I don't think humor is done the way it used to be. I loved Zak McKracken, the Leisure Suit Larrys, the Space Quests, Freddy Pharkas, Touche: The Adventures of the Fifth Musketeer, and the obvious big favorites: Monkey Island 1, 2 and 3; Day of the Tentacle; Sam and Max; Discworld. Grim Fandango changed that, and I haven't enjoyed humorous games since. Don't really find the new Monkey Island that funny, either. I guess Grim Fandango changed it because (and I'm replaying it again now and taking notes) when Tim Schaefer (or whoever wrote the jokes) tells a joke, he doesn't act as if the game depends on it being hilarious. They get told when necessary, and they make me laugh out loud. The story and dialogue are the gems, and the jokes fall into place.
Every other game out there that tries to make players laugh seems to just take shot after shot, hoping the jokes will be funny. It seems like humorous writing is a lost art form in adventure games these days. But then again, it's a lost art form in so many other media these days, too. It's not that I don't like playing humorous games because I prefer serious ones -- it's that humorous games these days just aren't funny to me.
Or maybe since the dawn of voice in AVs, the art form of fitting the perfect voice to the perfect jokes/funny characters has yet to be mastered?
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"Reading/writing people, we are finished; we are ghosts witnessing the end of the literary era." -E.I. Lonoff
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