Adventure Gamers - Forums

@meteor
It’s not about slavish definitions, it’s about having a coherent one so stuff like The Last of Us 2, which is clearly not an adventure game, don’t get included on a genre specific list.

What you like to play and the experience you get out of it is fine, enjoy what you enjoy for whatever reason, but there’s no point limiting the list to this genre at all if your conception of it so broad that something like Half Life 2 could plausibly fit the criteria.

Why do Infocom text adventures show up?

Makes perfect sense to me but this is how I define the adventure genre and explain its defining characteristic:

Adventure games are a narrative genre that focuses on exploration, story, or problem solving over action and reflex based challenges. A ubiquitous and defining aspect of adventure games is that their gameplay and narrative function inseparably. Whereas an action, racing, or puzzle game may have a story—even a deep one that greatly enhances the experience—story is not necessary for the core gameplay of these genres to function. Adventures, on the other hand, do require a narrative for their gameplay to function because their gameplay is an expression of the player interpreting that narrative. Take the example of finding a contradiction in Ace Attorney or sedating Elaine’s guard poodles in Monkey Island. In both cases the correct interaction is only knowable by the player successfully understanding the game’s story, and progress requires the player to communicate an idea to the game based on that understanding. Without a narrative context there is no contradiction to find, and there is no reason drugging a poodle equates to progression. Another way to think of this is other genres have story and gameplay, but adventure games have story as gameplay.

- Slightly edited from a thread I made about Japanese adventure games.

Timed Events and Action sequences in games that are otherwise adventure games are just that, they’re sequences/set piece moments not the bulk of the experience. Final Fantasy 7 has a snowboarding sequence, it’s not a snowboarding game.

Ultimately, I think people should go with what I suggested earlier. Compile a list of archetypical “game types” that are commonly accepted to be adventure games “text adventure, P&C, myst-like, etc” and agree on that rather than starting from scratch and trying to define what an adventure game is full stop. It’s a lot easier and it cuts through the noise.

Plus it could help categorize the end top 100 list into subgenres that people could sort through to find the games they want.

I guess definitions and the way you can look at games differ. The Last of Us works perfectly fine for me as an action adventure. Context given, some want you to progress by puzzles, some by action or a combination of both. Thinking about this, I felt artificially treated in The Wolf Among Us where every interactive dialogue was timed. Anyway I think that a list offering more than just one type of adventure is more interesting and offers more value for a majority. And it’s the one I’m interested in.

Suggestion/question from a total noob when it comes to programming.

There’s this website, called “ranker” (and I’m sure there are more equivalents to it in the web), where you can pretty much rank anything that is in their database (which is very thorough - music, sports, film etc.). It’s voted on by people who make an account,and every entry simply has an “arrow up” and an “arrow down”, pretty straight forward. I was wondering if it’s possible to implement this feature on AG. If it takes (however many, but not too many) lines of code to make every game “votable” (I just made that up), then all we need to do is find our “best/favorite” games in the database and give it an “arrow up”. After, let’s say, one month - top 100 of games that got votes get selected and put up as a feature like “voted by fans”.
The best part of it is that this kind of list is dynamic. If something like “There’s No Game” comes along, and a lot of people will go to the game’s page and vote on it - it will make its appearance on the list, however high, until the new awesome game will come in and knock it a few notches down.

I don’t think an “arrow down” is necessary.

If, however, this is a Sisyphus’s kinda deal and will require manually adding that to every game in database, of course, that’s not the way to go. Also, feel free to shut my suggestion down based on myriad of other factors. I know big fat ZERO about programming, and generally am a lost person in this world, so I don’t mind.

P.S. I can not imagine my “best” list without games that are older than 10 years. Or 20 years.

P.P.S. I absolutely think we need to keep in mind a certain definition of “adventure”. Otherwise, it will be a list of “these are the games I really enjoyed, and I saw some adventure in it so they should be on the list”. Because Hitman, Fallout and Gears of War will fit that definition for me,and they are not adventures. You point and click in almost every game in the universe, yet it doesn’t make almost every game in the universe “point’n'click”.

@Doom
I think that striking the right balance is more attractive because such games offer values adventure gamers could be interested in, more, like soso implementations of what defines an adventure game in a traditional way only.

The result is confusing nonetheless and makes you wonder about the taste and grasp of these experienced players or question the selection process. Ten years later, I’m pretty sure these rankings also don’t represent the current request.

But the more I write, the more I get a feeling that I’m just not part of this.

rtrooney - 23 June 2022 10:44 PM

Chrissie just finished playing the Gemeni Rue CPT by watching the last two sequences on YouTube. While the game is top 10, I wonder whether she thinks it deserves that ranking since it was unplayable on her computer.

Yes, it’s an excellent game & shouldn’t be demoted due to failure on my part to get by one shootout. But I couldn’t include it in my own personal list. 

Jabod - 21 June 2022 05:59 AM

Black Dahlia has often been wished to be available on modern machines (and before anyone thinks of asking and remembering me trying I’ve just about given up on that project)

rtrooney - 23 June 2022 10:44 PM

I may have loved them when I played them on my Win31SE machine. But they no longer have the cachet they did now that I can no longer play them. Black Dahlia

You guys are aware that there’s a fan patched distribution of that game?

It comes pre-packaged with DosBox and Windows emulation, it installs a nice launcher and manuals and everything, and you can even click subtitles on and off from the virtual desktop!

It’s easier than most old games from Steam, simply click and play.

Obviously it’s technically speaking illegal, or maybe “abandonware”, but if there are two options: never play a game you want to play, or using a fan distribution, at least I wouldn’t have any difficulties deciding there.

And of course the point here is that if those guys who created that fantastic distribution package can make it work on modern computers, so can you, if you spend enough time tweaking it.
Or then you save your precious time, and use that “click and play” package that other people have made for you.

Like I said previously, it takes very special circumstances in 2022 for some older game not to be playable. Old games are running more stable now than they did back then.

From the information file of that fan release:

This is an installer package for the game Black Dahlia (1998) which will allow it to be played on modern versions of Windows, with easy to use desktop and/or start menu shortcuts and an uninstall option for quick removal. The manual is also included. It uses DOSBox Daum running Windows 95.

A special shader has also been included which fixes the interlaced (black lines) FMVs in the game, and tweaked slightly for brightness.

Subtitles can be enabled or disabled via shortcuts on the virtual desktop if so desired.

Xxxx’x Xxxx is a passion project dedicated to bringing old classics to a modern audience, while eliminating all of the hurdles that that normally entails.

The name of the site has been X’d out, as it is technically speaking illegal, but I’m sure you guys can find it, if you Google and ask around.

Jabod - 24 June 2022 11:19 AM

GateKeeper - 24 June 2022 11:06 AM

You guys are aware that there’s a fan patched distribution of that game?

It comes pre-packaged with DosBox and Windows emulation, it installs a nice launcher and manuals and everything, and you can even click subtitles on and off from the virtual desktop!
It’s easier than most old games from Steam, simply click and play.

Thanks for this GateKeeper but it begs the question as to why you didn’t post the same info into the thread I started 2 years ago in Hints and Tech Support?

I haven’t seen that thread, as I don’t read every thread on the forum.
For the last couple of months I didn’t visit the forums at all because of time constraints and everything.

Anyway, I went to check that thread and it took me a while to actually find it. I believe you are referring to a thread titled “Running Windows 98SE in a VM on Windows 10 and building a Windows 98SE PC”.

I am only guessing, but perhaps someone could have posted an answer sooner, if the thread was titled differently, like including the game title in it.

But, all’s well that ends well, now you know about it and you can spread the information to other interested people.

Jabod - 24 June 2022 11:19 AM

However, you still think that Joe Soap is going to hunt around for all sorts of things that s/he probably knows nothing about. I know a bit and wherever that fan patch is it never once showed up when I was investigating getting Black Dahlia to run on modern machines.

Like it or not the average person will not put in that sort of effort to play a game from years ago.

Well, that really depends on the case, doesn’t it?

Are we making the assumption here that people who are new to adventure games are also somewhat new to computing in general?

Someone who has, let’s say, played lots of FPS games, knows stuff like GZDoom, The Force Engine, and everything else, but just haven’t had a real interested in adventure genre. I think such a person wouldn’t find too much troble downloading some fan patches or mods.

Of course there are some genre-specific “secrets”, like in the adventure world among those might be Monkey Island Ultimate Talkie Edition Builders, which not necessarily even all hardcore adventure fans know about.

But once you actually know the stuff and few places to look for, it’s not at all hard to use. At least I don’t think so. Back in the day, every game needed some special autoexec.bat and config.sys tweaking, and everything. So these days pre-made installers and step-by-step guides really are easy in comparison.

Any hobby requires some time and dedication, so games shouldn’t be an exception to that. If your Joe doesn’t want to spend time on learning about games and computing, then presumably the whole thing doesn’t mean that much to him. Nothing wrong with that, but Joe can learn, if he wants.

And with small encouragement even beginners can do some tweaking. I helped over Internet a person who is not most confident with computers to get Broken Sword 4 running. Of course I wrote the batch file, but that person actually ran it over their end. It was probably challenging, but not an impossible task anyway.