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Adventure Games that got Great Reviews and Awards that you think are way overrated

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Total Posts: 36

Joined 2020-08-13

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Phantasmagoria is one of those games that’s so exactly what it is that you just have to enjoy (or loathe) it. I’ve definitely never heard it referred to as a masterpiece. It’s like… a cheesy 70s horror movie. It’s really enjoyable and fun but not really an artistic masterpiece of any kind.

Tex Murphy games are so wild. Almost all of them are 50/50 brilliant/horrible to me. Mean Streets had those awful flight sim and shooter elements, but the detective work was amazing. Martian Memorandum removed both the worst AND best elements of Mean Streets. Under A Killing Moon was perfect.  Wink  The Pandora Directive had that god-awful miserable terrible no good Mayan Temple sequence. Overseer was buggy as hell and the logic puzzles and pixel hunting were pretty bad. And Tesla Effect literally can be cut in half to separate the bad parts from the good parts. The first 2-3 hours of the game and the very last 10 minutes of the game are incredible. Everything in between is utter garbage filler. It’s clearly a team full of geniuses that know how to make amazing games, I don’t know why they get caught up in horrible choices in each release.

     
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I still think the best fmv game is not an adventure game but a spacefighter shooter called wing commander 4.

That game is great, so is Wing Commander 3. I keep an old 3DO just to play these games.

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I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.

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Adv_Lvr - 16 March 2021 08:06 PM

I still think the best fmv game is not an adventure game but a spacefighter shooter called wing commander 4.

That game is great, so is Wing Commander 3. I keep an old 3DO just to play these games.

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That made my day, i play wing commander 1 through wing 4 at least once a yr

     
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mattaukamp - 16 March 2021 04:10 PM

Tex Murphy games are so wild. Almost all of them are 50/50 brilliant/horrible to me. Mean Streets had those awful flight sim and shooter elements, but the detective work was amazing. Martian Memorandum removed both the worst AND best elements of Mean Streets. Under A Killing Moon was perfect.  Wink  The Pandora Directive had that god-awful miserable terrible no good Mayan Temple sequence. Overseer was buggy as hell and the logic puzzles and pixel hunting were pretty bad. And Tesla Effect literally can be cut in half to separate the bad parts from the good parts. The first 2-3 hours of the game and the very last 10 minutes of the game are incredible. Everything in between is utter garbage filler. It’s clearly a team full of geniuses that know how to make amazing games, I don’t know why they get caught up in horrible choices in each release.

I actually have very fond memories of Martian Memorandum and other Access games from the early 1990s. They had that B-movie flavour and were so much fun to play that I wasn’t bothered by poor design choices, dead ends, awkward characters and corny dialogues. I was so engrossed in those games that I finished MM, Countdown and Guardians of Eden without any hints. The 3D Tex Murphy games that followed somehow felt too polished and less engrossing to me, although I still love them. Not so much Under a Killing Moon which is my least favourite of them for some reason as I didn’t like how the story progressed. Pandora and Overseer, on the other hand, felt like very solid games, and I was really happy to see Chris Jones coming up with Tesla Effect after so many years, even though it wasn’t exactly the game I was waiting for.

     

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Joined 2017-08-15

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Countdown and Guardians of Eden were my favorite Access games, I enjoyed them more than any of the Tex games. Even though I’m glad the later 3D Tex games exist, I wonder what would have happened if Chris Jones continued to branch out with other adventure games, instead of Access becoming “Tex + Sports Games Software Inc”

     

Member of the NAALCB - (North American Anti- Lobster Cop Brigade) since 2019.

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Joined 2014-08-01

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As a kid I couldn’t get my character out of jail in Countdown. It took me about a week to get through that first screen. Also there’s a new Tex Murphy game on the way apparently. The Poisoned Pawn.

     

” I remember. Somebody died. It was me.”
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mattaukamp - 16 March 2021 04:10 PM

Phantasmagoria is one of those games that’s so exactly what it is that you just have to enjoy (or loathe) it. I’ve definitely never heard it referred to as a masterpiece. It’s like… a cheesy 70s horror movie. It’s really enjoyable and fun but not really an artistic masterpiece of any kind.

Tex Murphy games are so wild. Almost all of them are 50/50 brilliant/horrible to me. Mean Streets had those awful flight sim and shooter elements, but the detective work was amazing. Martian Memorandum removed both the worst AND best elements of Mean Streets. Under A Killing Moon was perfect.  Wink  The Pandora Directive had that god-awful miserable terrible no good Mayan Temple sequence. Overseer was buggy as hell and the logic puzzles and pixel hunting were pretty bad. And Tesla Effect literally can be cut in half to separate the bad parts from the good parts. The first 2-3 hours of the game and the very last 10 minutes of the game are incredible. Everything in between is utter garbage filler. It’s clearly a team full of geniuses that know how to make amazing games, I don’t know why they get caught up in horrible choices in each release.

I’ve definitely seen it mentioned, on these forums and other places ‘round the ‘net (how about that apostrophe before ‘net’?), as a favorite game or ‘top 10 game’. Various lists and whatnot, likely compiled by people who weren’t born when the game came out.

You are so right about the Tex Murphy games. I played them ‘seriously’ for the first time earlier this year. Well, I played Under A Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive, didn’t bother with their predecessors and have not yet tried the later games. As a kid we had UAKM, but I think my dad determined it was too mature for us kids and so we weren’t allowed to play it much.

To me, Pandora Directive had higher highs and was overall a better experience, but the Mayan Temple was a pain in the bottom. Still, UAKM had the ‘stealth’ infiltration of that office building, which was also not so much fun.
I think both of these games, and Mean Streets and MM, were made before developers (and perhaps even gamers) realized that they don’t want anything but adventure style gaming in their adventure games. Before that, it was a more-is-more situation. The more types of game play we have in our game, the better it is. Puzzle difficulty and action sequence difficulty might not have been entirely distinguished from one another. So when you reach the end of the game and have to save-spam your way through a maze of deadly fireballs as you tightrope walk on crumbling pathways above a sea of lava, it’s just a matter of ‘it’s the end of the game! Let’s crank up the difficulty!’

I know this ‘more is more’ mentality was very much mine and my siblings when we played games together throughout the 90’s. We loved fighting the monk with the staff in Conquest of the Longbow, and using the Speeder in Space Quest, and things like that. It was like ‘whoa! Street Fighter in an adventure game!’ All those infuriating hair-trigger slip-up and you’re dead scenarios were still infuriating, but just part of the game. It wasn’t like mom putting jelly in our peanut butter sandwiches (or buying cream cheese with the vegetable bits in it, either. Gross.).

I really liked both games, and enjoyed slipping back into that era of experimental new frontier cd-rom gaming, when not everything worked, and part of the game was trying to work through or around those parts that didn’t.
The flat 2D object pixel hunting was my least favorite part of each game. Yes, it encouraged me to snoop like a real gumshoe, but at the same time, I knew that if I was ever stuck it was due to not finding a single 4 pixel object in quite a large and open 3d world, and that was not fun.

 

 

     

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Since Avr_Lvr posted Post Mortem in the underrated thread, I thought I’d ask: is Still Life overrated?

I’ve never been clear on why this seemingly ordinary 3rd person graphic adventure that came about during the ‘meh’ 00s, got such rave reviews.

     

Total Posts: 38

Joined 2020-06-17

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CMI started digging grave for the Monkey Island series and Telltale’s game just hammered nails in the coffin.

Transforming feature “evening” film into the Saturday morning cartoon completely ruined the spirit and magic of the first two games.

     
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VoodooDerina - 27 March 2021 04:52 PM

CMI started digging grave for the Monkey Island series and Telltale’s game just hammered nails in the coffin.

Transforming feature “evening” film into the Saturday morning cartoon completely ruined the spirit and magic of the first two games.

To me it was always a cartoon, and that’s why I liked it. I don’t think the atmosphere and quality of storytelling ever diminished—in fact, I think they improved.

That said, the tone of the Monkey Island series, and how it varied from game to game, seems to be very much in the eye of the beholder. It’s almost like a Rorschach.

     

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Baron_Blubba - 27 March 2021 06:46 PM
VoodooDerina - 27 March 2021 04:52 PM

CMI started digging grave for the Monkey Island series and Telltale’s game just hammered nails in the coffin.

Transforming feature “evening” film into the Saturday morning cartoon completely ruined the spirit and magic of the first two games.

To me it was always a cartoon, and that’s why I liked it. I don’t think the atmosphere and quality of storytelling ever diminished—in fact, I think they improved.

That said, the tone of the Monkey Island series, and how it varied from game to game, seems to be very much in the eye of the beholder. It’s almost like a Rorschach.

100 percent agree.

     
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I’ve never been clear on why this seemingly ordinary 3rd person graphic adventure that came about during the ‘meh’ 00s, got such rave reviews.

I loved this game back in the day. I need to replay it as I don’t recall all the details of why or why not this game was one of the very best releases of its time period. It is in the top 100 releases of all time.


  Heart

     

I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.

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Joined 2017-09-18

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Adv_Lvr - 29 March 2021 06:50 PM

I’ve never been clear on why this seemingly ordinary 3rd person graphic adventure that came about during the ‘meh’ 00s, got such rave reviews.

I loved this game back in the day. I need to replay it as I don’t recall all the details of why or why not this game was one of the very best releases of its time period. It is in the top 100 releases of all time.


  Heart

Oh well since it’s in the top 100 I’ve changed my mind. I actually love it too now, because the person who wrote that has a better and more worthwhile opinion than me.

Sorry, I’m feeling sarcastic today. It’s possible it’s a good game or even masterpiece and I just wasn’t in the mood at the time I played. That’s happened before to me, and I think this thread has room for all opinions.

     
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Joined 2004-03-30

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Luhr28 - 18 March 2021 03:56 PM

Since Avr_Lvr posted Post Mortem in the underrated thread, I thought I’d ask: is Still Life overrated?

I’ve never been clear on why this seemingly ordinary 3rd person graphic adventure that came about during the ‘meh’ 00s, got such rave reviews.

I’ve always thought Still Life was overrated. It had great atmosphere and a compelling mystery, yes, but rom what I remember the puzzles were awful. It was a detective story, yet I don’t seem to recall any puzzle having anything to do with detecting… Ido however remember a puzzle about what to make for dinner…

Plus, it’s a whodunnit which ends on a cliffhanger without revealing the culprit…

     
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Luhr28 - 29 March 2021 08:19 PM
Adv_Lvr - 29 March 2021 06:50 PM

I’ve never been clear on why this seemingly ordinary 3rd person graphic adventure that came about during the ‘meh’ 00s, got such rave reviews.

I loved this game back in the day. I need to replay it as I don’t recall all the details of why or why not this game was one of the very best releases of its time period. It is in the top 100 releases of all time.


  Heart

Oh well since it’s in the top 100 I’ve changed my mind. I actually love it too now, because the person who wrote that has a better and more worthwhile opinion than me.

Sorry, I’m feeling sarcastic today. It’s possible it’s a good game or even masterpiece and I just wasn’t in the mood at the time I played. That’s happened before to me, and I think this thread has room for all opinions.

It’s been a while, but I remember really enjoying it when I played it on XBOX, for at least these reasons, and maybe others which I’ve forgotten:

Well written and presented story, great mystery that keeps the player thinking.
Good graphics and voice acting (for an early 00’s adventure game, at least).
Atmospheric, genuinely spooky at times.
‘Adult’ without being over the top and obnoxious about it.
The puzzles were very challenging, and also very good. I don’t remember the dinner cooking scene well, although I can picture the kitchen in my mind. Some of the puzzles might have been nonsense in context, but they were at least good puzzles out of context. Again, it’s been a long time, so I might be wrong about this, but I don’t remember any duds—there was a nice mix of observation-based puzzles, logic puzzles, and inventory puzzles.
I liked the main character—Kate McPherson, I think her name was?
The suspense built so well that gosh darn it was I disappointed when it ended, couldn’t wait to play the sequel…which I hear is terrible and will probably never play.

I played it with my brother over the course of about a week and we had a great time. I don’t think it’s ‘legendary’ but it’s probably one of the best in its genre—psychological thriller crime mystery. I think Cognition had a similar feel, probably the closest to it of any game I’ve played since, but wasn’t nearly as good. Worth playing, certainly, but not as good.

     

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