Graphic Adventure Games are back!!!
I’m a huge fan of point-and-click Graphic Adventure Games and part of the attraction is the great graphics.
In the late 80s and early 90s this gerne of computer games almost single handed ruled the shelves in the shops. Scince the merge of realtime 3D it seems publishers find 2D games oldfashioned and Adventure Games became almost extinct.
Around 2000 The Longest Journey was released and is considered by many THE best adventure game of all time. At that time it looked like TLJ would be the last of its kind and the sequel that was announced parted from the pre-rendered graphic in vafour of realtime 3D graphics seemed to doom the gerne forever. Why on earch change sush a winning formula just to use realtime 3D graphics.
The re-emmerging adventure genre begun with a lot of 1st person games over the past years and, while attractive, the 3rd person format would soon get back into gear with Syberia.
Syberia was hailed by fans and the graphics were awesome. At this time Adventure Games were almost without exeption made in Europe, but a Canadian company stepped up to get adventure games back into american homes and the Adventure Company was born. Very soon they had an enourmous back catalog of adventure games by re-releasing many earlier games, for example Cyro’s Atlantis series.
But since a couple of years it has become clear that Adventure Games are back!! When I started MOTAS, my online adventure game in the end of 2001, the genre was almost invisible. But now 5 years later I have found new 3rd person adventure games like StillLife, The Moment Of Silence, Runaway, Secret Files Tunguska and many more.
I have created this page with an incomplete list of fairly recent adventure games and also lists a couple of trailers: http://members.home.nl/albartus/graphic_adventure_games.xml
The page is RSS compatible so it can be read into any newsfeed reader.
I used to love those games and partly for the same reason about the graphics. I’m really disappointed how most modern games don’t even use fmv cut scenes any more. That was practically your reward for completing a level.
The point and click games I liked were the Discworld series, Leisure Suit Larry (yay for cartoon nudity), Phantasmagoria etc. I don’t like Myst though. I’d really like to see those kind of games come back.
Here’s a youtube of what Leisure Suit Larry is like. Freakin’ hilarious. Don’t click it if you’re a big sissy girl and easily offended:
I’m sorry to hear your browser does not support standard XSL formatting of XML. It is visible like a ‘normal’ html file in both IE (5.5 and 6 tested) and FireFox.
What Browser and OS do you use if you don’t mind me asking? I got the impression that most browsers that conform to internet standards would have no problem with using a XSL and CSS stylesheet linked to the XML.
Ah, I see…
It’s a real shame those games aren’t available on Linux. Even MAC has only a fraction of those games. Consoles even less… Pre-rendered 3D graphics rule
If you like point & click adventure games, NUCLEOSYS, the creators of the game SCRATCHES (which I really liked) will probably release next week or so the engine that they used to make their game (SCream v1.0), with documentation. In fact, they will make it open source. I’ve been playing with v0.9 for the past week and it’s very simple to learn (it’s based on the LUA language).
Sure but the cool thing is that they don’t need a lot of processing so they run inside emulation and virtualization programs. I actually played all the games I mentioned in Virtual PC back on an old G3 PPC machine. These days it’s pretty easy to run them on both Mac and Linux.
I see they changed Broken Sword into a 3D adventure:
I still think the graphics quality of the old one was better than the 3D one and if that was back in the 90s, think how much better they can make pre-rendered games. Myst is an example of the quality that can be achieved but the latest one goes back to rubbish quality 3D. The prerendered graphics are one if the things that made the Myst series enjoyable.
You might want to add “Simon The Sorcerer 4” in your list. As far I know it shoul be ready to ship in february 2007. And it should be point’n’click in the style of two first, not in the style of that third one (which I haven’t played).
