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The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

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Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#61

Post by maccard »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #16
shevy-java wrote: post #13

I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g. King's Quest and what not, but in the 1980s or so that was novel and creative. Today the games tend to have powerful 3D engines, but the creativity was lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new to the table, for instance) and of course the graphics and sounds are great, but something is gone now. In part this m…

When the first-person shooter arrived, somehow we collectively decided that's what all games should now be. I think we've learned that creativity comes from constraints. Early computing platforms certainly were replete with that.

Here’s the highest rated games on PS5, Xbox and switch this year. There is _one_ first person shooter in the top ten of all three of these lists combined

[0] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/ps5/all/current-year/... [1] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/xbox-series-x/all/cur... [2] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/all/all/current-year/...

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#62

Post by maccard »

shevy-java wrote: post #13

I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g. King's Quest and what not, but in the 1980s or so that was novel and creative. Today the games tend to have powerful 3D engines, but the creativity was lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new to the table, for instance) and of course the graphics and sounds are great, but something is gone now. In part this m…

If this is your view of modern gaming, I think it’s you that has changed. This year alone my play list has been - blue prince, hollow knight: silksong, Ball X pit, split fiction, clair obscur, monster hunter wilds, arc raiders, helldivers 2 (came to Xbox, so this one is a stretch), nightrein, Indiana jones, dispatch… That’s on top of the “big” hitter that are still very fun experiences.

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#63

Post by anthk »

jhbadger wrote: post #56
anthk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a real time action-adventure game with puzzles. TR made point and click adventures obsolete as they drove a puzzle-event bound game with free exploration. OTOH, text adventures would still be featureful and playable as they achieved incredible things very expensive to do with graphical games.

If Tomb Raider is an "adventure game" so is Donkey Kong. Tomb Raider is basically a platformer like Donkey Kong but in 3D. Neither made actual adventure games "obsolete" because taxing your hand-eye reflexes is a different sort of fun than taxing your brain.

Also, definitively, what killed the adventure genre would be the PS1 survival horrors. You have everything there: items, combinations, loads of puzzles, action and a shitfed perspective. Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Parasite Eve...

Pretty much the definition of an old 'point and click' aventure with action points.

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#64

Post by sizzzzlerz »

I'd just begun my first professional engineering job after college. The company I was working for had a mainframe computer on which there was a copy of Adventure. When I discovered the game, there were a number of late nights playing it. One night, long after everyone had gone home, I was playing in my office with the lights off. The only light was from the green phosphorous monitor I was using. All of a sudden, I stumbled into the breath-taking view room with its erupting volcano. The words describing the scene filled the screen with descriptive prose that simply glowed in the dark room. The effect was mesmerizing. Forty-seven years later, I've never forgotten that.

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#65

Post by mancerayder »

ido wrote: post #29
shevy-java wrote: post #13

I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g. King's Quest and what not, but in the 1980s or so that was novel and creative. Today the games tend to have powerful 3D engines, but the creativity was lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new to the table, for instance) and of course the graphics and sounds are great, but something is gone now. In part this m…

I think it's mostly that you're no longer interested in computer games and as such aren't aware of what's currently available. IMO there has never been a bigger and more varied supply of good games as there are today, in pretty much every genre (my personal taste is mostly for small indie games, not AAA). I started playing computer games in the late 1980s myself and have never stopped.

Is that true? While there's a much larger overall volume of content out there, many many games to choose from... Don't you see a pattern around first person shooters, real life 'simulators' built on repetitive OCD grind, and a general sense of sameness?

Nothing feels really novel. Where the innovation is seems to focus on graphical realism, which of course I love.

I'm strongly attached to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and while I'm near the end of the game, I'm dragging my feet so I don't have to go back to the drawing board of sorting through endless terrible FPS and retro hack and slash games on Steam that don't interest me and are copies of 20 year old games.

Adventure games (the topic here) are my favorite though, and it's very rare that anything comes out. The Sierra and LucasArts days are over (RIP). That said a few gems come out here and there, like Lucy Dreaming.

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#66

Post by mancerayder »

fragmede wrote: post #49
ido wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's mostly that you're no longer interested in computer games and as such aren't aware of what's currently available. IMO there has never been a bigger and more varied supply of good games as there are today, in pretty much every genre (my personal taste is mostly for small indie games, not AAA). I started playing computer games in the late 1980s myself and have never stopped.

Monkey Island. The difficulty of the first game and the difficulty of the last game. The last game was still a game, but the challenge wasn't there. It just wasn't there. We might as well just be playing Progress Quest.

Monkey Island 1 and 2 have deep memories for me. I'll never forget playing Monkey Island 2 during a cold Christmas when I was a kid. The PC speaker music was great (King's Quest V was my other present and I still remember the opening music). One day I got the Sound Blaster on my 486 SX and it blew my mind.

The Monkey Island that came out a few years ago sadly felt like a puzzle-free story for children and their parents to sit together to play. Elaine lacked humor and cynicism, there was a child's voice in some of the narration, the graphics were strangely cubic and stylistic instead of warm, and the characters seemed caricatures of themselves (like season 5 of a comedy series where the writing devolves into self-referential insider jokes about the past seasons).

I feel terrible saying that.

Will Adventure games come back, or are we lost on the new ADHD world of interruptible short content?

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#67

Post by nottorp »

anthk wrote: post #63
jhbadger wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Tomb Raider is an "adventure game" so is Donkey Kong. Tomb Raider is basically a platformer like Donkey Kong but in 3D. Neither made actual adventure games "obsolete" because taxing your hand-eye reflexes is a different sort of fun than taxing your brain.

Also, definitively, what killed the adventure genre would be the PS1 survival horrors. You have everything there: items, combinations, loads of puzzles, action and a shitfed perspective. Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Parasite Eve... Pretty much the definition of an old 'point and click' aventure with action points.

Alone in the Dark predates those by like 4 years though...

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#68

Post by Apocryphon »

nottorp wrote: post #67
anthk wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, definitively, what killed the adventure genre would be the PS1 survival horrors. You have everything there: items, combinations, loads of puzzles, action and a shitfed perspective. Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Parasite Eve... Pretty much the definition of an old 'point and click' aventure with action points.

Alone in the Dark predates those by like 4 years though...

It does and there were also plenty of horror adventure games, but Alone of the Dark would also make the jump to RE-style survival horror.

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#69

Post by Apocryphon »

ido wrote: post #36
Apocryphon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adventure games became FPS as early as 1992 (only one year before DOOM, so maybe I'm not making much of a point here) with the coming of Ultima Underworld.

Wasn't UU an RPG rather than an adventure game?

That’s a fair point. I suppose if I wanted to focus on the first person perspective I could have mentioned Myst coming out the same year as DOOM, though I doubt it was even the first FP adventure game.

Re: The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

#70

Post by xtiansimon »

Interesting.

I recently investigated text based adventure games in Python as a possible tool to teach and evaluate outdoor wilderness safety knowledge and awareness (backpacking and overnight camping) for wilderness therapy.

While doing the research I recalled a friend showing me a text adventure game on his i386 PC. I could not understand the appeal. The possibilities the game suggested were vast, but the effective actions were unattainable--I was not able to see even the most basic level of progress before I became bored.

Now, outlining the wilderness safety "game", its obvious to me some understanding of software and programming would have made the game accessible. Then maybe a key in a room would be better understood as a metaphor of the code. In other words, a game at text level can be an attempt to model a complicated problem in an interactive program. If you can write a game where the final product is convincing (suspend disbelief), then maybe the game's model can be useful for other things. In my case instruction and evaluation of basic domain knowledge. And this level of programming awareness is useful in not getting bored (or experiencing cognitive gap between what a text implies and what the game can deliver).

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