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I played the Tales of Monkey Island games last year and really enjoyed them. Some chapters better than others but all are very good, and Tell Tale nailed the tone and humor. Enjoy.

Baron_Blubba - 22 June 2021 08:57 PM

I played the Tales of Monkey Island games last year and really enjoyed them. Some chapters better than others but all are very good, and Tell Tale nailed the tone and humor. Enjoy.

Yep, so far, so good. It’s like playing Secret of Monkey Island with better graphics so far.

Quite funny with clever puzzles. Plot has grabbed me and I want to get to the end now.

Adv_Lvr - 23 June 2021 07:15 PM

Baron_Blubba - 22 June 2021 08:57 PM

I played the Tales of Monkey Island games last year and really enjoyed them. Some chapters better than others but all are very good, and Tell Tale nailed the tone and humor. Enjoy.

Yep, so far, so good. It’s like playing Secret of Monkey Island with better graphics so far.

Quite funny with clever puzzles. Plot has grabbed me and I want to get to the end now.

Finished Tales of Monkey Island. As stated in the games review, the ending was simply amazing, a very long and original puzzle. This is one game well worth a 2nd play through. The ending cut scene was so very funny, I actually played the ending several times it was so fun.

Now onward to Neely Cootalot and the Fowl Fleet.!

Finished “TEX MURPHY,  UNDER A Killing Moon”.

I’ve been thinking about my top <random number> adventure games. Hanging out on these forums made me want to check out some new games, as well as some classics. St_Eddie recommended I’d start with Under a Killing Moon.

It’s very different from the games I’ve played before. I remember playing the demo of “Normality” as a kid. I played “Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within” a little later. In a way, this game is those experiences, rolled into one, but with a hardboiled sci-fi twist.

This twist is really what makes the game great. The characters, music and general tone of the game add a lot of flavour to a dish that is occasionally a bit chewy and hard to digest. It has interesting textures, though. It’s more or less balanced, with enjoyable, course or just plain weird surprises between chunks of solid 90s entertainment.

I don’t think it’s going in my top 10. But I’ll definitely check out other Tex Murphy games, one of them might end up on that list.

I think The Pandora Directive (the only other Tex game I have played) is the same thing but better. Almost all the flaws and frustrations from the first game still exist, but the good stuff is even gooder than before. If not for the last chapter, which features almost everything most people don’t want in an adventure game, this would be a top 10 for me. Really looking forward to the remake, but if you don’t want to wait on that (seems to be in the relatively early stages of development) then the original is absolutely worth playing.

Luhr28 - 14 July 2021 09:12 PM

From what I remember, both games started out absolutely great and then started throwing in stuff like unfair deaths and horrible stealth mazes.

That’s about right. They are definitely a product of a time when crossing other game genres with adventure games was perceived as a good thing, in a ‘more is more and more is better’ naive cd-rom era sort of way.
It’s a testament to how good the games are that they can still be so enjoyable despite those problems. Yet I completely understand why someone would *not* want to play them today. Like I said in the Pandora Directive remake thread, as much as I like UAKM and PD, I don’t recommend them to friends and family who are not quite as retro-tolerant as myself, because they can be soooo clunky at times.

I played and finished Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy.  It was pretty much as good as the 2nd, just much shorter.  For .99 cents, it was a good deal:

dirac - 20 July 2021 07:49 AM

Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned - 5/5

Lol, took me several months to finish it without hints but it was worth it. Story, Characters & Dialogues all top notch as expected from a Jane Jensen Gabriel Knight game. Puzzles some of the best I ever solved (and also some of the worst, hehe), but overall very good and most important they perfectly align with the story. Biggest negative point are the horrible aged visuals, the step from FMV to 3D graphics was definitely a bad choice for this setting, GK 1 & 2 look timeless compared to GK3. Voice acting is exceptional like the games before, some people seem to dislike Jim Curry’s performance I need him in my GK games. Alltogether awesome game, glad I finally jumped into it after avoiding it for so long due to horrible Screenshots.

And I absolutely agree with your review. I love the writing in GK3 a lot and Tim Curry’s performance as Gabriel is perfect, his remarks always crack me up.

-Mind if I ask about your machine?
-Yes, I do.
-Oh, c’mon, what is it? You are trying to call a giant sandworm or what?
-For your information, it’s a very delicate scientific equipment.
-Yeah, so is a worm thumper… So, see anything headed this way? Should we head for the rocks?
-Shut up, Knight.
-Look, it’s a giant worm! Get out the harpoons!

I wish I could experience the game for the first time again. There is so much going on in it, so many plot branches, twists, everything, probably the most story-heavy adventure game out there. And I like the move to 3D, it really “adds a new dimention” to the gameplay - all that area searching, walking through the rocks and discovering new places, following people, etc. I just wish they updated the graphics so that it wouldn’t scare people away.

Replayed two games from 2009: Runaway A Twist of Fate and Primordia. Haven’t played them since their initial releases, so it was quite refreshing as I had forgotten almost everything about them, including puzzles and plot turns. Runaway was a very pleasant experience, maybe a bit too uneven and pretentious - just like Fahrenheit, they tried to mimic various movies, to the point they made characters look like famous actors (Steve Buscemi, William Dafoe, John Goodman, Groucho Marx). Puzzles were of very traditional sort, fun enough to solve, although looking back I realise that I spent most of the time just clicking around and talking to people rather than solving something. That memorable corpse puzzle, for example, turned to be much shorter and easier than I remembered, but it still felt satisfying to solve. There are few places to visit during each level, but they are used wisely and the game doesn’t feel claustrophobic.

I think I’d rate it a bit lower than on my first play, like 4 stars out of 5.

Primordia, on the other hand, was everything I wanted and more: awesome post-apocalyptic/industrial settings, well-written, often humorous characters, story that seems simple and straightforward, yet you can’t get enough of it and by the end everything goes wrong. And some of the best puzzles to date, both easy and hard, always logical, sometimes with alternative solutions. The multi-step code puzzle was especially memorable, with the computer terminal part alone being beautifully designed. Also all the legal stuff was smart - I remember reading that the writer/designer used to be a professional lawyer, so it added a lot to the feel of realism. The only obvious drawback is that the game ends sooner than you wish, although there are plenty of various endings and some hidden extra puzzles to compensate. Also it’s sad that no sequel followed despite Primordia asks for one. With all due respect, Strangeland just wasn’t the game I was hoping to see from Wormwood.

All in all, I’d rate the game 4.5 or 5 out of 5 stars, it’s a modern classic.

Speaking of recent games, I also played Minute of Islands straight after reading a raving 5-star review here at Adventuregamers. And since the game was developed by the guys behind the Inner World series which I enjoyed (especially the second game), I was expecting nothing less than a masterpiece. Talk about overrating. I actually managed to finish only 2 out of 4 levels and watched the rest at Youtube on quick speed. For starters, it’s not an adventure, but a very uninspired, casual platformer with few basic and repetative puzzles thrown in. It’s VERY linear and VERY boring.

Each level basically goes like this: you slowly run through the empty ground level to your boat and head for some island, then experience a sick dream after entering a yellow fog where you collect several floating creatures in the right order (which counts for a puzzle here), then arrive to your destination and start looking for 2 or 3 switches you have to activate. But you can’t just explore the island the way you want - you have to follow one predetermined path and reach the switches in one predetermined order. Most of the time you just climb ledges, up and down, back and forth. There are invisible walls everywhere, so you can’t, for example, jump off a high ledge to get to the point - you slowly climb back. This is basically the gameplay. Sometimes you encounter levers that manipulate elevators or open doors just before you. Sometimes you push crates or alike to free your path. Sometimes you look for a key to unlock a door. A very basic platformer stuff.

You can also “collect memories” on your way which are also represented by 10-12 floating creatures. After you catch one, a monotonous voice which belongs to the narrator (there is no other voiceover in the game) reads 2-3 sentences, something like “Mo used to play with her sister in this hole. Those were the days”, and that’s basically your reward. All this time you have to stand still and listen to this dull and absolutely pointless “story”. When you are finally done at the island, you have to make all the long way back to your boat and head for the ground level. And then you have to wake up one of the four sleeping giants by… reaching and activating another 2 or 3 power sources. Only this time instead of colorful islands you jump through some grey undeground maze - again, very linear and repetative, with constant backtracking and zero fun.

The whole game lasts 5-6 hours, I tried to give it a chance and wasted some 3 hours on it, and those were some of the longest hours of my life. Yes, Minute looks pretty in Adventure Time’s sort of way, but that’s obvioulsy not enough to make up for a good game. I enjoy a good platromer just like I enjoy a good adventure, but this one is neither. It’s even worse than the similarly poor experience Lost Words: Beyond the Page which was also advertised as a platform adventure. 1 out of 5 stars from me