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Your Top 100 Adventure Games (Voting Ended)
I might be interested in trying the scoring method that tries to push newer games up on the list, in other words giving a smaller multiplier the older the game is.
Are you serious? I seriously hope not. Such a list would be a parody of itself.
Not a good idea for me too. A good game is a good game doesn’t matter when it was released. Giving handicap to newest games just to boost their ranking made them look even more inferior.
I might be interested in trying the scoring method that tries to push newer games up on the list, in other words giving a smaller multiplier the older the game is.
Are you serious? I seriously hope not. Such a list would be a parody of itself.
Not a good idea for me too. A good game is a good game doesn’t matter when it was released. Giving handicap to newest games just to boost their ranking made them look even more inferior.
Obviously it’s a bad idea if we are talking about what merits each game has.
But it’s not such a bad idea if we are trying to find some tools to counterbalance nostalgia and LucasArts/Sierra/something else fandom.
If we look very strictly games as they are, then games like The Secret of Monkey Island are not top material. For instance, there is unnecessary ambiguity in the user interface. Do you “use door” or do you “open door” when you want to find out that it’s in any case locked? 
Most newer games have only one option to perform that action, not to mention things like using right click to examine. But when we add criteria like, “but it’s a classic game”, “it’s LucasArts”, “those newer games wouldn’t exist without Monkey Island”, and of course decades of nostalgia, then people are ignoring those issues as if they didn’t exist.
Giving some minor, but in itself very small benefit to newer games, might make the list more realistic as it would shave off some nostalgia points.
And I think I suggested reducing the multiplier by -0.03 by each year, which is very small benefit, The Secret of Monkey Island would still be in the top 10 most likely.
It might be enough to make Broken Sword ranked higher than The Secret of Monkey Island, for instance, which would in my opinion just make the score more realistic.
I think some of you have forgotten what started this whole list.
The idea wasn’t to create a list of the best adventure games of all time.
The point was someone’s question which newer games would replace older games compared to the existing top 100 list.
We now know the answer, pretty much nothing would change.
Maybe Thimbleweed Park is going to replace Infocom text adventures, but that’s it mostly.
So to get some changes, there only few things that would make that happen:
- to tweak the scoring method (I personally think that’s the best solution)
- to limit the games one can vote (for instance, only one game from any five year period)
- to limit who can vote (new adventuregamers who haven’t played LucasArts and Sierra might have completely different views)
- something else similar.
But it’s not such a bad idea if we are trying to find some tools to counterbalance nostalgia and LucasArts/Sierra/something else fandom.
Are you sure it is about nostalgia? Maybe people just like different games. As example, i realized that i can’t remember nothing about Technobabylon apart from its subgenre and yet it made to best best games list of so many people.
]If we look very strictly games as they are, then games like The Secret of Monkey Island are not top material. For instance, there is unnecessary ambiguity in the user interface. Do you “use door” or do you “open door” when you want to find out that it’s in any case locked?
Again, different interfaces appeal to different people. I was already irritated at Sierra’s hand icon before one/two click interfaces because it made main character sometimes do things that i was not trying to do, thus solving puzzles for me.
Imo DoTT is just the sequel to Maniac Mansion. I would not call two games a series.
Oh yes, I missed that you limited it to 3 games, sorry. Although I wonder how would you count Telltale episodes, or Dreamfall chapters, or Zork games, especially those graphic adaptations that had little to nothing in common.
Episodes are one game imo. But me and my crystal ball are just thinking aloud in this thread and if you have a different definition, fine with me. Gray areas are inevitable, as your Zork games prove. The Zork text adventures are a series but the 3 graphical ones…? The only thing they have in common is the Zork universe, so they’re not real sequels either.
Butter my buns and call me a biscuit! - Agent A
I think some of you have forgotten what started this whole list.
The idea wasn’t to create a list of the best adventure games of all time.
The point was someone’s question which newer games would replace older games compared to the existing top 100 list.We now know the answer, pretty much nothing would change.
Maybe Thimbleweed Park is going to replace Infocom text adventures, but that’s it mostly.
Not much has changed in the Top Twenty, it’s mostly classics games in a different order. But I went to the trouble of comparing 88 games in AG’s Top Hundred to the new one LadyKestrel compiled. (NB: Many games got 6 votes, which makes it impossible to compare the entire top 100.)
41 games in the Top 88 All-Time do not appear in the recent Top 88. That’s almost half.
Penumbra: Black Plague – Dark Fall – The Dark Eye – Colonel’s Bequest – 7th Guest – Quest for Glory II – Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened – Freddy Pharkas – Silent Hill – Drawn: The Painted Tower – King’s Quest 1 – Shadow of the Comet – Discworld II – Maniac Mansion – Shadows of Destiny – Pepper’s Adventures in Time – Hotel Dusk – Black Dahlia – Obsidian – Another Code (Trace Memory) – Myst 3 – Startrek: Judgment Rites – In Memoriam – Samorost 2 – Return to Mysterious Island – Zork Nemesis – Infocom Text Adventures – Space Quest IV – Professor Layton and the Curious Village – Blackstone Chronicles – Conquests of the Longbow – Myst 4 – Last Window – Stacking – Amnesia: The Dark Descent – L.A. Noire – Bad Mojo – Police Quest 2 – Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel – Portal 2
In the new Top 88 those games were replaced by 15 different oldies (= adventures that had already been released at the time of the official Top Hundred) and by 27 more recent games:
Oldies: The Dig – Broken Sword 2 – Toonstruck – Broken Sword 3 – Discworld – Gray Matter – Whispered World – Emerald City Confidential – Runaway 1 - Runaway 3 – Blackwell Legacy - Blackwell Deception – Blackwell Unbound – Blackwell Convergance – Journey Down
More recent games: Thimbleweed Park – Blackwell Epiphany - Kathy Rain – Return of the Obra Dinn – Technobabylon – Resonance – The Wolf Among Us – There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension – Unavowed – Whispers of a Machine – Fran Bow – Life Is Strange – Paradigm – Shardlight – Walking Dead Season 1 – Gorogoa – Primordia – The Witness – Botanicula – Broken Sword 5 - Cognition: An Erica Reed Mystery - The Darkside Detective - Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders - Disco Elysium – Heaven’s Vault – Silent Age – What Remains of Edith Finch
That’s quite a lot of new ones!
EDIT: 15 + 27 = 42 and not 41. Hmm… Well, I’m not going to check what I did wrong.
Butter my buns and call me a biscuit! - Agent A
Gatekeeper:
Are these lists always going to be mildly damned by nostalgic subjectivity? I think so.
Enough that any of your counterbalancing suggestions make sense? I don’t think so.
Limiting games voted for from any given period will create an artificially curated list. Fact is, some [X]-year spans have more great games than others.
Limiting who can vote will likely skew votes in a different direction, toward a different era. More importantly, voices with opinions that deserve to be qualified will be stifled.
And there’s no definitive integer that could be used to accurately adjust for nostalgia. Math is concrete; sentiment is not. Everyone’s favoritism is swayed by nostalgia to a different degree, and in some cases, not at all. In other cases, nostalgic favoritism can be identified and set aside by the voter, for purposes of making a more objective list of best games. For example, because of nostalgia, King’s Quest V is one of my favorite adventure games. But while it might end up in a list of my 10 Favorite Adventure Games, I wouldn’t put it in a list of 10 Best Adventure Games.
The simplest and most accurate means of correlating data for a Best Games list, I believe, would be to leave things as they are.
A truly great game will *usually* rise to the top and supplant a classic to which it is superior, in the majority opinion of the general public. For example: Thimbleweed Park, Primordia, There Is No Game, and others.
Heck, even Broken Sword and Syberia came some time after the Sierra and Lucas Arts golden age, and many people will place those games ahead of the Monkey Islands and Space Quests (etc) of the world.
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Explicitly baking bias into the system to counteract a perceived bias isn’t a good solution. There’s no need to overcomplicate things, if you want a list of people’s favorite new adventure games choose a cutoff date and make a thread for “top adventures of the past X years.” Nothing wrong with that, could be interesting to see what comes of it.
If we look very strictly games as they are, then games like The Secret of Monkey Island are not top material. For instance, there is unnecessary ambiguity in the user interface. Do you “use door” or do you “open door” when you want to find out that it’s in any case locked? Tongue
Most newer games have only one option to perform that action, not to mention things like using right click to examine. But when we add criteria like, “but it’s a classic game”, “it’s LucasArts”, “those newer games wouldn’t exist without Monkey Island”, and of course decades of nostalgia, then people are ignoring those issues as if they didn’t exist.
This is the argument for why Monkey Island is not “top material?” A minor interface issue on the margins of the experience that isn’t even really a problem because the game has right click default verbs?
And you’ve just decided the reason most people are “overlooking” these “issues” are because they’re blinded by nostalgia, rather than them genuinely still enjoying the actual content (music,art,puzzles,writing) of the game? Okay…
Dear Karlok, will you just for a short while please unblock me so that I can PM you about something that matters to us both. 
This is the argument for why Monkey Island is not “top material?” A minor interface issue on the margins of the experience that isn’t even really a problem because the game has right click default verbs?
You must have missed some words that I wrote, such as “if we look very strictly” and “for instance”.
If you want to have some discussion about other bad things in the game, then that rowing part is simply unnecessary and doesn’t really provide anything to the gameplay experience.
And we could find other things, but that’s not really the point.
But if it makes you happy, let’s say that The Secret of Monkey Island has one of the best game opening scenes ever. Beautiful pixelarts, nice music, and the first dialogue lines famously describe what the game is all about, and also help the player to get started by telling what to do next.
From the top of my memory Broken Sword (not the DC version!) and Leisure Suit Larry III have as strong opening scenes as well.
And you’ve just decided the reason most people are “overlooking” these “issues” are because they’re blinded by nostalgia, rather than them genuinely still enjoying the actual content (music,art,puzzles,writing) of the game? Okay…
Nostalgia, fandom, other reasons, yes.
People can be blind to mistakes in the things they like.
I can even speak with some personal experience here.
I played Star Trek: The Next Generation - A Final Unity through twice and never noticed how uneven the background graphics style and quality were.
Then I read some review about it, which pointed that out, and when I played it again, I noticed how that indeed was the case.
That game is still one of the best TV/movie based adventure games, but there’s no denying the obvious. The graphical quality could be better.
(STTNGAFU has a very nice opening scene as well, I have sometimes watched it just to see it.)
You must have missed some words that I wrote, such as “if we look very strictly” and “for instance”.
Saying “very strictly” doesn’t change the fact that your example was a non-issue with how the controls actually work. It also doesn’t justify assuming people only rate Monkey Island over newer games because of nostalgia or making a list that arbitrarily weighs against older games. Neither does listing other small issues on the margins of the experience. You could do that with nearly any game of any era and you’re not even coming up with good examples.
Leisure Suit Larry 5 is missing entirely too!
Did it get grouped with LSL 4 somehow?
But seriously, it’s a classic Sierra game, and it also led the series to cartoony direction, and was point-and-click for the first time in the series, so there shouldn’t be even any anti-pixelart or anti-parser influence there.But yet, not on the list at all.
So are Sierra games generally speaking on the way out from the adventure top lists?
The difference between LucasArts and Sierra is unbelievably obvious here.
I personally haven’t played LSL5. Maybe that’s true for many other people? But if you think it should be higher, why not nominate it for a community playthrough? I would be happy to join and see what I’m missing, especially with someone like yourself leading who can point out the game’s brilliance to us.
If we look very strictly games as they are, then games like The Secret of Monkey Island are not top material. For instance, there is unnecessary ambiguity in the user interface. Do you “use door” or do you “open door” when you want to find out that it’s in any case locked?
If you want my opinion, this is just getting academic. Have you ever found someone who has complained about that when playing?
There’s nothing wrong with having two possibilities for opening a door. Whether a player selects “use” or “open” makes absolutely no difference to the player, which is the only thing that counts.
AKA Charo
First of all there never was an LSL4. I think the poster was trying to lure you into an argument you can’t win.
For whom the games toll,
they toll for thee.
If we look very strictly games as they are, then games like The Secret of Monkey Island are not top material. For instance, there is unnecessary ambiguity in the user interface. Do you “use door” or do you “open door” when you want to find out that it’s in any case locked?
If you want my opinion, this is just getting academic. Have you ever found someone who has complained about that when playing?
There’s nothing wrong with having two possibilities for opening a door. Whether a player selects “use” or “open” makes absolutely no difference to the player, which is the only thing that counts.
Isn’t the whole point having deep discussions about these games?
If we don’t go deep into the topic, then we are left with very superficial “it’s a nice game” discussion.
But, here’s a shocking answer for you: even LucasArts themselves found out that the user interface is too complicated!
This is the original interface:
This is the reworked interface:
Of course some of that was hard-coded into the game logic that they couldn’t get rid of all overlapping things, but at least those “turn on” and “turn off” things were dropped. I’m not sure if either one of them could be used for anything at all in the original game.
If we look very strictly games as they are, then games like The Secret of Monkey Island are not top material. For instance, there is unnecessary ambiguity in the user interface. Do you “use door” or do you “open door” when you want to find out that it’s in any case locked?
If you want my opinion, this is just getting academic. Have you ever found someone who has complained about that when playing?
There’s nothing wrong with having two possibilities for opening a door. Whether a player selects “use” or “open” makes absolutely no difference to the player, which is the only thing that counts.
Isn’t the whole point having deep discussions about these games?
If we don’t go deep into the topic, then we are left with very superficial “it’s a nice game” discussion.
Right, and I’m not saying don’t go deep. I’m saying I disagree. Maybe every post needs a disclaimer after the Return To Monkey Island thread where it seemed like certain people were trying to silence others, but that’s not what I’m trying to do.
But, here’s a shocking answer for you: even LucasArts themselves found out that the user interface is too complicated!
This is the original interface:
This is the reworked interface:
Of course some of that was hard-coded into the game logic that they couldn’t get rid of all overlapping things, but at least those “turn on” and “turn off” things were dropped. I’m not sure if either one of them could be used for anything at all in the original game.
Okay. Assuming we went go the “it’s too complicated” assessment. What’s the alternative to a verb like “open”? The only one I can see is to have “use” for every action that isn’t looking. That’s the Sierra system, which has equally enough if not more grounds for criticism for being too simple.
AKA Charo
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