I miss the good ol adventure game days

Wow, you joined 3 and a half years ago and this is your first post... Please stick around, the more the merrier...

I have to agree with you for the most part... They certainly don't make them like they use to... There are a few that come out now and then that are worth the time to play, but nothing like they use to be...
I own all the games you mentioned except for Tentacle, I've played it, but I don't own it... Along with many others...
Phantasmagoria was a great game, did you ever play the 2nd one??? Not as good as the first, gets a little weird near the end, but still a good game...

Yeah, the 90s were great for adventure games.

I'm surprised you didn't mention Gabriel Knight.
Those were good.

Day of the Tentacle is a great game. That was one of my favorites too. It had so much humour. Sam and Max was good for that too.

Tex was my all time favorite as well.

I like Larry 6 and 7 the best.


As far as game's that came out in the 2000s that were notable.

The Longest Journey was really good and so was Dreamfall.
Vampyre Story was really good too.
The Secret Files Tunguska and Syberia were really good too.

The list of quality games that came out in the late 80s and 90's is near bottomless.

Aside from what's been said, you can throw in

Police Quest series
King Quest
Grim Fandango
Sam & Max
Full Throttle
Ultima
Little Big Adventure
Blade Runner
Normality
Crusader
Shadowrun
Monkey Island
Beneath a Steal Sky
Allone in the Dark
Discworld

And so many more. There are some definite classics from 2000 and on too, but not as memorable, and not in such vast numbers.

Normality! <3 Haven't played through that in AGES!! I loved that game!

Also, I'm wondering. Does Sanitarium count as an adventure game?

-Fred

How can i forget Monkey Island, Sam & Max, and Full Throttle. Those were great.

Hey Bafitis,

I tried to play the second phantasmagoria but there were way to many movie sequences. It felt more like a movie then a game. I was watching way more than playing.

Hey other people who remember Normality, cool! Had it as a kid but then had to sell it to afford another game after completing it. There was a period in my life where I forgot the name of that game for aages and it bugged me for a long time until 1 day I described it to someone and they could tell me its name. Then I bought/brought it back into my game collection (like some others I had had to sell as a kid like the crazy Monty Python games).

By the way I know a funny Youtube playthrough series on Phantasmagoria 2, I'll make a thread about it.

Normality was understated brilliance. I don't think the game itself knew how great it was.

RogueAgent wrote:Hey Bafitis,

I tried to play the second phantasmagoria but there were way to many movie sequences. It felt more like a movie then a game. I was watching way more than playing.

Yeah that is true, Urban Runner was a lot like that too... Almost every time you clicked it was another 3 minute movie clip, or longer... I think it was the first game I played that I remember having nudity in it too... It was kind of shocking to see something like that in a Game, I was taken back by it... Just never really thought of nudity having a place in a video game back then...

There is another game i really enjoyed but I can't remember the name. It had something to do with the space shuttle on an asteroid. The astronauts were stranded and trying to escape. does this sound familiar to anyone?

There are a couple of games I really enjoyed but never got to finish and I still regret that today. I got stuck in both games and I eventually abandoned them. One was called Return to Zork. I can't remember the name of the other one. It had something do with you escaping a Turkish prison. You could not remember who you were or how you got there. As you progressed through the game you would start to regain your memory.

RogueAgent wrote:There is another game i really enjoyed but I can't remember the name. It had something to do with the space shuttle on an asteroid. The astronauts were stranded and trying to escape. does this sound familiar to anyone?

Could it be Rama?
http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue35/game.html

I never actually played it aside from booting it up and having a brief glance and probably promptly got stuck. If I remember right it was sort of in that vein of Myst games at least to start with (exploring abandoned spacey wilderness) and a) I was never that good at puzzles and Myst-like games had a lot of puzzles and b) I missed the dialogue/plot of interacting with lots of characters like other games.

Remember the Lighthouse one? I liked the atmosphere in that... until I got stuck on the aforementioned a and b :\ Still, looked like a good game while my mileage lasted.
http://www.pagodagamedatabase.com/game.php?id=190

The 1990s was just a goldmine for Adventure Gaming. In fact, it was the era where Lucasarts were at the top of both their game and that of the industry. Some amazing stuff came out of that decade, not only limited to Adventure games either:

- Tex Murphy
- Doom
- Quake
- Half Life
- Unreal
- Command & Conquer
- Day of the Tentacle
- Fate of Atlantis
- Last Express
- Broken Sword 1 & 2

The list goes on.....

What's really heartbreaking is that these game were released within MONTHS of one another, now it works out being 1 classic title every 2 or 3 years.

Yeah I do miss the golden age of Lucasarts and Sierra adventure games.
In addition to the above there was also Space Quest series, Gobliins series, Toonstruck.

I wonder if we'll ever get close to that glory again. Everything is very much focused on multiplayer aspects these days (FPS, MMOGs, vs Modes) but Adventure games are very much a singular affair. I think to an extent even single-player RPGs / Tactical RPGs suffer, a lot of cool ones fall under the radar and slip off the shelves pretty quickly, I have to get some of them closer to release than I used to due to them always stopping distribution fairly fast. I understand some more adventure games are being put out recently (including TCM) though.

There are just too many good games from the 90s to mention... 90s was definitely the time of Games... Maybe we can do a repeat of history with 2010-2020...
The biggest problems with Adventure games are that the designers and programmers weren't paid big bucks back then and now companies don't want to finance the adventure games, so the designers and programmers are left with their hands in the air... If they had gotten paid what they were worth, a lot of the programmers from the 90s would be able to finance their own projects and we would still have adventure games being produced on a much bigger scale than we currently have...