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Originally Posted by darthmaul
All of these games scores 3/5 or higher from adventure gamers and B-A on the other sites... so I'm not sure what you mean by average low reviews.
I never said they would "turn the tables" for adventures, just that they are good to great games for adventure gamers. The genre will never "turn the table" because most people do not like using their mind, period, let alone in their downtime(free) hours. It won't happen. You can change the genre all you want, but it'll never get mass appeal.
Just like how Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Farscape, and DS9 will never get mass appeal. It doesn't matter how good the writing of a sci fi show is, people would rather watch something familiar, brainless, or one of the 3 million police investigation shows.
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Usually high score is used for scores > 85%, games with 3/5 = 60% cannot be considered as being awarded high scores.
I don't think the reason of decline is people avoiding thinking but rather a matter of drop in content quality. The action puzzles in Prince of Persia require thinking and these games are allot more popular than most adventure games at the moment. The reason for that is that PoP puzzles are more fun and well designed, apart from that the rest aspects of PoP games are more calibrated.
Mass appeal will come when we see games that are in the front line of story, graphics, gameplay and world/universe-design. If other genres deliver such games they, rightfully, will get the mass appeal. Given that most people have a finite amount of money they are willing to dispose for gaming and also finite time to play, if their income/time is better spent in Mass Effect/Prince of Persia/Half Life 2/Zelda/WoW, they won't consider looking significantly less calibrated games. Adventure games need to move forward in terms of their design and become the impressive games they can be.
I remember that Roberta Williams used to push programmers to create engines which reached the best possible visual/audio/gameplay outcome given the technology of that era. Scenes from later King's quest games were drawn realistic because actors were hired and artists were modeling them. Every release was pushing the genre one step ahead in all departments, if that wasn't the case instead of SCI/SCUMM we would be playing text adventure games during the late-80s/90s.
I am not convinced that adventure developers treat their games like that now, they seem content to use older graphics, less dynamical engines, not interesting puzzles and in many cases a non-intriguing story.
