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."

Comments

Adventure games - the distillation of gaming

[tod_miller]

When a new game comes out, people may wow at the graphics, but always come back to - is the game play good, and even, is the story good.

A compelling story is in itself a good gameplay, a simple standard point and click, and interestingly rendered worlds (not necessarily realistic, see Sam and Max and DOTT).

So why are adventure games destined to be always the dying genre of computer games!

Anyone ever play 'Terrormolinos' for the Spectrum? I played it for the best part of a day and got ran over. The good old days of pocket lint and useless stuff.

The game has great looking graphics, I would love a JOGL powered adventure kit, where you plug in 3ds/obj and textures and rooms, and ogg dialogue and text and use x on y.

Anyone know of anything? Anyone also interested in doing such a program? XML desriptors for the games, such like... then work on making 3d versions of DOTT! just to showcase it of course... the sotry and characters are the best parts!

Re:Adventure games - the distillation of gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. The Adventure game was a VERY big genre when I first got into PC gaming. My first Sound Blaster card came with a copy of Kings Quest V. The gameplay was pretty horrid by today's standards (or even the standards of the time, to be honest), but this was regarded as the big, flashy genre in which you could show off the PC's capabilities. I mean, some of these games even had proper speech, which was pretty much unprecedented at the time (although this didn't come into its own until the CD-ROM drive became widespread). Some of what were, at the time, the biggest names in PC gaming were heavily focussed on adventure games... Lucasfilm (later Lucasarts) and Sierra being the most notable examples.

I think what really killed the adventure game as a mainstream genre was the coming domination of 3d graphics. Publishers and, to a slightly lesser extent, customers, came to expect that every game should have 3d graphics (the superb Monkey Island 3 predicted this, with a spoof "3d acceleration" option on the settings menu). The adventure game genre worked best in 2d (or even in text format) and the few attempts at doing 3d adventure games (most notably Grim Fandango and *ugh* Monkey Island 4) fell completely flat.

Re:Adventure games - the distillation of gaming

[Ape_the_Dog]

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.

Found something nice

[tod_miller]

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.