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The Return of (Old) PC Graphic Adventures
KingofGnG writes "Though they belong to a genre already considered defunct and inadequate for the mainstream video game market, adventure games have a glorious past, a past that deserves to be remembered, and, of course, replayed. At the center of a good part of this effort of collective memory, there is ScummVM, the virtual machine which acts like an interface between the feelings and the puzzles from the good old times and the modern operating systems. As already highlighted before, the ScummVM target has grown immensely over time, going from the simple support of the 'classic' adventure games par excellence published by Lucasfilm/Lucasarts, to a range that includes virtually any single puzzle-solving game developed from the beginning of time up to the advent of the (Windows) NT platform. The last video game engine added to ScummVM within the past few days is Groovie, created by the software house Trilobyte for its first title released in 1993, The 7th Guest ."
While the definition of mainstream videogames can be debated, new adventure games are still sold in places like best buy and wal-mart. That seems mainstream to me. It is true they don't have the prestige or marketing behind them that they used to but they are still good.
I picked up the Agathe Christie series on a whim at best buy one day and am presently surprised.
adventuregamers.com and justadventure.com are still 'keeping it real' so to speak.
Have you tried holding the stylus in your other hand?
I can't believe I never thought of that! BRB.
With many of the companies that made these games now defunct and out-of-business, how do you expect to connect to the activation servers in order to play these games?
And some of these games likely came on 3.5" disks, unless you happen to have an old disk drive connected to your machine, you're also out of luck, since we all know that you need to have disk #1 in the drive in order to get past the Securom checks.
Besides, I'm sure that most of you have long since used up your 3 installs.
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Tim Schaffer's studio Double Fine is working on Brütal Legend, you may be interested:
http://www.doublefine.com/news.php/projects
Also try Psychonauts. It's free on Gametap until the end of the year, so if you hurry...
You can get that for free including a snazzy installer set up that works directly in Win XP from gog.com. Love that site. Great price and increasing selection. As of a couple of days ago BASS was still free to download complete with modern installer.
You can hear the tunes from the 7th Guest and 11th Hour again, and download them, from Amiestreet: http://amiestreet.com/music/the-fat-man-and-team-fat/7-11-soundtrack-to-the-7th-guest/ I tried to make the audio CD a real nice experience, flowing from track to track, and kind of telling a story. I think it came out pretty enjoyable--it feels better to listen to than the CD that came with the game, or the mp3's. At least to me. I hope you enjoy it... http://www.texasmusicroundup.com/The_Fat_Man_p/ru0206.htm
And don't forget about the adventure games that somehow worked something from the original manual into the gameplay. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I'm scowling at you.
Yup. I remember. You had to constantly read your own copy of the Grail's book to advance in the game, just like Indy in the movie.
But also the various "Conquest" series of Sierra games which came packaged with extensive documentation about the era of the game and everything in the game being very strongly based on that culture leading the player to constantly cross check their documentation.
I personally think that it's a much more brilliant and unobtrusive mechanism for copy-protection than the average "Please type word 65 of paragraph 11 of page 174 of the manual" (Or even worse : the horribly long magical incantations from King Quest III that you had to copy as is).
Of course it integrates a lot better with puzzle/detective oriented gameplay like in adventure games or not too much combat oriented RPGs. Whereas today market is 99% FPS, and I really don't see how to integrate phases asking the player to pause the game and start mining the documentation looking for crucial clues in games which are usually action packed and fast packed (I don't know : detailed map of the battlefield that the player must scrutinize in order to sport possible place where the damn sniper who is constantly head-shoting has hidden ? Heroic fantasy gates that only open on answer of complex riddles that require knowledge about the in-game historical back-ground ?)
And not to forget the single most important factor that encouraged people to actually buy the games :
the games came in decent boxes *WITH* all the aforementioned documentation together with lots of additional merchandise :
additional books (Space Quest II came with a comics book) nice cloth maps that you could pin on the wall (a must have in some RPG with complicated geography) posters, even weirder stuff (Space Quest III came with a "Andromeda Guy" disguise). In the past, Infocom has been renown for the "feelies" bundled with the game.
A genuine legal game box had a lot of significant advantage over a pirated copy.
Today, most of the games are sold in small plastic shitty boxes. Containing only the disc, and the activation code. If you're very lucky, you'll get a small "quick-start" leaflet explaining you how to download Acrobat from Adobe's site in order to be able to print the documentation on your own.
There's absolutely no difference between a retail game, and something that you burn yourself and throw in a plastic box.
The diminishing quality of game packages, I think, has a small role to play in the fact that lots of pirate don't even see what's the advantage of getting a retail box.
Note that both my brother and I tend to buy my games in "Limited Edition" and similar package (Bought Dreamfall together with the artwork book, bought Paradise (intl:Last king of Africa) with the making of, etc.
Because if I'm going to give money to support the authors, I definitely want to have something worth the money in return - not just something that looks exactly like a home made CD/DVD. I really appreciate the art books, etc.
Nonetheless we download the game cracks right after installing the games, because we're just fed up with yet again some obscure DRM system that fails to recognize the original disc. (The first few Starforce games I've met, were systematically detecting forbidden background task - even if my Windows partition is empty and has no DeamonTools or whatever installed. The first few SecuROMs just was unable to detect the original disc. I haven't bothered to check if later versions of the games did fix these bugs - I just crack them by default)
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There was an unfortunate set back when the video driver crashed, turning the screen black and the entire dev team was eaten by a Grue.
hahaha, reminds me of the old skool D&D games. 320x240 graphics..oh yeah that takes a whopping 32K of graphic memory heh oh yeah the guide into the game thing. same games by SSI/TSR Look on page 3 word 4 of paragraph 2. Those were easy to crack because all you had to do was open the (.EXE) in a hex editor and then pick out any english words. copy them and when they worked you put the question next to it. after about 20 or 30 plays, depending on the game and how many passwords; you had your password list all set, until you lost it but, that is another story for another thread on another day...
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