Adventure Gamers - Forums

All games that go beyond steering a white cube through a maze are overly fanciful and a waste of digital space.

chrissie - 24 April 2022 09:21 AM

& as for artwork it is apparent that it’s possible to construct a game & make it work with no talent at all in that field so not confined to the 1980s

Well, while the art in those SierraVenture titles was crude you do have to understand, that before they were able to even do those graphics in Mystery House, they had to make a drawing program from scratch. There was far, far more work in doing those games than what you’d have to do now.

Nowadays, you probably would be able to whip out something like Mystery House in a weekend, they are just stick drawings, really, but back then, quite a bit of time went into it. Not to mention after Ken improved the engine to display actual colours, which was a feat in itself for Apple IIs of the era.

The way I see it if you really want to review something as old as The Wizard and the Princess is, you do have to take all of that into account. Otherwise, it’s a rather pointless exercise, as it’s obvious that 40-years old games will lose in every aspect in comparison to modern games.

Since I didn’t start playing adventures until the late 1990s, I appreciate reviews like that from a historical perspective, but rating them against today’s standards is probably not a good idea.

Vegetable Party - 24 April 2022 08:36 AM

All games that go beyond steering a white cube through a maze are overly fanciful and a waste of digital space.

tomimt - 24 April 2022 04:16 AM

Karlok - 24 April 2022 03:26 AM

Weird. I guess she would say that if she’s rewriting it. But if it’s timeless and unsurpassed why doesn’t she simply leave it alone.

I guess it’s an interesting exercise to try and bring it to modern VR devices and more modern graphics and controls.

I can see the appeal in it for her, Colossal Cave was the game that sparked her own game-designer career, as it was the first adventure game she played and made her want to design her own games.

Yeah, you’ve got a point.

On another note, I’ve never played Colossal Cabe myself, so I can’t really comment on it further other than in a very superficial level.

I’d hate to replay Colossal Cave but I intend to watch a stream or youtube walkthrough to refresh my memory before tackling Roberta’s version.

i havent read the review before i posted to this thread, but those two lines down at the bottom are actually criminal, imagine rating the 70s invasion of body snatcher by today standards, saying ‘its visual effects are horrible’ and ‘its sound effect are childish’

Horrible four-colour CGA palette in the most widely accessible IBM version
No animations and very limited sound

Regarding graphics and sound:

The graphic style of The Colonel’s Bequest is highly artistic. A combination of stylistic choices and technical limitations, but its result is unique and has artistic merit, beyond being the best result they could get at the time.

I’m not contrarian or nihilist enough to defend the internal speaker, but adlib has some distinct qualities that make it a perfect fit for certain games. Modern games may allow for more dynamic sound design, but a song playing on a loop needs to have certain qualities to make it work.

These things can be appreciated from a current perspective, for their place in AG history, or as representation of things that work/don’t work about the genre, concepts that were experimented with and didn’t succeed, or the other way around: stuff that was clever and on to something, but got lost as the genre got more boxed in.

But, when it comes to these very old games, the changes in tech need to be accounted for when reviewing them While there were only about 7 years in between KQ 4 and The Wizard and The Princess, huge leaps were made in tech. Not only was higher resolution of graphics possible for KQ4, but it was also the first PC game to actually use sound cards. The jump from AGI to SCI engine was as big, or even bigger, than the leap from SierraVenture engine to AGI engine.

Of course, these are technical matters and don’t necessarily mean squat in terms of gameplay or storytelling, but they are, nonetheless, limitations which should be at least acknowledged when reviewing older games.

Otherwise, you could just as well write a grating review of the 1st Super Mario game and crush it because it utilizes 3D space very poorly.

Benjamin Franklin said ‘Don’t judge the past by the standards of the present.’ Those are sage words, but they are words which require several qualifications in order to avoid severe fallacies. I think he wrote them regarding human action and not art, but the idea is still applicable here. By the standards of the back-in-the-day-day, this game was totally swell, as the contemporary reviews indicate. By today’s standards, I’m sure it stinks—Although I should disclaim that I have not actually played it.

Since I think that this site’s review section is only a historical archive by coincidence, being primarily concerned with recommending (or not recommending) games to would-be players of *today*, the score makes sense. Had the review been written within a year or two of it’s release, then the 1 score would probably be unfair (unless the reviewer really didn’t like the game, of course). But judged by the standards of today combined with the mission statement of the AdventureGamers.com review section, it’s sensible.

Important does not always equal good. I derived everything I shall ever wish to derive from the game just by reading the review. Speaking of which, I’d be keen to read more similar retro reviews, which acknowledge the game’s contemporary context while also speaking of their value when removed from that context and placed in the current day.

PS: More topics like this, please.

tomimt - 25 April 2022 07:51 AM

But, when it comes to these very old games, the changes in tech need to be accounted for when reviewing them While there were only about 7 years in between KQ 4 and The Wizard and The Princess, huge leaps were made in tech. Not only was higher resolution of graphics possible for KQ4, but it was also the first PC game to actually use sound cards. The jump from AGI to SCI engine was as big, or even bigger, than the leap from SierraVenture engine to AGI engine.

Of course, these are technical matters and don’t necessarily mean squat in terms of gameplay or storytelling, but they are, nonetheless, limitations which should be at least acknowledged when reviewing older games.

Otherwise, you could just as well write a grating review of the 1st Super Mario game and crush it because it utilizes 3D space very poorly.

Thing is, that first Super Mario game (the NES sidescroller, not the single screen one) still plays great today. Even if a reviewer panned its graphics, they’d still likely give it a glowing review for its superlative gameplay. A lot of other retro games have outdated graphics *and* gameplay.

Baron_Blubba - 25 April 2022 01:08 PM

Thing is, that first Super Mario game (the NES sidescroller, not the single screen one) still plays great today. Even if a reviewer panned its graphics, they’d still likely give it a glowing review for its superlative gameplay. A lot of other retro games have outdated graphics *and* gameplay.

My point was, that you can’t really judge something based on standards that didn’t exist when that something was made. You could just as well criticise silent movies for lacking dialogue. which from a modern perspective might sound sensible, but which was not technically possible at the advent of movies.

tomimt - 25 April 2022 01:21 PM

My point was, that you can’t really judge something based on standards that didn’t exist when that something was made. You could just as well criticise silent movies for lacking dialogue. which from a modern perspective might sound sensible, but which was not technically possible at the advent of movies.

Consider the response to modernized graphics of classic games. They tend to make use of technology and disc space in ways that were not available for the original designers, at the time. Quite a few people don’t like the update. I think this goes beyond nostalgia: pixel art techniques, even if they are the result of compensation, do really clever things with suggestion that are hard to emulate in High Res.

Vegetable Party - 25 April 2022 02:25 PM

Consider the response to modernized graphics of classic games. They tend to make use of technology and disc space in ways that were not available for the original designers, at the time. Quite a few people don’t like the update. I think this goes beyond nostalgia: pixel art techniques, even if they are the result of compensation, do really clever things with suggestion that are hard to emulate in High Res.

From here, we actually do get into another interesting aspect: when those old SierraVenture games were made, there really weren’t pixel artists, there really weren’t even that many people around who knew how to make art with computers.

You can actually quite nicely see the evolution in the quality of art from game to game in those games as the people making it became more proficient in producing it.

Mystery House had art drawn by Roberta, who by her admission isn’t much of an artist. But as it was their first game, where they were testing out stuff while they went along, I’m willing to be pretty lenient in terms of art. They even had to create their own drawing programs.

The jump in art quality in Adventure in Serenia is quite high, really, the biggest boon being that they had a proper artist and colour, but you also have to take into account, that while they had a proper artist, they were not only hindered by the tech, but also the lack of experience in making digital art.

I think the first actually good looking SierraVenture titles were the Dark Crystal and Time Zone. You can tell that the artists had gotten the hang of how to create art in a digital medium, as limited as it was on Apple II. https://www.mobygames.com/game/hi-res-adventure-6-the-dark-crystal/screenshots

Mind you, there are Apple II games that look far, far better than the Sierra titles ever did, but those were made several years after Sierra had already moved on to AGI engine and PC.

With all due respect to the works of Roberta and the rest of the founding mothers/fathers of adventure games, I just imagined a kid from early 1980s coming back from an arcade saloon (or bar or whatever it was called) we he had just played Dragon’s Lair and Xevious. And then his parents present him this game with amateurishly drawn non-animated CGA pictures. Would it be up to his standards?