The Death of Adventure Games • Hacker News Board

Re: The Death of Adventure Games

#21

Post by technomancy » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 9:57 PM UTC

_b8r0 wrote: post #14

I think the relaunch of Monkey Island on the iPhone proved that adventures are far from dead. Are they still mainstream? Maybe not, but I definitely see elements of adventures in modern games. Games like Fallout 3 and Bioshock rely heavily on storytelling. You could argue that some sandbox games like GTA San Andreas (haven't played IV, sorry) are technically adventure games or have adventure components. While I think…

> Games like Fallout 3 and Bioshock rely heavily on storytelling.

Compare Bioshock to System Shock 2 though; Bioshock is extremely simplified in order to still be playable on point-n-grunt console platforms.

Re: The Death of Adventure Games

#22

Post by r0s » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 10:01 PM UTC

Pretty funny, but point and click adventure games are still popular. There are several titles on Steam released this year for PC.

The NintendoDS has several successful titles: Trace Memory, Hotel Dusk, and others. A new Professor Layton title topped sales for the 3DS, recently released in Japan.

The genre is probably as popular now as ever.

Re: The Death of Adventure Games

#23

Post by romaniv » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 10:07 PM UTC

Adventure games continue to be released by indie companies. Some of those are pretty good. For example, Gemini Rue was released just a few days ago. A Tale of Two Kingdoms came out couple of years ago. Both were polished and quite innovative in their own ways. This is more than I can say about many AAA titles today.

Re: The Death of Adventure Games

#24

Post by jhamburger » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 10:12 PM UTC

r0s wrote: post #22

Pretty funny, but point and click adventure games are still popular. There are several titles on Steam released this year for PC. The NintendoDS has several successful titles: Trace Memory, Hotel Dusk, and others. A new Professor Layton title topped sales for the 3DS, recently released in Japan. The genre is probably as popular now as ever.

Hmm, as popular as ever? I dunno. King's Quest, Myst, 7th Guest, these were the 'Call of Duty's of 80s/90s PC gaming.

Re: The Death of Adventure Games

#25

Post by davidjhall » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 10:12 PM UTC

Check out AGDinteractive : http://www.agdinteractive.com/ They remade the KQuests and QFG2 and are building brand new adventure games.

Re: The Death of Adventure Games

#26

Post by praptak » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 10:16 PM UTC

There are some good flash adventure games. "Alice is Dead", "Hansel and Gretel" to name two.

Re: The Death of Adventure Games

#27

Post by GvS » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 10:16 PM UTC

They are not dead, just less popular. Check out Gray Matter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Matter_(video_game)) or 999 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999:_Nine_Hours,_Nine_Persons,_...) - very good and recently released adventure games.

Re: The Death of Adventure Games

#28

Post by modeless » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 10:19 PM UTC

pmcginn wrote: post #8

Oh, wow. OMM, talk about memories (the linked article is from 2000.) Among other things Chet and Erik were famous for the Time To Crate system of reviewing games by how long it took from starting the game until you saw a crate. Since this was the late 90s/early 2ks, it was generally zero seconds. This was in comparison to real life, where I frequently go years at a time without seeing a single crate, but then again,…

The Crate Review System is a true classic that's worth reading even though a few of the jokes are outdated: http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html

Re: The Death of Adventure Games

#29

Post by dwc » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 10:19 PM UTC

zandorg wrote: post #12

Before I clicked, I thought it meant text adventures. Clearly they're deader than corduroy if graphical ones are now 'old'.

The graphic ones took all the depth out of the text adventures, but offered eye candy. So the trend goes...

Re: The Death of Adventure Games

#30

Post by hvs » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 10:20 PM UTC

sid0 wrote: post #13

The article's over ten years old, and since then there's been a sorta revival of the genre. There are all the Telltale games, the Monkey Island remakes, and more recently the brilliant Machinarium. Digital distribution services like Steam have helped, of course.

I just started replaying the Monkey Island games this week after about 15 years since I last played the original. Definitely one of the "best of breed". Sam & Max were enjoyable, as well as the Indiana Jones games, but Monkey Island was perfect in that it never took itself seriously so it didn't suffer from the "why the hell do I have to do this?" factor that some adventure games did.

In general, I think LucasArts was probably the best at this in the 90's.