Be Excellent To Each Other

So, yesterday i had a big urge to play some classic adventure game. I ended up installing scummVM and Loom. Loom was the first game of this genre i played, and it's still among my favorites, being only surpassed by Monkey Island 1.

I never played any PC version of it before, so i went for the CD-Rom one. After playing for a while something felt odd. The face close-ups i so fondly remember were nowhere to be found and the game felt empty. Turns out a lot has been stripped on this version (lots of text mostly) to accomodate all the spoken dialogue. I also preferred the 32 colors of the Amiga as it gave the game a darker, much more atmospheric tone. The VGA version feature some out of place garish colors, specially on the weavers robes.

I will start again tonight, but the FM towns version. As much as i love the Amiga, winUAE can't compete with the slickness of the scummVM emulator.

Loom was lovely. Musical puzzles. Puzsics. Muszles.

Anyone remember Dreamweb in fond terms? I frickin loved that game for its immersive atmosphere.

The only ones I really played were the monkeys, and zak McCracken and the alien mindbenders (it had a yak in it.. surely that's enough to want to play it)

I could never get into sam and max or day of the tentacle

The DS version of Broken Sword absolutely captivated my wife. 10 hours in 2 days from someone who doesn't usually play a game from one year to the next!

i remember being reviewed in Amiga Power. I think i read that issue not long ago. But i never played.

My adventures urges come and go every 4/5 years. I lost interest in about 95. Then in 00 i got into it because i started reading Pratchett and wanted to try Discworld. Most frustrating adventure games i can remember. I also tried The Dig and Curse of Monkey Island. I was enjoying The Dig until it was getting way too hard later on. Monkey 3 just didn't click but i have to try again.

about 4 years ago i tries Syberia but it was just too slow and boring, even if looks beautiful. I also re-played monkey 1 and 2.

Lets see what 2009 will bring.

Broken Sword never did anything for me. In fact i think it was the game that killed my interest in the genre back in the day.

Bloody Discworld. The most ingrained memory of that is Eric Idle repeatedly saying "Anyone get the number of that donkey cart?" every 2 seconds when you went near the Librarian.

I remember "buying" Innocent Until Caught, managing to get about an hour in then copying over... I mean, returning it to the shop for a refund. Awful game. Didn't try Universe, but may give it a shot soon. I found Flight of the Amazon Queen to be incredibly overrated dross, too.

ScummVM can run the files from the Amiga version though can't it?

Reminds me, isn't Beneath a Steel Sky freeware now?

I am the only person in the world who liked Myst. So there.

maybe not...

http://uk.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/simslivinlarge/news_2857556.html

I loved the weird atmosphere, but the puzzles were annoying.

I. CAN'T. WAIT. FOR. MONKEY. ISLAND. ON. XBLA.

The books are superb. Except the third one, which is good. But the first two are brilliant.

Yeah, the copyright holders released all the IP a few years back. That's why it's prominently downloadable on SCUMMVM's site.

And dam good it is too.

And GOG.

Anything planned/available for the iPhone/iPod Touch?

Full Throttle was brilliant, with great voice acting, and few annoying puzzles. The bike combat was a bit hit and miss though.

I'm not sure if its been mentioned here, but there was a fun browser based point and click game by Tim Schafer for the Game Developer Conference:
http://www.doublefine.com/news.php/mini ... ost_Master

SCUMMVM is available if you jailbreak. I don't know if your finger is precise enough to play it though, I didn't try it out (I put it on my PSP instead). Myst is available in the App Store.

Someone I know is currently doing Monkey Island for the iPhone, but severely doubts it'll ever be allowed to be released by LucasArts.

Played it a few times finished it a 3 montsh ago, I might have to dig it out.

I used to like the leasuire suit larry series just for sillyness.

sort of. It doesn't accept adf images and it doesn't support sound. So it's not really an option.

I restarted the game with the FM-Towns version. It's also VGA (even though some objects are in EGA) but it has all the text (no spoken text though). The annoying thing is that the music never stops. I love Loom music, but i have to turn it off every now and then or i get sick of it.

I thought this kind of games would be easier now that i'm old and wiser, but its actually the opposite (years of dumbed down video games have taken its toll). And i only remembered the puzzles from the beginning.

You know damn well how accurate my fingering is.

First hand?

Could you ask him to make an Armored Core: For Answer point and click adventure then, save him wasting his time.

No. First finger, then finger and thumb, extra fingers then up to fist then double fist.

oh, well...

The wife and I are currently working our way through Discworld Noir (me having introduced her to the delights of Monkey Island last year - she's now very excited about the new episodes). It's fun but frustrating - we're getting stuck a lot more than on the MIs (though that's possibly because I'd played through those before).

For quite a while we were trying to place the voice of the main character Lewton - sounds a bit like Terry Wogan doing an English accent. Turns out it's Rob Brydon from when he was quite a lot less famous than he is now.

The first 2 Discworld games were known then for stretching logic for puzzle solutions in a ways MI didn't tend to do. So I'm not surprised Noir is the same.

Wrong. I also thought Riven was excellent, and even more creepy.



Myst 3... not so much.

Have you read the books? They're ace. I might have said.

I would get them from my library if you hadn't closed them all down.

I thought this game was great. I only had the demo on the Amiga, but I played it lots and lotssss. (I later pirated the PC version, as you do, and the rest of the game is really good, albeit very hard). I really liked the artstyle -- all dark and red -- and the random sci-fi elements like electric wips. Yummy.

Dreamweb was the overhead view one? I remember PC Gamer's coverage made several mentions of the 'naughty shagging scene' and 'gratuitous bonking sequence'.

I really liked Amazon Queen - it wasn't quite Lucasarts goodness but it had plenty of memorable bits in a much underused setting (1930s adventure serial). The repeated encounters with the disappearing, talking ape made me chuckle heartily (especially the ape's voice).

I was more of a Sierra adventures kid and played the Police Quest and Space Quest games religiously (King's Quest was far too twee for me - and after, in frustration, I typed 'KILL MONK' at rude member of the cloth who just ignored all attempts at interaction, and was rewarded by a preachy message and game over, I swore off them).

I'd still like to try the talkie version of Willy Beamish, terrible though it was. I could never get past the bit with the security guard.

Police Quest 1-3 = awesome
Quest for Glory = awesome
Quest for Glory 2 = fuck you money changer
King's Quest & Space Quest = fuck off.

There's an awesome retrospective of it in PC Gamer this month. I was delighted at how thorough they've been... they've even gone for a drive in Sonny's Micra while he's on duty in order to get a screenshot of the 'chewed out by the captain' sequence.



Indeed. A classic example of foolishly starting a game off with a hateful, tedious task. Still, once it's done, the magic map all but removed any need to walk around Shapier. And there were some utterly classic sequences to be had in that game. The sheer effort that went into it astounds me.



Why does Space Quest fuck off? Apart from the fact that everything resulted in death, that is.

You should try the fanmade in-between-quel, 'The Lost Chapter'. Set between SQ2 and 3, it is without a doubt the most difficult, hateful adventure I've ever played. It's almost a parody as practically EVERY screen has instant death waiting for you, and the puzzles are so convoluted I don't know how you'd ever figure them out without the walkthrough.

At the same time, the other fanmade prequel, Chapter Zero, is an incredibly pleasant little romp that feels much more Space Questy, and without nearly as much death.

What with its depressing central theme, accompanying "Diary Of A Madman" and impressively dystopian soundtrack, I'd attribute a fair proportion of my melancholy at the time to DreamWeb's painstakingly crafted atmosphere. Except it was more likely due to that fucking interface.

I loved and adored Dreamweb. In fact, I'm going to play it on WinUAE when I remember again. I haven't remembered now.

I'm pretty sure I only ever played the demo of Dreamweb, but I liked what I played a great deal. Hopefully I still have the .adf files sitting around on my backup harddrive.

Two that haven't been mentioned here - first: Blade Runner. Fucking awesome, awesome point-n-click-er. I'd love to be able to play that one again at some point.

The second I'm not sure counts due to the strategy elements of it, but the original Dune. Very atmospheric game and one that I still occasionally fire up in WinUAE to this day.

The worst thing about DreamWeb is

ERRM YOU WHAT?!
Want a fight about that?!

Really though: Space Quest is the best of the Sierra bunch (along with QFG, maybe). Even the Colonel's Bequest is better than the entire Kings quest series.

Whilst we're talking about Sierra games, I'll say this: I didn't like the artwork in their SGI games. Everything was basically a 320x200 blurfest. Real artists, with brushes and that, painted these pictures themselves in the real world. But here's a hint: You can't appreciate art at that small resolution. Just stick with blocky men, much clearer.

But you could take off your shoes -- YOUR SHOES!

I don't see guybrush taking off his shoes on request. Nor do I see guybrush having a handy zoom window.

I never got on with the text/graphic adventure hybrids before the point and clicks. They just seemed really inaccessible and unfriendly.

Finished the 1st episode of Tales of Monkey Island and it was much better than expected. Played with my girlfriend and she hates almost every game, but really enjoyed this so much that started complaining that it was too short.

I think they contributed in some part to my fast typing and good spelling. I remember suffering like hell trying to take the 'analgesic' at the start of Hitchhiker's Guide.

The old Sierra AGI adventures were nightmarish as they didn't pause while you typed. Hence a few sequences where you'd have to slow it down to Slow speed and still type furiously to perform an action to avoid being killed (the robot guarding the escape pods in Space Quest 2 is a great example of this). The later SCI stuff fixed this program but except in a few isolated spots mouse control just let you move around and use the menus easier... there was still the nightmarish GET KEY OPEN DOOR OPEN TRUNK GET KIT CLOSE TRUNK (and then later) OPEN TRUNK PUT KIT CLOSE TRUNK OPEN DOOR sequence in Police Quest 2.

Funnily enough, the King's Quest pack on Steam is 25% off until 30th of July. That's £7.49 for seven games. Alternatively, I'll come around to your house and kick you in the balls for a fiver. You pay petrol costs. I'd take the kick in the balls, personally.

I have little doubt that KICK MANANAN IN THE BALLS would result in a 'Kicking the old wizard in the happy sacks is not nice, and I, Roberta Williams, am grievously offended. Your character drops dead from sheer naughtiness' if they'd thought of it at the time.

I've posted this before (though possibly on WOS, can't remember), but if you have a DS & flash-cart, you can get a load of old adventure games here, complete with a tasty DS interface to play them on :

http://gugusse.central.free.fr/papafuji/adventures.html

Cor, that's fantakka. Cheers Berts.