Limbo

Limbo is a game about two things: platforming and death. But it's also about gigantic spiders, perilous pits, murderous hotel signage, facades of danger, and mysterious tribal children who want to kill you.

Because of this, you could say Limbo is a game of two sides, of which all games are divided between: gameplay and story. Gameplay consists of the acts of interaction the player performs: jumping pits, pulling levers, pushing boxes, and evading danger. Story is the meaningful connotation those acts take on through visuals, sound, and writing. Combine the two and you are no longer a series of pixels jumping across an empty pit with spikes, but you are a lost boy with glasses, evading a gigantic spider, and searching for his missing sister.

Limbo is a game that takes advantage of this. It doesn't isolate its puzzles from its story but uses its story to infer meaning beyond its puzzles. What about games that focus on gameplay without story, such as Bejeweled, Solitaire, or Tetris? These games are fun on their own but what does story bring to the table? Story elicits an emotional connection between players and the game. Story has the power to create feeling, to give you a reason to play, to interact with your mind while your hands interact with the game. It has the power to re-contextualize actions so that they take on a meaningful form greater than the sum of their parts. Instead of Limbo being a game just about evading traps and progressing through a world, it instead becomes a game about an oppressed boy searching for his sister through many different perils. And I would argue that's where the real magic of games comes from: when stories and games work together to create something more beautiful than their isolated parts.

Limbo is a beautiful game also because it does not force any of these story elements on the player. There is no direct exposition, no text, and no narrator telling you who you are or why you are doing it. Therefore the meaning of the story is left up to the player to infer. When a group of tribal children begin to attack you, the player is left to wonder why are these children attacking me and who are they? One of the more poignant moments in the game is when the player sees one of these other children operating a fake gigantic spider after the player killed the real spider earlier. Moments like these raise narrative implications that go beyond their immediacy. Does this mean that this entire world of Limbo is a facade? That these children control all the traps and deviousness out to kill you? Such questions are never answered (for better or worse).

In that sense there is no narrative progression in the game; it works instead as an atmospheric exploration of the world the player inhabits, which inevitably must be about death. The core experience of the game revolves around platforming, yes, but everything and nearly everyone is out to kill you. And the amount of times you die as the player reinforces this notion of despair. If the game were to make a final narrative say, then it must be about death--what does it mean that this boy dies so many times? That everyone wants to kill him? That even the boy would risk so much for his sister? It may be assumed that she must be the one person not attempting to kill the boy but the ending of the game leaves this ambiguous, which remains a perhaps better thing.

Limbo is a successful game through its use of signifiers, things that take on new meaning based on their appearance or context. You are not just a player solving puzzles; you are a boy fighting for his life. This is more than what Braid did, which I commend Limbo for. It is in the meaning of the gameplay in Limbo that the true story emerges, not in narrative bookmarks left for us at the ends.

Gemini Rue: coming FEB 24, 2011

Gemini Rue
Coming Feb 24, 2011 to a PC near you

Boryokudan Rue = Gemini Rue

Hi, to the three followers of my blog!

Announcement: I have changed the name of Boryokudan Rue to Gemini Rue. Official Press Release as follows:

--

Boryokudan Rue is now Gemini Rue. Tell your friends!

Official Link here.

Josh

La Croix Pan Service Announcement

That's right kids! You can now play your favorite game in two more languages!
Download Now!

Here are the last panel's lines for your copy+paste+translate convenience:
Потому что почему замените этот внушительный неразборчив текст с тарабарщиной?

честно, рыбы cow опьянение поскаканное расстегаем потока неразличимый tomorrow' дуют пожарными рукавами, котор вне; истиратель телефона тарелки s моя.

La Croix Pan Nominations

So AGS has an award ceremony every January/February for the most distinguished AGS games of the past year. And, the nominations for this award ceremony have just been announced. There are a total of 17 categories and I'm happy to say that La Croix Pan has five nominations, but they are in the categories I expected.

Best Background Art
Best Short Game
Best Animation
Best Programming
Best Use of Sound
La Croix Pan


Hooray...

Beneath a Steel Sky

Beneath a Steel Sky by Revolution Software (1994)

Analysis:
One interesting thing about the graphics is that most of the backgrounds use vanishing points that are well off the top of the screen. This allows the characters to walk around quite freely without scaling--an interesting design choice.
Another thing I noticed is just how short the game is. It can probably be beaten in 2-3 hours, but then again, so can most old adventure games nowadays.
It's also interesting to note the direction of the game's atmosphere. The story and themes itself are quite dark, but many of the character sprites and music tracks are comical in nature. I'm not sure if these two balancing acts are a good or bad thing.

What's wrong with this game
The Intro: it doesn't really explain what's happening. You are a prisoner being taken back from the wilderness when your helicopter crashes, but for all you know, it could've just been a joy ride by three happy-go-lucky mechanics on lunch break.

The Puzzle-Design:

2 instances (out of many) where the puzzle design fails -

1 - You are supposed to go inside this cathedral (but the game never tells you that, it's just one of those problems that you solve out of knowing it's a problem) blocked by a guard. So in order to do so you must:

- Take a videotape of a cat from a fat man's apartment.

- Tell a lady that you are the long lost son of her old friend (which is true by the way).

- Go up into her apartment since you now are friends.

- Use the cat video tape on their television in order to distract the dog.

- While the dog is distracted you must take a biscuit from his dish.

- Back outside when the dog is on a routine walk you must put the biscuit on a seesaw device.

- When the dog goes for the biscuit you must pull up the lever and launch him off the seesaw.

- This causes the lady to scream for help, so the guard comes to her rescue and you are free to go into the cathedral for which you have no reason of entering.

And that's all for distracting a guard, of which you have no real reason to do in the first place, nor even the logical incentive to complete any of those tasks above and connect them together.

2 - You need to get past an enemy android who is in the next room, so you must:

- Go below that room and loosen a grate.

- Repair your broken computer friend by inserting his data chip into a new robot shell.

- Tell this robot to open a tank of liquid which will create a mess.

- Now that the mess is there, enter the room with the enemy android.

- Since the enemy android sees that there is a pool of liquid on his closest route to your destruction, he decides to side-step that route into the loose grate that goes into a lava pit of doom.
Now, you had no idea of knowing that the mess of liquid would block the android's path, among other things.
Other Puzzle-Design Problems:
Unnecessary pixel hunts, in at least two locations.
Sudden deaths without any prior warning.
An increasingly linear middle section that uses seemingly unconnected puzzles to advance.
Doing many things without knowing why or how they help you reach your goal.
The Story Progression:
Not enough is explained at the beginning, and your goal changes from getting out of the city to saving it quite unknowingly.

In conclusion, Beneath A Steel Sky is an immersing game with some good ideas but fails to execute them into an enjoyable experience. The story as a whole is great, but its progression suffers somewhat. The game play has some good ideas with Joey and the computer world, but most of this is negated by other illogical puzzles.
Worth Playing? If you are a sucker for atmosphere, and can stand illogical puzzles.

Beneath a Steel Sky
8.1/10.0

Star Trek 25th Anniversary

Star Trek 25th Anniversary: A Review
(It's a video game.)

The Good:
- The puzzle design for the most part is good, but most of the solutions are unnecessarily vague and too brutal for the common player.
- The ship combat is well-done and an inventive way to incorporate more Star Trek Elements into a Star Trek game.
- Creating multiple solutions and choices that have meaning in each mission is a great idea. The only downside is that two seemingly equal good choices can have drastically different effects on the outcome of the mission. This is bad for perfectionists who must get 100%.
- Continuing the 100% mission rating, there are some things that you must do in order to get 100% that you would never do beforehand unless you had a walkthrough or some-odd.
- The other characters that come with Kirk are well utilized in game-play by using them on other objects, and as sidekicks.


The Bad:
- Kirk and the gang would constantly walk to the center of each room after entering or completing a task. This is an unnecessary feature that just irritates me when I need to get places faster.
- The character's walking ANIMATION unnecessarily slows down with the walking SPEED when scaled down, both of which should probably be raised. Also, the rooms were poorly designed so that the characters scale upwards of 100% creating blocky shapes.
- The interface requires too many clicks for each simple task. First you have to right click to select your action. Then you have to move your mouse and left click to select your cursor. Then you have to find your hotspot to use it. If you want to do so again or with another cursor mode, you have to repeat it. That's 3 Clicks for every potential different action. Lucas Arts had a two click, or keyboard + 1 mouse click system, and Sierra had a pop-up GUI for a two-click system, or a right click system that would stay on the mode you chose. When you play an adventure game for hours, every little click adds up. ST25's interface just takes up too much time in the long-run for the entire span of the game.
- Having both an inventory item for McCoy and Spock, and the ability to use them on any object seems redundant. You don't know whether you should be using the device, or the character on the object you're looking at.
- Sometimes using characters on objects would be backwards. I tried for the longest time to have SPOCK interact with a science console, when I really needed KIRK to interact with the console, so then SPOCK would go over there when I had told KIRK to go there.
- Too many actions that seem to make sense give no feedback to the player, leaving him in the darkness of what to do.
- It's too hard to tell what hotspots are interact-able, and to distinguish between the interact-able ones, especially when they are grouped together in one blob. You don't know if it's a single hotspot or several hotspots touching each other. Fix this by adding a hotspot indicator GUI.
- More often times than not, I have no idea what to do or how to do it. The player is often times only told once of his goal, and forgetful people like me need reminders otherwise I have no clue what I'm doing. In one situation, I THOUGHT (because in this game, the designers want the player to come up with their own goals by interacting with the environment, which might be fun if the interface wasn't as unresponsive as it is)--I was saying, I THOUGHT I had to make a poisonous gas. But I had no idea how to do this. I was presented with several consoles and machines, and different ways of using them, and the only way I could figure out how to use them was by using Dr. McCoy on them, but he just gave me some unintelligible answer that needed to be described in LAYMAN'S TERMS for me. Most of the mission goals were just so vague and I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing.
- Many of the exits are poorly designed, leaving no sense of direction to the player, or letting them know that another room even exists in that direction.
- It's too hard to tell that you can combine inventory items. When it doesn't work, the game just switches to the other inventory item, causing me to think that the combine feature never existed.
- The difference between USE and GET is indistinguishable. Sometimes both are interchangeable, other times not so.

Anyway, I'm sorry to say I wrote this review without completing the game, because the final space battle is ridiculously hard, and it took me about fifty tries to go from 3 (enemies) vs me, to 1 on 1, and then it took me about twenty tries to give up, because the enemy was circling me and sitting on my head the whole battle. He would only pop out about once every 3 minutes, for a two second interval. And then, I didn't even know if my damage was properly registering, or he was just healing and recharging his shields every pass, causing all of my actions to be futile, thus inciting my choice to give up.

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary

7.4/10.0

Creating a New Game

When designing a new game, I have several goals outlined in my mind:

1) Gameplay:
Introduce a new gameplay element, or reintroduce old elements in intuitive ways. Also, you can fix broken gameplay elements. Don't just make a new game that recycles old gameplay elements. Using a new gameplay mechanic will make the player think; it will make the player have fun.
E.g. I'm going to keep the "kick" verb to use for more puzzles, and I'm going to have multiple characters. By interacting with other characters, you can "use" them on objects. This is like another inventory item, and will make the player think about how his companions can help him. Each companion may also have special abilities that the player must understand to solve puzzles. Aside from those I will try to make creative puzzles and introduce a "trust" bar for each character you interact/talk with. That way, every dialogue choice has real meaning behind it. By the end of the game, your choices should have a lasting effect on the story.

2) Story:
a. I'm going to try and create a mystery/scifi story that will play out in a similiar vein to LOST, where you are presented in a new world with plenty of questions, and by the end of the story, most questions should be answered but they will also keep you thinking.
b. The story I create should also naturally present gameplay elements and obstacles through the screenplay. I think I managed to do that.

3) Characters:
Creating characters is not my specialty as I believe most of my characters are flat. I'm going to try and change that by making some characters different in this game, and by creating conflicts within your main set of characters. I always thought it was interesting in Lord of the Flies and Ender's Game how the character conflicts move the story forward. I wanted to try something like that in this story too.

4) World:
There are three elements to a story: the screenplay (story), the characters, and the world (backstory). One of the ways you can make games more believable and more immersive is to create a long, interesting world behind all the action. However, you have to reveal the world in an interesting way. If you throw pages and pages of backstory at the player, they'll just get bored. Have them discover the backstory in the game, by reading logs, or having the characters comment on things in subtle ways. Get the player interested in the world, and slowly reveal more of it to him at every possible place. Don't force a story on the player.

5) Technicalities:
And then you get past the brainstorming and the ideas and you actually have to make the game. This involves drawing, animating, finding sound effects, putting together a believable world, and all that. If you can draw the player in with the technical aspect, then you can hook them on the gameplay aspect. Then you must maintain the technical side until the end to keep the atmosphere.


My goal in La Croix Pan was mainly focused on the technical and gameplay aspect; the second time around I want to get into a story. I just think it's harder to tell a story in a short game, and it's easier to go into details in a medium/long game.


That's pretty much my to-do-list for my next game, which may or may not get made. I want to make sure the game is worth making before I start making it.

._.

Innovation in Adventure Games

Over the years I have grown tired of this thing called an adventure game, this thing where you control a character, walk around, pick up items, trade items, and solve quests. I grow tired of the standard, overused, generic adventure game model, with generic settings, and generic puzzles.

Generic Adventure Game Settings: Pirates, Detectives, Average Joes who get thrown into crazy adventures, Police Men, generic space stories, or stuff like that.

Generic Adventure Game Screenplay: Start the player out with a goal to open a door. To open this door he must solve a series of convoluted puzzles in a group of locations by doing inane things that could only happen in an adventure game. He will talk to random people by saying "Hello," "Can I have item?", or "Bye." He will trade items with characters, use locks on keys, and then finally get the one inventory item that will open the door. He will open the door only to face another arena.

Adventure games need innovation. Adventure games need new design mechanics, new features, new settings, new problems, and new screenplays that don't involving talking to random strangers and then trading items with them.

That's what I tried to do in La Croix Pan. I tried to add a new element to the standard "Walk," "Interact," "Look," "Talk," bit. I added a new verb "kick" to that sequence. I tried to incorprate a new setting into adventure games, one I had never seen before, one in World War II. I tried to change the adventure formula by adding in a sniper action sequence, which I haven't really seen in any recent adventure games. I tried to prevent myself from adding a whole sequence of unncessary puzzles just to solve one puzzle.
For example: I didn't add a whole 20 minutes of gameplay just to open one door. That would never happen in real life. You don't walk around an abandoned French village picking up random items in random rooms, and then combine them together to create a lock pick just to open this one door.

I don't want to play another game where I control a character who can walk around a town, talk to other characters, and then trade items in a seemingly adventure-game-esque world. There are so many other settings that could be explored in adventure games instead of this generic screenplay that seems to be recycled ever since the first Monky Island game was released.

Give the player new and interesting goals, and new ways to acheive them, in new and different settings. I'm tired of adventure games; I want something "innovative."

My Game

That's right. I released a video game. I am now an internet celebrity. I will make lots of cash.

La Croix Pan

What I Learned Designing Games (AGS)

I can't really believe it's been almost 5½ years since I first found AGS. I was an eager, energetic game-designing ambitionist* back then, and I could only wait to hurl out that new Indiana Jones sequel, which I knew was going to be the best game ever, thanks to my design skills.
* Not a real word.

You learn a lot in five years, and it makes you look back and wonder, "Did I really learn anything at all?"
The answer is most likely no.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Game Design Tips
Making Games is WORK--NOT play: Game-Designing is fun; you get to throw out all sorts of crazy ideas and features you'd ever want to see in a game and wrap it all together. Game-development is hard work; you have to sit at a computer slaving away the hours working on pixels and lines of monotonous code.
The only way that game-development will be fun, is if it is a learning process, and you push yourself to the next level in everything you do. If you already know how to design and develop everything, then it will be a long and tedious process to the finish line.
Plan it out: Know EXACTLY what you want to make. Know who the characters are, how the plot is going to end, why these things are happening, when to implement the puzzles, and where to end it all. It's probably less fun to do this, but it makes your game less of an illogical and crummy mess when it's finished.
Fan-Games are good, but they are superfluous: Everyone wants to make their own sequel/prequel/fan-game about their favorite series. It's fun, because you love that series to death and want to create something in that world, but it's already been done before. RARELY are any fan-games ever good.
Breaking the 4th wall gets old, fast: The best thing about making a game for the first time is including as many in-jokes as you can about other Lucasarts and Sierra adventure games. It makes me feel all happy inside every time I manage to slip another in-joke in about my favorite game. But this is NOT the way to go. Everyone can make an inference to some obscure adventure game, but it is much harder to create an atmosphere in a game, maintain it, and then finish the game and say I created that world from scratch.
Humor games outnumber serious games about 4-1, and a serious game is much harder to attempt.
EXCEPTIONS: If you are going to break the 4th wall, do it in an awesome and good manner, e.g. Secret of Monkey Island, Space Quest, FL-CL.
If you are making a serious game, THEN DO NOT BREAK THE 4TH WALL.
Less Puzzle Games, more ADVENTURE games: It's so easy to create bad puzzles, and it's so hard to realize that they're bad. Adventure games continuously fall into this weird heap of a quest where the protagonist has to collect random items and then give them all to a guy blocking a door and then go on to the next section, where you learn why you're in the next section, where the next guy blocking a door is, and then you repeat. (Unfair)
Start thinking realistically. Start applying puzzles to the situation, and have the puzzles rise out of the situation and the world instead making boring, generic puzzles.
Adventure games DO NOT have to be about endless quests and trading items, reaching for items out of reach, and then unlocking doors. You can do so much more in a game, instead of boring trading tasks. Prioritize your puzzles according to your story, game world, characters, and locations.
...
UNIQUE, NEW CONCEPTS: Adventure games are old, and I dare say the standard adventure game interface is flawed (Walk, Hand, Eye, Mouth). The more I use a text-parser, the more I miss using reason and logic instead of clicking on everything.
Adventure games need NEW features in order to survive. Cross the genre and make a hybrid (Quest For Glory), implement new features (New Verb actions like KICK!), totally change the interface (LOOM), or just do something that will make the game different, and a new learning experience to every player. Old adventure games have been designed with the same interface countless times. Pump something new into the genre.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Besides the above, you can learn specific skills in puzzle-making, animation, backgrounds, characters, story, world-building, etc.

Atmosphere (In Adventure Games)

Creating (a believable) atmosphere in adventure games can be a very hard thing to do sometimes. But there are some key things that can boost the atmopshere in your game, and once you know them, they are easy to apply.

Each item is labeled with a number and a plus. E.g. "+5"
+1 (min) Means that this will help the game a little.
+5 (max) means that this will improve the game ALOT.

1: Animated Backgrounds +2
Lots of places in real life are not still life. Trees wave in the wind, lights flicker on and off, doors open and close, and some things are shiny. Having a blank slate of a background can be okay in most places, but making it animated can make it awesome.
E.g. trees blowing, grass moving, water rushing, dirt blowing, lights flickering, fans moving, etc.
2: Animated Objects +2
Self-Explanatory. Interacting with objects in the world, and then having then animate, makes the world seem so much more alive.
E.g. Doors opening/closing, cabinets opening/closing, turning on machines, turning on lights, using computers, using tvs, picking up phones, etc.
3: Animated Characters
3-1: Actions +3
All player actions should be animated. The animations don't have to be a smooth 10 frame animation. They can be simple, but having 1 frame is 10x better than nothing, and have 2 frames is twice as good as one frame. And having 3 frames will make it seem very smooth and believable.
E.g. The character animates for: picking up items, reaching up high, reaching down low, falling down, sitting, opening objects, using objects, etc.
3-2: Speaking +4
People don't just open and close their mouths while speaking to each other; they make gestures. People cross their arms, kick the ground, wave their hands, shrug their shoulders, or put their hands in their pockets.
3-3: Idle +2
People do not just stand idlely on the side of a path waiting for you to trade an object with them. As funny as it may sound, PEOPLE DO THINGS. Nobody stands around doing nothing unless they have a specific reason. But if you can think up a reason for why someone is standing there doing nothing, then that's good, and you're all set.
But you have to make the character animated, no matter where he's standing. NOBODY just stands or sits somewhere and stares straight all day, unless they have a serious problem. People turn their heads, change their postures, move their legs, and other stuff.
4: Sound Ambience +3
Unless the location the player is in literally has dead silence, you need to have some kind of background noise. For city scenes you can have crowd noises. For outdoor scenes you could have the wind blowing or animal noises. For ocean scenes you can have the waves hitting the rocks or sliding up onshore. For indoor scenes you could have the sound of machinery humming or something.
5: Sound Actions +2
Every individual action the player can preform should have some kind of sound. The sound can be loud or subtle, but opening doors, picking up objects, walking around, using computers, etc. should all produce a sound effect.
6: Music +5
In my experience, the difference between a good game, and the difference between an unforgettable game is most often times the music. Great music can stick with the player forever, and improve the atmosphere ALOT. Don't underestimate the use of music in a game.
7: Writing +4
The things people say, or the things people do can be the base for the whole atmosphere. If a serious game suddenly breaks the 4th wall, the atmosphere is destroyed. If characters do things or say things that are totally ridiculous (and usually the author doesn't know it), then the atmosphere can be destroyed.
The level of seriousness/funniness should be maintained in a game, and kept consistent, otherwise the player will lose his sense of disbelief.

Atmosphere in games comes down to 3 things:
GRAPHICS: Animations, characters, objects, backgrounds
AUDIO: Sound effects, ambience, music
WRITING: Story, dialogue, etc.
Either of the items/sub-items can improve the atmosphere in their own way, or on the contrary, destroy it.

Beginner's Guide to Drawing (For Adventure Games?)

Alrighty then... I am going to outline several (common?) mistakes that face beginner artists when creating their first backgrounds. All of these mistakes I made myself, and I hopefully have outgrown them by now.

1 - Make A Sketch

When I first started drawing, I had some idea of what I wanted the background to look like, but ideas always work better when fleshed out first. After making a sketch, you can re-evaluate your ideas and change them if necessary.

2 - Color Choice
I think this is quite a common mistake that beginners make. When I first started drawing, I used alot of highly saturated colors. In real life, you won't come across pure blue, red, or white that often. You should choose colors that are less saturated and don't strike out of the screen very brightly (but it all depends on what you're drawing).

3 - Perspective
Many beginner drawings look flat, fake, and unrealistic because of bad perspective. 1 Point perspective is easy once you learn it, and it can help make the leap from a fake drawing, to a more realistic one.

4 - Objects
Rooms exist with alot more than bare walls, blank ceilings, and just a chair or table. This seems quite obvious, but many people (myself included) just draw rooms as bare as can be, until they start thinking about it. There are many things that can be added to a room besides the basic furniture. These could be lights, vents, baseboards, outlets, switches, or other pieces of furniture.

5 - Shading

Shadows can add life to a picture, and make objects stand out, or appear realistically. There's some kind of special rules for shadows, but I forget them or never learned them.

6 - Broken & Dirty

When I first started drawing, I would draw objects as clean as possible. This meant that all tables, chairs, and walls looked liked they were just built yesterday. But as in the case of real life, things get old, dirty, and they wear out over the years. You could add cracks, dried out paint, smudges, or anything that would happen to the item in question if it existed for awhile. You don't have to go overboard though. Some things actually do manage to stay clean :P.

7 - Lighting
It gets dark outside when it's late. Night and day should always be conveyable in your pictures. Make the scene darker or lighter if necessary, depending on whether it is an interior or exterior scene. Always pay attention to your light sources, whether these be lamps, the sun, the moon, or a single light hanging from the ceiling. Lighting is very important to a realistic picture.

Teh Secret Trick! Okay everybody knows this, but flipping a picture horizontally will expose errors that you did not see previously. This is because of something in your brain/eye.

This guide is not based on any proven techniques, professional or otherwise. It is mainly based on my personal experience, and the advice of some other people.

The End.

Evolution of Adventure Game Interfaces

Since the adventure games have developed as a medium, one aspect has always been in debate--the interface. The interface has the power to make puzzles fun, interesting, or just simplistic and boring.

Traditional text adventures had the "do-anything" interface. To solve puzzles, you just type in whatever is needed. This could be from "Block door with chair," "Eat roast," "Turn on Speakers," or "Close drawer." These are all unique commands which were unfortunately terminated when adventure games "upgraded" to the point and click interface.

In the Sierra interface of the 90s, there were four actions: Hand, Eye, and Mouth, and walk. With this interface there are only four things you can do to your game world, which over-simplifies the game, making puzzles simplistic and boring in most cases.

Lucas Arts had an upgraded version of this by having a total of 9 verbs: Give, Push, Pull, Talk to, Walk to, Pick up, Use, Open, and Close. It's better than the Sierra counterpart, but it still groups all actions to a total of 9 verbs. You could say this is three times better than the Sierra interface, but it still limits interaction with the game world.

And then for some reason in the mid 90s, a large majority of games decided to adapt the "Two-Action" interface. This means, you can either look at the object, or "do-whatever" with the object. It's ultra-simplistic, and removes alot of thought from puzzles. With this interface, you have the greatest chance of a player solving puzzles by accident, or resulting to just trying to click on everything.

Adventure games need to change. For too long they've been stuck in the 2D realm where the player does not think and the actions are too specific and simplistic, and the game is a mesh of recycled cliches.


2 Adventure games have stood out to me as being the next big things in adventure games:
Penumbra: http://frictionalgames.com/penumbramedia/
Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy): http://www.gamespot.com/pc/adventure/fahrenheit/index.html?q=fahrenheit

Penumbra is a first person adventure game that uses physics and the mouse cursor for you to preform a variety of actions, from pushing objects, moving barrels, opening doors, and various other things. The actions feel natural because of the way you have to move the mouse to actually open the door, i.e. you have to pull the mouse towards you to open a locker door, as you would in real life.

Fahrenheit also has you moving your mouse in a pattern to preform actions, each action specifically having its own special pattern for the mouse.


And now we come to the Wii.
With the Wii, you can eliminate all "verb-bars" and interfaces thanks to the power of the motion-sensor. With the nun-chuck the player can control the movement of the main character. With the Wii-remote, the player can do virtually anything to an object (Pushing it, pulling it, opening it) all by simple gestures. You don't have to have any more push, pull, open, or hit, commands. You can just let the player swing the remote with hard enough force, or hold down the B button to drag an object, or open it. Then the player can use his brain and his movements to solve puzzles instead of randomly clicking on everything and hoping something will happen.

Most adventure games have sadly become just a click-fest without too much thought, but hopefully new technolgical advances like the Wii can give the players a "thinking" chance.

Those Old Adventure Games (Lucas Styles)

They were like the "super special awesome" games of awesome back in the day.

The Rating System -
0.00-3.00 - Terrible, absymal, awful.
3.00-5.00 - Pretty bad, but not the worst.
5.00-7.00 - Mediocre. Not REALLY BAD, but bad.
7.00 - AVERAGE (Fair Game)
7.00-8.00 - Fairly good and fun.
8.00-9.00 - Pretty good and pretty fun.
9-00.9.99 - Pretty amazingly awesome.
10.00 - EVERYTHING IS PERFECT IN THIS GAME

Monkey Island:
Secret of Monkey Island - 9.3
This game was pretty amazing in every aspect. And super fun too. Also gets the funniest award.
Monkey Island 2: Lechuck's Revenge - 8.6
Back to the Islands of the Carribean, yet for me it didn't have the original charm the first game had. Also, I hated some of the puzzles. Yet it was still fun, funny, and interesting.

Indiana Jones:
Last Crusade - 8.2 I really liked this game, even though it had a lot of deadends. The whole atmosphere and the fighting/adventure gaming/multiple solutions intrigued me. Yeah, I liked it. Fate of Atlantis - 9.2 This was a very awesome game. I probably only liked Monkey Island more because of the Sword Fighting and the funniness. But this game had everything. Multiple paths, multiple endings, fighting, puzzle solving, all that stuff.
Maniac Mansion:
Maniac Mansion 1 - 6.6 It was fun I guess... but the puzzles were too confusing for me and I never really understood everything.
Day of the Tentacle - 8.4 Yes it was funny I guess, yes the puzzles were ingenious, yes it was funny, but it didn't really strike to me as "super special awesome."

Other Specials:
Zak McKracken! and the Alien Mindbenders - 7.3 This game was pretty good in retrospect, yet there were a gazillion inventory items, endless mazes, and hard puzzles. I had to use a walkthrough for much of it. But it made very interesting uses of inventory items...
Loom - 8.6 This game probably had some of the funnest, most interesting puzzles. The plot is fantasy freaky. Good game.

Yes virtually all their games were good to me except Zak McKracken and Maniac Mansion 1.
Yes, I left out some games. No I didn't want to comment on them.

Those Old Adventure Games (Sierra styles)

I never understood why King's Quest 1 is always in the top 10 on Adventure Game lists. Yes, it is innovative, yes, it is probably the first graphic adventure game, yes it is a landmark in the adventure industry, but no, it is not better than the 9 other games on that top 10 game lists. It has terrible random deaths, awkard puzzles, and some other stuff.

The Rating System -
0.00-3.00 - Terrible, absymal, awful.
3.00-5.00 - Pretty bad, but not the worst.
5.00-7.00 - Mediocre. Not REALLY BAD, but bad.
7.00 - AVERAGE
7.00-8.00 - Fairly good and fun.
8.00-9.00 - Pretty good and pretty fun.
9-00.9.99 - Pretty amazingly awesome.
10.00 - EVERYTHING IS PERFECT IN THIS GAME

King's Quest Series:
King's Quest 1 - 4.3 Yes I would say it's fun, but it's kind of... random... and meh. The puzzles are okay but it doesn't all tie together the best.
King's Quest 2 - 5.2 It was different, and made a little more sense and had a plot.
King's Quest 3 - 6.0 I played this game and needed a walkthrough on everything. It was really weird and it seemed like I just kept doing random stuff until I got to the end of the game. First it was like "Escape from wizard!" then, uh... I forgot. You go on some pirate ship but I forgot why.
King's Quest 4 - 7.9 I liked this game actually. It had some pretty fun puzzles and stuff, and wasn't as bad as the others.
King's Quest 5 - 7.2 What is the point of having 5 bad things you can do with each object, that potentially get you stuck in the game, as opposed to only 1 right thing to do with it? I could never beat it because it crashed or something.

Space Quest!:
Space Quest 1 (VGA) - 7.0 It was pretty fun, but it was kind of weird as in you kept wandering around and randomly stumbled into the right place and then randomly got onto the bad guy ship and killed them, yet it was fun.
Space Quest 2 - 5.8 This game was one of those ones where I just kept wandering around trying to do everything with nothing and eventually I got to the end and I was like... ok... that was interesting.
Space Quest 3 - 8.1 Man this game was soo funny. Yes so were the other ones, but whatever. This game was pretty fun all around, but the one bad thing about it was the plot. You escape from this junkyard freighter then decide to save these 2 dudes whom you know nothing about. Weirdd. But the awesomeness of the funniness makes up for it, especially the ending.
Space Quest 4 - 7.2 I don't know why so many people love this game the most out of the series. I thought it had a bunch of randomly convoluted puzzles (the beginning mainly) and then you had to run around and escape bad guys. I admit, I hate this game mainly because the chase sequences were ruined because Intel Pentium processors could not match up with the technology of 1994.
Space Quest 5 - 8.7 I really loved this game. I thought it was super awesome and fun. It was the first space quest game I played and I pretty much loved it. Really funny and awesome stuff.

QuestForGlory:
QFG 1 VGA - 9.0 A very fun free-roaming game way ahead of its time.
QFG 2 - 9.1 This game had a super awesome atmosphere and everything was very awesome in it. But it was a little too hard for me or something. And it was so funny that I had over 500 gold coins imported from my previous game... But the combat/gameplay/story/puzzles, were all amazing. The ending was very awesome, especially since you could do it a different way depending on your class.

PoliceQuest attacks:
Police Quest 1 VGA - 7.6 It was ok, but not super amazing. Not bad at all, either.
Police Quest 2 - 7.7 This game has some pretty nifty sequences and puzzles, but it was too hard or something.

Yes, I would say Space Quest and Quest-For-Glory were the best series. Yes...