Look back at Adventuregamers rate in 2006
 

I've just looked back at all the Adventuregamers reviews in 2006 and I realized that no game has been given above 4 stars this year! 4 stars is the highest. I'm kinda suprised. Hope in 2007 Adventuregamers will be more generous(just kidding:D) .So which game next year do you think will get 4.5-5 star?

Well, I reviewed 3 new games this year (Paradise, Secrets of Da Vinci, Tunguska), and played several more, and never felt I was playing something worth 4.5 or 5 stars. There have been a lot of reasonably good games this year, more than in recent years, but nothing especially great. In many cases, I had to force myself to get back to them, because they just were not fun to play (bad puzzles, interface design flaws, etc.) or quickly stopped being interesting (I'm fed up with all those plots I feel I've already seen a million times; and I'm even more fed up with bland writing, especially when the designers decide to put 30-minutes-long conversations every time you meet a character*). Lots of games this year had lots of good things, and quite a few showed potential, but I always felt there was also a big something that went wrong.

(I'll also point out that scoring is a delicate matter, and not meant either as placing games on an absolute scale or as saying how much the reviewer enjoyed the game. Something odd I was thinking about recently is that the adventure game I had the most fun with this year was probably Destination: Treasure Island, and yet I'd probably only give it a 3.5, because it has some huge flaws which must be taken into account, even though they didn't prevent me from enjoying the game and playing through it in one sitting (something I hadn't done in a long time).)

And as far as 2007 is concerned, I'm not sure what to expect. The disappointment I felt with Dreamfall will prevent me from getting excited again about a game for a very long time, but there are some things that might prove interesting. Especially Overclocked and Experience 112. I usually have a very bad feeling about games whose biggest reason to get excited about is just the designer's name (cf. Paradise, Gray Matter, A Vampyre Story, Dreamfall...), or games which put the emphasis on arguments such as pretty graphics and 100%-traditional-point-and-click-like-in-the-old-days gameplay (Tunguska, Runaway 2...). But Overclocked and Experience 112 drew my attention because of what was said of their gameplay and plot --- and that's usually a very good sign.

* actually, even many games with rather good writing could do with cutting half of the dialogue (Culture Shock, for instance)

Grey Matter, Simon 4 & A Vampyre Story are the only games that I am interested in thats out for 2007. I hope we see more than 2 good games for 2007, these last few years have been monkey balls. :) Heres hoping the wii might turn out some nice adventure games like the DS has.

I was about to say Samorost 2 got a 4.5, but I see that came out late '05. Man, where the heck did 2006 go? :crazy:

I agree, though. No game that came out last year really deserved to be in that "classic" category. Quite a few pretty good games, but no real exceptional ones.

One trend I'm really starting to see in adventures is that developers continue to play to their strengths, but rarely address their weaknesses. So we keep ending up with games that are best described as "almost, but not quite". Maybe this is reality for a modern day adventure developer, though maybe it's a sign of inflexibility, too. Hard to say, and the answer may just be different in each case.

I'm also looking forward to Experience112 and Overclocked, and the new Phoenix Wright should be a winner, but there are also a few games coming from first-time (adventure) developers that show a lot of promise. I really hope one or more of them will blow us all away.

Maybe time- and budget constraints play a role?

What about Dreamfall? I believe there isn't released a better game this year.

Dreamfall got 4 stars, which was indeed the highest score handed out this year. Speaking personally, I was terribly disappointed by Dreamfall, just like Kurufinwe, and have a hard time believing it would be the best game of the year. To be fair, though, I don't think I've bought any other major titles in 2006, so it's hard to say for sure. Nearly all the games I have played have been Underground or indie titles, with some classics thrown in. However, several of these non-commercial and indie games gave me more enjoyment than Dreamfall did.

I only played BS4 and Dreamfall of the adventures made this year. They were both disappointments, BS4 not so much because BS2 and 3 were also disappointments. Dreamfall was such a disappointment I wasn't ready to post a proper critic of the story until this week, many weeks after playing it (close to the time it was released. So this is hard for me, because I'd only give it two and a half stars.

I didn't touch Moment of Silence because of reviews that mentioned things that would fustrate me too much (flawed gameplay, controls, and dialogue), and the plot sounded generic and uninteresting (like Indigo Phophecy). Overclocked has a terrible name, but it sounds like it has an interesting premise, and if the content is quality (and there seems to be a lot content), this game could get 5 stars easily. If House of Tales have learned from their experience, improve of the technical side of making games then this could turn out to be a good game.

I don't know much about Gray Matter, but I like the concept art. Apparantly it's going to a standard adventure, but they can be done well, or they can be done badly, atleast the format is tried, if not revolutionary, it should work.

At least the lowest judgement handed down was one star, for Lunar Deep - hardly the devastating half-star verdict delivered to 'Isabelle' in 2000!

I expect improvement at both ends of the review scale next year please. Someone merely needs to release a very good adventure game, while someone else hands Lacey a polished turd to review - job done.

The greatest adventuregame feel I got this year was Sam & Max Culture Shock. The game was to me 100% entertaining, so much that I poked on every object on every screen and use every dialogue option just to hear what they would say, and it got me laughing several times which is uncommon today.

Vampyre Story, Gray Matter, Runaway 2, Culpa Innata, City of Metronome, Simon the Sorcerer 4.. Plenty of potential hits, unlike this year.

City of Metronome isn't even in production right now; it has no publisher or funding. It's not going to be coming out in '07, even if it gets a publisher tomorrow.

Back to the topic at hand, the best adventure game I played this year was Scratches, which received four stars. I thought that was a fitting rating for it; it was an excellent game, but it didn't push any boundaries. The story, acting and puzzles were what made it great, but the gameplay itself was simple first-person point-and-click. Four stars was good; I might've given it four and a half at most.

Some of the games this year, however, got really inexplicable ratings. Barrow Hill got four stars? It had a barely-there story, run-of-the-mill puzzles, and one of the worst endings I've ever experienced in an adventure game of the past five years. I'd've given it 2.5 at most. And Secret Files: Tunguska with 3.5? It had a cut-and-paste conspiracy story with a different MacGuffin, awful voice acting, ridiculous, and contrived puzzles. If it hadn't been for the "hotspot highlight" feature I think I would've eaten the CD and enjoyed myself more.

All in all, it was a mediocre year for adventure gaming in my eyes.

Didn't Adventuregamers has awards "Best of..." in the end of each year?. If I'm not wrong, TLJ won Adventuregamers Best of 2000 .This year I haven't seen anything yet?!

next Sam & Max, Gray Matter (Jane ftw :P ), Simon 4 - thats what im realy looking forward to

There definitely have been no such awards since the reactivation of the Adventuregamers in 2003. I don't know about prior to that.

Anyway, as everyone else was saying 2006 indeed didn't have its masterpieces, as opposed to solid games, from the looks of it (there are a couple of more games I'll have to catch up on to be sure), and it's especially sad after the awesome 2005. (Seriously, I believe a case could be made for Fahrenheit, Voyage and Phoenix Wright all getting 4.5-star ratings (although only the last one actually did). For a genre that's supposed to be dead, three must-plays ain't bad. :) )

Next year, the two which seem most likely to score sky high are Gray Matter (yes, I sure could do with some more concrete info about it, but it's Jane Jensen for crying out loud! :D) and Experience112.

I so agree! I am especially looking forward to Gray Matter. That is the one game that I would actually get up early and stand in line outside the store for. Overclocked also looks promising, but.. there is no one like Jane Jensen. Great games, and her novels are also highly entertaining.

Ankh was fun for me, but I was more happy about the quality of graphics, music and voice acting. I think the game was really fun, but not a classic. I would say Bone and Sam & Max as even the demos were enjoyable, but I'd rather wait for a few of the episodes for each to be released on one disc and play a 15-20 hour game of them both than 2-6 hour episodes. The only other, which showed promise, was the indie The Exchange Student.

This year, or the next, Whispered World, Tony Tough 2, Runaway 2, Nearly Departed, Vampyre Story and a few others will hopefully show this is a better year than 2006 but only time will tell.

I liked Voyage but... a must play? And Fahrenheit?

Franckly, the only two games that I consider even eligible in the last 2 or 3 years are Myst 4 and Still Life, and they both have many detractors.

But really, who cares? There have been plenty enough in the last years to satisfy someone who actually wants to play an adventure game. Why keep waiting for the Messiah of Adventure Games? (mag?)
Why not just enjoy the fact that we still get a whole bunch of fun AGs, that still manage not be different from each other? We've got The Black Mirror, we've got Syberia, we've got Da Vinci, Dreamfall, Dark Fall, we've got all kinds of Myst.
Me, I'm glad. As I've said a few times before, I was used to believe that I would never play an AG again, after Myst spawned a shitload of clones. I've been proven wrong.

So 2006 was a good year, as was 2005, and 2004 before it.


EDIT: And in regards to the original question, the only game that I'm waiting for is Simon the Sorcerer 4, because I really like this series. But the others could be nice. I'll just wait and see.

Will you be reviewing it for the site? I really liked the game, and I'm curious as to which flaws you found it to have. The only obvious one (to me) is the short length.

No, I won't be reviewing it. The main problems I had with it (apart from small things like the regular "I'll deal with this later" comments) were the length (especially when you see the price of the French version) and the plot. While I thought it was a good thing that DTI was plot-heavier than their previous games, because it allowed for more variety in the goals and puzzles, the story itself (and the characters) was rather ridiculous (especially compared with the book it was based on). Still, I definitely had a lot of fun with the game.