaire is a game!)
:)
In chess, go, or pente (or all kinds of similar games) each move could be seen as a puzzle.
You may not like games that focus mainly on puzzles, and maybe I don't like games that focus on blowing up avatars of other people (Which I do like, actually) but you're trying to redefine the word Game to exclude things that don't suit your tastes. punk.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
I'm going to take a moment to rant a bit here. Several people have commented to me lately, in varying degrees of frothy fervor, how online communities of the text variety (MU*s) have changed. I wanted to take a moment to throw in some thoughts on the subject for those of you who care. And some of you do. Clearly.
First of all, as with any community of people, real or virtual, things are going to change over time. They just are. Someone who's goals it is to change the natural progression (or regression, as the case may be) of time are not just attempting something futile, they're just not being realistic.
Now, clearly, one might argue that the good ol' days were better, longer, faster, more (or less) intelligent, more (or less) sexy, or better informed than before. But isn't that always true? Isn't the grass always going to be greener? Pining away for times when The Internet was all Fresh and New isn't going to bring it back, is it?
Now, I wouldn't even begin this topic if I didn't have some sort of theory as to why this is the case, or even why it pertains to this thread at all, so I'll get to that point now. The online communities of old have slowly but surely turned into social clubs. We don't go there anymore (and I definitely do still go there. I personally administrate no fewer than 2 at the moment), but instead to simply stay in touch with the folks we've come to know and love through their use over the years. In fact, some of the more reclusive places tend to (d)evolve into just a single social group! Those places lucky (or not) enough to have larger groups of folks hanging out on them might have as many as 15-20 such social groups, each with different interests and concerns, sometimes mingling, sometimes not. But clearly, the groups are not, in general, going to all get along with everyone in every other group, no??
My theory as to why this is the case is exactly the point though. When a 13-24 year old seeks out 'action and adventure' or 'something immersive' to make them forget reality for awhile, they dont' go looking for a MU* anymore. In fact, I'd be pretty confident in saying that most of them don't even know what they are. Instead, they're in Q3A, Tribes, UO, EverQuest, Asheron's Call, some other multiplayer immersive environment that provides that fix OH SO MUCH better than a MUD ever could. This is the part where the over-25 crowd of die-hard MU*ers go screaming and running around yelling heretical things about me. You know what? Get a grip. Tell me how immersive MU*ing is for you anymore. I'd bet my pennies that all you use it for nowadays is a way to stay in touch with some social group you've accumulated along the way.
Ah yes, one more final point. Some have also mentioned to me that they use them for romantic purposes still. There's so many prospective mates, there blah blah blah. Ok. Well, though I've no personal experience with them, have you tried things like Yahoo Personals? Holy hell in a handbag. Even providing only anonymous stats about yourself yields DOZENS of people, all within your geographical area, with similar interests, who want to meet you, within 20 minutes. I do have friends that are experimenting with this recently, and it makes using MU*s for romantic purposes look like chasing around a gnat with chopsticks.
Alright, well... I've gone on long enough. I won't rationalize the quality or nature of this post. There are some folks out there who know where I'm coming from and what I'm getting at. If you don't agree, fine... but don't come bitching to me when you realize how fruitless your efforts to 'get back to the good ol' days' really are, and how many of the people you're trying to get to stay are going to leave through the draconian efforts you're making.
end rant.
: "I abort and kill -9 him in my caffeine dream" - fridge code
As far as worship of Mary goes, go back and read the introductions to the Gospels (in particulary Luke) where an angel (not the Pope) calls Marry 'Blessed among all women.' There is a large distinction between veneration and worship.
Then how is it that in the Confessional, forgiveness can be granted through the invocation of either the Lord or Mary? Only the Lord can grant forgiveness, yet the Catholic cult seems to place Mary on the same level as the Lord, which is a heresy and a sin.
Hardly. The Babel fish puzzle walks you through, step by step. You have to do many things to solve it, but there's plenty of feedback on the sequence you have to follow.
The really difficult puzzles are those where there's simply no hope of logically inferring what you should do. This happens just a bit later in HHGTTG, with a puzzle involving fluff and not tea and several other things. I got to this point, couldn't solve it, and checked a hint book. I then uninstalled the game, realizing that it would be just another game requiring you to try every permutation of verb and noun (or in this case verb noun noun verb noun verb) to solve a puzzle. Several years later I uninstalled the highly acclaimed Sam 'N Max for the same reason.
The much-hated Myst is a great example of a game where being smart actually paid off. I rolled through Myst in something like 20 hours. There were several DIFFICULT puzzles, but if you paid attention and thought it through, there was an intelligent solution to every puzzle.
But the Grue was far scarier than anything in Doom or Quake, because you never see it. It's as horrible and scary an your mind makes it out to be. Besides, if I want babes in my games, there's always Leather Goddesses of Phobos!
Well, Gabriel Knight III is the most difficult game. But there is one even more taxing puzzle;
You must at one point complete a latin sentence with a final word, and the re-arrange all letters to form a new sentence (again in latin!).
But the story in Gabriel Knight III is the most compelling one i've ever seen. It would make a great film. (No i havn't seen J Jensens catscan)
But we are now only two month away from the next episode in the most hilarious adventure game series ever; Escape from Monkey Island.
As long as Lucasarts keep releasing adevnture games, i dont mind booting up Windows to play.
I liked Grim Fandango... and can you ever imagine a more Nerdish hero than Guybrush.
The problem with adventure games is once you solve them, there is noo need to play them again (unless you wait a couple of years). So you get more for your mon(k)ey if you buy a action or strategy game.
Perhaps thats one important factor to the Grim Future for adventure games.
And don't forget those creepy teleporters. That whole section of the game was just too eerie.
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Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Once upon a time, I disliked FPS games, because of the dumb violence. I've played adventures and strategy games. They were great and they still are. This was while I was a student.
Now I spend all of my day in a firm as software developer. I come home late and have several other more important stuff to do than playing (and in addition I'm married now). This means, I don't have the time to spend hours on one game as it is necessary for playing strategy or adventure games as I don't have the time to read a novel anymore. When I have got some time left, it's just some minutes. In very rare occasions more than an hour, never more than two hours.
Formerly I spend up to three hours on just one game of Command&Conquer or up to 12 hours on an adventure.
Today I cannot afford spending such a long period of time on a game. When I play, the game has to be ended quickly. Solitaire games and Tetris got to boring. The only exciting games that are left are FPSs and Racing Games.
So, for me it's more a question of time than a question of violence. I would appreciate a FPS like game without violence, but there aren't any.
Have fun!
Yaba
you're like that man with a hammer looking around and seeing nails everywhere. your hammer is the piece by Borges and the nails are issues around you. folow?
No - you're like a man with a hammer, and you post that stupid man-with-a-hammer witticism any chance you get.
listen, if Borges said this in 1967, then odds are he is speaking about a movement that is much larger then the video game phenomenon which has been around for maybe 15 years.
Borges identified a trend that was going on in 1967 and is still going on now - the breakdown of the complex, plot-driven novel in favor of simpler, hero-driven epic (like Hollywood Westerns). The complex plot-driven adventure game is breaking down in favor of the simpler, hero-driven first person shooter. It's the same thing!
K...what do you do when you are lying in front of the bulldozer? hehe
Sig it.
All games are fun because you solve a puzzle.
Deathmatch is fun because you are solving patterns in how people act.
Counter-Strike is more popular than DM because the patterns you recognise are necessary for your survival, and therefore you get bigger rewards for learning a pattern.
All information is contained in a pattern. I think the same pleasure you get from playing games is the same pleasure you get from learning.
Yeah, I used to love text adventures like HHGTTG and Collosal cave and I still partake in a bit of Moria action, but I like pretty pictures as much as the next guy... Yeah, some convoluted problems are a pain in the arse, but those will be weeded out.
Working for the (other) man
I have long felt that Spellbreaker was the best of the Infocom games, and probably the best adventure-puzzle game I've seen. But the text definitely does describe the puzzles very well - it's just quite subtle about it in parts, and requires you to put yourself in the perspective of the game situation more than most (where you can respond as a passive reader). This is really a goal of interactive fiction, so it succeeds.
But yes, there are an awful lot of other puzzle games that are hard just because they're stupid, obscure, or poorly-described. I would put HHGTTG squarely in this category - it was moderately amusing, but the puzzles were largely very poor. The one where you're stuck in the dark place and it "lies" about the direction of the exit particularly stuck in my craw. And I paid about $40 for that game, at a time when I could scarcely afford it.
As for Myst, the puzzles weren't really puzzles at all - the only one that required a logical leap was the floating chest. Everything else (and I mean everything) was simple extrapolation or lookup. Boring.
The best piece of interactive fiction I've seen since Infocom (there are puzzles, but they're not hard and they're very nicely integrated) is Photopia by Adam Cadre. He had a Java ZIP interpreter on his site so you could play it straight from a browser for a while, but I'm not sure if it's still up somewhere. You can certainly download it from the IF archive and play it in an interpreter for your platform. Be warned that it's poignant and rather sad, and relates to a personal tragedy the author experienced - but it's very, very worthwhile.
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
That may be 'cause Catholicism is farther to the left than the Pat Robertson crowd.
I think you're confusing the image of society as marketed to you with the society that actually exists - not to mention a gross overgeneralization of "society" in general. Western? Eastern? European, North American, US-specific, what?
One of the only good points Jack Valenti has ever made is that if violent media were to blame for violence in society (particularly among the young), then we'd have dramatic increases in violent crime among, say, teens (to follow Valenti's example). After all, who's playing all those violent games and watching all that filth on TV? Are we creating a race of monster kids, an entire generation of lawless, bloodthirsty little ankle-biters? Statistics say no.
Reflection my ass - shock value is always the attention-getter, and marketers know this. If they've got your attention, they're halfway to selling you their product, be it a game, movie, etc. This trend isn't because we're more violent - it's because violence in media is proven to be more effective at sucking the money out of your wallet.
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
I always used to like text adventures. I even wrote some of my own (see my previous comment).
Graphical adventures I never really got into. They were too limiting, and the graphics never lived up to the pictures in my head. The graphics got better, but my imagination is better still. Sadly games makers don't credit people with having an imagination these days.
I never got on with Tomb Raider. After all, it's basically Donkey Kong in 3D with tits.
That said, I liked Wolfenstein 3D, played Doom and Doom II, Quake and Quake II. Sometimes you just need to fire up a game and have a quick blast. And I think this can be cathartic.
BLAM!!! Take that, boss!
BLAM!!! Take that, yuppie bastard who almost knocked me downstairs!
BLAMMO!!! Eat flaming death, fascist scum!
and so on. Work out that aggression in a safe way. And some FPSes are very good. I've often found Half-Life to be quite scary. When you're creeping through a dark air-vent and something leaps out at you as you hit a junction, I've been known to really jump off my seat (whilst yelling "Fuuuucck!" and convulsing on the fire button)! Yeah, it's sad that the text adventure is a thing of the past - but at least there are places keeping them available and serving the same purpose for classic text adventures as MAME does for classic arcade games. And if I had the time, I'd dust off my adventure game stories folder and write some more.
"Information wants to be paid"
to be truthful, i don't care for the Tomb Raider games either, but i haven't been much of a gamer anyway, with a few exceptions....
However I do still a love of blood soaked death matches in both quake and Solider of Fortune, but only as a good stress relief
The clue for the tea / no tea puzzle was that 'no tea' was listed in your inventory.
The babelfish was easy, getting the right tool for Marvin was the killer as you had to get all of them, otherwise he picked the one you didn't have.
Evil game, I gave up on it when it first came out, then picked it up again, and finished it, when it was re-released in the best of infocom 20 game bundle.
rot13'd for spoilerness, and I'm not 100% sure it's correct, It's been a long time...
Whfg jnvg n srj gheaf
The correct name is JorgeLuis Borges, not JoseLuis Borges.
Oh come now.... Aren't we jumping ship a but early now? I don't know about the rest of you folks but I can't 'twitch' nearly as fast as I used to and i'm only 21. That means I don't play Q3 anymore.
Truth be told I'd rather play AD&D but who has the time?
I can't believe the writer is telling me that ALL
americans regardless of age love shooters over RPG's. He's obviously reffering to the 12-25 group. I know older folks how play computer games
and very few of them can play something like decent or quake.
There is no plauge sweeping the nation because we are all immoral bastards. Folks are getting lazier,plan and simple.
You have now spoon feed TV, internet on demand, and an abundance of engaging video games. No wonder why some people who aren't the most self motivated people in the world get sucked into this void of being a vegetable.
You wanna blame someone? Blame the parents for not kicking their kid off the playstation and giving them an alternative like oh I don't know. Sports, Hanging out with friends, A JOB, and so on.
Peter
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www.alphalinux.org
www.alphalinux.org
Admittedly and perhaps appropriately, the text-based adventure genre is dead.
I love to play FPS and RTS games, and spend entirely too much time with Counterstrike, RA3 on q3, and q3f. I've finally weaned myself away from a grevious Starcraft addiction.
However, I've never, ever played a game with more tactical thinking, visceral impact, and unbelievably fast-paced action than Genocide from late 1992 to (kind of) the present. Nothing has even come close. Not close.
And you know what?
Genocide is completely and entirely written and played through a text interface. The combat was real-time and unbelievably intense - the difference between the ping monkeys at shsu and us mortals with a ping of 125 could make even more of a difference than in a FPS like q3.
The environment was immersive and massive, and the systems for combat, hunting, and item management/environment interaction were both complex and easy to use in a simple manner. The ability to create aliases for any/all actions allowed tremendous flexibility.
There was always a tremendous amount of communication intra-team and outside of combat. Once you became accustomed to the shockingly fast pace that textual information arrived it was amazing how much data could be processed and acted on through this interface. The learning curve was steep, but good lord, the neurons would be firing and the adrenaline would be flowing in the heat of battle. The high complexity and nature of the game also allowed for a tremendous differentiation of skill and capability- the best players were absolute and frightening killers, and everyone else sorted themselves out somewhere on the spectrum.
The other great thing about gameplay was that, once you died, you were dead, and would have to wait until the ongoing war finished to play again, which could take an hour. It really, really meant something to die; you hated it - no respawns here. On the plus side, you then had a full hour to map another area, work on better aliases, and improve your game.
Although it's now a skeleton of the game it used to be - there's no longer new blood, just a lot of reg/developers sitting around writing code and talking over old war stories, I still feel a sense of longing every time I play another game. Nothing has given me an experience as consistently enjoyable, challenging or intense before or since. Sigh.
And you know what? It was all text based.
Don't underestimate the power of the textual medium. As is usually true, and overlooked, the real power in a game lies in the gameplay, not the medium.
James/Daemon
Hehe, I almost don't mind losing my scholarship to the damn game, or spending 4500 hours in game over 3 years of steady play. In reality, it put me on the path towards programming and the money I make today more than any degree could have.
BTW, to look around what's left of Geno today, telnet to geno.org:2222. J
Where did you hear that? Their site certainly doesn't mention anything about a cancel... Of course, it also mentions a Fall 2000 release.
I assume you're referring to American McGee's Alice and not some other project.
Anyways, there have already been several FPSes that included fairly advanced puzzle-solving -- Half-Life and, to a slightly greater extent HL:Opposing Force had quite a few puzzles to go with the gruesome slaughter. MDK2 was third-person, but managed to be a pretty good hybrid of puzzler, shooter and 3d platform game. Messiah was supposed to be a sort of shooter/adventure hybrid, but it turned out the biggest puzzle was getting it to run for more than a minute without crashing. And, of course, there's the "thinking man's shooter" games System Shock 1&2 and Deus Ex. They're no Grim Fandango, to be sure, but there's a lot more to FPSes these days than rocket launchers and blue keys.
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00"; s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72, (74..76),(78..80),(82..85))[hex $1]/eg;
That's actually an important distinction. I don't recall the precise wording, but vincent Price is famous for saying (among other smart things) that once you show the audience the monster, it isn't scary any more.
Most of the scariest movies and books I've seen are ones where the nature and form of the monster, or stalker, or whatever are kept vague. See, for instance, H.P. Lovecraft's wonderful "The Colour Out of Space". Or, more dramatically, the mini-series versions of Stephen King's "It" and "The Langoliers". Both were creepy and suspenseful until the monster was revealed. After that, they were jokes.
Too many game creators fail to take advantage of the value of a good creep-out.
-Dave
It seems to me that the variety of artifacts that predate the second millenium indicates otherwise. The most notable ruins are, of course, in South America where entire civilizations are dated to prior to 1000 CE, but up here in North America there have been many discoveries made of tools and dwellings that date to before Lief Erikson made his longboat voyage.
Now that is indeed a shame because if history teaches one thing it is that there are no innocents. Virtually every race and nationality imaginable has its share of skeletons in the closet. It just so happens that some were more successful in their conqueests than others.
Children should be taught in school that, yes, Europeans did do quite a number on the natives when colonizing the Americas and, yes, this was a bad thing, but this is the story of history. There is not one race on the planet that is not guilty of the same crimes. We must not forget that humanity as a species is prone to horrendous violent and despicable acts, but neither should we let that fact result in a defeatest attitude that attempts to slough off responsibility for our despicable acts.
And also, within the sad story of history, there are also many, many acts of redemption, the genesis of the ideas of the hospital, of equal rights, of liberty. To teach one side of the story without also teaching the the other is to do an injustice to children.
The best adventure games will always be the ones that are silly just because the puzzles, as described in Gabriel Knight 3, are silly and will detract from a really great story. And let's face it, isn't that what most adventure gamers are after? I don't mind typing: N, N, Maximum Verbosity, I, Use Ax on Tree, Yell, 'Timber', Run S so long as the story I am interacting with rocks. But all to often the story doesn't rock. It holds my attention like paint drying, thus my motivation in completing the puzzles isn't there. I come across something too hard I just switch over and play Tetris.
Listen, Sigmund, we'll discuss it in the morning.
Its got guns, action, good graphics, a storyline, and perhaps most importantly, a hot babe in tight clothes...
What more does a male need?
Ok, this is probably worthy of some flames....
"Thanks to their television-atrophied attention spans, these casual gamers are mentally incapable of spending six hours trying to randomly guess at the absurd dream logic Roberta Williams has applied to the problem of getting the dungeon key out of the bluebird's nest."
I don't watch much television as most of it's crap. I'm a software engineer... after a day (alright, and most of the night too) sitting in front of the computer thinking for my job, I don't particularly want to play cerebral game. I want a complete change of direction; a huge dose endorphins to clear the brain. I could go for a run, or something, but you have to admit the Q3 is a fun why to get the job done!
Now I've heard that computer/video games cause(particularly in men) huge amounts of dopamine to be released within the brain. This is why certain games become so addictive: it's all about getting one more fix!
I played a few adventure games when I was younger. The thing that bugged the most was the built-in life-time of the game. The more involved one got the game, the less time that one got to play it. I didn't have much money when I was younger, and so this was really quite upsetting. Before Doom, I played the Microprose games, as they were pretty open ended. Even Doom had a lifetime... after completing all the levels on Ultra-violence with just a shotgun, there wasn't much left to do until I went to university and discovered multi-player deathmatch! Quake2 was eventually installed on our computers at my first job as why to wake ourselves up during all-nighters. In the end, I've probably played that more than anything else (deathmatch only... the single player side was soon completed and forgotten about.) Although I've moved to another country, I still play Q3 over the internet with my friends that I used to work with... it has a social aspect too (it's good to laugh with friends, even though they're far away and you can no longer hear or see them.)
I feel that Text Based RPG's lost their interest in the public eye when the unser interaction moved from BBS's to Internet. You cannot blame this transition on the computer using public,at least not for the BBS generation. Because, if this was so, there would have been a lot of games utilizing RIP graphics on boards. I think that the people to blame for this transition, for this loss of thought process, is the generation of children who have been brought up to only use computers to game, and not actually learn on them. This generation had all their games bought for them by Mommy and Daddy, and when a game didnt run fast enough, they went and bought a new Video Card, or a new processor. I think text based games do still have a target audience, it's just a lot smaller now because we (a) have moved to *nix systems, and belive that an open source game would be much more interesting than a retail text based RPG, and (b) do not have as much time to play these games anymore. .. thats just the way I feel though...
Probably the same reason why most people would rather watch TV than read a book. Less imagination/effort is needed in understanding your entertainment when you have everything setup in front of your face in moving pictures. I kinda miss the ol' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text game myself. Progress...ain't it great? hehe.
Sig it.
An interesting idea I had for a gaming engine that would cater to -many- different people who enjoy different genres would be an engine that allows multiple points of entry depending on your interest.
Say you liked Descent: Freespace and you love flying around shooting things in a fighter. You'd enlist in a faction and start training the next day. Player two comes along, they don't care as much for shooting things day in and day out, they like to fly around and control the battle from a "safer" place. They could enroll in the academy and become staff on a major battleship. Many functions of the battleship would have to be computer controled, hardly anybody would want to join the game as a cook until the game fleshed out and the real RPGers got interested. So for a while many things would have to be automated, but before long you have would have a battleship that is practically full of RPGers each doing their function and taking orders from somebody.
Take it a step further. Eventually the game would get big enough to allow more control, and those officers who were most respected could be promoted to be in charge of more strategic commands if they so desired. From there, they wouldn't really be involved with the nitty gritty details. They would simply order Battleship CCX-101 to such and such solar system for such and such cause. The twist here is that unlike Master's of Orion or whatever 'Emporor' style game you prefer, you would actually be giving orders to living breathing humans who possess intelligence and inguinity.
Gone would be the days of issuing one line commands to your wing mates and watching the computer AI botch up yet another strike attack. Gone would be the days of ordering a fleet to a system and getting a bunch of numbers back telling you that you lost. You could watch the battle through relay video and moniter it as it is being fought by real humans on opposing sides.
Such a system would be really fun, and could definatly extend far beyond the 'ordered' military set up I described. The concept could go all over the place. People on planets, scientists, mercenaries, traders, guys on street corners selling antiques to tourists. The game would be so much more fun because you would actually be defending something. There would be real players on that planet who have otherwise ordinary lives. Giving the command to surrendor wouldn't be such a thoughtless move anymore.
Well, I think it would make for a wonderful game. As with all RPG type games you would need gamemasters somewhere. I think the best approach would be to distribute them among the players. Have them RP as well, with the purpose of creating missions for people, or giving reason to their gaming experience.
I could go on and on...
I think the single biggest appeal to me with all of this is taking good old fashionied RPG to the modern world of interconnection and real-time multiplay. We aren't quite there yet as far as technology goes, but we are getting close. The thing that appeals is the fact that most of the characters that used to be NPCs in paper and pencil games would become real players with their own missions and ideals. It would make for a much more realistic world since they wouldn't be extensions of your local gamemaster, however creative he/she may be.
V
:Church attendance by early American colonists was less than 20% Since when does church attendance equal religion? I am a Christian, but I don't go to church. I think I can get more on my own than from a church. Churches are for people who either don't know enough about the religion to practice on their own, or don't want to think for themselves and follow like sheep. The Church is not an organization with walls and congregations. There are no priests, pastors, or whatever you want to call them. It consists only of people who can think for themselves and choose to follow Jesus.
2000 != 1984 Stupid English people.
Gabriel Knight isn't exactly the best choice to represent all of adventure-based gaming. It does make for pretty humorous commentary.
Of course, those who still want to play adventure games can always check out the adventure games that continue to be produced by a small but dedicated community of clever authors via ftp.gmd.de, or get involved with ongoing debates on usenet at rec.arts.int-fiction.
But, I'm wondering whether folks think that some of the puzzle-based tricks of old adventure games are actually finding their way back into current FPS. Examples that come to mind are the Thief series, and maybe Deus Ex. Thoughts?
For something close to that right now, try Square's recently released Chrono Cross. Two friends and I are playing this at the moment. We are all in roughly the same place in the game (the overall plot doesn't change) but we got here by completely different paths. The game has 44 chararcters that can be in your party! OK, I know Suikoden had 106, but I haven't played it far enough to find out if they have a profound effect on the story. I can say that they do in Chrono Cross.
Its probably the same reasons as to why people use GUI's and not CLI's - they look cooler.
Once graphical adventures started taking hold (i.e. the technology advanced enough for it to work), text-based adventures started falling by the wayside. I don't think it had so much to do with a preference... Just evolution.
IMHO, Solider of Fortune is an excellent FPS. For some reason it reminds me of golden eye on the N64, only better.
Its time to kick ass and chew gum, and I'm all out of gum.
I started playing computer games on a DEC 20, back in 1979 - "Adventure," naturally. From there it was a short hop, skip, and jump to Zork, and then to Rogue. Then I passed on the whole genre until I bought a SNES with StarFox and Doom II. That's when I noticed my tastes had changed.
I don't try to solve puzzles any more. If the game involves a puzzle, I buy the cheats. I want to see bodies explode. Whether it's shotguns or chainsaws, I don't care. I don't want thinking, I want mayhem.
I think part of what's going on is that I think all day at work, so it's the last thing I want to do at home.
Maybe what's happening (in the U.S., at any rate) is that as the economy becomes more intellectual and less physical, the intellectuals get their rocks off with virtual physicality.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Text adventures are not games; they are puzzles. Games cannot be solved, only won.
Single-player FPSes are puzzles that are so intricately molded that you can't tell they are puzzles. There is typically one solution ("kill the boss!"), but hundreds of ways to get to that solution ("Let's just use the pea-shooter this time!"). The more interesting single-player FPSes hide the nature of the puzzle by improving the AI to the point where you can't see any obvious patterns.
Other single-player games become too puzzle-like when the AI is crap. In various incarnations of EA Sports' NHL series, for example, the game is fun until you find one type of shot that always works for a goal. At that point, you have "solved" the "game" because the goalie bites on your deke move (or whatever) every time.
Multi-player computer games are GAMES. And in my very extremely humble opinion, gamers graduate to the point where computer AI is no longer interesting and the only solution is to add humans.
This is why the consoles must eventually be netted; not because the net will become utterly ubiquitous, but because AIs will always be harder to make interesting than other humans.
--
The one where you're stuck in the dark place and it "lies"
Was that the one about the painfully bright light stabbing at the front/back of your eyes? I found it particularly nasty b/c it required more retention. You had to remember exactly what the descriptions were (beyond the typical 2-3 moves) to notice the clue. Doesn't that merit a real challenge?
Now Suspended and A Mind Forever Voyaging were a waste of money. And the end of Infidel stuck in my craw, as you put it.
And thanks for the tip on Photopia.
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Yeah, like times were really LESS violent a hundred years ago. I guess that's easy to say, since you didn't live in it, but i'm betting that domestic violence, street brawls, shootings per capita, etc. were a lot more prevalent then. A hundred years ago no one would even blink at you popping your wife a good one if she mouthed off. To me that's violent, and a degraded form of society compared to what we have now.
you also may want to consider the fact that 100 years ago horse theft was a hanging crime, no matter what, while murder was often only taken seriously if you killed someone "important" like a grown man with money and power.
ooky
I appreciate your more thorough response. As a christian, I get edgy when I hear people talk about our "Christian Nation."
Having read four books this year on US History (by Stephen Ambrose, and excellent writer), it's quite clear that our history is truly muddled with some tremendous leaders, noble ideals, amazing actions as well as some horrible actions and hypocritical leaders at times.
An interesting note: during Jefferon's presidency, there was essentially taxation withour representation on the settlers living west of the Appalachian Mts. And that's a terribly sad occurrence of hypocrisy among some of our early leaders.
OTOH, with the wealthy landowners, there were those who came because they saw a possiblity for a better life for them and their children; not so much greed as the desire to improve their life.
Getting further OT; Jesus said to expect persecution, but He didn't say you had to stick around for it. Many from the early church agreed with that attitude when the fled Jerusalem to escape Pauline persecution.
Well, anyhow, I agree that we both initially over-simplified the case. The history of the US can't be categorized as simply "Good" or "Bad".
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Yeah, all those mean Catholics stole all those Christian books that pius Jews were hoarding throughout the millenia. Sure. Whatever.
The standardization of Scripture happened at a point before the Catholic Church gained any sort of meaningful political power.
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
The key points are: (1) there are only 'other witnesses' if one goes outside the accepted tradition of the Church and (2) the only significant contradictions (contradictions pertaining to theology rather than matters of fact) occur with extra-canonical sources.
So what's my point? Simply this, one can only make coherent sense of Christianity if one assumes that the apostles were valid witnesses (although, strictly speaking, one could also make coherent sense of the morass of extant documents by choosing any one school of theology and sticking with it as the rule to judge everything else). If one doesn't make a judgement call on who has the 'correct' tradition the teachings of Jesus are so contradictory that any attempt to make Jesus into a wise man like Gandhi or Sundar Singh or Buddha is doomed to failure on the sea of contradictions.
It is a simple matter as to how the apostles could be faithful witnesses given that there are contradictory accounts of Jesus' teachings outside of the party line. The other accounts could simply be wrong.
My contention is that the Church in the first century, having known Jesus and having known the apostles, was much better equipped to make such a judgement call than I am two thousand years later when the only evidence is on manuscripts copied (and edited) by hand for generations prior to the copies we've found.
I would love to continue this conversation via email if you please. lee . malatesta @ yahoo . com. Leave out the spaces.
For a solution to this, I would recommend Hugo, whihc is an engine with the potential to combine the level of descriptive storyline available in text adv entures with the visual cues that help make the gaming experience more intuitive.
According to their site information, apparently this has the potential to deal with multiple storyline branches as well, which is something I'd like to see. For that matter, once I've had a chance to play with it a bit, I may consider working on something along those lines.
I have always thought the Ultimate Game myself would be a massive online Star Wars Universe where we can all try to take out DeathStars, lead rebellions, go spying.....whatever we want (pod race to make money, kill innocent bystanders, join Jabba, be a bounty hunter). If the infrastucture was capable of dealing with a million players and the games wouldn't collapse after a few years or so I reckon we could soon see newspapers publishing little tit-bits of news on the war of the Alliance V the Empire.
So how long before Lucas Arts are ready to bring all their Star Wars games together into this beast and would you play?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Personally I fail to see how a man lusting after a man in tight clothes is any less clean than a man lusting after a woman in tight clothes. Lust is lust is lust. If a man lusting after a man is sinful, a man lusting after a woman is also sinful.
Therefore, I'm confused why you don't request that slashdot moderaters mod down posts that condone male/female lust.
Its not a christian principle. Its protestant apologetics that allows for individuals to gain wealth, and still feel like they are going to heaven. It was an excuse... Its also a large reason that lutheranism and protestantism caught on as quickly as they did. They allowed people to accumulate wealth without the guilt that the catholic church placed on them. And yes, I realize that the catholic church is ridiculously wealthy, and abused their position causing the reformation.
Not quite. It's called the "Protestant ethic", as has already been pointed out, but it should actually be called the "Calvinist ethic", as it doesn't occur in any other protestant form of Christianity. It's also not quite just an excuse to get filthily rich. Originally, you could be a good Calvinist and be as rich as Bill Gates, but there wasn't anything you could do with your wealth, as all the fun stuff was considered sinful.
The real reason Calvinists believed in this work ethic is the doctrine of predestination. According to this doctrine, God had already decided who would go to heaven and who would be eternally damned (the vast majority of people) at the start of creation. Material wellbeing was one of the signs that you were one of the chosen few, so, as a result, it was a *good* thing to gain enormous wealth. Maybe you were one of the chosen, maybe you weren't (only God knew tat), but it didn't hurt to make it at least *seem* as if you were by going for large amounts of cash.
However, good deeds were also a sign of being one of the chosen, and hence it was also advisable to give away a large portion of the wealth you had acquired to charity.
So it's not as black and white as it's often made out to be. Furthermore, Calvinism has only been prominent in American WASP culture, British dissenters, parts of Switzerland and France and the northern part of the Netherlands. Catholics, Lutherans and all the rest do not share the protestant ethic.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
so i checked Amazon for the book "The Myth of Native American's" and there were no references to books that remotely fit the description that you gave. if you could please point me in a direction that i could locate this tome, I may give your arguments a little credibility.
and i distictly remember the bible metioning that "it is easier to pass a a camel through the eye of a needle than it is to get a rich man into heaven".
I dont know why you think that catholicism isnt christian, but by your actions and attitudes, maybe you should be asking if YOUR the one who is truly Christian, and not blindly discriminate based on a religion that you dont understand.
tagline
... hi bingo
The best part of Doom I was the series of cubicles where you didn't know which, if any, had a CacoDaemon hiding inside. Playing that scene in a darkened cubicle while working third shift on a help desk certainly raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
Suspense is the key to enthralling play in any media whether it be FPS or text adventure.
>look
You are in a texture-mapped, shadow-mapped, Bezier curved hallway. There are obviously a lot of polygons being pushed here. Through the volumetric fog you see a pink monster.
>i
You are carrying:
a brass lantern
a shotgun
a pile of junk mail
The pink monster attacks!
>kill monster with all
brass lantern: The pink monster howls with pain!
shotgun: The pink monster howls with pain!
pile of junk mail: Your thrust is blocked, and the pile of junk mail breaks in two!
>hi, monster
The pink monster tips his hat to you.
The pink monster emits a hideous scream, and ends your life with one fell swoop of his gigantic claw!
-- END OF SESSION --
You've been lied to.
There is absolutely no reference to a structure like you mention being called a needle. Nor is there a gate in the wall of Jerusalem refered to as the eye of the needle. Both of these are fictions that first appear in the medievel time period to make Christianity more palatable to rich people.
You can get more info on this untruth and other s in David Downing's humorous volume What you know might not be so: 220 Misinterpretations of the Bible
Imagine that you had never heard of a babel fish, or what it does -- how the hell are you supposed to know that, in order to advance in the game, you have to enter the command 'PUT FISH IN EAR'?
(spoiler ahead)
You never have to enter that command. There's a babel fish dispenser in the room and not much else of interest. You're sitting around with nothing to do, so you try pushing the "Dispense" button.. It shoots out a fish and it goes right into a hole in the wall. So you put your gown on a hook on the wall and try again, and the fish hits the gown, goes down its sleeve, and into a drain. This continues, and eventually, the fish ends up in your ear as the result of a huge Rube Goldberg-style chain reaction. You never have to know it belongs in your ear; it just ends up there.
Plus, your character is carrying a copy of the hitchhikers' guide itself, and you can type
> LOOK UP BABELFISH IN GUIDE
and it will tell you all about them.
You really shouldn't have taken such an authoritative tone with such blatantly incorrect information.
--
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
The contemplative life has always been lived by personal initiative, almost always against the trend of the current culture. Nothing new here.
I sustain a life that is as contemplative as I want, thank you very much. I do that by not paying attention to those parts of the information barrage that neither inform nor entertain. I do that by taking it upon myself to contemplate what I feel is worth contemplating.
No, I'm not some kind of a monk. I just know where the OFF switches are on my home electronics. Including the computer that I enjoy the occasional Quake session on.
I read a book called The Illiad recently. Man, if you think this is a death-culture, and the worship of the gun is a problem, you just aren't familiar with the power of the bronze-tipped spear.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Attending Church does not, in and of itself, equal religion, but attending Church is one (among many) good indicators of whether a given individual (or society) is religious.
This individualistic attitude runs quite contrary to scripture. The analogy of the believers being a body is used time and time again in the New Testament. The purpose of this analogy is to show that Christians need each other.
The Bible teaches otherwise. Scripture teaches that all spiritual gifts (such as pastoring, teaching, healing, etc.) have been given for one purpose, the building up of the body. These gifts have not been given for the building up of the individual, but of the body. Christianity is inherently a team sport, not an individual sport. This is why we have assertions like that of Paul's in Corinthians where he makes the outrageous claim that if any Christian is hurting, all Christians are hurting.
The Bible puts forth a different claim. Paul mentions the positions of deacons, priests, and bishops by name throughout his letters. He goes on to detail (in some places) some of their responsibilities and the qualifications of people fit for the job.
There are two aspects to the Church, the Church militant and the Church triumphant. The Church militant consists of all believers present on this earth and the Church Triumphant consists of all believers that are now in heaven. To say that the Church militant does not have boundaries and does not meet in buildings and does not have people that were given by God to shephard people into a fuller relationship with Deity is to deny the validity of the scriptures that your faith in Jesus are based on.
One can be a Christian without attending a Church, but individuals on their own will seldomly grow into mature Christians. This is similiar to open source software. Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. Well, given a body of believers, all sins are shallow. Together we can build each other up and help each other achieve the full and abundant life that Jesus promised for his followers. Alone we are limited to only what we ourselves can achieve which in most (but not all) cases is not very much.
regards,
-l
Imagine that you had never heard of a babel fish, or what it does -- how the hell are you supposed to know that, in order to advance in the game, you have to enter the command 'PUT FISH IN EAR'?
Well, assuming that you haven't read the book, it could be tough. But, only if you've never studied history or Hebrew mythology, either. The City of Babel is famous as being the site of a great tower whose construction was halted because the builders were unable to understand each other's languages.
And frankly, if I have a fish that I don't know what to do with, my ear is pretty much the first place I stick it...
We must respect evil, and we must make evil respect us.
Free form adventure games are very difficult to execute properly. The naked flame object is the best example I can think of to highlight how even a seemingly trivial item can make things complex - unless you are happy with "I don't understand" type messages, you have to handle how each and every other object in the game will react to the command "ignite *" Besides, free form games are not even desirable. Free form adventure games would be unplayable (read: boring) as there would be necessity be no plot.
None of the FPS games I played (doom, quake, half-life etc..) are at all difficult to play. You can run around like a complete moron, shoot everthing that moves, open a few doors and press a few buttons (oh yeah, and press 'E' to talk to the scientists in half-life). Presto, game solved. I would like to see a game in which you must really think to reach the end of the game. In (almost?) all the FPS games you are automatically led to the end of the game, but for pressing a few buttons.
How to make a sig
without having an idea
Did Dennis Miller start writing for Old Man Murray? I think he is pretty much spot on, though. Adventure games became insufferably stupid. Infocom was the only company making witty, intelligent games, but they didn't adjust with the times, and computing power was not sufficient in the eighties to create an immersive, graphical world with substantive characters and meaningful ways to interact with them. Some of the most important communication humans have with one another are subtle, like body language, but no one has been able to put this into a game that I am aware of.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
So the protestant bible does mention guns then? "And Moses came down from the mountain bearing 2 tablets and a full-stock AK-47 with night-sight attachment"
This is a bowel disruptor, and you are just full of shit. - Spider Jerusalem
Choosing an awful example from a single product, the author indicts an entire genre. Sure, bad adventure games are bad. But so what? So are bad shoot-em-ups.
In the 80s, the attraction to photorealism, which sucked up too many resources to leave room for any game, was undeniable. In time, however, Moore's law makes it possible to step back again, and perhaps we will someday see an article ridiculing the "brain-dead" gib-hunting of Doom, arguing that the raw shoot-em-up killed itself.
But neither view is fair to either genre. At a time when photorealism in personal computers was a laughable goal, adventure games were the place for an artist, and therefore a gamer, to be. Suggestive (as opposed to representational) graphics added something, but the text was how we painted images in "those days."
Some artists were oblivious to the problems of "dead ends," ludicrous obscure non-puzzle puzzles and improbable (sometimes indefensible) prose. 90% of Text adventures are crap. But that's OK. 90% of everything is crap.
Now, we confront again the possibility of overcoming the oxymoron "interactive fiction" with new genres that are not text adventures, not RPGs and are not shoot-em-ups -- yet draw from all that is good in each. But the artists really haven't stepped to the plate. When they do, we'll see magic that will make last year's genre seem old and obsolete. (Indeed, studying the traits of that oxymoron provides a far more plausible explanation for the relative success of these two genres.)
In the meanwhile, let us evaluate the artist within their media, and the context of what their machines could do -- and appreciate what was wonderful in every game.
Danny ("thinking of Maud, your mind turns in upon itself")
I have written over 900 book reviews
That is why adventure games work best as comedies - the inherent absurdity of the situation is a great platform for jokes.
That said, comedy is sadly lacking in computer games. Many games have some comic relief, but very few games these days could truly be classified as comedies.
We're so worked up about gaming genres - FPS, Adventure, etc, that we've forgotten about the story genres - drama, comedy, action, etc.
Whatever else you add to it, an FPS can never be anything other than an action game. This was amply demonstrated by Deus Ex, which had a fabulous story, but at the end of the day had to have the fighting because that's what the game part was. If you're crap at fighting, then you don't get to find out what happens.
You couldn't make a romantic-comedy FPS, though you might be able to make a romantic-comedy-action FPS.
Similarly, adventure games consist of a bunch of absurd puzzles, and no matter what else you add, they will always be somewhat absurd. You can't easily make a pure dramatic adventure, but you can make great comedy-dramas like Grim Fandango, or great pure comedies like the Monkey Island games.
Some people don't like storytelling and gaming to overlap, but for those who do, Adventure games have tended to be the games that deliver. This is why many Adventure gamers felt kinda let down by Myst - it had no plot, it just had backstory about stuff which happened to other people. Your actions didn't advance the plot one iota, they merely allowed you to find out more about what had happened.
That is what Myst killed - the idea that plot was an essential element of the Adventure game.
Adventures are still the best bet for telling non-action stories in games, but they're far from perfect.
It wasn't the Dark puzzle in general that I objected to, but specifically a feature of the Hearing component (I think) - when you "Listen" it tells you that you can hear an exit to port. When you try and go that way you can't, and after trying all the directions (assuming you don't just give up and feed the game disk to your garbage disposal) you discover there's actually only an exit to south - as you exit it says "I lied about the exit to port". Uh-huh.
There are other examples of Adams's desire to merely frustrate, like the Babelfish dispenser running out just as you trial-and-error your way to the solution (which is the only way to reach it). That one means you must quit and restart the game, hopefully from a saved position, and that's a real no-no IMO (requiring the player to know something in advance based on a previous playthough - something the character couldn't know). That kind of Murphy's Law stuff is funny (maybe) in a novel, but not for long in an interactive game, and HHGTTG is full of it (Bureaucracy is even worse, which sealed my opinion that Adams should stay away from authoring computer games). The only time a game should be frustrating is when you can feel a solution just beyond your reach, intuitively knowing that you've been given just enough information but not quite making the leap (yet).
I didn't mind the Infidel ending too much, but then it had already been spoiled for me by a letter to The New Zork Times. Even so, it was fitting because the character was supposed to be a nasty piece of work, and he got what he deserved. My real problem with Infidel was that I played through the whole thing on one quarter, so to speak - the puzzles were so logically obvious that I never died or got even momentarily stuck (well not strictly true, I allowed myself to do the wrong thing at the point where you have to put the pole across the doorway because I wanted to see what would happen :). And I still haven't played AMFV mostly because of reviews like yours above, though I keep meaning to check it out one day anyway.
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
Does FPS stand for first-person shooter or for frames per second? Sounds like they're directly related to each other.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Why First Person Shooters Beat Text Adventure Games
The article doesn't mention text games except obliquely -- the adventure games they're talking about are pixel-hunt games like King's Quest or Myst. Besides, OMM's article is not so much an indictment of adventure games as a parody of an earlier Gamecenter article which loudly proclaimed the death of the genre. (As OMM themselves point out, they've apparently been dying for 15 years or so now, so I think it's a bit late to be getting hysterical about it.) The bulk of the article is devoted to making fun of Gabriel Knight 3, a 3D adventure game cited by Gamecenter as the "last title of note in the genre."
"Old Man Murray has this commentary on why the adventure game genre lost out to titles like Doom, Quake,
Get with the decade. The adventure game genre is losing out to games like Half-Life, Deus Ex, Counterstrike and Soldier of Fortune -- games which present a relatively open, dynamic world for the player to explore (and blow up). They're also losing out to games like "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire", but that's a whole other story.
and why players would "rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories..."
Odd that the quote you chose isn't from the article you're linking to, but the Gamecenter article they're making fun of. Also odd that you chose what is arguably the unfunniest sentence on the entire page.
also provides an interesting look into the eyes of an adventure game writer."
I think you mean "through", not "into". Unless you thought there was a retinal scan mentioned somewhere in the article. Anyways, it doesn't provide a look through, into, or even in the general direction of anybody's eyes. It *does* provide a comprehensive list of the writer's Adventure Fan credentials ("My entire wardrobe consisted of five matching Gymboree Aspen Adventure Swing Top and Beret suits... The only philosophies I accepted were those of Age of Adventure thinkers such as Erasmus and Kepler") and a hilarious breakdown of the logic behind a GK3 puzzle ("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.")
All hysterics aside, the problem with adventure games is that they're difficult to do well. It's fairly rare that you find an adventure game that *doesn't* feel horribly stilted and limiting -- that "on-rails" feeling that RPGs and FPS have been moving away from for their entire history. After playing Opposing Force or Deus Ex, it seems ridiculous to a player that there should be exactly one, usually absurdly complex solution to a simple problem. A good adventure game must present a story that's so compelling that you *want* to progress, and present puzzles which are challenging without being absurd. (Or, like "Sam & Max Hit The Road" or the infamous Babel Fish puzzle from HHGTTG, revel in that absurdity and make it part of the joy of the game). It's so much easier to write a fun, fast-paced shooter than a smart, enthralling adventure game that it's no surprise there's more of the one than the other.
--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00"; s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72, (74..76),(78..80),(82..85))[hex $1]/eg;
HA, I've never spent as much time playing a single game title as I have spent playing an average TW game. For about 5 years I would be up day and night during all my free time, whuping some ass and building an empire. No game has ever compared to tradewars! :)
This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine...
The popularity of the Palm and similar devices could very well be the platform to resurect the Text Adventure genre.
There's already a Z-Code interpreter for the Palm called Palm Frotz. There are a few others avaiable too, but Frotz is the most advanced. The popular Kyle's Quest Levels are little more than text adventures with a Square-Like interface.
As a matter of fact, Dreadling is about the only playable FPS like game for the Palm.
I argue that games like Elite, Zak McCracken, and Ultima were the reason Text Adventure games disappeared. They aren't dead, they have merely changed their face.
This is evident by games like Zork Zero. The most recent change that this genre has been undergoing is in the online world. We now have games like Ultima Online and Everquest.
My point is, don't think that the text adventure is dead simply because you can't buy a new Zork at EB.
You're confusing a "programming" decision with a very deliberate game design decision.
Tomb raider's gameplay is dependent on the decision to play in third person. All the shooting is auto-targeted and the player is encouraged to take a godlike view at the exploration and problem solving portions of the game. Most of Lara's leaps and climbing moves would be impossible in a FPS game. Tomb Raider and IJ are probably "exploration" games - in terms of gameplay they bear more resemblance to Mario than they do to doom.
The framework of a FPS gives the player direct control over aiming. Instead of "making lara shoot people," *you* shoot them. This is why Doom etc make such compelling multiplayer games.
Don't let the use of 3d confuse you. If a game doesn't look a lot like Doom, it is NOT a first person shooter.
+++++
+++++
The harder you look the less you see. That's what we're up against.
Adventure games certainly haven't died. If you're a parent of grade school age kids, it's hard to avoid Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, Pajama Sam, etc. They don't seem to feel the compulsion to add in a couple of ridiculously difficult, illogical puzzles that most of the adventure games for adults did. I enjoyed zork and the like, but later games always seemed to be virtually unsolveable without cheating.
Rather than type
"turn left", "open door", "blow motherfuckers' heads off"
Most of us would rather , ,
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I think the key word here is "shooter". I don't want to solve puzzles.. running around and climbing through ducts just pisses me off. What I would really like is a game where I am a soldier in some war. And there is a lot of shooting going on around me and I get to fight along side the AI as well as against it. Sort of like a war history lesson where you get to experience what it was like to be there. I don't see why I have to be the central character all the time. Just let me enjoy the experience, play will cool guns and generally do stuff that I cant do in RL. The closest there is to this at the moment is multiplayer games. Counterstrike and the like are fun, if not a little monotonous.
How we know is more important than what we know.
FPS games are developed with multi-million dollar budgets. In more and more cases they are also moving to "off the shelf" engines, allowing them to put the full development resources in to the game play itself (Halflife, Aliens Vs Predator 2 etc).
Compared to that, MUDs (the evolution of adventure gaming) are still largely run by enthusiasts. Often they have great skills in hacking something together but rarely with the time, software engineering skills, experience or resources to add the next generation of features: Complex AI non-player characters (Bots in just about any recent FPS); more complex, professionally scripted dialog (see Halflife); graphical automapping (Diablo, Ultima Underworld); learning shells (so when you type a command it doesn't recognise, it asks you to teach it what it does mean).
It's unlikely that any major investment will come to MUDs in the short term (though Microsoft has allegedly been inquiring about purchasing Darker Realms as a vehicle). There is simply too much competition from from free, albeit non-professional, MUDs to be able to easily charge for a professional experience (EverQuest).
Given the continuing trend for MUDs to thin out, the point will be reached when a commercial venture could be profitable and, with the standards of a professional development, MUDs would take a massive step forward.
When it comes down to it, the freedom of expression via text (see the massive growth of chatrooms such as chat.msn.com) is far greater than one hand on a mouse and the other on the action keys. Were the playing field to be leveled with investment, MUDs are not better or worse than FPS's, they are different.
Pen and paper roleplaying games were supposed to be dying out due to computers. While many minor ones did, an, albeit different, equilibrium was reached. Pen and paper RPGs were accepted for what they are and what they can offer beyond the abilites of a computer and AI.
In the same way, the equilibrium is shifting but MUDs and text adventures won't die out, they'll simply evolve and take on a more competetive, different, niche.
Huh, I guess I was mistaken. I thought I heard that it was cancelled, sorry. Well, just line me up with the rest of the misinformation spouting slashdotters I guess...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
It seems to me that a large part of the reason for bogus scenarios like the Gabriel Knight 3 one listed is: lack of playtesting.
There are numerous stories back in the Zork days of players playing Zork and thinking of something that the designers never thought of, and the designers going back and fixing things to make them better. For example, instead of grues, Zork originally had bottomless pits. If you wandered into a dark room without a light, you had a good chance of falling into a bottomless pit. Players soon pointed out, however, that if there was a bottomless pit on the second floor of the white house, you'd probably be able to see it from the first floor. Hence the invention of the grue (notionally, the 'dungeon master' went around the whole dungeon filling up the bottomless pits, but this displaced the grues, who now wander the darkness looking for food.)
Another such example was the troll. As everyone knows, the troll had an axe that he would attack the player with. Players complained that when they killed the troll, the troll's axe would disappear too, and finally the designers said 'ok, ok, you can get the troll's axe now.'-- of course what they did was just code up the axe as another weapon. However, then one of the players said 'great, I can get the axe now, I'm going to go to the forest and chop down the trees.'
The point of this all being: designing good adventure games is Hard; you're Not Going To Think Of Everything. Best to let independent eyes and brains work on it for you some; you'll find things you never would have thought of.
---
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Huh... never heard of Elite and its two sequels? THAT was exactly what you mean. THAT still is THE ultimate game. If it went online multiplayer and with 'modern' gfx it'd be a true revolution.
It may not matter, as the shooters are under the gun from the US Congress.
"Back in my day, you needed imagination to have fun." We now see the Old Man in Old Man Murray, going for the easy old school gripe (and updating three times per decade).
If you want adventure games get "Pyramid" for the TRS-80 model 1 - and something called "YoHo" (which had nothing to do with managing a stable of Hos as I later found out).
Ha! It's fun to search multimedia.lycos.com for "adventure" and post them on your site. Who needs photo research?
ridiculopathy.com: our hubrice knows no bounds
Interactive Fiction (text adventures) might be dead from a lucrative standpoint, but it continues to have an audience. And from the games of my youth that I cherish the most, it's always the Text Adventures that stand out over the arcade games.
Check out the Interactive Fiction archive for literally hundreds of text adventures available for free. Some of them are even good!
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
There's still a thriving community turning out quality text adventures. They're just not commercially viable any more, which is why you never see them mentioned in the 'mainstream' computer games press, who only care about advertising revenue from computer games manufacturers and hence will never look at 'free' games.
For those who want to relive the infocom experience with new (and some might say, even better!) games, check out ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive, the newsgroups rec.games.int-fiction, rec.arts.int-fiction and wesites like XYZZYnews
Enjoy!
nosig
I have loved playing Zork, and all of the Monkey series, Day of the Tentacle, along with Grim Fandago. Some of the best computer games around and definately some of my most favorites. (Gee most Lucasart's games ;-)
;-)
:-)
But there are reasons WHY I play Quake TeamFortress, (now Quake 3 CTF) every weekend.
a) Adventure games are linear. Everything is brand new the first time through. Replaying the game again is like re-reading a favorite book. You know exactly what is going to happen. (And yes, FPS are repetitive, no argument here.)
Adventure: 0, FPS: 0
b) Adventure games are usually solo. (Allthough I had one of my best friends over when playing the Monkey Island and Grim Fandago. It was like watching a good movie together.)
Adventure: N (lots of fun to play) FPS: N (where n = # of players in game
c) There isn't any teamwork in an adventure game. I'd say this is the only reason I keep playing FPS's. Deathmatch gets boring pretty fast (Doom/Quake junkie) so team play is what keeps things fresh. Diablo 2 single player is awfully repetitive, but hardcore co-op is certainly a blast (pun intended.)
Adventure: 0, FPS: 1
d) FPS can be played for just a few minutes. Only have 5 minutes for a quick game? No prob. Adventure games take a "while" to get into the mood. I remember playing Thief ONLY late at nite, whereas Quake3 most of sundays
Adventure: 0, FPS: 1
So on a purely articial scale, FPS's "win" - just barely. Doesn't mean adventure games aren't just as good. FPS just happen to be more "convenient" to the mass-gamers.
I would say the social settings is the main reason FPS's are more popular. Massive Multiplayer games (like UO, EQ, Diablo 2), and FPSs clearly show that people just want to "virtually hang-out"
Here's an interesting thought: that Thief 1/2 is a FPS "adventure game", but yet I still enjoyed it. Maybe today's adventure games are morphing?
Aside: Woohoo, Monkey Island 4 is in development.
Cheers
*cough*
Landfish kicks ass...
- Damnit, I'm dead Jim
I wouldn't say that adventure games are dying. The genre is just now catching up.
Consider - FPS were the first 'massivly multiplayer games'. Sure, we enjoy running around a map, solving puzzles and fighting battles, but does that compare to the glee elicited when graphically shredding your best friends head? A complete stranger? Who lives in another country?
I belive multiplayer gaming, in grand scale, caused the decline of adventure games. Now, look at games such as Everquest, Ultima Online and Acheron's Call... While I'm lax to call them RPGs, they hold close to the 'graphical mud' model, and are tremendously popular.
I'd like to think (quite possibly just wishfull thinking) we are seeing a new awakening of adventure games, played under the new phenomenon of the multiplayer arena.
sononomo@hotmail.com - Has seen the Factory Ass at Comdex
I think you're confusing the image of society as marketed to you with the society that actually exists - not to mention a gross overgeneralization of "society" in general. Western? Eastern? European, North American, US-specific, what?
Well American of course, what else would I be talking about?
One of the only good points Jack Valenti has ever made is that if violent media were to blame for violence in society (particularly among the young), then we'd have dramatic increases in violent crime among, say, teens (to follow Valenti's example). After all, who's playing all those violent games and watching all that filth on TV? Are we creating a race of monster kids, an entire generation of lawless, bloodthirsty little ankle-biters? Statistics say no.
No, that wasn't what I was arguing in favor of. I'm not saying that we're producing a generation of extra-violent people, merely that these people hold violence to be a valid way of getting ahead in life. They don't see it in the same negative way that people did a hundred years ago - it's a part of their society and a part of their life.
Whilst they may not be more violent per se, in the long run I'm sure that violent incidents will be higher, and this situation can only get worse if today's trends continue.
No, he's right. Although it's not really taught in American schools (where the curriculum is basically "Are you white? Then hate yourself?", it has been shown, to the embarrassment of the Left, that the "Native Americans" share 95% of their DNA with the inhabitants of the Basque Country, and most probably arrived in the Continental US some time after the Vikings left, but before the English arrived.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
If you think about it though, compared to the FPS that are available now, the Sierra games were "text" adventures, even though they were graphical.
First Person Shooters have little text, almost no text and Sierra games, although there were graphics on the screen, most of the time, the text did the story telling.
Chris
Why not just go outdoors?
But all facetiousness aside, what you suggest is anathema to what I look for in a game. Which is simply the same sorts of things I look for in a novel. A compelling story, believable and interesting characters, immersive environments. That's why I've been a fan of Japanese-style RPGs for so long. There, you can find the sorts of things that make books, theatre, movies, what-have-you so enjoyable.
But I don't think they're perfect, either. What I would personally like to see is a game of the Japanese sort, but with many divergent storylines that depend on choices the player makes. Sure, this would be relatively difficult to accomplish, but the focus here would be on the writing, rather than the programming. Such games are possible right now.
It still wouldn't be perfect, of course, since not everyone likes that sort of game. but who cares? Instead of striving for "perfetion", let's just aim for "damn cool".
How about a fast-paced game of tag or hide-and-seek? The characters could be very athletic with cool levels to do gymnastic moves and dodges on (high-dives to underwater hiding places, nets and tightropes, cliffs to climb, etc.)
Or instead of tag, a race to collect the most "coins" or whatever, with ways to "trip" your opponent or mess up his path by cutting a rope bridge, etc.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
A guy dressed in green with the handle "WrathMonkey" stands ten yards in front of you with a large shot gun.
>:Change weapons
I don't know what you mean.
>:Inventory
In your sack of plenty you have:
1. Pointed Stick
2. Nail Gun - 100 Rounds
3. BFG - 1 round
>:2
You are now holding the Nail Gun
>:Gib the green guy.
I don't know what you mean.
>:Shoot the green guy with the Nail Gun
That won't work. Try something else.
>: Load ammunition.
OK.
>:Shoot the green guy with the Nail Gun.
OK. The green guy is now dead. I hope you feel good about yourself.
www.ridiculopathy.com
copyright ridiculopathy.com!
/. does not own this
Golden eye really told a good story. I actually appreciated the game more than the movie.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I think the book you're thinking of is the first book in the Otherland series by Tad Williams, "City of Golden Shadow." The second and third are "River of Blue Fire" and "Mountain of Black Glass." The fourth hasn't been published yet. You can check http://www.tadwilliams.com for more information and excerpts from the books.
I agree with this comment regarding the Alien Mod. The author used not only pacing, but a very good mix of sounds, audio sequences ("watch that corner...") and music. Junior
J Williamson
Surely you mean "are you white? Then you have good reason to be ashamed of what your ancestors have done to other cultures in the recent past". Bit of a difference.
Infocom's rating system was dead on. They're highest difficulty level was just that. Collecting all 16 cubes to make the hypercube at the end was a feat of stamina.
But here's my question:
Is a puzzle hard because the description and interaction blows? or is it truly a hard puzzle, regardless of how well it is described?
I always wondered whether spellbreaker was just poorly described or if the puzzles were truly difficult.
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
If those puzzles like the one cited in the article seem bizarre and arcane, it's because they're supposed to be--they're puzzles. If you just had to go to the shop and buy a disguise, it wouldn't require any thought. That's the difference. It's not supposed to be realistic! It's supposed to be hard, it's supposed to require unconventional thinking. Yes, that takes effort. But it's gratifying as hell when you solve it. And you expand your mind by thinking on different levels to solve a problem. You get a lot more into the game than you get into something like Tomb Raider. When I played the first Gabriel Knight (the best), I was somewhat young and got very very into the game. I remember being thrilled to visit New Orleans for the first time and see all the locations from the game in real life! Strange? Maybe. But it's very easy to get deep into a game like that because you spend so much time thinking about it and interacting with it. Every mental breakthrough carries with it gratification that goes beyond reaching a certain number of frags, or whatever.
MUDs, also, are something you can never replace. So-called "graphical MUDs" (in my mind an oxymoron) are really ineffective at doing what MUDs really do, which is bring people together in an imaginitive game environment. To me, MUDs are fascinating because they twist things like communication and spatial concepts into new forms, in effect taking your thought processes to new levels they wouldn't have gone to before. Much of this is due to the textual medium. The closer we get to reality with the game environment, ie the more graphical and 3D we get, the less of this element there is. It becomes like an extension of reality, and there is no more playing with the fabric of reality. I sat in a pub recently with a couple of MUD friends and we had a discussion about MUD design that was simultaneously about how you perceive objects, space, and communication, how these could be warped in interesting ways--that kind of conversation will never exist with graphical environments because the whole idea of a graphical (and in particular 3D) environment is to approximate reality.
Anyway, to sum it up: adventure and text games have yielded to things that require a great deal less thought because people don't want to use their brains. But there will always be enough people who want to use their brains and who want to explore things that MUDs and adventure games are not going to disappear for a long time to come. I hope.
> I always found adventures more fun when I had people with me
:-)
;-(
:) Allthough Horizons is one of the first 3d games that actually LOOKS close to the quality of great 2D art: http://www.artifact- entertainment.com/horizons/screenshot1.htm < /minirant >
Hmm, I remember play Full Throtle and Grim Fandago with other people.
So, I certainly agree: playing adventure games is a lot more fun with friends.
Heheh. Like the time Chuck (friend) and I blew through "The 11th hour" in about 12 straight hours. He solved the word puzzles, I did the object puzzles. Was a lot of fun (partially due to us never getting "stuck".
Personally, I really didnt' care for Myst. It was too easy. Solved the game in an afternoon.
< minirant > That, and the whole time I was playing, I wanted "FreeLook." (Why can't I freely look UP or DOWN. YES, I know the graphics were pre-rendered and looked good, just used to crappy looking "True 3D"
Cheers
> what is a grue A grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever seen by the light of day and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale. > turn off lamp It is now pitch dark.
They are just called MUDs... They don't draw the mindless shoot-them-up types, but rather the puzzle solving, and of course the flapping types.
A very good MUD to visit is 3k.org.
For fun one day, I typed: "smoke pot"
And the repsonse came back: "That's Illegal"
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!
Definitely. I was browsing around the local computer shop one day and I saw a two-cd set of UUW and UUWII for $15. Needless to say I snapped it up in a hurray. By far my favorite game. I think the Dungeon atmosphere probably helped constrain the play to a manageable level, but there seemed to be an endless array of actions you could do.
Don't Panic...
On the other hand, the Monkey Island games were classics. I still fondly remember the spitting contest...
:-)
How appropriate! You fight like a cow!
----
Dave
MicrosoftME®? No, Microsoft YOU, buddy! - my boss
- Dave
You must have just read the spiralx Troll-HowTo. Impressive. And that was a classy touch to throw in a reasonable argument at the end. (Note to self, use the "quantum mechanics" analogy in the future.) Over all, a well done troll.
--------
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
FTL's "Dungeon Master", on the Atari ST
originally but later available for the Amiga
and PC, was the best game of this type
I've ever seen.
-- You've got to get a hat if you want to get ahead.
Thank you! I knew it was city/golden something or other. I read the first one, then got halfway through the second before Cryptonomicon came around and I've never come back to the series, I intend to though, it is very well written and with a good story to boot.
V
Interactive fiction has become a great little movement, with very active usenet groups, rec.arts.int-fiction, and rec.games.int-fiction, annual competitions www.textfire.com, cross platform support is excellent, and an excellent archive: ftp.gmd.de/if-archive
With the infocom language properly reverse engineered, parser support is top notch.
as an aside, http://interactfiction.about.com has an excellent article on linux IF this week.
check it out.
when Push Comes to Shove
It's interesting that you say this. Caucasians -- as well as every other race -- share 98% of their DNA with chimpanzees. If it's *only* 95% that we share with Indians ... wow. They were here a long, long time before us.
Not true. There were clues for the fluff and the tea/no tea puzzles. I think you could "consult guide about fluff" and "consult guide about intelligence", which would give you a nudge. :)
I think your memory of the game is a bit off, you don't HAVE to put it in your ear, it just lands there when all the other conditions are right.
Captain Loogie in da house!
Do you mean the parable where the rich man dies and goes to hell, while the beggar (Lazarus) that sat on his doorstep goes to heaven?
Or perhaps you mean the parable of the rich fool where the rich guy dies, faces God and is condemned.
That's two words...
"Information wants to be paid"
There's so much more to this game than hiding around a corner waiting for people to arrive so you can shoot them! You might be walking across a frozen river that happens to melt. If you don't know how to swim, you will drown.
When movies first had sound, the old silent film actors would talk about how all that talking got in the way of the "real" acting they were doing.
When movies first got color, plot was secondary to epic sized sets and retina burning colors.
If 3D movies had ever become as ubiquitous as their flat brothers, they might have risen above all that sticking stuff in your face.
As the new kid on the block, the current FPSs focus on how the new technology differentiates itself. Given time, these games will become more about plot and strategy than the fastest action your hardware T&L can deliver. If you compare Quake and Unreal to Deus Ex and Half-Life, you can see the evolution starting. There will always be a market for brainless, fast-paced killing, but it is way to early to judge what the FPS genre is capable of.
I have realized for a while that someone needs to release a decent mod for a FPS without violence. I always want to show off my 3D card to my girl, but she does not appreciate the violence. The best I can do is tell her "look, with accelerated OpenGL 3D, the blood droplets are round instead of square"
Th Quake 3 engine is amazing (and the new unreal engine somehow looks even better with support for exterior places). With the support for large textures, curved surfaces, fog, light effects, and mirrored surfaces, something could be made up.
Idea- simple mod where you can "paint" the walls of a large room. I did this with Q3 and a plasma gun.
Or maybe reimplement that arcade firefighting game...Spray water on fires to put them out...
I wish I had time to be a mod writer...
Maybe there are things out there, but I don't know any.
ed
Zork baby!
Option 1:
Find a carrot.*
Find a fishing pole*
Attach the carrot to the fishing pole.*
Find a goat.*
Get goat to follow carrot*
Walk over bridge with goat in lead, following* carrot, to knock off the menacing troll.*
* NEVER MISPELL ANYTHING
Option 2:
Find a REALLY REALLY BIG GUN (Like a rocket launcher)*
Obliterate the troll**
* You start the game standing on top of the rocket launcher
** You start the game with the troll standing about 20 paces in front of you.
They both suck.
I'm annoyed when people call games like Tomb Raider, Indiana Jones, and such "First Person Shooters" - they're third person games, for one, and they don't even emphesise the shooting, it's mostly autoaim based. They're "Third Person Action/Adventure" or "Tomb-Raider-Style" titles, not First Person Shooters.
----
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Has anyone noticed that some RPGs are trying to blend the adventure aspect into their games? Valkyrie Profile (new PSX game) is very interactive, and Legend of Dragoon actually has y ou taking part in the battle by way of trying to sync your button hits with the action on the screen. Other games like Star Ocean have gotten into this too.
What ever happened to good old Legend of Zelda games?
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
-Kriticism
-PARANOIA is fun. D20 is not fun. The Computer says so.
-The Computer
I know that I still miss playing the Zork series, and other classic text games like that. One of my favourites, however, was The HitchHiker's Guide To The Galaxy, based on the novel by the same name. It was a great game that followed the story faithfully, while leaving some new things to do for people who weren't familiar with the story.
Unfortunately, this caused a lot of problems. Why? H2G gave birth to what is referred to as the most difficult puzzle ever: the babel fish.
Imagine that you had never heard of a babel fish, or what it does -- how the hell are you supposed to know that, in order to advance in the game, you have to enter the command 'PUT FISH IN EAR'?
That's the problem with text-based games -- unline games such as Monkey Island, there aren't any visual clues as to what you do next. You have to rely on your wit to get you through to the next puzzle.
--
CitizenC
I don't think adventure games are dead - as far as I know Ultima Online is doing great with thousands of people paying them ten bucks a month to play.
I haven't played Ultima Online so I could be wrong, but I wouldn't describe UO as an adventure game, certainly not in the sense that Old Man Murray usedt. UO is a descendent of games like Moria, rather than true text adventure games like Zork.
Sailing over the event horizon
You can that about anything. All humans share 95% of there DNA with a chicken. 98% of all genetic code is garbage left over from virii. There is only a fraction of a percent difference in DNA between the races. So yes 95% of anyones DNA is the same as everyone elses.
As someone who long ago played both Scott Adams and Infocom adventures (yes I'm THAT old), there's something to be said for both reasons for puzzle-style adventure gaming dropping off.
... doesn't sound quite like a dead genre to me.
(Note: NOT Dying, just pining for the fjords. Go to the Interactive Fiction archives and see that a great many tools have been developed for people to write their own adventure games, and many have. It's almost open-sourcey, in fact...)
By the way, who remembers the Scott Adams adventures? What a parser those things had! Could only accept one or two whole words at a time, and any sort of mistype would befuddle the poor stupid little thing.
Infocom's parser started out good and evolved over time to be phenomenal. Under Infocom's z-machine parser, I was always tempted to write an adventure in which the player would have to 'light the light light blue light' and I have faith that the parser could have handled it, damnit!
But enough of me geezing...
On the one hand, Gamespot is right that the FPS had more sparkle, more action, more color and flash. Even the original Quake, half of whose color table was shades of 'mud,' had more pop than even the fanciest *text* adventure.
Much the same way it's advertising's job to be seen, so it is with games. They need bigger explosions, bigger shocks, and bigger enemies to draw players from their competitors' bigger explosions, bigger shocks, and bigger enemies. The text adventure, never equipped to deliver that kind of flash-bang, fell by the wayside or got replaced with the graphic versions.
(And as long as I'm going to geeze, I might as well toss in that the violence isn't the problem: it's that the videogaming industry is trying to play to an audience so infovoracious, so dependent on that flash-bang, that they could be diagnosed as attention-defecit. To further back up my point, trust me on this one: I've seen preschoolers sit down at a computer and start machine-gunning the mouse on whatever program is running, just to get the computer to do things quickly. They're not learning how to use the computer because they don't have the patience to learn. They just want to get on to the next image as quickly as possible. And come to that, the teacher in that classroom didn't have the patience to learn it either...)
On the other hand, Old Man Murray has a point too: some of the games started getting too fancy-shmancy for their own good. Some of the later adventure games, in an attempt to be more clever, completely lost their credibility.
It doesn't help that I hold Sierra, the company that put out Gabriel Knight (among others) in low esteem. It wouldn't surprise me if that disguise puzzle quoted in Murray's article was something concocted by middle management.
Games like Myst and Riven helped carve the puzzle game a new niche from the text adventure... and it helped that Myst and Riven had their own internal logic. They took thought rather than jump through hoops. And as for the genre being dead, note that Myst 3: Exile is in development
The Myst series isn't just a set of hoops or contrived events, but a journey set in a world with its own internal logic. Look around and explore enough, and everything is explained. But you need to do the exploring. And a little thinking.
You don't think of Myst and Riven much as interesting games because even though they have huge panoramas of beautiful scenery, they still lack the flash-bang. They provide their thrills to the whole cerebrum, not just the frontal lobes.
(Damnit, I've gotten all stream-of-consciousy again...)
And suddenly, I'm imagining a game using Unreal's FPS engine, backed with the Z-machine's gorgeously elegant parser (which is quite SMALL and could fit)...
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
You're dense. It's a humor site. Put two and two together, Charlie. Or maybe that's too complicated for one used to a "SubtleNuance", such as the subtle smell of something burning.
I thought that was what that Alice in Wonderland game what supposed to be. A sort of macabre puzzle/story/FPS game. Of course they cancelled that.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The correct name is Jorge Luis Borges, not Jose Luis Borges.
Indeed!
You are in a musty cellar. To your north a hole in the floor reveals a secret passage
GO NORTH
You are standing on the edge of a hole which leads down to a secret passage
GO DOWN
You enter the passage. As you proceed along it, a blade suddenly leaps out of the wall at you.
DUCK
Do not understand DUCK
GET DOWN
I Can't do that
CROUCH
You crouch, but your reactions were to slow, and the blade severs your head from your body. In your dying moments you see a large-breasted girl in tight shorts somersault over your headless body and on into the Tomb. She's quite athletic. You begin to feel that progress is catching up with you.
Game Over
For example; "You are standing in a forest next to a river. To the North you see an old mill, to the west a large cave and to the south, six marines armed with bazookas. In your hands you have a fish, some chewing gum and a the August 1987 edition of Practical Electronics" What do you wish to do now? >
Find funky gifts
Have you looked at the game "Asheron's Call"? It implements an allegiance system which means players group themselves into social hierarchies in a similar manner to that which you suggest. Granted, it's not quite as grand as the scenario you paint, but it seems to work quite well and there's some good use of plot to boot. Z
telnet dune.servint.com 8888
Violence is in your life too. How many people have YOU killed today?
I appreciate commentary on history, but I think you've swerved a bit close to revisionism.
Fleeing Persecution: Most people, I think, would call that sensible, not cowardly.
Capitalism: Taking advantage of a way to improve your life is usually considered wise, not greedy.
Refusing to accept taxation with representation: Most consider that sensible and appropriate; not negatively rebellious.
Granted, it's not that simplistic either, but you paint too cynical of a picture. It is accurate to say that Christians and the Christian worldview were significant influences on the formation of the USA. Not the only influence, nor were the theists perfect, but the impact is great, and much (most?) of it benefits us even now.
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Have none of these people ever heard of TADS, or Inform, or the Interactive Fiction Archive?
Not being sold in a big shiny box at Best Buy does not equal dead.
As far as the Nerf Arena demo goes, I really enjoyed it. I'm a long time FPS player (back to the days of Wolfenstien) and Nerf holds up to most other FPS's. No blood, no gore, no 'dying'. Just hit the opponent enough times and you get a point. (Sure, you can call it a frag if you wish, but they don't.)
All in all, a nice, civil, bloodless FPS.
I remember almost 6 years ago I wrote a text adventure game which almost no one played, a few months later I released a hacked up 3d fps shooter based around the same story line of the adventure game and got rave reviews. The sad thing is that the text adventure game went into so much detail and was really like a book. I wish people would sit down and take time to play these games.
-dk-
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve and Kickass at the sametime!
Imagine trying to play an excellent game like Sam n' Max with somebody who's never played an adventure game before...
And so on. While most adventure games aren't quite as bad as the Gabriel Knight example, they do rely on a bunch of arbitrary rules that, while somewhat logical to anybody who's played an adventure game before, would make absolutely no sense to anybody who hasn't been trained to the way of adventure games.
And that, I believe, is why adventure games (at least the old-style ones) are dying. At least with an FPS, you can figure out the rules within the first 30 seconds (Shoot something and it dies!)
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
Ideally, the adventure would have to have multiple plots and storylines, the main characters should be 'configurable' to your own wishes, etc..
I do play FPS games from time to time, and I do admire the graphics and all, but those games tend to be very boring, because the levels are too easy to solve. The level writers seek complexitiy in just adding more and more opponents in a level, instead of adding more story and more puzzles to solve.
So in my opinion, the FPS is *not* the right way to go, it should be combined with the good elements from the 'old' adventure games.
How to make a sig
without having an idea
i am amused that you dont see how ridiculous your argument is.
listen, if Borges said this in 1967, then odds are he is speaking about a movement that is much larger then the video game phenomenon which has been around for maybe 15 years.
you're like that man with a hammer looking around and seeing nails everywhere. your hammer is the piece by Borges and the nails are issues around you. folow?
shaolin punk, activist post-industrial
My take on the rise of the first-person shooter is that it is a reflection of the increasingly violent society we are living in, where the media attempts to overload us with a constant barrage of sensory stimulus just to attract our jaded and cynical attentions. The FPS is the natural evolution of this idea - rather than being passive it allows people to deal with the stresses of society in a way that is a reflection of its darker side - violence.
This country was founded on the decent Christian ideal that hard work leads to reward - the American dream is a reflection of the Protestant work ethic. But in recent years the rise of technology and the increasing secularisation and liberalisation of society have lead to a culture where people are uncertain, afraid of what they're meant to do, and of what will happen in the future. This situation was exacerbated by Cold War tensions and the "Red menace", and it found its outlet in an increase in violence, paranoia and hedonistic behaviors. With the liberal views of the establishment, these excesses are likely to continue.
Nobody can sustain the contemplative life any more - we are constantly being hit with an overload of sensory information. In the culture where MTV is prevalent, text adventures just don't seem "real" enough. On the other hand, the FPS allows for us to participate in violent situations that may seem carthartic in the short term, but reinforce the violent underpinnings of society in the long run.
So the first-person shooter has come to reign supreme in the gaming world, a reflection of a society that has lost its hope and its faith. Until we, as a nation, start to deal with these underlying societal issues, games of death will continue to be incredibly popular, and the worship of the gun will pervade the national conscioussness.
#define IRONY "Bruce Willis was a robot"
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
You know what Hayes ? You make some good points regarding history but, unfortunately, as soon as you start braging about Catholics your credibility is gone ...
Certainly the visceral nature of Doom is second to none, including my nosalgia for Zork et. al., but the FPS method of presenting the virtual world from the first person point of view, doesn't HAVE to be a shoot 'em up. A story with interesting puzzles and actual thought could still be creating, but using this newer more engaging interface. Think Half-Life. Think Myst, but with real time movement throughout it's world. Anything is still possible, but people are much more drawn into the game when they can see where they're at.
head over to http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/ and check out to the Game DIsgn area. Many topics are discussed, including such gems as Goblin Genocide in RPG's
I certainly *don't* miss having to click every pixel in a room trying to pick up a pair of tweezers so I can get the nosehairs out of a brass elephant, which I will use to hotwire a go-cart, which will be used to push a giant three-headed Big Boy statue out from in front of the cheese shop.
The people who got this were the ones that wrote games less dependent on an inventory system. The inventory system leads to the most contrived, awful puzzles, simply due to its nature of forcing you to be a packrat.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Yep, I heard of Elite (and even worked with the father of its creator/one of its creators). The thing about Elite is that it is a pure Space Stategy Game, no First Person type element (or Pod racing). I want a game where after I leg it round a corner from the squad of Imperial Stormtroopers who are trying to blast me for nicking their power unit, I can hop into my POD/Falcon/HideOut to try and dodge them. I want nearly every game genre covered through one universe, where the aims are gone, the world mearly turns out as the sum of the inputs of its players, and with enough players the game goes beyond the influence of its creators sort-off).
Elite is a marvellous game but you either miss my point entirley or you have a rather grand impression of it.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I remember (in the days of the Spectrum) text-adventure writers would sometimes deliberately come up with obscure commands that had to be entered just to make the game harder. One particularly infamous one was where the player had to come up with "DISBELIEVE ILLUSION". Not clever.
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maybe I'm dumb, but I've been playing Jigsaw for months and I've only cleared the first few chapters..
most of the time when I sit down to play it, i get nothing done.
It is nice that a game can keep me interested (or not so interested sometimes) for a very very very long period of time, and that I actually get a very nice story out of it..
but sometimes you want something more entertaining, less challenging.
Mmmmmm...
But do you 'really' play lambda moo?
It was more a programming experience for me then anything else. Building not playing.
Somehow, reading the adventure is more fun and involving, much like reading a book versus watching a movie forces you to use your imagination more.
Of course, another benefit of textual adventures is that they lend themeselves to shared-play quite readily - look at MOOs, MUDs, MUSHes and so on.
In all honestly, I've never found a graphical adventure that was really worthwhile. Granted, I don't play all that many to begin with, but from Kings Quest to the Star Trek ones... They all seem flat and dull.
In that case, I much prefer RPG games - which translate much better. From originals like Wizardry and AD&D's "Eye of the Beholder" for example. These added an additional element to game play besides picking a direction. You had to manage your players and make strategic decisions, which is even more involved than Myth II for example, because you have to focus on a long-term goal, rather than short bursts of combat.
There is a MUD i used to help run (which technically is still going on a machine in someone's bedroom) which has actually done this - someone recreated Doom within a text environment. And it worked! Multiplayer deathmatch was great.
:)
For those uninitiated, a MUD is a text-based multiplayer adventure. as it isn't written by sadists (only masochists who spend weeks, months, years writing them!), they don't usually have as fiendishly bad puzzles in them, but are a bit more hands-on. So instead of "go north, get sword, tickle troll with sword, get shield, use shield to cook stir-fry", it'll be "go north, kill troll, get all from corpse, enter shop, sell all".
Suffice to say it was such a big undertaking to both port the Doom environment into the Mud, and the coder is very lazy (as the best mud coders are), that it never got past Beta, and is Doom instead of Quake 3.
but yes, playing it multiplayer actually worked, and was brilliant
Fross
Yes, it is quite clear...
As everything today can be blamed on the degradation of society. We will once again do the same by applying that theory to gaming. The crime rate is up, ethical behavior is down, and computer gaming is shifting to evil 1st person shooters... it is quite clear that this is entirely linked with the decreasing social values in society today.
You see, text based or thought driven puzzle games take some time for completion and generally a little more drive then say games like a shoot em up fast paced arena of rockets. Youths require less attention and less thought to complete their goals. As society falls deeper and deeper into ruins we gradually start to see the effects. First, it was visible in the creation of Slashdot (this is pretty much the starting point for all evil in the world today), then it was all to clear when we started to see such things as DVD playing on linux, and the kicker really is the shift to 1st person shooters.
Yep, society is on a downward spiral, of course, I thought we were done for after the introduction of the aibo... but I believe humanity may still have a chance.
Next week I will be linking the degradation of society with the reasoning behind why CmdrTaco no longer replies to my e-mail messages.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
From the article: Remember how shocked you were at the end of the Sixth Sense when it turned out Bruce Willis was a robot?
Either I'm dense (maybe) or the author is. Obviously he didnt remember Sixth Sense. Here is a refresher:
Bruce Willis was a ghost.
Decker was a robot
Okay, lets look at the works perpetrated by the "cult of Catholocism."
Next time you pick up the Bible, bear in mind that it was the Catholic Church that not only decided which books and letters to include but also protected and saved those books and letters for well over a thousand years before we upstart Protestants came onto the scene.
How can anyone with a straight face claim that Catholicism is a cult and then use the exact same canon of New Testament scripture for the sole reason that the Catholic Church defined which books belonged in the Bible?
Also bear in mind that the vaunted Textus Receptus that Martin Luther and the King James scholars used to translate the Bible was compiled by Erasmus, a Catholic Monk.
And let's briefly examine the claim that Mary the Mother of Jesus was a virgin whore. Aside from being completely unknown to Catholic tradition, such a claim runs contrary to scripture. If Mary was a whore, then it is quite likely that Jesus had a human father which is heresey according to most Protestants.
As far as worship of Mary goes, go back and read the introductions to the Gospels (in particulary Luke) where an angel (not the Pope) calls Marry 'Blessed among all women.' There is a large distinction between veneration and worship.
Further, Protestant Churches are just as blood stained as the Catholic Church. Martin Luther fully supported the brutally violent massacre of the lower classes during the peasant rebellion. The 'God-fearing' colonists of the America's would often beat and imprison in stocks anyone that came into their territory that was not of the same denominatin. I won't even start on all the Protestants that owned slaves and treated them as being less than human.
The God-fearing founding fathers of the USA imprisoned, tortured and even executed such noble people as the Quakers who refused to fight in the revolutionary war on either side.
And, BTW, I'm not Catholic.
Such a game would require incredible resources and could only really work in a full multiplayer setting, like Ultima Online, unless some really good AI comes along soon.
Why do I think this would be the ultimate game? In a sense, it would appeal to almost everybody, even the non-gamers out there. Who could resist the temptation to fire up an alternate-life and see what its like to walk around in those shoes. Many people would be able to use such a game to increase their abilities in the real world. Inversely, many would get sucked into it and lose all touch with reality. (Bringing along with it a host of philosophical questions that are better left untouched in this comment.)
It isn't a novel, or new idea, but it is precisely this idea, that I feel, once created will revolutionize gaming, and possibly the world. If you don't think that such a concept would take off, look at the success of a limited attempt at such a game had, The Sims. While comparing it to what I'm talking about here is a bit of a stretch, it contains the same ideals, and freeform nature that made it so popular.
V
In the late 80's-early 90's with my TSR-80 i was playing a text game called bedlam, and thought it was the greatest. And i was right.
In the early 90's to mid 90's i was playing a BBS run game called Major Mud, and thought it was the greatest i had ever seen. And i was right
When UO first came out within its first week i started playing that, and thought it was the end all be all of my gaming experience up to that point. And i was right.
When Evercrack beta came out and i got on the beta release (before open beta) i KNEW it was the best i had ever seen or played, deffinately the most addictive. Boy was i right.
During Asherons Call beta it was much of the same.
Point is txt games have evolved into the games with the pretty colors and great sounds we play online. With any luck 10 years from now you me and everybody who enjoys these games will be playing online games together that make Evercrack and Asherons call look like a monochrome text based MuD.
-Ive been on the computer technology ride for 10 years now, we keep going faster and faster, i hope we dont start slowing in my lifetime.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. -Fight Club
Did anybody else play Bill Frolik's and Rob Lucky's Warp adventure game?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine is more puzzle that FPS, even though it is a FPS.
Haven't played the game, but what I've seen of screenshots etc suggests that IJATIM is a third person puzzle game similar to tomb raider. First Person Shooters are easily identified by the first person viewpoint you take on when you play. Another thing to look out for is the shooting aspect :)
+++++
+++++
The harder you look the less you see. That's what we're up against.
When FPS's came out, they were a new idea and something interesting that everyone tried. Most people enjoyed them, and they became popular. Adventure games had to change with the times, so they became 1st and 3rd person shooters. Try your hand at System Shock 2, and tell me that you can make it through the game without thinking. Maybe try Ultima9 without solving the puzzles. Try to make it through Thief with guns blazing...
Adventures haven't died, they've changed with the times!
-- "Almost everyone is an idiot. If you think I'm exaggerating, then you're one of them."
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Ok...I'll bite at the ol' flamebait, hoping that's all it is and that you're not serious... First: "its worship of saints and the virgin whore" We don't worship the saints or the Virgin Mary, and where is this "whore" stuff coming from? Second: "Like heathens, the Catholics are all going to Hell" Says who, you? I'm kinda hoping that when judgement day comes you're not the one doing the judging--and have no reason to think otherwise except for your post! Ok, enough with the numbering--the part about the living by the Ten Commandments is true enough, but people living in a religious society are just as likely to break them as the rest of us, since we're all human. Good point about shooting people in the name of whatever, though--some jerk saying he's killing for God doesn't make it God's fault.
It's just that story-driven games are enjoyed on a different time-scale than shooters. A person might relish the mayhem of a shooter for anything from a few days to a few months. So there *have* to be more of them on the market for shooter-fans to enjoy. But adventure games you can savor for much longer. Why, I'd imagine you could dwell on the notion of a syrup and cat hair mustache for a few weeks alone...
-- dR.fuZZo
I don't think adventure games are dead - as far as I know Ultima Online is doing great with thousands of people paying them ten bucks a month to play.
It's possible that more people prefer shotem'ups than adventures - but as I remember it was exactly the same back in the 8-bit "home computers" days and somehow adventure games didn't die back then...
Were it not for sheer brute force, America would have never been conquered. Violence is what had shaped our civilization from the beginning. Holding violence to be immoral is sheer sentimentality.
I'm not sure if I agree that the adventure game genre is dead or even vanishing but I think the decline is not necessarily related to a change in the taste of individual gamers, more likely a change in the population (or demographic if you want to use marketing terms) of them. More and more people jump into gaming every day so the population is bound to get dilluted with something other than hard core players. The hard core guys who want to spend hours figuring out a small puzzle are still around, there are just a lot more people who want to grab a cannon of blow up a bunch of stuff.
Icebox
The traditional claim (FWIW) is that Paul (and the other apostles) being taught by Jesus had a much clearer understanding of what Jesus actually taught than we do almost two thousand years later. I think that there is something to this claim, but I couldn't prove it as history is in essence nonrepeateable.
The alternative, that the apostles were not faithful witnesses to the teachings of Jesus leaves us with absolutely no guide to judge which sayings of Jesus are authentic or not. After all, the Apostles (and their students) were the ones the wrote and compiled the New Testament.
Your view point is certainly worth considering, but it can only lead to agnosticism, not any form of Christianity (short of some sort of time travel device by which we can go back and find out what it is that Jesus actually taught independant of the traditions of his followers).
regards,
-l
I've probably played as many "adventure" games as Mr. OMM, but never referred to them as Adventure games. They were simply Text games (not same as screen games, like NetHack.) The incomprehensible nature of many of these, like his example of the moustached impersonator of the non-moustached man, and the non-obvious path of logic I hadn't often chalked up to the author being on acid, so much as the author/publisher trying to make a killing on Hint books.
I still think Text games have an audience, but not where authors expect someone to follow their non-obvious logic.
Example of non-obvious logic:
A small red-brick house stands nearby. A bed of colourful flowers grows around the outside with a birdfeeder and several garden gnomes tastefully set about. A driveway extends to the east with a mailbox, flag up, standing at the end.
There is a rock here.
>
Example of obvious logic:
A computer store with a large display window stands nearby. A Beowulf cluster of 1GHz Athlons is producing some impressive graphics on a gorgeous letterbox LCD display, while audio booms out of what must be a THX sound system behind the flimsy glass, making it shake. A riot is going on down the street, thus keeping the local constabulary occupied.
There is a shopping cart here.
There is a brick here.
>
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
People need to realize that action games and puzzle games (the ones listed above) are two different genres that have yet to compete with each other except in a few isolated titles [*]. For every puzzle game that is put out, there are easily 3 if not more quake-like clones, the action market gets that much more visibility.
Additionally, at this point in time with technology, it's very hard to do a truely complete puzzle game that is completely free-form, as the mustache example tries to emphasize. You'd have to create a small subset of the Grand Unified Theory in order to deal with every sitution that the player may attempt. This, of course, is impractical, so there is a very limited subset of actions that you can do.
But my biggest beef is the choice of example. Gabriel Knight's not very good as a puzzle game. Better examples tend to be anything from LucasArts, including the Monkey Island triology and Grim Fandango. The objects that you collect tend to have very unique properties, that fit in the game at only one place, but generally have good, funny responses if you try to use them elsewhere that are a near match. To that extent, it shows that the game designs tried to anticipate all actions the users might want to do, and add appropriate actions or responses for flavoring. They also drop more than enough hints, but you have to make sure you talk to everyone and look at everything.
Puzzle gaming is far from dead. It's just that there's a vast difference for most players of puzzle genre and fps genre.
[*] Some of the recent FPS/RPG combos (System Shock 2, Deus Ex) come somewhat close, while Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine is more puzzle that FPS, even though it is a FPS.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Oh, please. Is now the time for all good trolls to come to the aid of their idiot brethren? It has also been said that Random Joe shares 95% of his DNA with chimpanzees. Its that other 5% that counts, evidently.
/. troll.
Moderators, have your will with streetlawyer (he is, at least, funny) but do mod down anything by Dan Hayes - its an alias for a particularly boring
Notice how the title on Slashdot is "Why First Person Shooters Beat Text Adventure Games" (emphasis mine) but the OMM article talks about Gabriel Knight 3 and other games by Sierra?
There's a big difference between text adventures and "Sierra game" graphic adventures. There's a lot less story in most of the latter, which is due to and made up for by static artwork. People didn't buy King's Quest V for the story; they bought it for the state-of-the-art graphics and sound. Same for most of the puzzle-adventures like Seventh Guest and Myst.
Text adventures, on the other hand, haven't had to worry about their game engine very much, especially once specialized languages like Graham Nelson's Inform came into being. So all there is to work on is plot and puzzles. Sure, you get the occasional find-the-keys structure from people who don't know anything else (and even this can be excellent; play Curses or Mulldoon and see what I mean), but there's a lot more out there.
Plus the third person view can give you problems you don't expect. One thing I recall was in IJ; as you rotate the camera up over Indy, you could see over walls that from a first person view, you couldn't; this could include things like enemies or objects that you needed to aquire. Certainly not cheating, but somewhat unrealistic; how much it can detract from gameplay is questionable.
But getting back to the original point; whether a FPS or TPS, these games tend not to have the same traits as puzzle games like Monkey Island or Myst.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Its part of my rebel streak. I get sick of people toting the party line (doesn't matter much which party these days) of America being built on Christian principles. It wasn't. At best Christianity influenced some (and only some) of the thinking that went into this building this country. At worst, Christianity was twisted to support the thinking that went into building this country.
In principle I certainly agree with your assertion that most people call fleeing persecution sensibility and not cowardice. However, we're talking about Christianity here, not common sense. There is a reason that Jesus called following his teachings the narrow path. Most faiths (not just Christianity) turn a good deal of 'common sense' on its head. And while I don't condemn people who choose to flee instead of staying and being martyred, I do think that the Christian philosophy is built on the premis that it is better to stay and be martyred. What would Christianity look like if Jesus had fled instead of being martyred?
I didn't do a very good job at placing this one in context. The American revolution was caused mainly (but not exclusively) by wealthy landowners that had a good deal to gain if the US escaped British control. As is the case in most wars, the poor were conscripted by both sides and had little actual say in the matter except that those unfortunate enough to be conscripted by the losing side got branded as traitors.
Remember, we're not talking about common sense. Jesus said to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. Paul taught outright to pay one's taxes. Now, if Jesus and Paul living in Palestine under Roman rule thought that taxation without representation was a good reason to start an armed rebellion, I'm fairly sure that they wouldn't have incited their followers to pay their taxes. If there was ever a case of taxation without representation, it was in Roman occupied Palestine, and the word from the heads of the Christian movement was to obeisce, not revolt.
I agree that the real picture is never as simple as anyone makes it out to be. Theists did have an influence on the US, but I'd argue that deists had a far larger influence (especially in the realm of political philosophy) in shaping the reasons and rationelle for revolting against Britain. I'm sure there were Christian Patriots just as there were Christian Torries. But the only ones living out the teachings of Christ in the sad story of slaughter and mayhem were the pacifist Quakers who had their property confiscated, were thrown into prison, were publicly humiliated and tortured (good ole tarring and feathering and the stockades) and who were sometimes even executed (most commonly by hanging) just because their beliefs taught them to turn the other cheek and love their enemies.
Thank you very much for a reasonable and though out reply. I don't agree with everything you say but you certainly saw through much of my baiting...
-l
I always found adventures more fun when I had people with me. Two brains are better then one, and not having to type allows more time to think. Although once in a while you get voted down when you say go north and everyone else wants to go east.
I'll never forget the look on my unlces face when playing Adventure in the Fifth dimention. (Written in Basic for the atart 800) They came across a device.
Exmaine device
It has a slot for a battery
(okay, there is a store that sells batteries for a buck, and there is a dollar on the ground in anouther room.
(go to dollar)
Get dollar
(Go to store)
Buy battery
(go back to device)
insert battery
It doesn't fit
Alone they never would have found the device in the little time they had, but several minds togather allowed them to find it. Myst and Riven are the same type of game, you can play alone, but they are more fun when you have a few eyes helping you think the puzzle through.
Oh... come on now... this is so clearly a troll... There is absolutely no basis to support this claim... Which peasants fled? from whom? why? what smelly hole did you crawl out of...
You also said that the country was built on the "christian priciple" that hard work is its own reward... sigh... first of all, its called the "protestant work ethic".
Its not a christian principle. Its protestant apologetics that allows for individuals to gain wealth, and still feel like they are going to heaven. It was an excuse... Its also a large reason that lutheranism and protestantism caught on as quickly as they did. They allowed people to accumulate wealth without the guilt that the catholic church placed on them. And yes, I realize that the catholic church is ridiculously wealthy, and abused their position causing the reformation.
Ah yes, you don't like what I'm saying... it *must* be a troll because otherwise your belief systems might have to be justified!
No, he's right... You're a troll.
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... hi bingo
On the other hand, games where the first person view is impossible to do, such as Baulder's Gate or Diablo I/II, would be a Thrid Person game, but these generally fall into the RPG catagory. Probably the best example of a true TPS would be a game like Space Invaders.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
This month's Atlantic Monthly has a piece written by Jose Luis Borges in 1967. He puts forward the argument that the novel - which is centered around the intricacies of original plots - is dying. Instead people are "hungering and thirsting for epic" - and the plots of epic are few and simple, but far more powerful.
I think we are seeing something similar in gaming. Adventure games based upon dizzyingly intricate and confusing puzzle-games are dying, replaced by simple, but far more powerful game-plots based - like epics - upon the travails and victories of heroes.
Borges writes in the piece: "I think that the novel is breaking down. I think that all those very daring and interesting experiments with the novel - for example, the idea of shifting time, the idea of the story's being told by different characters - all those are leading to the moment when we will feel that the novel is no longer with us." It isn't hard to substitute "adventure game" for "novel" in this sentence.
ever heard of "Apocryphal" texts? Such as the Gospel according to St. James? Complete with Jesus turning mud sculptures into doves like a cheap magician, and a burly Midwife cheking the virgin mary if her hymen was truly intact. I think the quote she says before checking her was "Prepare thyself woman?"
What, never heard of it? Oh - thats because the Catholic church read it, and decided that it was not divinely inspired, and should not be included in the "official" gospel. That isnt exactly librarian type stuff.
So, it is a pretty big deal, because if you had to read ALL the works that were related to Jesus and his time period, you might come out confused, and would have to learn to sift through all the crap.
I have no idea why I'm still feeding this troll... slow day at work, i guess....
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Love them or hate them, Simutronics has done a good job of building and maintaining text based adventure games that have managed to stand the test of time. (10+ years!) I happen to be a fan of Gemstone, but they have several other games as well. For people that enjoy MUDs, it can be rather fun, especially when there are as many as 2000 people on at any given time. Hey, I hear they use Linux too. :-)
I played it for a little while. It was nice to see a MUD where you couldn't just walk around killing innocent NPCs and get away with it. I once got jailed for stealing (the police in the game escorted you to jail)! I created a thief character , got him up a few levels and practiced lock picking and sneak, and busted my character out of jail!
The reason I say the game was too realistic is because it had like 50 identical forest "rooms" between towns. Once I wanted to get somewhere, got lost in the woods, and by the time I figured out where I was going ran out of food and water. You don't die from starvation, but you can't move, so I ended up having to quit anyway. It was boring, stupid, and I never came back again.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Have you read Ernest Adams's articles at Gamasutra? In "It's Time to Bring Back Adventure Games," he makes the point that "3D engines have just as much to contribute to adventure games as they do to other genres." Quake does not represent the state of the art in gameplay. Thanfully, id sells the engine to more ambitious game developers.
However, I have to agree with OMM. The good old games weren't always good. In "Three Problems for Interactive Storytellers," Ernest talks about the problem of amnesia in adventure games:
Jane Jensen didn't invent the asinine puzzle.Computer games are linear. Half-Life, StarCraft, Diablo 2, Grim Fandango, System Shock 2. Anything that "tells a story" tells one story from beginning to end. I hope the next-generation adventure game is also the next-generation FPS and RPG.
players would "rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories...
What about the Marathon Trilogy, by Bungie? Granted, it is fairly linear, but as far as stories go, it beats a lot of RPGs out there. AFAIC, it defines what an FPS SHOULD be for the single player scenario. Of course, a lot of you (read 90+% of this community, I'm sure) x86 people out there may have never played it. Well, they have it for linux over at source.bungie.org.
out.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
What hasn't been mentioned yet is that there are more than a few free tools in development for creating graphic adventures, as well. Possibly the most well-known is the SCRAMM project, which looks like it could be *VERY* promising once released. Adventure Game Studio _is_ released and works great, though it's somewhat outdated. A quick walk through SCRAMM's link page shows plenty more tools, both available now and in development.
From my standpoint, it looks as if there's a growing community of people who want to create their own graphic adventures, and a growing number of people working to make it happen. My guess is you can expect an upsurge in interest in independant graphic adventures Real Soon Now...
I fall into both camps. I enjoy the sort of mindless doom/quake/unreal type violence, but I prefer such games *not* to have an intricate plot. Too often, publishers insist on writing a story, and weaving the game into that, at the expense of gameplay. I'd much rather have a doom-style "you're a marine in hell -- kill everything" type plot, but with buckets of playability.
On the other hand, I also enjoy adventure games. Real ones, that is, not the nasty Sierra-style ones. I can't count how many hours I lost playing the classics like Snowball, Lords Of Time and Kentilla. The sad fact is not that adventure games comitted suicide, just that the demographics of the gameplaying market changed. With computers (and consoles) gaining mass acceptance, the proportion of gamers with half a brain has naturally decreased. It's just not good business sense to develop an interesting (but low selling) adventure game, when a mindless action game will sell many times as many copies.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Second level. Wandered around a bit, went down some stairs and found some funky green stuff. All of a sudden something attacks and I fell outta my chair cause it scared me so bad.
I wasn't used to going through a 1 1/2 levels with nothing to fight. The guy that did that was genius in pacing it for maximum scare effect. I didn't play anything as good in that genre until Half-Life.
Bleh!
The part in which the author descibed the essence of not wearing a fake moustache is hilarious. Reminds me of wizards wearing false false beards just to see a flick. It's the same type of (il)logic, 'though it's better in books, than it is in interactive stories.
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"Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a sick mind." (Terry Pratchett)
And don't you think it's just a LITTLE bit embarrassing how religious propagandists regularly attach their ideologies to whatever respected cultural attribute happens to be in the forum at a given moment?
I mean, c'mon!
We're talking about adventure games v.s. FPS's. Let's stay on topic here!
(Though, for the record, I don't agree at all that there is ANY connection between the violence of FPS's and the lack of mythological standards in society. Look at the Romans! They had gladiatorial combat in a time rife with god worship. I think the real connection with violence obsession in a culture has more to do with the size and general corruption of a given society.)
-Garund