Most Overrated/Underrated Adventure
 

And if you're wondering "overrated/underrated in terms of sales or in terms of public opinion?" Answer: Yes.

Overrated: Syberia 2

Underrated: In terms of sales: Loom. In terms of public opinion: Atlantis: The Lost Tales.

Overrated Adventures:

Syberia 1&2: Personally, I didn't like these games at all. They looked great, but I just didn't get involved with the characters. The story seemed a bit boring to me, as well as the fact that there was hardly anything to interact with.

Underrated Adventures:

Most of Sierra's games: I've been getting more and more fed up with the LucasArts snobbery on the boards as of late. Besides the Gabriel Knight series, it seems quite a few people are out to constantly bash Sierra's adventure games, and for the same two reasons: You can die, and you can get stuck. Personally, I like both aspects, as it makes me play the games much more thoroughly. I look at everything, try to pick up everything, etc... And save often.

The Dig: I'm surprised that so many people can talk about how amazing the Syberia games are, yet complete slander The Dig. If you compare them, they're quite similar. Very barren locations, with few interactions and beautiful graphics. However the difference for me is that I actually enjoyed The Dig's characters and plot. Usually people quote that it's "just not as good as the other LA adventures," which means to me that they don't like it because it isn't funny. I wonder, if it was released by another company, would it be getting the praise it deserves?

I haven't noticed anybody doing this. Plus, what does being a fan of Lucasarts games have to do with it? There are many other games by different developers that don't feature deaths and dead-ends. I agree that most Sierra games get a bum rap from their style of gameplay sometimes, but I haven't seen someone do it in a while.

OVERRATED: The Longest Journey. A good game for sure, but it's The Shawshank Redemption of adventure games...it gets far more love than it really deserves.


UNDERRATED: The Last Express. How this can't be in everyone's Top 5 is beyond me. Heh.

I think most Lucas Arts game are very over-rated and people always think their better than Sierra adventure games. I just think almost every Sierra game is more interesting than some Lucas Arts games. Thats just me.

Syberia is over rated because there is no other good game to compete with it these days. :P

I never thought the dig was under-rated? I love that game so much! :)

I enjoyed The Dig, except for the characters - too much egotism there for my liking. I didn't like any of them, but Boston Low was the best. He, at least, acted professionally. Maggie was a biatch, and Brink, I just couldn't tolerate him at all.

Lynsie

Grim Fandango is overrated. And it deserves this :pan: .

Blasphemy!!

No, seriously. Where do you see this?

Most overrated? The King's Quest games, easily.

Grim Fandango actually is overrated. I enjoyed the story and the characters and everything, but it's flaws really stick out, making it hard to believe it's the greatest adventure game ever, or even so best game ever. Terrible controls and very, very few logical puzzles easily drag down the experience down, especially towards the end. That's not to say it's bad game.

Underrated? I don't know. I guess Escape From Monkey Island gets a lot of crap. I found the game itself to be an all around enjoyable experience and the technical aspects seemed perfect running on a Playstation 2.

Overrated

Broken Sword: Shadow of The Templars: Very high production values but no soul in this game.
Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within, falls pretty much into the same category for me. Everything was very much polished but the outcome was somewhat flat for my tastes (Gabe as prince charming, bitchy Grace and some idiotic and baffling puzzles didn't help much there).

Underrated

In terms of sales: Definately Toonstruck, one of my favourite comedy adventures which had its designers fired :\
Also Discworld: Noir. I am not sure of its actual sales but I gather that it didn't go too well (though it certainly deserved to).
If Loom went unnoticed at its time, then I have to agree on that one as well since it is a most excellent game.

In terms of public opinion: Maybe In Memoriam (Missing: Since January) since not too many people seem to have noticed it. Oh and Faust: Seven Games of the Soul, only Cryo game I truly enjoyed.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry...it's my favorite adventure game. ;(

Heh. I pretty much fit this view, in the sense that I dislike the games for the same reasons that you like them, but I'm not quite sure how that equates to LucasArts snobbery. I'll perfectly happily admit that I think LucasArts made some of the best adventure games ever - and in that sense I don't believe that they're overrated - and I do believe that the Sierra games are cut way too much slack for flaws that would be criticised if produced by any other developer (deaths without warning and mazes always feel like bad design to me, whoever the developers are, and are reasons why I hate games like Stupid Invaders and The Mystery of the Druids). This isn't snobbery, though, any more than it would be to think that these games collectively are better than, say, Myst.

You're going to hate me for it, but I'm going to put the fifth and sixth King's Quest games down for the most overrated adventures, and for reasons that I've stated many a time elsewhere. As for underrated games, In Memoriam deserved greater commercial success than it found, and I quite liked Normality. And Loom certainly deserved to do better...

Overrated: Most of Sierra's Games

Underrated: In Memoriam, BS3, Loom

The controls in both of these games are pretty much the same, unless you used the keyboard for GF. I played them both with a gamepad on the PC.

I loved the puzzles in GF. Not so much in EFMI.

Don't get me wrong, I like LucasArts as well. Day of the Tentacle and the Monkey Island games are amazing. What I'm referring to is situations such as when someone on the forums asks for a suggestion on what adventure to play next. Usually in that kind of situation, if a Sierra game is mentioned, there's at least one person that will post something along the lines of "Don't play THAT, it has dead ends and you can DIE. Play Monkey Island 2 it's the best game ever made I love it."

I've seen plenty of times where people have ragged on Sierra games so much that they've dissuaded newcomers to the genre from even trying one. It just seems to me that a lot of members seem to think that the fact that neither dying or getting stuck in LucasArts games automatically makes them better than Sierra games.

I love LucasArts games, but personally, I miss the threat of being able to screw up. It just doesn't seem realistic that Indy can get Sophia to distract that guy a hundred times, until you figure out the puzzle, etc...

And just so this topic doesn't get TOO off topic... Another underrated adventure, in terms of modern day acknowledgement: The Pandora Directive. This game is so amazing, I don't know why it's not brought up more often. You can't read two threads without seeing a mention of a LucasArts game, but where's the love for good 'ol Tex?

Well, to be honest, I also don't like dying unexpectedly for entering the wrong toilet cabin or picking up a ragged tissue underneath which was a sleeping man-eating caterpillar, but hiting dead-ends can really ruin a game for me. Replaying to the point I touched the wrong doorknob I can stand but scavenging through my saved games for a clean one which won't result to the dead-end situation? No, sir-ee. Let alone that acknowledging the very fact that I am stuck requires endless hours of excruciatingly exlporing all possibilities and eventually resorting to some walkthrough in order to find what went wrong.

So, maybe Sierra games may not be overall worse than LucasArts' but they sure are less entertaining, especially to the newcomer. Lucas games are in general more fun to play, gamer-friendly and have the same- if not higher- production values as Sierra ones. Hence the up thumbing they enjoy in suggestion threads.

As for Pandora Directive, it is my favourite adventure game of all times so shame on me for not mentioning it first. :pan: However, I can see why it also falls behind in people's recommendations as it features a kinda hard to master, yet rewarding, interface combined with some pretty hard puzzles.

Overrated: TLJ

Underrated: Dreamfall

Yeah, chew on that. The sad part is that I'm serious.

Overrated: kings quest series, sure its great that they're using all these old fairy tales and such but seriously.. you gotta get sick of fairy tales being re-done and re-done after a while. especially when batman becomes involved :(

underrated: Loom. Should have been a Loom 2 and 3 apparently from the interview with Brian Moriarty that i read. Should have been but the game was way underrated with both aspects.

GoT

Overrated: Sam and Max, Fahrenheit, Broken Sword, Longest Journey, Monkey Island 2, .

Underated: Loom, Quest for Glory (well, at least it doesn't seem to get discussed all that much around the place :P ), Pandora Directive. Oh, oh and Conquests of Camelot.

I would add The Last Express to underrated, but as far as it didn't sell well, it seems that most people that are aware of it know what a masterpiece it is.

oh yeah for sure i should have added Conquests of Camelot to the underrated list!!! you're so right!

I played GF with a keyboard and EFMI with a PS2 controller. EFMI played super smoothly. And I agree, there were some really good puzzles on GF, (escaping the boat puzzle), but there were some pretty bad ones too, (find the secret tunnle using a sign that spins whenever you place it in the ground. What? This made no sense to me. Completely without any real logic.)

However, it's still a great game, it just deserves an 8 rather than a 10.

Yeah, you're right... instead if you saved/restored 100 times it would be so much more realistic. :shifty:

I could understand why someone would like dying in advenutre games... but liking dead ends... now that's just sick! :crazy:

Anyway... back to the topic:

Overrated: Syberia (espesially 2), i enjoyed both games a lot but i don't think they are that great as many people make them to be. Neverhood, after hearing people talking about this game i expected it to be at least a good enjoyable game, instead i just found it mediocre.

Underrated: Simon3D, Black Dahlia, Dreamfall.

I don't think that I have actually finished any old Sierra adventure game that I've played. Or even played them more than a couple of hours worth. The reason being the difficulty of the games either by means of dying too often or just having plain too hard puzzles (unsuitable for me).

A few days ago I felt like trying some old adventure games that I had not played before or that I hadn't finished and one of the very first ones I tried was King's quest 1 VGA remake. I watched the introduction and quite liked the mood it set for the game; it got me interested to start exploring the world. However, when the playing started it only took me one mouse click to get myself killed :) I had to laugh. It all came back to me, the reason why I had quit playing the game before. I watched the moat snake finish the prince and then I quit the game, again.

That type of gameplay just totally kills the fun for me. Then I remembered that I hadn't finished Monkey Island 4 and that you can't die in those games, so I reinstalled the game and enjoyed it from the beginning to the end (apart from the monkey kombat finale). After finishing MI4 I played 5 Days a Stranger, which became the first AGS game that I've finished and liked the mood of it quite a bit. I did die in the game twice before I finished it but it didn't feel like hindrance at all. It is admittedly necessary for a scary game to have that aspect of thrill to it, which is similar to horror movies.

A nice text by Ron Gilbert about why (old, really old) adventure games suck: http://grumpygamer.com/2152210

Well, enough of that off-topic chatter.

Most underrated:

Planescape Torment. Not a pure adventure game but I would rate it as one. You don't really play it because of the character (as an rpg, gaining levels & items & whatnot) but because of the story. You just want to know what will happen next. Has a uniqueness to it parrallelling that of Grim Fandango. Underrated by mass-market, although critics did like it.

A quote from imdb.com:
Most overrated:

Old Sierra adventure games (KQ, PQ, QG, ...). I haven't played any Gabriel Knight games, so I can't say anything about them. I think I will still some day try playing at least KQ1 again just to see how it really is and if I can get over the barriers these games present to me. At the moment I feel they aren't that fun to play and thus overrated.

The most overrated game I can think of, at least in terms of sales, is The Crystal Key. It's mediocre at best, yet sold phenomenally well. What mkes it even more bizarre is that Dreamcatcher was selling the rather underrated Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy at about the same time and for the same price, IIRC.

Alice: An Interactive Museum is, I think, overrated. It's good, but I think that most of its repuatation comes from its rarity. L-Zone and Gadget were both better.

As for underrated, a lot of that has been addressed in the "obscure yet good games" thread. I'll mention the Mercenary series again here, and point out the existence of the freeware MDDClone for Windows. Play it.

I think that Willy Beamish is underrated. It's a good, classic inventory and dialogue game, with a great cartoon feel to it.

Martian Memorandum is another one that is underrated. As a game, it's every bit as entertaining as the later three Tex Murphy games, but is often forgotten. Mean Streets was a bit lacking, granted, but Martian Memorandum was superb.

I feel ill.....I need a lie down. Please tell me your joking??!?!?!?!?!?

Overrated -
The Longest Journey. Flawed controls, boring characters and diologue, just seems really cheaply made.

Underrated -

Runaway : A Road adventure. Never really seems to get the credit it deserves.
Gilbert Goodmate and the mushroom of Phungoria : Again, a fantastic adventure which always seems to go under the radar.

Most overrated

DOTT: Awful and unrewarding puzzles that only make sense long after you've solved them, no story.
GK2: By far the weakest of the series, with some terribly uninspired parts (esp. the whole chapter 4) and really awful acting.

Most underrated

The Pandora Directive: But I guess it's just that people haven't taken the time to explore the various paths, especially the dark one.
Conquests of the Longbow: I can't see how anyone could think this game is anything but perfect.
The Dig: People keep saying that the puzzles are hard, or don't make sense. Yet, it's one of the only game that never frustrated me, while never being awfully easy. I got stuck a lot, but I'd just stop for a while and always return with new ideas and figure out the solution -- which is a feeling I love when playing adventure games.

About the production values? No man, this one is really polished. Honest.

:D

Overrated (not bad, but overrated)
The Longest journey
Syberia
Grim Fandango
Still Life


Underrated
Dreamweb
Sanitarium
The Dig
Black Mirror
Torment (more "adventure" than "RPG")

I agree. :shifty:

*runs*


Underrated:

Broken Sword 3

HaHahaha...*cough*.

Overrated
New games are all overrated but if I have to make a choice..
Broken sword 3 (crates & ending)
Still life (non-interactive)

Underrated
Conquests of the longbow
Runaway

Overrated: Dreamfall,TLJ, Still Life,Syberia 2,Fahrenheit, Grim Fandango,Sam and Max,Dig
Underrated: Sanitarium,Blade Runner,Bad Mojo,Willy Beamish,Road to El Dorado

Conquests of the Longbow, QFG, Willy Beamish are SERIOUSLY underrated, those games were amazing.

Road to El Dorado, is an okay game, not over-rated or under-rated.

TLJ is slightly over rated but its good out do its flaws.

Heh, there goes 2 of my Top 5 Adventure Games. :P

I thought GK2 was the strongest of the series, and frankly, I loved Chapter 4 because without it, the whole story wouldn't be as excellent. I didn't always love Chapter 4 though. I first got GK2 on Christmas day 1995. I was only 15 years old. My friend Kevin got the game a few days later, he was 14, and we were both playing it. At that time, I remember we would both say, "The Beast Within is such a great game! Well...except for the Grace chapters..." Ha ha. We particularly hated Chapter 4 because it was all about research...clicking around the screen in old castles. However, these days I love all the chapters, and I love how much story and depth is added to the game in Chapter 4.

As for the acting, I think it compares favorably with most television acting over here. Not feature film, but that's ok...

Wait wait wait....let me get this straight. You think Grim Fandango is overrated because of the controls...and you think Escape from Monkey Island is underrated?

Play EFMI on the PS2, and then you'll see how good the controls are. And GF's controls wasn't the only reason.

To me, it seems that clicking the walk icon on the moat with the evil looking snake things would obviously result in death. People tend to criticize Sierra games because "You can walk off a cliff and die" or other deaths such as that.

...Isn't that common knowledge? You wouldn't walk off a cliff in real life, or go swimming in a dangerous moat, so why get annoyed when doing so in a game results in death?

And I know eventually someone will bring up the puzzle in KQ1 where if you push the rock from one side, you die, and if you push it from the other, you live. Yes, this is a bad puzzle. Yes, it doesn't make sense. But you have to remember that it's in the game to showcase the fact that the game recognizes whether you're IN FRONT OF or BEHIND something. KQ1 was the first game that allowed "3d" movement of that sort, so you've got to remember that.