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New Issue Of Independent Adventuring
Greg Micek writes "DIY Games has posted another edition of Independent Adventuring, their monthly round-up of the underground adventure game scene over the last month. The latest edition, found here, covers the news and releases for the month of August and includes information on the recently released Brain Hotel, the new title from the developers behind A Case Of The Crabs. When comparing the two titles the writer states that "...the developer came up with a radically different world, story and graphics, and yet succeeded in creating a title that matches or even surpasses the previous game in all aspects." Other titles covered include a depressing tale of murder called Dead City, some bad news for the long awaited Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Youth, and much more. Read the entire issue at this link, links to previous editions can be found at the end of the article."
Nothing to do with Gibson, but the Wintermute engine:
Wintermute
Wintermute Engine Development Kit is a set of tools for creating and running graphical "point&click" adventure games. The kit includes the runtime interpreter (Wintermute Engine, or WME) and GUI editors for managing and creating the game content (WME tools) as well as the documentation, demonstrational data and prefabricated templates.
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They're not a dying genre by any means, just a very small one that never was all that big compared to action or RPG titles. There've been a few big name adventure games like Myst, but not enough for me to say the genre's on a decline now.
Good points, but I think the reason they're not longer made lies more in that adventure games have to be completely original to sell. You can't steal other peoples ideas and put them in another setting the way you can in a 3D FPS. If your puzzles weren't original, your game was a bad one. If your story was bad, so was your game. Every adventure game required a tremendous amount of creative work. I guess it just doesn't pay off to do them anymore.
Ahem, plain adventure games are not dead, you just dont see them advertized in the mass market anymore. Where Lucasarts and Sierra left off, a bunch of rather small development houses now fill the niche nicely. With Black Mirror, The Westerner (Wanted), Runaway, Uru, Syberia2, Tony Tough, Dark Fall, Lights out, Law and Order2 and a bunch of new titles in the line. The List of commerically released adventure games has been quite impressive, too big for a genre, already declard dead, if you ask me.
Here is the list for the upcoming months (from www.justadventure.com):