If you’re not a big fan of slogging through countless dungeons of monsters, you may want to test drive Morrowind before shelling out your cash. The Elder Scrolls: Arena, and TES: Daggerfall were quite indepth for their time, at least in the cities. Out of the cities? Nonstop monster smashing. Guess where most of the quests sent you? Did you say winding maze-like dungeons filled with nasties? Good!
Personally, I enjoy the good adventure game now and again, and I will say that I haven’t really enjoyed one since Grim Fandango. Haven’t played the new Monkey Island yet.
Um, you might want to take a look at some of Interplay’s semi-recent stuff too. Although Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment lack the all important ‘Use Item on X’ factor, they aren’t quite as combat intensive as Quake (Not that it’s hard to be less combat intensive than Quake or anything). Both of those games also have really deep NPC interaction.
I’ve heard similar good things about Baldur’s Gate 2, but after the dissappointment of Icewind Dale, I’m not real eager to try it out.
There are a lot of dumb things in the Oni for PS2, which, as I understand, is essentially the same as the PC and Mac versions. Game developers! Don’t fall into these traps! Heed the warning!
That said,
You can’t skip cutscenes. A reviewer mentioned that this should be one of the 10 commandments of game design, and they’re right; who wants to sit through a long, boring cutscene 10 times because you keep dieing?
The awful save points. I’ve pretty much tossed the game aside due to frustration with the saves. The points are too few and far between, and you are forced to replay very difficult areas that you’ve already beaten 20 times, just to try to get to the next part of the level. Replaying the same thing tons of times after you’ve beaten that part is no fun.
(More of a problem on disc-based consoles) Obnoxious load times. This couples with both problems I’ve mentioned earlier to make the game all the more annoying. You die, you have to restart the level (which is presumably already loaded in memory, no?), and it has to reload off the cd. This takes time. A long time. Like, a minute or two. You sit through this only to sit through the opening cut-scenes, before finally getting back into the game so you can replay the part you’ve played 50 times before due to the minimal number of save points.
I know. I still have Daggerfall installed on my computer and play it occasionally. I love every minute of it
Morrowind looks fascinating because EVERY square foot of the world (about a quarter the size of the map in Daggerfall) is deliberately rendered, not just randomly designed by computer algorithms.
Hear, hear, Nerd! I have a natural knack for thinking in three dimensions, so I usually get the hang of any 1st-person game immediately. In addition, I can see the half-second flash of an enemy on screen and immediately know where they are.
Many hours playing Quake, many more playing Quake-II, yet more playing Quake-III… and many more yet to come.
occ I hear you. How is it on the PS2? I heard the controller setup is less than ideal (and totally unchangable). One of my favorite ways to die in this game (on the PC) is to be creeping along on a catwalk that’s suspended over a pit of instant death goo. Now keep in mind that on the PC, [shift] is the stealth key and that you hold it down while walking to walk silently. Also keep in mind that when you let go of it, you walk normally. And, finally, remember that when you press it while walking normally, you slide. Add these all together and you have Konoko creeping along above death goo, twitching (due to an itchy finger), then sliding off the catwalk and going ‘plop’ into the goo.
This happened on try 57 (of 69) of the “missing pieces” or something level, one of the few times I was doing well (plasma rifle, two clips of ammo for it, 4 health thingies in stock).
They also could’ve added some melee weapons. (Note: Hopping forward and trying to bop someone with your ammoless gun doesn’t count. It’s also another good way to fall into death goo.)
Sorry, KK, you’ll have to wait until we get DSL at our house (hopefully, we’re capable of receiving it now!). I don’t think you wanna play CTF with a 28.8 connection on the server. That’d be more like playing Myst than Quake.
That said, however, I DO rock the house down at CTF. I can steal the flag from ten Thresh’s.
I want to play the arcade games from the 80’s like Defender, Battlezone, Marble Madness & Missle Command. I have seen PC versions of these games but they fail to charm me mainly because of the way the game is controlled.
Half of the fun of Marble Madness was whapping at the heavy trac ball until your palm was red. Battlezone had those two monster grips that actually made you feel like you were manuvering a tank. Missle command had a trac ball also, and really gave the feel that you were actually at a missle targeting station (I’m sure that’s what they use at NORAD, right?). Defender had the up/down level for altitude, and a button for the thuster.
Those were the days…
I’ll get excited about PC games again when they make I/O devices like super-heavy trac balls for targeting & double joysticks for tank steering. The up/down/left/right arrow keys on a keyboard just ruin the whole game for me.
I think production values are way out of whack for a lot of companies. Quake III, for example. Excellent coders, the fastest 3D engine out with amazing abilities, but they didn’t bother with anything other their standard browns and reds. Also, ID didn’t bother with a story, music or really anything else. They only give deathmatch and CTF as your options and seemingly never bothered balancing the weapons. It seems that Quake III is more of a Tech Demo for the engine, not a full game.
Too often you see graphics on top of everything else in game design. I understand that it’s the first thing you’re presented with in a game, but no matter how good they are, there has to be a good control scheme to go along with it. Depending on the genre, a good story must be present too. I don’t think there is any reason to have a bad soundtrack, and not having a good one makes a game much worse no matter what the type.
Of course, every game should have a good story, good gameplay and good graphics, but I would always overlook bad graphics and even a bad story for excellent gameplay. Too often, however, companies shirk on the creative parts and just pay for a clone of what’s been selling already.
I must say, I do have one personal peeve with AI. In just about every EA racing game, they have AI that just goes away once you pass a car and you can never get more than 3 or 4 seconds in front of any car, no matter how much faster you normally drive than the AI car. The car just floats behind you like a ghost until you hit a corner wrong and slow down a bit then passes you. Of course, you pass it easilly again, blowing it away, but it’s always 3 seconds behind you. It’s blatently cheating. The only reason this AI was implemented was because older systems didn’t have the resources to figure out the position of each racer. With today’s technology, it’s just sloppy programming. And amazingly infuriating.
When I make my racing game, I’ll make sure they always stay only 1 second behind, then make sure I mail the game to each member of the EA development team.
My biggest whine? Giving the nukes to every civilization in Civ2 after I spent all time developing it. I hated that!
Another thing is QUALITY online opponents in Close Combat 5. If I play against another idiot who thinks we are playing command&clunker, I will just quit playing it period.
Zsofia mentioned a bit about Final Fantasy and I’d like to extend that, merging it with what some others have said here.
First though, I loved Final Fantasy 1. What a great game that was. I didn’t play any of the other Final Fantasies though until number 8.
I have to say that the graphics were absolutely amazing. But how it even remotely related to FF1, I still have no idea.
OK, problems with that game and FF9:
Save points. Yes, it was mentioned before, but I’ll reiterate it here. Those save points suck. It’s not just a matter of how hard it is to get to those save points either. FF9 is really not difficult at all. But last week I was playing one section where I went for 50 minutes between save points. 50 minutes! There was no way I could have saved sooner than that. By the end, I was worrying about how pissed I’d be if the cd stalled to even enjoy the game anymore.
The game is almost too easy at times. There’s no challenge to it! Probably because it’s supposed to be designed for someone 10 years younger than me, but 14 are pretty damn smart when it comes to video games. And along that point…
Make the princess 18! Look, you’ve designed the game so that we’re supposed to love the characters and fall in love with the princess and have all these romantic fantasies about what it’d be like if we were in the game (or maybe that’s just me, I remember doing that when I was younger). But fantasizing about a 16 year old just seems icky.
I often wondered when I was younger what a game would be like if it were more like a movie. I now know…and I don’t like it. I feel like pinochio, being led where they tell me to go. Cut the strings already and let me play the damn game!
I stopped playing FF9 last week after getting through the first CD.
I got into the Need for Speed series with Porche Unleashed, and later bought Hot Pursuit in order to use some user-created vehicles I found. With PU, I did just fine on beginner but started having problems with not finishing at least third at the higher difficulty levels. After becoming frustrated at the evolution mode, I found a way to cheat. It’s a program that creates a saved game where the player owns all cars possible and has access to all the tracks. The most recent Test Drive games and the NASCAR series are also a problem for me. No matter how fast I drive, I just can’t catch up to the AI cars!
Here’s a pet peeve of mine. I’ve played a bard in every game that supports them, even when under 2nd edition AD&D rules they’re really kind of crummy. Now that bards have really come into their own with 3rd edition, the new Pool of Radiance 2 won’t include them. smoulder
As for adventure games, they’re out of vogue, but one good one hitting the market could breath life back into it – as Fallout is said to have done for the RPG genre. Honestly, I think the genre lost a lot of ground when Sierra ditched its parser for point-and-click. But that was where the industry was going. It was also a shame how Sierra’s engine started sucking to the point of being unplayable. But at least then we had LucasArts. But they’re not exactly cranking them out at this point.
The last good adventure game I played was Discworld II: Way, Way Easier. They came out with Discworld Noir, but it wasn’t released in America. Lousy motherfrenchifiers.
But, if it’s any consolation, here’s GamesDomain’s list of games in the works:
I’m with you all the way on the change of control in adventure games. I was always partial to the original Quest for Glory interface, where there was some clicking interaction but most of the commands were typed. I was so pissed off when I found that later releases of the game (the QfG omnibus is the one I played) replaced the click/text interface with a point and click.
I never really minded the point and click interface that lets you toggle through different command cursors (walk, talk, operate, push, pull, etc) and click on object, but I hate Hate HATE H-A-T-E the interface that gives you a standard cursor that “hilights” when you move it over an action point. At least the toggle system let you work through your options on an item and gave you a chance to figure out what an item was really for. With the hilight cursors, I just drag the cursor over the screen and watch for the damn thing to light up. Yeah, that’s big fun. :rolleyes:
