When I think "badly written English and piss-poor dialogue," the examples that come to my mind are all commercial games. ;)

Let me rephrase then. Lose the blatant disrespect, and use the proper standards, or the failing is yours. Your standard clearly seems to be "look as good as bigger budget commercial games". That being the case, you're right. You're wasting your time playing them. By all means, pay your money for the esthetic enhancements. But it's not a game's fault for failing to meet standards it never sought to achieve.

Incidentally, who here is touting fan games as the "next big thing"? I must have missed it. Perhaps you're confusing that with "not shit", which really aren't much alike.

King Quest 2 remake is almost like a new game, for all the stuff that they added to it.

And who cares whether it's a remake or not? It's free, it's amateur, and therefore, by your standards, it should be shit. Well, my opinion is that it's better than most Sierra games, which are considered classic by many (probably you included).

It depends on what you're looking for: A 3D adventure, or a point and clicker with ace backgrounds. Still Life fits the latter, and something like Escape From Monkey Island is still a great looking 3D adventure game, five years after its late 2000 release.

Edit: I think you're asking what my ideal adventure games are visually, although I'm not certain since you've been rather vague too.

Well yes, Still Life did have one grammatical error.

I don't write off an amateur game immediately. I write it off later once It's proven itself as...Well, as you all like to quote, "shit".

A lot of people were extremely keen for KQ9 to be completed. I simply didn't -- and still don't -- think it'll be much good. At least, I'm positive it won't be the worthy successor to the Kings Quest series everyone expects it to be and I don't believe it warrants the hype it has been receiving, or the endless howling for it's development process to be resumed.

I've found them absolutely un-engaging; soulless repeats of adventure games gone by. It's time to move on: Indigo Prophecy has shown as such. These fangames are just a testament to the stagnant state the genre is in.

Actually, there are games in the shop that shouldn't be there. The game has to be pretty bad not to be "worthy" of a commercial release.

So why haven't these fangames been commercially released? Because they're not good enough? I'm not quite sure what to make of your post.

First and foremost, because their authors never wanted them to, ergo they didn't even try to find the publisher or anything. What did you think?

I think they don't have the confidence to approach a publisher, or are flatly turned down. There isn't a market for short-of-length adventure games.

So, in short, you hate fan games, and you're especially upset that they don't cost money, because if they did, you could call them overpriced rip-offs, which you can't, because they don't.

Is that correct?

I don't think fan games are any good. That's all.

I dont see whats there to hate? 99% of them all are free, so if you hate them so much just don't play them.

(even though I bet you actually play fan games, even though you hate them. ;) )

Wow. I guess all independent movies are shit too because they weren't released by major studios.

So, based on 8-10 fangames you have played, you are concluding that the entire fangame community is producing crap?

Interesting.

I know of someone who had been working 3 years on a game, never gave-up and managed to release it, free, after a great deal of work. How is that less dedicated than someone being paid to do a game?

Mind you, it turns out that game made some people very happy. It was called Other Worlds. Certainly, the graphics are horrible, but it provided hours of good and free fun.

Really, you do have a face to call those games "sh*t". I can't imagine how I would feel if I was working on a fangame.

some fan games are poorly made, I'll say that. But anyone who would use that as an excuse to write off all fan games as crap is a closed-minded fool.

Let me focus on the "shoddy old engine" -point.

What do you MEAN?! Old? AGS is updated all the time! WME is updated all the time! Sludge is, too! And every other engine! And how are they "shoddy"? They're fast! They don't crash! They're easy to use for the developers! In fact SCUMM is more shoddy than AGS!

If you mean that game makers want to make their games low-res, well... It's not the engine's fault. Many developesrs prefer low-res, because it lowers the file size for internet distribution, for example. They also like the retro look. I'd like to see more high-res games, btw. AGS can handle 800*600 (at least), WME 1024*768 or higher.

And finally.

...

Who would publish a low-res game these days? Who would publish an adventure game? You can clearly see that most commercial ags haven't been very succesful. And amateur game developers want to make the games free for everyone.

Well you are working on one, aren't you? And thanks for your input. :Z