Adventure Forums - View Single Post - Why did you first play an Adventure Game?

Antoinetta · 02-01-2005, 12:24 AM

"My first game was a charming, although tough little gem called Altered Destiny. This was back in '92, when I was 40 years old. The game came on six or seven 3.5 inch floppies. I didn't even have a computer then, but my neighbour had a 386 and introduced me not only to the game, but to computer gaming as well. Altered Destiny has a score-counter, like the Gabriel Knight games, and as I recall we got about a third of the way through the game. The game was part point and click and part text, you had a text-bar with a cursor as well as the mouse cursor. You would move your character via point and click, then type in various questions/commands when you had moved the character (this dude that gets transported into an alternate universe by being sucked into a TV set he is watching) to where you wanted to perform the action. Usually, these were simple commands like "take sword" or "grab vine", but the game's vocabulary wasn't that extensive, and there were some frustrating times trying to come up with the exactly proper wording.

Then, one day in the latter part of 1993, we forgot about Altered Destiny pretty much for good. My friend, Jan came over and asked me to come down and look at what she had up on her machine which by now I believe, had been upgraded to a 486. I went over, and I stared when I saw, in all its colour and crystal-clarity, Achenar's bedroom in the original 256 colour version of Myst. So we plugged away at Myst for about two years, making good progress, but not finishing the game. All this, of course, was before you could just jump online for a moment to snag a walk-thru when you get stuck. But then Jan moved away, and I didn't play any games until I got my first "real" computer, a Pentium II laptop early in 2000. And the first game I played then, that I bought at the same time I bought the computer, was Gabriel Knight III......and a year or so after that, I went back and finally finished Myst."

I posted the above on another thread, but it is applicable here as well. While Altered Destiny was cute and fun, I don't think it would have got me hooked. No, it was the blowaway graphics and general surrealistic quality of Myst that got me addicted. Prior to the Pentium II laptop, I had in 1998 aquired an antique Compaq with Windows 3.1 and no CD-ROM drive. This was sufficient for my work, but ever since my friend had moved away, I HAD to finish Myst, so as soon as I could afford it, I bought the Pentium II, with its CD-ROM drive. A chance observation of the name "Rennes-le-Chateau" on the Gabriel Knight III box (I had recently finished reading "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln) caused Gabriel to be the first game I completed, but then after finishing Myst, there was Riven....and yes, I was hooked.

Antoinetta

02-01-2005, 12:24 AM	#10
Antoinetta Senior Member Join Date: Mar 2004 Posts: 339	"My first game was a charming, although tough little gem called Altered Destiny. This was back in '92, when I was 40 years old. The game came on six or seven 3.5 inch floppies. I didn't even have a computer then, but my neighbour had a 386 and introduced me not only to the game, but to computer gaming as well. Altered Destiny has a score-counter, like the Gabriel Knight games, and as I recall we got about a third of the way through the game. The game was part point and click and part text, you had a text-bar with a cursor as well as the mouse cursor. You would move your character via point and click, then type in various questions/commands when you had moved the character (this dude that gets transported into an alternate universe by being sucked into a TV set he is watching) to where you wanted to perform the action. Usually, these were simple commands like "take sword" or "grab vine", but the game's vocabulary wasn't that extensive, and there were some frustrating times trying to come up with the exactly proper wording. Then, one day in the latter part of 1993, we forgot about Altered Destiny pretty much for good. My friend, Jan came over and asked me to come down and look at what she had up on her machine which by now I believe, had been upgraded to a 486. I went over, and I stared when I saw, in all its colour and crystal-clarity, Achenar's bedroom in the original 256 colour version of Myst. So we plugged away at Myst for about two years, making good progress, but not finishing the game. All this, of course, was before you could just jump online for a moment to snag a walk-thru when you get stuck. But then Jan moved away, and I didn't play any games until I got my first "real" computer, a Pentium II laptop early in 2000. And the first game I played then, that I bought at the same time I bought the computer, was Gabriel Knight III......and a year or so after that, I went back and finally finished Myst." I posted the above on another thread, but it is applicable here as well. While Altered Destiny was cute and fun, I don't think it would have got me hooked. No, it was the blowaway graphics and general surrealistic quality of Myst that got me addicted. Prior to the Pentium II laptop, I had in 1998 aquired an antique Compaq with Windows 3.1 and no CD-ROM drive. This was sufficient for my work, but ever since my friend had moved away, I HAD to finish Myst, so as soon as I could afford it, I bought the Pentium II, with its CD-ROM drive. A chance observation of the name "Rennes-le-Chateau" on the Gabriel Knight III box (I had recently finished reading "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln) caused Gabriel to be the first game I completed, but then after finishing Myst, there was Riven....and yes, I was hooked. Antoinetta