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Point and Click adventures.

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facattack

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The Longest Journey was very fun. I also liked the games ported from Mac from Infocom that I talked about in the Mac thread. Any other great recommendations?
 
I really enjoyed Full Throttle and The Digg. Maniac Mansion and it's follow up Day of the Tentacle are pretty entertaining as well. Basically anything from Lucas Arts that used the SCUMM engine.

EDIT: I totally forgot about the Monkey Island games. Probably some of the funniest I've played ever.
 
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I'd say... virtually any LucasArts game in this genre - but I thought the 'Golden Age' of their 'Scumm' game engine / user interface came at round the time of 'Monkey island' (1 and 2), 'Day Of the Tentacle' and and 'Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis'. In these games, the user interface, the writing, animation and humour and the game engine generally were just the most perfect that they ever got to be. The first Monkey Island game is still an absolute classic of the genre.

Although I enjoyed 'The Dig' which came later, I didn't enjoy what had been done to the user interface by that point - in a (rather pompous) feedback letter that I sent to LucasArts at the time, I said that it was pointless to hide the user interface because the game couldn't be played without it. It was like putting your computer keyboard away in the drawer in your desk and closing it every time you finished a sentence, and then getting it out all over again when you wanted to type another sentence.

The user interface in 'Full Throttle' was dumbed down even more and frankly almost ruined the game for me - I was only ever really happy with the 'classic' Scumm interface, with the location image taking up the upper three quarters of the screen and the 'user interface' - the 'vocabulary' and inventory - visible at all times during gameplay.

Also worthy of note are 'Lure Of The Temptress and 'Beneath A Steel Sky', from Virgin Interactive. Oh, not forgetting... 'Simon the Sorceror and Simon The Sorceror 2'. And 'Broken Sword' - there are three 'Broken Sword' games altogether. Those are all great games.

LucasArts's great rival in this field was Sierra Online with games such as the 'King's Quest' series but honestly, I never really took to them, and the main reason was Sierra's persistent pointless habit of killing your character in the blink of an eye simply for turning a corner or walking through a door without anything to suggest that what you were about to do could be a bad idea. LucasArts, by contrast, never did this to the player: They understood that the player wanted to be entertained and challenged, not simply irritated by random, unheralded death.

However, there was one brilliant Sierra exception which I persevered with and that was the first 'Gabriel Knight' game - well worth playing, with a terrifically creepy atmosphere and a nice voice acting turn by Michael 'Mr Worf' Dorn as a charismatic Voodoo expert.
 
I enjoyed the Sierra games because of their ridiculous number of insta-kills - even outside of the Space Quest series in which it's a main source of humor, there's so many entertainingly gruesome or weird game-overs waiting for you. Plus, they were even more gorgeous in 256 colors than (most of) the LucasArts titles.

That said, there is absolutely no shame in using a walkthrough for a Sierra game - otherwise you'll inevitably find yourself doomed because you chose the wrong food item to eat when you got hungry five screens ago, failed to get the cheese out of the five-pixel mousehole in the dungeon you can never get return to, or any of a billion other maddening little gotchas no sane human would ever see coming. And, naturally, your last save was half an hour ago...
 
Speaking of Sierra Games, Quest for Glory was my absolute favourite series from them. One of the first that allowed you to build a character and take it with you to the next game, plus the humour in those games (except 3, where they seemed to have lost their whimsy) was great.

This may help you find some new games to try: http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/18643/
 
No Myst doesn't count.

I also love Lucasfilm/Lucasarts adventures.


The later Sierra games were also pretty good - Larry 5 to 7, Space Quest 6 and the others.

An adventure i liked that was however pretty hard was "Universe".


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe_(1994_video_game)


It was pretty innovative in 1994 and looked really good on Amiga 500 (They had some programming trick to use more colors or so). On PC it was not that impressive technically, but still a good adventure...
 
glitch said:
Does Myst count?
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No, I would say that is a distinct genre all on its own, probably starting with 'The 7th Guest' and leading on to Myst / Riven et al.

Those games were characterised by the fact that they-

-Let you walk around in a nearly photo-real pseudo-3D environment, although with usually a limited number of viewing angles in each location.
-Loaded their highly detailed location graphics from a CD-ROM which at the time could typically hold much more data than could be held on the hard drives of home computers.

When 7th Guest first came out, a 100MB hard drive was considered to be pretty decent.

When HDD capacities eventually overtook CD ROM capacity you could (optionally) install these game entirely on HDD to speed up gameplay, but originally, they were only made possible by the arrival of the CD-ROM.
 
I also really liked Quest for Glory. The fact that you could take a character to the next game was something absolutely new. Not to forget about the great humor.

Web design Poland http://www.ideoagency.com
 
I'm playing the original Space Quest for the first time - and while I have needed a couple of hints to avoid spending hours of trial and error situations, I'm finding it quite fun and loving the humor / attention to detail.
Perhaps it's just my immaturity, but when I typed "kick body" and it suggested I was a rather sick individual I had a good laugh.

I think the later VGA version was point and click.
 
vcwalk said:
the Lucasarts stuff was fantastic...miss those days
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Some time ago now I noticed that 'special edition' Monkey Island 1 and 2 were available for the Xbox 360 on disc - previously, I think they had only been available (as a download) from Xbox live arcade, but I prefer to have 'hard copies' of games so when the compilation became available on disc I bought it and put it away with the intention of playing it again 'some time'. That must have been at least three years ago, but I finally got around to spinning it up and playing through the first game again.

One of the nice features in this version is that you can fade smoothly back and forth between the original 1990s blocky pixel graphic version of the game with its command word panel below the location graphics, and the new, graphic-enhanced version in which the location graphic occupies the whole of the screen and the commands are invoked by various combinations of the controller D-pad, bumper and trigger buttons. I have ironically found that I often have to go back to the nineties version when I want to string together complex commands such as 'Use Rubber-Chicken-With-A-Pulley-In-The-Middle with cable' or when I want to do something quickly and precisely within a limited time, such as grab a certain red fish, because the new version's user interface is much clunkier and less intuitive than the original more or less perfect nineties version.

..Still a brilliant game, though, and has spoken voice acted dialogue throughout the 'new' version. The new version's versions of the original Soundblaster / Adlib music tracks are great as well.
 
SiriusHardware said:
Some time ago now I noticed that 'special edition' Monkey Island 1 and 2 were available for the Xbox 360 on disc - previously, I think they had only been available (as a download) from Xbox live arcade, but I prefer to have 'hard copies' of games so when the compilation became available on disc I bought it and put it away with the intention of playing it again 'some time'. That must have been at least three years ago, but I finally got around to spinning it up and playing through the first game again.

One of the nice features in this version is that you can fade smoothly back and forth between the original 1990s blocky pixel graphic version of the game with its command word panel below the location graphics, and the new, graphic-enhanced version in which the location graphic occupies the whole of the screen and the commands are invoked by various combinations of the controller D-pad, bumper and trigger buttons. I have ironically found that I often have to go back to the nineties version when I want to string together complex commands such as 'Use Rubber-Chicken-With-A-Pulley-In-The-Middle with cable' or when I want to do something quickly and precisely within a limited time, such as grab a certain red fish, because the new version's user interface is much clunkier and less intuitive than the original more or less perfect nineties version.

..Still a brilliant game, though, and has spoken voice acted dialogue throughout the 'new' version. The new version's versions of the original Soundblaster / Adlib music tracks are great as well.
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Oh cool, I had no idea there was a special edition! I had a look at the new graphics and they look great, I think I'll give it a go. :)
 
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