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The Grumpy Gamer Speaks
Ron Gilbert, well-known for his work during the golden age of LucasArts adventure games, is also well known as The Grumpy Gamer. Gamasutra has up an interview with Gilbert, discussing his career in the post-Threepwood period of his life. From the article: "It's actually kind of frightening, you know. You sit down with a publisher and the minute you mention anything like an adventure game or something story-based or adventure-game-like in any way, the meeting's basically over. So the publishers do have a huge resistance to this. And I think a lot of it is that they cannot point to anything like this that is successful in the market today. So it's very difficult for them to put anything behind it. It's a very difficult process."
Don't get me wrong, I play San Andreas just as mush as the next guy. SA looks great, the game play is fun and the controls are easy. And yes, I can pull a lot of social commentary and some story out of it. I also turn SA off and fire up my old consoles and play Chrono Trigger or FF7. Even though these games look like crap by modern standards, I still enjoy them because, either because of the quality of the gameplay or the story. Heck, I even bust out the old Infocom text adventures on occasion.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
At this point I'd half expect someone to be able to make a game in their freaking basement, and then jump start a studio off just a few thousand digital download sales, with a few thousand in revenue. I mean really, we've got the Gimp, various free audio editing tools, Python is Free/Free. Studio recording equipment is Ass-cheap. What's stopping people?
GTA, all iterations, are pathetically overhyped. They offer the illusion of a 'freeform' world, but always become bogged down in a series of scripted missions that can more or less only go in one particular order. Then, we always get a samey 'story' about some gangster (Or Blaxploitation in San Andreas) and immature drug/sex/violence jokes. There are games that outdo every aspect of GTA, except they don't have to lower themselves to encouraging the player to murder civilians for no reason. Hell, even Fable and Freelancer were better than GTA. They looked a whole lot better too, and the worlds felt like they had been crafted with care.
I'd argue with you over this, there are some games who tell a lot of the story in cut scenes of one form or another and do it extremely well. Resident evil for example does it well, the plot is perfectly b-movie grade and works awesomely witht he cut scenes.
I tink people forget something. Games are all different, some games suit some things and other games suit other things. I'm an old school RPG player so I perfer my characters to talk in text and cut scenes more or less to start and end the game (Tales of symphonia and Shin Megami Tensei 3 come to mind here, as long as you turn the dubbing off in ToS as I did).
But there are people who love the FMVs and huge overly unneeded movie sections in FF games. These people are also part of the same market and should be accepted and allowed their share of the pie. The problem is as the article says, people at the top are going "okay sure!" when they ask for more, but when we ask for more we have to pray Japan makes something and Atlus picks it up (BTW, Super robot taisen : Original generation on the GBA is out soon, for the love of God support the series, it's awesome and I've never seen a single FMV on the GBA versions).
Just because you don't like interactive movies doesn't mean the same applies to you.
I like muppets.
Nintendo thinks more people will buy an affordable 480p console than an expensive 720p console. Yo muthafscka Wii!
Why is stretching an image not acceptable? In 2006 we have smarter line art stretching algorithms such as Scale2x/Scale3x and hq2x/hq3x, and we have LCD HDTVs that stretch SDTV to 720p and also stretch 1080i to 720p. Heck, on a 1280-pixel monitor, you can emulate a 640-pixel monitor.
Why is running the game in a window not acceptable? For one thing, it lets the player more easily switch between the game and the online hint book.
Third choice: Vector graphics. Ever heard of Inkscape?
So why did Lucasarts stop with adventures?
To be honest I think this guy might be too blame with his "getting adventures into the mainstream" crap. Now its RPG he tries to bolt ontop of it to create some frankenstein monster, back then it was 3D.
Yes I know some people loved Grim Fandango and the last monkey island but can it be a coincedence that these were also the last adventures? A long line of 2D adventures, a handfull of 3D and bam, the end of the adventure era.
I am not totally against 3D but that one MI game didn't really do anything with 3D just made it a bitch to control. The sleeper hit The Longest Journey also used 3D but in a 2D world so that 99% of the time it behaved just like a old 2D game but with 3D models. Mmm, 3d April in her undies.
Adventures worked when they were adventures. Easily controlled puzzle games that were fun to play. Who here really thought the fighting scenes in Full Throttle were fun? The 3D world in the last monkey island. For that matter any of the mini arcade games that Sierra always tried to squeeze in?
If the adventure is going to make a comeback it is going to be in the form of the old adventure. Just the adventure and nothing but the adventure. If you look at the small successes that is exactly what happened.
Stop listening to game reviewers who laud every game that does something unusual and simply rely on your gaming audience.
This guy says it himself, there is a market for old scumm games but then totally fails to realize what this means by saying he wants to add RPG elements. Hello! There is a market for old scumm games. That is it! The OLD scumm games. So any new game should NOT try to add anything new. If people wanted that they would be playing the new games.
The whole adventure debacle reminds me of the new coke crap. Except that game developers like this guy seem unable to grasp the fact "people upset with new product, lets give them old product back". Instead he keeps coming up with new recipes while the customers just want their old coke back.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Troll - probably not. Maybe just misguided. HL2 was the sign of the coming crisis in the games world and it shares a small deal of problems with nowadays games, but it was about the last good game.
:) And eight turrets in the teleporter battle is a pure madness.
Sure the ending was a cliffhanger, "to be continued..." and because of that, sucked. But you point out WRONG weaknesses.
The story was good. Last good story to date. The climate, the world with the resistance, the post-soviet cities and rural areas, the oppression. The storytelling was great, with some even if cliche, then still well executed twists. Ant lions, gravity gun, combine rifle secondary fire, turrets, these all required quite a bit of skill. Have you tried carrying the turrets in Nova Prospect? The prison fight gets really fun with 5 turrets for your defense, especially if you try to strategically place them in such a way that the whole fight would fight itself without your help
Vehicles - oh, no, they didn't drive the same at all. The hovercraft would never land upside down, you could do some really mad stunts, and it was driving like a hovercraft, that is you turn, apply acceleration and as result modify vector of speed. No wheels to change direction and long sequences where you'd madly drive through radioactive sludge dodging or hitting the combine at high speed, rarely slowing down. The buggy OTOH required much more cautious driving and often it felt really redundant, because of lots of places where walking on foot was definitely preferred - get in, drive for a moment to next "event place", get out, wipe the house or solve the puzzle, continue driving to the next place.
Enemies - okay, not -much- development here. The combine elite sucked, the rest appeared quite early. The fighting technique had to be adopted to situation though, zombies in Ravenholm different than Anticitizen One.
The weaknesses were - linearity and restrictiveness, you couldn't take a stride and see behind the church, climb a mountain over the tunnel or go check the docks instead of getting into the buggy. The story was told, and simultaneously the game was played, but you couldn't change the development of the story, they didn't blend, they were separate and playing the game was like clicking "play" on video player, simply replaying prerecorded story. Enormous amount of work put in details resulted in the overall story being short. Game length aside, pieces that kept forcing you to spend time on tasks that weren't directly connected with the plot, obvious sequencing into "blocks" - a settlement with combine ambush, a road block in the tunnel, a series of tunnels for fast and rough ride, a physics puzzle location - little or no continuity between these, they felt each like a minigame with little impact on what happens later. The piece where you fight 4 dropships and a gunship, your buggy is taken away and the rebels demand your help has completely nothing in common, with no mention, no sign of continuity with Laszlo who lies wounded 100 meters away and must have passed through that base recently. They are separate pieces, separate minigames. Laszlo is part of physics puzzle plus jumping game of sandtraps, the lighthouse is a dropship battle. And neither has anything in common with the main story...
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Nintendo DS, this platform already within the last months has had two higly successful adventure game releases one being Phoenix Wright the other one Another Code by Cing. The next one, Hotel Dusk already is in the line, adventure games fit perfectly into the lineup of the machine, which also has a very high emphasis on adult puzzle games like Dr. Kawashis Brain Jogging,and also the stylus is a perfect blend to point and click mechanisms.
GTA3 - Story about a bank heist double cross and a series of mob bosses that double cross each other plus a media tycoon whose nuts, and the eventual catch up with said bank double cross.
Sounds like a fucking story.
Vice City - Cocaine deal goes bad, you have to track down and infiltrate the guy who did it, pick up a power-hungry parter (or 3) and double cross the origonal family that didn't reward you for going state's evidence.
Sounds like a fucking story.
San Andreas - Bad cops, toss you into the gang wilderness, and you have to build your way up with minor turf wars until you work with regional mob bosses and the governement.
Sounds like a fucking story.
The article - which I read - put out in glowing letters, that the open sandbox nature of the game lent itself for only player driven narritives. This is bullshit. So Mod me down fuckos, or play the goddamn game.
Actually, many games attempt to rectify this, and fail miserably. The standard nowadays is an incredibly hackneyed, tacky, cliched and, if voice talent is present, terribly overacted plotline. Most this/next gen storylines are an embarrassment, and generally you want to wear headphones in case anyone happens to overhear the mortifying content that's sold as "compelling story". Usually, it's boisterous californians, complete with modern san francisco mores, transplanted into a sci-fi or medival fantasy world, taking themselves way too seriously and delivering woeful lines with enough sauce to make Plan 9 look like an expertly choreographed space epic.
Look at Super Mario. Classic games, stand the test of time. Games that good don't need a story. Sonic and Knuckles managed to convey all the plot progression it needed to without a single utterance, text or otherwise, and wth one paragraph in the manual. The game did not need anything else. That's how things should be done. I shudder to think about the Sonic Adventure games, and how perfectly playable games were almost ruined by some idiots junior hight attempt at a "compelling storyline".
Metroid Prime is an example of a modern game that got this 100% right. The story is there, but only if you give a damn. It's nice and text based, so no west coast hysterics will bring the whole household in to gawk at the idiocy. I would have gotten rid of the ridiculous V/O, but since it's only a few lines, I'm willing to let that go.
If you want an example of how to put a "compelling story" complete with voice acting and "movie quality" action, then you have to go to Metal Gear Solid. The first one. That's the level you have to go to. If you're not prepared to, please don't have the characters, especially the NPC's speak. It's very irritating.
May the Maths Be with you!
Has no one played Dreamfall: The Longest Journey??? (Note: I did not have time to read prior comments, apologize if this was already mentioned...) I finished that game recently, it came out April of this year, and I was thoroughly impressed. Yes, it's an adventure game...and it was awesome. I'm just sitting here waiting for the sequel...and I find this article. *shakes head* It makes me sad. Adventure games are wonderful.
"Success isn't a result of a spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire." - Arnold H. Glasgow