(no subject)

[fan_eunice]

I feel like I should post but I'm not sure about what, since I don't actually have much to say about this season's television that I'm watching. I'm vidding like a madwoman, but that's mostly for festivids so what I could say about that is limited.

Oh! I can tell you that I am currently renewing my love of 3d person point and click adventure games! You know, the ones where you wander around talking to people and gathering shit that you put together with other shit you found to form an improbably useful gadget which you then spend hours and hours poking at every conceivable thing in sight until you break in frustration and hunt down a walkthrough, because oh my god it's 3:30 am and you can't sleep until you figure out just how in the hell a rubber duck that's wrapped in twine and dipped in vinegar is supposed to get you out of a locked room.

It's kind of difficult to really wallow, though, on account of point and click adventure is nearly a dead genre in computer games. Which makes me sad, y'all. Almost all the adventure type games I can find these days involve, like, fighting and shooting and running and stressful stuff like that. And I really do have a sort of unholy love for the improbable gadget formation puzzles. It seems mostly the genre can be found on the detective/mystery side these days, which is cool...but you have to be careful to read the game description closely or you're just going to end up with a hidden object game. I hate hidden object games. If I just wanted to find a list of things randomly hidden in a pile of clutter, I'd clean my living room.

Right now I'm playing Black Mirror II, which is only a few years old, I think? And is straight up classic point and click. The main character is a bit of a whiny dick, but it affords me the opportunity to do things like use this syringe I found to get some of this random bottle of liquid laxative I found and inject it into a bottle of soda pop I found and then use it to distract a guard. So! Ridiculous and improbably useful gadgets? CHECK. I'm golden.

So, HI! What are y'all up to? And do you have any suggestions for more recent games of this type? So far my favorites have been the Art of Murder series, but I have played all three over the last year and now there are no more :(

Comments

[kellyfaboo]

Drive by

I've been playing glitch online. Which isn't as narrative driven and is more wander around and do stuff.

[fan_eunice]

I will check it out, thank you!

[eleanorjane]

I was about to suggest Glitch, too.

I haz a spare invite if you're interested, but I'm not sure how to 'sell' it. On paper, it seems... shallow and uninteresting, but in play it's oddly charming.

[fan_eunice]

Sure! It sounds fun :)

[eleanorjane]

Okay - to which email address would you like the invite sent?

[some_stars]

Aw man, I love those, and yeah, they're totally a dying genre if not already dead. It is an eternal sorrow to me that I can't play Grim Fandango because my computer can't handle a game that old, and I can't figure out the labyrinthine instructions for making it run under Windows 7, if that's even possible. I'm glad that a few, like the Monkey Island games, are being re-released, but it's just such a rich genre and there's hardly anything left. You wouldn't think "puzzles + story - roleplaying - combat" would be such an unpopular combination.

I haven't heard of Black Mirror, but that laxative soda puzzle sounds like it was lifted straight from The Longest Journey. I'm actually terrible at puzzles, so I go through these kinds of games using progressive hints--get the start of a hint, go as far as I can, get slightly more hint, etc. But half the fun is in seeing the ridiculous and awesome solutions, even if I can't come up with them on my own.

My all-time favorite adventure game, actually, is Syberia, which is kind of an outlier--it's a puzzle game, but by adventure game standards the puzzles are easy; the focus is on the art and the story, both of which are more than capable of supporting a game. (I am so in love with Syberia, in fact, that I requested it for Festivids this year. It's seriously one of my favorite stories ever, in any media.) On the other end of the scale there's The Neverhood, which is brutally difficult and also fifteen years old so you'd probably have to jump through quite a few hoops to make it run these days. I played it back in the nineties, and the art and story are just magnificent--it's done in claymation, which just works so well. And of course there's The Longest Journey, although that's not exactly an obscure hidden gem. *g*

Depending on how your brain works, you might want to look into interactive fiction--it's all text-based, of course, but IF is pretty much the direct inheritor of the point-and-click adventure tradition (which was the direct inheritor of the early text adventures, so it's all pleasingly full circle). A couple I've really enjoyed are Anchorhead and Blue Lacuna, but there are dozens of great ones out there. I find them harder overall than graphical adventures games, because of my own brain issues, but the popular ones will have walkthroughs and they're just so much fun and so well-made. And virtually all free, of course.

edit: and Sanitarium! How could I forget Sanitarium, IDK. It's one of the greatest point and click adventures ever--so smart and so rewarding and fun.

[fan_eunice]

I really like that the newer ones tend to have 'hot spot' keys that avoid endless pixel hunting. As noted I'm not find of hidden object in general and while I get stupidly excited about wandering a room and seeing a mop or whatever and picking it up to use in some weird creation later...I really, really hate having to slide my mouse all over the screen on the off chance there's some tiny marble in the back corner of a dim room that I'm supposed to pick up.

Also, there's no shame in walkthroughs. I have yet to get through a single adventure game yet without using them at least once (though I am a masochist and will bash my head against a puzzle for HOURS trying to solve it myself before finally giving in). And there's always, ALWAYS at least one 'use this shit with that shit to make this thing and use it in this way' puzzle in adventure games which MAKE NO SENSE AT ALL. And you either figure out the answer through blind flailing luck or by looking it up :)

OMG I loved Syberia. And, heh, yeah I played Longest Journey when it came out (SO MUCH FUN, OMG). I have never played Sanitarium though, I shall have to check it out!

[some_stars]

ohhhh, how I hate pixel hunting. A lot. A LOT. The decline in pixel-hunting is the number one greatest advance made in video game history, as far as I'm concerned. I don't know how anyone ever thought it was okay.

Sanitarium is just--so smart, and has a remarkable amount of psychological depth--psychological complexity is basically the game itself, actually--and a great sense of humor, and I just love it. I should play it again sometime.

[jetpack_monkey]

TellTale Games are doing point and click adventures out the wazoo:

http://www.telltalegames.com/

I've had a lot of fun with their Sam & Max series, Tales of Monkey Island, and the first few episodes of their Back to the Future game. All of their games have a delightful sense of humor (which you might expect from a bunch of renegade LucasArts developers).

[fan_eunice]

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooh. Thank you kindly :D