Sam and Max Hit the Road
Full Throttle
Maniac Mansion
Indiana Jones and the
Grim Fandango
X-Wing
TIE Fighter
Monkey Island
Zombies Ate My Neighbors
Now all they churn out is crap. What happened…?
Ahhh, TIE Fighter, how I miss thee…I don’t know what makde it so much better than X-Wing, but I played it a lot more. I think it was the little things, like being able to actually see a list of mission goals, or being able to match speeds with yuor target.
Genres come in waves, I guess. Adventure games and space sims were big 15 years ago. Now it’s all first-person shooters and strategy, which at that time were the upstarts (Doom and X-Com, e.g.). I just replayed Gabriel Knight 3 last week. That was a cool game.
–Cliffy
I’m still trying to tweak my copy of tie fighter to run on my xp machine…for some reason, I’m still getting serious lag on it. sigh
Any clues as to whether they’ll re-release any of the LucasArts flightsims for XP?
I’d love to see x-wing redone with some of the features in TF…
I’d love an UTD version of Grim Fandango.
There’s a new game out by the man who wrote Grim Fandango. Psychonauts. It rocks, as I understand. Going to pick it up in a few weeks, myself.
Started playing that one yesterday. Lots of good characters and clever dialogue, the humor is original and a bit edgy. Gameplay looks good so far, with a number of ways to customise your character.
The graphics, particularly the character animations, are slightly dated. But that’s a trade-off I’ll take for the above any day.
How are you doing this? A DOS emulator, acuse that would be the way I go, personally.
got it going with Dosbox (the tie cd), even got the joystick and sound working…but there’s a lag when tracking in flight mode. Makes the game very un-fun. Working with D-Fend (Dosbox frontend) to tweak it, but the best I have still has enough lag to be noticeable.
It irritates me since I was running Tie on my old 486DX/33…and now it won’t run on a 2.4Ghz pentium 4.
I am still bewildered as to why LucasArts doesn’t think bringing the best flight sim ever up to winxp specs would be worth the cost.
Rebel Assault and that goddamned Imperial Walker. I could never get past that level without the cheat codes.
And my copy of the Indy Atlantis game had a glitch so that no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get into Atlantis. I must have spent a week’s worth of game time trying to figure that out before throwing the game away in disgust.
But I loves me some Maniac Mansion.
What happened? They started relaying mainly on the Star Wars universe, that’s what happened. Although the Episode I Podracer was pretty good.
The adventure game genre is still bigger than you think, it’s just that almost all of the adventure games come out of Europe these days. I’ve probably played a dozen or more in the last year, many of them quite good, and all but a few of them at least decent.
Eh?
I think the point is that updating X-Wing, Tie Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance (well, I liked it anyways) with some new missions seems like it would be some easy cash.
I know I’d get 'em.
-Joe
I meant post-prequel. 
I’d be first in line.
If they came out with TIE Fighter XP, I’d pay a hundred dollars for it.
There’s a collecters series floating around that was updated to work with Win9X. Apparently they improved the graphics and some other things.
Other then that, I don’t know.
But yeah, I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.
I’d respectfully say that the adventure game genre is smaller than you think. European developers have a lower barrier of entry than US developers, so it takes less sales to be a hit. That bottom line is what happened to LucasArts, in brief.
They used to have a fairly sustainable system where they could promote brand loyalty and recognition through their original titles, and finance those via their licensed titles (Indiana Jones and Star Wars, which still had to be licensed from Lucasfilm proper). But it got to the point where they could spend years of development on something like Grim Fandango, which had fans and critics going on and on about how great it was, and still it only sold a fraction of what the other projects did. They saw that they could basically crap in a box, call it Star Wars: Republic Squadron Force Assault, and see it sell a million copies, minimum. If the adventure games weren’t that much cheaper to make, didn’t attract that much attention, and didn’t sell nearly as much as their console games, then why keep throwing money at them?
So that attitude drove away the talent behind the Sam & Max and Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion and even X-Wing/TIE Fighter games. (To be fair, arrogance and the whole auteur attitude helped; it wasn’t all just the publisher’s fault). And once they lost that talent, all they had were spectacular licenses and iteration after iteration of the Hoth level and the Death Star trench run. Really, really neat-looking iterations, but iterations all the same.
Now it’s all third-party development, do there’s no consistency. There’s still potential for great stuff (I’ve heard good stuff about the not-yet-released Empire at War, and a couple of the recent games are supposedly pretty good, Lego Star Wars in particular), but it’s no longer the case that people will buy anything just because it has the LucasArts logo on it. IMO, it’s the classic example of short-sighted publishing decisions not recognizing the real long-term value of brand loyalty.
Do y’all already know about ScummVM? If so, ignore me. If not, check it out. Lets you play all the old SCUMM-interface games on your modern hardware.
I been playin’ the old Monkey Island games with it. Fun!
Loom
Yes, I’m dating myself…
I have Loom, The Dig, Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, DOTT, Sam and Max, Grim Fandango and Full Throttle through ScummVm.
Oh, the memories.
I to, would LOVE to have Tie Fighter again. That was, seriously, one of the best games of any type I’ve ever played.