[HN Gopher] Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)
___________________________________________________________________
Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)
Author : lifeisstillgood
Score : 104 points
Date : 2024-07-22 17:02 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (grumpygamer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (grumpygamer.com)
| sgbeal wrote:
| Noting that it's dated 2004 and starts with:
|
| > I wrote this back in 1989...
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| It was a retrospective publication - after he "retired" the
| first time.
|
| The guy was making workd wide popular games while I was still
| at school, And write this as part of a mission to ground his
| next game design and shared it internally. Plus this was pre
| www! Then he republished it years later
| rightbyte wrote:
| Like, how can he be so pessimistic when Grim Fandango was
| released some years ago?
|
| The game design advices seems fine though.
|
| [edit, some years ago compared to 2002]
| nottorp wrote:
| "I wrote this back in 1989 while I was designing Monkey
| Island."
|
| The _first_ Monkey Island. Of course the design advice seems
| fine, since he (and the old LucasArts) applied it in several
| acclaimed titles that make all the "best computer games ever"
| lists after the article was written :)
| soapdog wrote:
| Grim Fandango was released in 1998, it is literally 26 years
| old... also at that time Adventure Games were being eaten by
| RTS, JRPG, and soon after shooters. It was easy to feel low
| when looking at the scene.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| I think the adventure game portion of Lucas Arts was in the
| process of dying at that point. They didn't release another
| adventure game after Escape from Monkey Island in 2000. They
| would have already cancelled a Full Throttle sequel. They had a
| couple of attempts after this but they were both also cancelled
| within a couple of years.
|
| Grim Fandango was very good, but honestly the genre got worse
| after it, not better. Overall the introduction of 3d to the
| adventure genre had a pretty shaky start. Although there were a
| couple of exceptions, the genre in general backpedalled for a
| while.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ye in retroperspective he was right.
|
| It was at first some years ago with the 'indie' studios
| publishing on Steam I've played nice adventure games again.
| 'We Were Here'. Quite good but not very polished.
|
| I think the early 3d mix of 2d backgrounds and 3d characters
| was allright. Like Grim Fandango or Resident Evil. But ye
| many of the early pure 3d games didn't work out at all.
| tempodox wrote:
| > Real time is bad drama
|
| That paragraph recounts the reasons why RTS games never work for
| me. When I'm gaming, I want to do things in my own time, not be
| on someone else's clock.
| nottorp wrote:
| I read that as "time limits are bad drama", not how the game is
| presented.
|
| It can be badly done in a turn based game too, see XCom 2.
|
| If you don't like RTS games you don't like RTS games, but this
| is more about, say, a RTS where you also have a fixed time
| limit for missions.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I understand it as the game can adjust the time behaviour of
| NPCs to improve the players experience. If you are a spy who
| needs to meet your contact at the cafe at 1pm then getting
| delayed by an interesting side quest and arriving at 1:20, in
| the real world you screwed up and your mission is done. If
| you do that in a game then it's boring and you probably won't
| realise and wait hours at a cafe. Instead the NPC can simply
| arrive 20 minutes late. There were games then that had the
| real world clock approach and would be hard to play - I think
| for monkey island he actually built a scheduler to avoid this
| nottorp wrote:
| I've played both monkey islands multiple times and I don't
| remember any time limit. Everything went at the speed of
| plot.
| crb wrote:
| As opposed to Maniac Mansion, where you could die if you
| drained the pool and waited too long to refill it.
|
| (Among many other ways, which you can find here:
| https://www.maniacmansionfan.50webs.com/waystolose.html)
| nottorp wrote:
| ... and then Gilbert saw the light, wrote this article
| and the rest is history.
| pimlottc wrote:
| The server you linked seems to be down, here's an
| archived version:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240529033339/https://www.ma
| nia...
| _flux wrote:
| I recall you need to do the mug'o'grog-puzzle fast.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I think the criticism is of less self-contained time
| limits that involve multiple puzzles/locations. You can
| retry the mug'o'grog puzzle if you're not quick enough, I
| think.
| nottorp wrote:
| You sort of do, but you can always get a new mug if i
| remember well.
| dudinax wrote:
| If you stay under water for ten minutes you'll drown in MI
| 1. It's one of the few ways you can die.
| NeoTar wrote:
| Even then it's a faux death isn't it? Doesn't Elaine tell
| you that you could not have died there since the story is
| told in flashback, so you don't lose any progress?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I think for monkey island he actually built a scheduler
| to avoid this
|
| That wouldn't make any sense, since nothing in Monkey
| Island moves.
|
| (Exceptions: During Act I, the cook periodically leaves the
| SCUMM Bar kitchen to visit the tables. Also during Act I,
| you can trigger the shopkeeper to walk to the Sword
| Master's house; he will return when triggered by your
| actions in the shop. Movement can happen between Acts. On
| Monkey Island, you have to lead a monkey from its location
| to somewhere else. Herman Toothrot will show up in the
| cannibal village at some point after you're already
| required to have picked up the banana picker; his being
| there is not relevant to anything. Otherwise, nothing ever
| moves.)
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > It can be badly done in a turn based game too, see XCom 2.
|
| I disagree. I hated turn limits in XCom1 (we're talking about
| remakes, not original 1993 game, right?), because they
| weren't really justified by the game world, but in XCom2 when
| you are the scrappy resistance on quick hit and run missions
| it really helps build up tension.
| nottorp wrote:
| > we're talking about remakes,
|
| Yes.
|
| > not original 1993 game, right?
|
| The original 1993 game has a great example of how to put
| time pressure on the player without an explicit time
| pressure: terror missions. Diddle around and you get an
| army of chrysalids on your butt.
|
| > you are the scrappy resistance on quick hit and run
| missions it really helps build up tension.
|
| They had a demo day. I played the first mission, or maybe
| made it to the second. Ran out of turns because I explored
| an empty corner on the way to the objective. Uninstalled.
|
| And yes, i finished the first xcom remake multiple times.
| Hated every bomb disarm mission with a passion.
|
| If you ask me, they kinda painted themselves into a corner
| with the aliens on fixed patrol routes that you could just
| wait around until the position was perfect. You couldn't do
| that in the original xcom. But instead of fixing that, they
| added ... turn limits. It's just bad game design.
|
| Possibly too much world of warcraft. I've seen this trend
| in games starting a few years after wow was out. People
| thinking that if Blizzard does it into a MMO, it's okay to
| do it in a single player game too.
| nkrisc wrote:
| How does WoW relate to turn limits?
| nottorp wrote:
| To fixed patrol routes. A younger designer who played too
| many MMOs can think that's the only way to place enemies
| in a game: either standing in one place or patrolling a
| fixed route.
|
| That may work in a rpg, but look where it got the tactics
| game in xcom 2.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I'm still not seeing the connection to WoW. Games did
| that long before WoW ever existed.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I disagree on this. I played through the remake once and
| never tried it again. But XCom2 was great and i liked it
| far, far better than the first part. Btw in most timed
| missions you don't lose on the spot when the timer runs
| out, you just face more and more reinforcements, which is
| completely justified by the setting.
| nottorp wrote:
| Not in the first or second mission. Way to welcome new
| players, especially ones who are already suspicious since
| they read the reviews...
| bicolao wrote:
| With XCOM 2 if you miss a tile in the last turn, you lose
| the mission. It's not a great execution even if it does
| apply time pressure. Long War or other mods handle this
| much better by bringing in reinforcement, so you can't stay
| for long, but you won't lose just because you miscount the
| tiles.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Without a time limit, every game just becomes an optimization
| game. Like playing a board game with a player who will spend
| two hours thinking each of their turns through to make sure
| it's the optimal play.
|
| If you like doing that on your own, go for it. But for me it
| just becomes boring and not fun. Not fun because if I choose to
| spend a reasonable amount of time I know I'm leaving good
| things on the table, and boring if I play every turn optimally.
| With a time limit, the game becomes about prioritization and
| making the most of a limited resource (time).
| oasisaimlessly wrote:
| So... a constrained optimization game.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Yes, any game with a goal can be described that way. I
| still think there's still a meaningful difference in terms
| of gameplay.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Not really, you're just optimizing for some metric that
| includes time instead of some other resource
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > Real time is bad drama
|
| Not necessarily. The ending sequence with the plane on a motorway
| in "Full Throttle" had me on the edge of my seat when I played it
| for the first time, and on replays, too.
| nox101 wrote:
| I see this is a 2004 post of a 1989 article.
|
| Still, I'm not sure what the definition of "Adventure Game" is.
| To me, it's usually a game with graphics at the top (not required
| but most common), and 4 or so lines of text at the bottom. Some
| times you walk a character around. Other times you just type
| "exit door", "open drawer", "take key" (or pick from a menu)
|
| Those games might have been dead in some form (King Quest, Monkey
| Island, etc...) but the basic form has been alive and kicking (a)
| in the form of Japanese story games and (b) as indie games on
| places like itch.io. It's covered with "story adventure games"
|
| Of course most of those games would benefit from this list of
| rules.
| amiga386 wrote:
| It's boom and bust. When adventure games became graphical, they
| became massively popular, one of the top-selling genres of
| games. But since 2000 they were in decline, almost to the point
| of death. Gamers wanted 3D shoot-em-ups or simulators or other
| genres, more than they wanted the old point'n'click adventures
| they'd been playing for the past decade.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game#Decline_(2000%E...
|
| They haven't really come back, in that form, except as appeals
| to afficionados. _Deponia_ (2012-2016), _Syberia_ (2002-),
| _Dreamfall_ (1999-2017) did quite well, but I don 't know how
| many people who hadn't played an adventure game before would
| willingly pick them up. Then there are nostalgia-bait games
| which Ron Gilbert is especially guilty of, e.g. _Thimble Park_
| , _The Cave_ , _Return to Monkey Island_. You could also add
| the remake of _Riven_ to that list.
|
| If by Japanese story games you mean visual novels... they're
| not really the same genre, even if technically they have you
| moving around the place collecting things to solve puzzles. I'd
| also argue that anything David Cage has done (Farhenheit, Heavy
| Rain, etc.) are _not_ adventure games, he chases after
| "interactive movies" as mentioned in the article.
| cubefox wrote:
| A few years ago, adventure games had a revival on
| smartphones, especially with The Room series and the Cube
| Escape / Rusty Lake games. They were greatly helped by the
| fact that A) adventure games have no action and B) most
| action games do not work well with touchscreens.
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| Telltale Games was big for a decade with their adventure
| games, in which Gilbert was somewhat involved as well. The
| Walking Dead from 2012 was one of the best selling video
| games of all times.
| amiga386 wrote:
| I grant you, Telltale did make a good number of adventure
| games in the classic style, e.g. Sam & Max, and then also
| applied them to licenses like Wallace & Gromit and Back to
| the Future... but I feel The Walking Dead was a different
| type of game. More a narrative and character led game, like
| a visual novel, rather than a puzzle game of any kind...
| and as that was so successful, they stopped making the
| point'n'click puzzle-type adventure games.
|
| Would you consider them to be the same genre, an evolution,
| or a different genre (that perhaps Telltale spawned?)
| BeetleB wrote:
| For me they are part of the same genre, but a different
| subgenre. They are more like choose your own adventure
| stories.
|
| But still very satisfying!
| rererereferred wrote:
| Not sure about visual novels, but the Japanese Zero Escape
| and Ace Attorney series are great. Maybe they meant those.
| amiga386 wrote:
| The Ace Attorney series are visual novel games; I'd call
| them a crossover of genres.
|
| They have the presentation of a visual novel (first person
| perspective, characters look straight out at you, most of
| game is paging through dialogue), but they also have
| gameplay elements of traditional adventure games (looking
| around multiple locations for clues, try every item in the
| inventory to see what response you get, etc.) - I think in
| Japan they'd call that an adventure game for being overly
| interactive, but in the West we'd still call it a visual
| novel.
|
| I haven't tried the Zero Escape series, but after a quick
| look at one on Youtube, it does look like that same mix of
| visual novel with adventure game / puzzle elements?
| sersi wrote:
| Adventure games that have elements of visual novels have
| existed for a long time in Japan even though they were
| often not translated and sold outside of Japan. Examples
| of this are the The Portopia Serial Murder Case (from
| Yuji Horii who wrote the scenario for Chrono Trigger),
| the Jake Hunter games, etc...
| gs17 wrote:
| I'd add Danganronpa to the list for people able to stomach
| a much more "anime" take on the subgenre.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I loved it so much!
| Retric wrote:
| The original Monkey Island was a smash hit for its time and
| sold significantly less than 1 million copies.
|
| So, while adventure games didn't take off like 3D shoot-em-
| ups that doesn't mean they actually declined even if they
| aren't posting 200+ million GTA 5 numbers. Monkey Island 2
| special edition sold 459k units on steam that's far better
| than the original Money Island 2's 25k on launch.
| pandemic_region wrote:
| In all fairness, it was easier to get the cracked warez
| version back then then to find a shop that had these games.
| At least in my country. So maybe sales numbers don't tell
| everything in this case.
| BeetleB wrote:
| The genre has been doing well ever since The Walking Dead
| games came out.
|
| I recommend people play Life is Strange.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| The Telltale version? Telltale actually went out of
| business a few years ago.
|
| Even so, those aren't akin to the classic adventure games
| like Maniac Mansion, Secret of Monkey Island, etc. They are
| more like "Choose your own adventure" novels - but a major
| criticism is you always end up in the same place at the end
| so your choices are largely irrelevant.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Telltale went out of business, but the genre is doing
| fine. Others continue to make games.
|
| > They are more like "Choose your own adventure" novels -
| but a major criticism is you always end up in the same
| place at the end so your choices are largely irrelevant.
|
| They _are_ like Choose Your Own Adventure novels, but I
| think it 's unfair to say you end up with the same
| ending. I know games where, based on your decisions,
| people may die in the middle of the game. Whether they're
| alive or not does lead to a different story.
|
| Even in The Walking Dead series, there's a game with a
| very different ending depending on who you choose to get
| killed.
|
| The games are much easier than the old adventure games of
| the 90's. For me, though, that's a blessing. I simply
| cannot devote as much time to solving those types of
| games, and I appreciate they've made adventure games for
| someone like myself.
|
| The point is that if you liked adventure games, you'll
| likely enjoy these games as well.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| I have a firm belief that the original point-and-click
| adventure boom was an accident. A lot of previously popular
| but now niche genres follow a pattern: They applied some
| constraint to their interaction that lead to (relatively)
| high-fidelity graphics and/or storytelling on weak hardware
| and with small budgets. Once technology advanced to the point
| where said graphical fidelity could be achieved without those
| constraints, all but a few hardcore players left for other
| genres. Fighting games (where the machine could spend its
| entire resource budget on two characters and a largely static
| stage), rail shooters (where the fixed camera and scripted
| encounters allowed the designers to very easily know how many
| entities would be onscreen in any given frame, even to the
| point of being almost entirely pre-rendered), racing games
| (cars are easy to model, fixed tracks give the designers full
| control of entity visibility, sprite scaling allowed for
| 3D-ish effects before 3D acceleration existed), flight
| simulators and space games (the sky/space is easy to render,
| planes and spaceships are also easy to model compared to
| humans). None of these genres are as popular as they once
| were, probably due to the fact that even a go-anywhere open
| world game with hundreds of living entities on screen can run
| on modest hardware these days, so there's no benefit from a
| graphical perspective of applying those restrictions.
|
| The adventure game and the visual novel once occupied this
| position. By being a series of (potentially entirely pre-
| rendered) stills that could only be interacted with in a few
| predefined ways, you could make impressive-looking scenes
| even on 16-bit hardware. It would be a very long time before
| anything as impressive as Myst could be made to run in real
| time on consumer-grade hardware. I suspect a lot of people
| only bought these games because they looked pretty, and once
| that edge was gone, they realised that maybe they didn't
| really like the genre in the first place.
| sersi wrote:
| I think that there's another factor to consider. The market
| for computer game was both much smaller in the 80s and
| early 90s but also tended to be much more educated. So,
| games that are essentially puzzles with stories would have
| much more appeal to that group of people.
| a1o wrote:
| I really recommend playing games from Wadjet Eye, like Gemini
| Rue, Blackwell, Unavowed, they are all point and clicky
| adventure games. I think that adventure games aren't dead, they
| are just a niche.
| two_handfuls wrote:
| I remember pkayung the adventure game "Milkmaid of the Milky
| Way" and loving the style. It's indie, and the text just
| rhymes all the time. http://machineboy.com/milkmaid/
| tmtvl wrote:
| I really (really, really,...) love Technobabylon, it's my
| favourite Wadjet Eye-style game. Shardlight was also pretty
| good.
| Gormo wrote:
| Primordia is fantastic in terms of art and story.
|
| Resonance has some unique mechanics that are actually
| effective at restoring some of the reactivity and world-
| building flavor that was lost when adventure games moved from
| parser to point-and-click interfaces (while still using a
| solely point-and-click interface). It's also a really good
| game on top of that.
| derbOac wrote:
| I think "adventure game" has broadened a bit in meaning maybe.
| To me it means a game where the outcomes don't depend on
| response speed or dexterity in a game task and where those game
| tasks are diagetic content within a narrative. So basically
| puzzles only, where the puzzles are a natural intrinsic part of
| a story.
|
| Everything else is UI. You can have traditional adventure
| games, first-person adventure games, third-person adventure
| games that are not really traditional, and so forth.
|
| Just my opinion though. Traditionally "adventure game" meant a
| sort of text-driven story game without combat or dexterity-
| based tasks, and it often still does. But I see the term get
| applied more broadly than that.
| wavemode wrote:
| I think "story-driven game with no combat or dexterity" covers
| it decently well (story-driven in the sense that, the story is
| the primary, usually sole, focus - making "progress" in the
| game is equivalent to finding out what happens next).
|
| Though some people tend to consider visual novels as being
| distinct from adventure games, with a stipulation that a visual
| novel has no "overworld" (i.e. you don't walk around on a map -
| neither graphically nor textually - you just move from one
| "scene" to the next. You move forward in time rather than
| N/S/E/W in space.)
| m463 wrote:
| I think there are still "classic" adventure games around like
| Deponia, but they run into those problems.
|
| I think the way around this is to make things less trickier,
| but at some point you get a story-based game/visual novel or
| maybe a "walking simulators" like firewatch.
| asimovfan wrote:
| I agree with this and don't worry friends! I am going to make the
| best adventure game ever soon! Have the plot ready already.
| luqtas wrote:
| you could make it with any violent elements ^-^
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Have the plot ready already.
|
| The article stresses that the game shouldn't be thought of as a
| movie, but... having played some high-budget adventure games
| and some low-budget adventure games, it's clear that the
| quality of the game is basically just the quality of the plot.
| Good writing and bad art and software make for a good adventure
| game. Bad writing and good art and software make for a terrible
| adventure game.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| As long as the puzzles are at least acceptable in quality. No
| amount of writing could save, say, puzzles of the quality of
| Colony Ship for Sale, Cheap.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Out of modern takes I really liked the game "The Captain" that's
| like a chain of old point and click adventures strung together
| with sort of rougelite like mechanics.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| Looks good. Gemini Rue is good if you're looking for something
| adventure gamey. Return of the Obra Dinn is good if you're
| looking for something related but different.
| zokier wrote:
| It's interesting how this was republished just at the cusp of the
| rise of indie games. And indie games certainly have been
| exploring lot of the ideas mentioned.
| freetanga wrote:
| I think the genre has gotten smaller, but higher quality. Games
| are more a work of love than a marketing hype.
|
| Thimbleweed Park, Kathy Rain, whispers of a machine, Disco
| Elyseum, Unusual Findings, Sexy Brutale, Darside Detective,
| blacksad, obra-dimm, takes two, Orwell, unheard, shadows of a
| doubt, 12 minutes...
|
| I actually enjoy these slow-burn games a lot
| ykonstant wrote:
| I do agree the quality has increased significantly; we view old
| adventure games through quite a bit of rose-tint and tend to
| ignore significant warts. To add to your great selection, I
| think the whole Blackwell series is a modern adventure game
| masterpiece.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > blacksad
|
| Is that based on the comic?
| freetanga wrote:
| I think so, never heard of the comic
| pfdietz wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacksad
| sersi wrote:
| Yes it's based on the comic and absolutely worth playing
| if you like me love the comic.
| cmiller1 wrote:
| To be entirely fair, the guy who wrote this article CREATED
| Thimbleweed Park.
| freetanga wrote:
| I know. And while I have lots of respect for him, I felt the
| ending was a bit meh
| BeetleB wrote:
| Meh is an understatement. The ending was terrible.
|
| Gameplay was great to that point though.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| The ending was uninspiring at best unlike the rest which
| is very enjoyable.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| That's exactly how I felt about Escape from Monkey
| Island. The gameplay was great (although the 3D graphics
| were awful...), but the ending completely ruined it.
| soneca wrote:
| Just so it doesn't seem _that_ unanimous, I feel always
| obligated to say that I enjoyed Thimbleweed Park's ending
| as well as Return to Monkey Island's ending. RtMI ending
| actually grows in me each time I think or read about it.
| I consider now to be one of the best endings I ever saw
| in a game (I do not play that many games though)
| sersi wrote:
| Was disappointed also by the ending of Monkey Island 2 and
| Return to Monkey Island. Ron Gilbert seems to love going
| meta and breaking the fourth wall to the point where I'd
| almost be shocked if he released a game that didn't do
| that.
| fsckboy wrote:
| sounds like you need a game where the protagonist is
| clearly trying to break the 4th wall, but can't. It's a
| puzzle you need to figure out.
| Gormo wrote:
| Don't forget Wadjet Eye's entire catalog, including the
| Blackwell series and especially Primordia, Resonance, and
| Technobabylon.
| toasteros wrote:
| Resonance will always be quite funny to me. You start the
| game as a dorky blond named Ed who unravels a government
| conspiracy with worldwide ramifications.
|
| Only a few weeks after the game's release date was announced,
| we heard a dorky blond named Ed speak from a hotel room in
| Hong Kong.
| parpfish wrote:
| I'm looking forward to see it how modern language models can
| improve these games.
|
| One peeve I've always had is that in a game like disco elysium,
| I don't feel like I (the player) am solving a mystery because
| dialogue trees are always leading you to the answer. Instead
| I'm just watching the guy on the screen solve it. Dialogue with
| an explicit tree would be rad
| uniq7 wrote:
| Games like Return of the Obra Dinn or The Case of the Golden
| Idol may give you exactly that feeling.
| quitit wrote:
| Adding these titles into the mix:
|
| - Hugo's House of Horrors
|
| - Maniac Mansion
|
| - The Goonies II
|
| - The Cave
|
| - Machinarium / Botanicula / Samorost (put together because
| they're, at their core, the same idea.)
|
| - Love you to bits.
|
| And I think these also give that adventure story feel (find
| objects & solve puzzles to progress a story), even if they
| don't transport the player to far-away locations
|
| - The Room series
|
| - There is no game
|
| - The Rusty Lake series
|
| - The Stanley Parable
|
| - Tangle Tower
|
| - Chuchel
| diffuse_l wrote:
| He wrote this piece in 1989, and then went on and designed Monkey
| Island 2, which did things like having solutions to puzzels
| depend on other puzzels in differnet islands in the most annoying
| way possible, on purpose.
|
| So you have that...
| layer8 wrote:
| That's really ironic. I liked the _idea_ of the LucasArts
| adventures very much, but they generally turned out to be too
| "puzzly" for me, in that you got stuck if you didn't "get" what
| the puzzle wanted from you, you missed some object you needed
| to pick up, or you didn't mindlessly try out every object-verb-
| item combination or every dialog path. And very often, things I
| wanted to try that seemed sensible weren't possible.
| santoshalper wrote:
| Designing a good adventure game is much easier said than done.
| I would eventually love to see him write that annotated
| version.
| ferfumarma wrote:
| > in the most annoying way possible, on purpose
|
| Can you elaborate? You are making a really strong statement of
| intent.
|
| I tried to search ("monkey island 2 design criticism") for what
| you might mean, but I don't see any obvious description.
| zug_zug wrote:
| I'm not GP, but I've played a few adventure games and was
| very excited to try Monkey Island because of its sense of
| humor and style. But it felt basically unplayable to me
| (basically it felt like the only strategy was brute force),
| here's the puzzle that made me give up:
|
| Give the jawbreaker to Blondebeard to loosen his gold tooth,
| then give him the pack of gum. When he blows the bubble with
| the tooth in it, pop it with the pin and the tooth will drop
| out. Get the gold tooth, then exit the shop. (To get the gold
| tooth on Mega-monkey, chew the pack of gum to get the chewed
| gum. Inhale from the helium balloon, use the gold tooth in
| the chewed gum and then chew the tooth in gum. It will float
| out the window of the shop and land in the mudpuddle outside.
| Use the pie pan in the mudpuddle to get the tooth).
| tripa wrote:
| You're describing a puzzle from the Curse of Monkey Island,
| aka Monkey Island 3. Ron Gilbert had no involvement there.
| NeoTar wrote:
| That's not Monkey Island 2 (Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's
| Revenge), it's Monkey Island 3 (The Curse of Monkey
| Island), which Ron Gilbert was not involved with (I
| believe).
| dsego wrote:
| That was the toughest puzzle in Monkey Island 3 for me, I
| remember being stuck on it as a kid for a long time, weeks
| maybe, until we read the solution somewhere, either a
| website or a game magazine. And it was the one puzzle
| keeping us from progressing to the next CD I believe. My
| father, not understanding english, was one to try every
| item with everything, brute forcing his way around, even he
| couldn't crack it. I think on easy mode this puzzle doesn't
| require all the steps. The other tough one was the dueling
| banjos, I think I had to write down the sequences on a
| piece of paper. It's still my favorite game ever, left such
| a big impact on me, from the intro music, humorous cut
| scenes, drawing style, the sense of wonder and excitement,
| everything was just perfect.
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| I remember that puzzle from Monkey Island 3. I mean, yes,
| the game is tricky but think about all the hints the game
| is giving you: ,,gold tooth", ,,jaw breaker" and I think in
| the dialog tree with Blondebeard you could compliment him
| about the gold tooth ... and the mud puddle where you dig
| for gold using a pan like like gold diggers did in the
| cliches about the gold rush. So I mean it could be worse.
|
| You get the hang for these kinds of puzzles once you played
| a couple of them.
|
| On the other hand what I hate most in adventure games are
| random logic puzzles to open a door or find out where you
| need to go next. This is usually a cheap way to slow the
| game down. Lucas Arts was guilty of this kind of thing
| after Ron Gilbert left in ,,The Dig", too, which still was
| a great game nevertheless.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| In my experience Monkey Island 1 was still relatively
| reasonable with the puzzles but 2 was ridiculous.
| wslh wrote:
| Curious about how LLMs for generating graphics can revive
| adventure games and have a second thought about this article.
|
| Generating images in Adventure Games was a bottleneck since they
| were mainly static and fixed within a small set. Now you can
| generate original images based on the adventure situation.
| Gormo wrote:
| Adventure games have already been revived -- this article is
| from 20 years ago, and there was a sustained resurgence in the
| genre that began only a few years later.
|
| LLMs are _terrible_ for this sort of thing.
| soneca wrote:
| The linked post about who killed adventure games is pretty good
| too:
|
| https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/79.html
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Off topic but I find gendered writing really jarring and every
| time I read "she" instead of "he" I get jerked out of the flow of
| understanding.
|
| I get why the authors do it .... they don't want to be sexist, so
| they flip he to she.
|
| It's much easier to read the gender neutral "they" rather than
| "she".
|
| For me anyway.
| susam wrote:
| The article is from 1989 and this used to be one of the common
| writing styles back then. Of course, times have changed now and
| (at least to my ears) "they" sounds more natural than "she" in
| the current century.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| >> The article is from 1989 and this used to be one of the
| common writing styles back then
|
| I'm from the past and that's not my recollection.
| relaxing wrote:
| You probably blocked it out in an act of small-minded
| cognitive dissonance.
| TillE wrote:
| Tabletop RPG books c. 1989 were doing all kinds of stuff
| with generic pronouns. I believe Vampire (1991) primarily
| but not exclusively used "she". Other games would use "she"
| for the GM and "he" for players, stuff like that.
| illusive4080 wrote:
| Classically 'he' was used to be more universal. It was always
| understood to include women as well. But that language is
| frowned upon. When I read 'they' I think plural people not
| singular like 'he.'
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > When I read 'they' I think plural people not singular like
| 'he.'
|
| I'm sure you're aware that it's usually obvious in context,
| like many ambiguous uses of language. For example,
|
| > Every time the player has to restore a saved game, or pound
| [their] head on the desk in frustration
|
| Changing "his" to "their" doesn't make the phrase any more
| difficult to read, imo. Maybe it's just something you'll pick
| up with practice.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think there's always been a good case for "they" rather
| than "he" in those contexts, e.g. "the player" being referred
| to as "they."
|
| When speaking about "the player," you're not just speaking
| about _one_ player, but anywhere from tens to tens of
| millions of players. That 's a "they." And as they're all
| acting individually and independently within tens to tens of
| millions of individual game sessions, it makes sense to treat
| that "they" singularly.
|
| So from that perspective, it's not really a desexed
| reference, but a reference to a multitude of people. But even
| if you're talking about the person hearing a Catholic
| confession, and it would always be safe to refer to each
| _instantiated member of the class_ as "he," "they" still
| makes sense. _They_ are a bunch of priests.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If you went to school before about 1990 (?) you would get
| marked down in any writing assignment for using "they" in a
| singular sense. I did and I still notice it when reading.
| Sometimes the context allows only a singular interpretation but
| often it doesn't and it causes a mental stumble trying to
| figure out what the author means.
|
| We learned that "he" is neutral unless the subject is already
| known to be male. I agree that using "she" in a neutral sense
| is somewhat distracting.
| vundercind wrote:
| Graduated early 2000s. Gender neutral "he" was taught as
| correct throughout primary and secondary school, neither
| "they" nor "she" was permitted. "She" didn't become common in
| writing-in-the-wild until after 2010. You'd see it in
| academic writing occasionally before then, or explicitly
| feminist pieces maybe.
|
| "They" was more common but came off as very informal or low-
| register (to those taught the other way, at least).
|
| It did take me a long time to stop going "wait, who? I missed
| who we're talking about" and start searching backwards in the
| text when encountering gender-neutral "she". Did indeed make
| things hard to read for years.
| djur wrote:
| Singular "they" was more controversial at the time and was
| considered ungrammatical by some. "She" is unquestionably
| grammatical and yet it seems to be persistently shocking for
| people to read. (I would prefer "they" today, but this is from
| the '80s.)
| twoodfin wrote:
| Not an adventure game, but it's amusing the degree to which
| Infocom & Douglas Adams flaunted rules like this to the extreme
| of high art for _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I wondered if at least some of Gilbert's criticism was aimed at
| HHGttG. I'm sure there's at least one case of "pick it up early
| on or you'll later find out you've wasted most of the game" and
| one of his 'bad puzzle' descriptions sounded like it could have
| been a nod to the infamous Babel fish puzzle.
|
| HHGttG was incredibly well written and creative, but I think it
| was probably a bit 'mid' as an adventure game.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Infocom made (almost) nothing _but_ adventure games. From
| 1980-1989 they made no less than thirty-nine text adventures.
| And a database. Which lead directly to their downfall.
|
| They never made a _point-and-click_ adventure game, but they
| were the _kings_ of the adventure game when you could make a
| pretty compelling argument that the images the home computers
| of the time could produce were much cruder than what words
| could evoke in the mind of the player.
| djur wrote:
| Infocom games were adventure games, just text adventures. The
| tricks in Hitchhiker's are fun but not really great for
| playability. The Interactive Fiction community has spent the
| last few decades trying to figure out ways to get that same
| kind of surprise and lateral thinking into a game without
| making it feel unfair. Most of those games are for people far
| more advanced in their puzzle thinking than I.
|
| ("flouted" not "flaunted")
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| I appreciate the dig at Sierra games and their reliance on
| missable items. But he wrote that puzzles should make sense, and
| went on to give us the rubber chicken with a pulley in the
| middle!
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I _think_ that chicken was a satirical dig along the very same
| lines. IIRC, it clearly described the pulley and the resulting
| puzzle - using a pulley on a wire - isn 't exactly cryptic.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| As opposed to, say, the "monkey" wrench in MI2?
| BeetleB wrote:
| I prefer to call them interactive narratives as opposed to
| interactive movies.
|
| Aside: What Remains of Edith Finch is perhaps the most powerful
| narrative game ever. Not an adventure game per se. But extremely
| powerful storytelling.
| ykonstant wrote:
| I love it too; I also love the secret layouts of the house.
| o11c wrote:
| Full title is much less click-baity:
|
| Why Adventure Games Suck And What We Can Do About It (1989)
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Interesting parallels to games today.
|
| > It is bad design to put puzzles and situations into a game that
| require a player to die in order to learn what not to do next
| time.
|
| I feel like this is not good advice anymore. Nowadays dying is
| more common in games and less intrusive. In some games it's even
| canonical that the character is dying. It's become less intrusive
| and thus more ok. Even for puzzles I think this is bad advice.
| Puzzles probably engage the player more when they're solved right
| or solved wrong; vs when they're either solved right or in limbo
| of not being solved yet. It encourages feedback on your solving
| path.
| jprete wrote:
| The modern version would be "don't severely penalize players
| for failures they can't prevent". I think in 1989 having to
| start over was considered less of a punishment, because games
| tended to clock in at low-single-digit hours with perfect play
| (assuming the game could even be finished).
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Nobody wants to replay the portion that they've figured out
| again and again to get to the part they haven't. It took game
| developers a long time to figure that one out, for some reason.
| Heck, they still sometimes put a checkpoint too far back, but
| that probably comes down to testing.
|
| I'd say Super Meat Boy was probably a big turning point as far
| as that goes.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Ludonarrative dissonance is, I think, my biggest turn off in
| gaming. Problem is, the vast majority of games have it because
| they try to be like movies with a set story and cutscenes and
| dialogue. So yes, to me Adventure games suck and utterly destroy
| my suspension of disbelief without fail
| sqeaky wrote:
| I'm not familiar with that word, Ludonarrative, but yeah
| constant interruptions to suspension of disbelief are a huge
| pain in the ass. And the Wikipedia page on it goes into deep
| and nuanced examples when we have just basic failures.
|
| I'm not just talking point and click adventure games, I mean
| any game that breaks its own rules just gets on my nerves. If
| it's a Sci-Fi setting you tell me there's FTL, fine but then
| when I can't use that in a context where it it follows the
| other game rules to do a thing I want to do, that just ruins it
| for me. How many open World RPGs are there with just invisible
| walls in a place that looks totally passable? When in cutscenes
| or story elements the characters can just walk through that
| area or have no problem turning on the FTL.
|
| I know it's a lot of effort, but attention to detail hearing
| about the end result is the only real fix this kind of shit.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Ludonarrative
|
| This is describing the _rules_ of a game as related to the
| _narrative_ of the game.
|
| A ludonarrative dissonance would be the _narrative_ of the
| game being "we need to hurry and rescue the thing!" but then
| the rules/mechanics of the game having no punishment for not
| actually hurrying and rescuing the thing or maybe no support
| for even understanding the time taken by the player.
|
| Similarly the mechanics of the game can clash with the
| narrative. The narrative says the player character is a
| strong hero but then with the game mechanics they're killed
| by a rat in the forest.
| parpfish wrote:
| once you learn that term, you see it everywhere in games.
|
| Two that always bug me:
|
| - game narrative introduces urgency ("we have to hurry up and
| catch X before it's too late!"), but time doesn't matter at
| all. And in fact you're encouraged to grind away on sidequest
| and collect items before continuing that urgent main story
|
| - early game has a city surrounded by weak monsters and some
| local needs you to hunt down a few that have been bothering
| them. two towns over there's another town of normal people
| surrounded by monsters 100x stronger but they don't care or
| need your help.
| asimpletune wrote:
| Does anyone else think Guysbrush Threepwood is based off of Burt
| Lancaster?
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32936015 - Sept 2022 (57
| comments)
|
| _Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625578 - March 2020 (104
| comments)
|
| _Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15569221 - Oct 2017 (1
| comment)
| mancerayder wrote:
| Has anyone tried Lucy Dreaming? It's first of all a British
| version of games like Monkey Island (which inspired it) including
| dry British wit
|
| Secondly the puzzles are hard but very very reasonable, as in I
| never felt they were unfair. I think they did that as a lesson
| from the classics, where sometimes Brute Force was the only way
| objects and environment needed to interact to unlock more of the
| game.
|
| An enormous amount of thought was put into it, and I hope more
| games come out like it. I'm truly tired of FPS, grinding 'work
| simulator ' type games, and multiplayer games which predominate
| on Steam.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-07-27 23:07 UTC)