You can’t click through the dialogue in Monkey Island?
No, you have to wait through it. I could deal with that, but the travel time of watching the character icon go from one place to another is extremely tedious.
I feel ya. I just played through Grim Fandango, and the slow speed of the walking was almost a deal breaker, until I learned about a keyboard shortcut that would let me warp to any room in the game. I used it liberally.
I just wish there was a cheat that made the controls better. I honestly think they played a part in keeping the game from being popular. (One mode is counterintuitive but allows you to go anywhere, the other glicthes up all the time and can even get you stuck in some cases, so you have to pull up the other mode.)
Depending on what you mean by ‘simplistic’, I think you’ll find that Monkey Island 2 is quite challenging.
All the old Lucas Arts games are terrific, as well as the Sierra On Line games. The Adventure Company was actually leading the pack on newer adventure games until Telltale came along. The Longest Journey was remarkable in how it managed to balance difficulty. If a game is too easy, then you blow through it and it’s hardly worth the money if you bought it retail. But making the game last longer means you have to add production cost, pointless tedium, or frustrating difficulty – i.e., the fun is actually less. But in this case they got it just right. The Siberia games were nice as well, though the end of the second game pissed me off.
But right now Telltale is almost single-handedly reviving the adventure genre. The Sam & Max games, of which they have done three, are cleverly designed and often hilarious challenges that never substitute obscurity for depth. Puzzle Agent 1 + 2 aren’t adventure games with object puzzles and lateral thinking excercises so much as classic puzzles injected into a story.
Generally, I’d recommend all their titles, except for that CSI thing that I haven’t played. My caveat is that some of their newer non-game-franchise games are designed for people more into the franchise than into adventure gaming. Back to the Future is pretty damned easy even if you didn’t cut your teeth on Zork, because it’s meant to be a sort of interactive sequel. Jurassic Park goes even further – I haven’t finished it yet, but basically it’s more quicktime events than puzzles, though it manages to surprise me with how much fun this can be. I’m afraid their new Law & Order will be more non-gamer friendly, too, but I’ll probably pick it up.
Telltale titles are on sale all the time, at their own website or on Steam, so I’d recommend being on the lookout.
Monkey Island is killing me. I think I’ve found a glitch- I’m at the edge of the screen and can move vertically but not either progress into the screen or back onto the previous page. I have a note in to the designers.
On a positive note, I played a game called The Island Castaway which I quite enjoyed. It was modestly challenging and had few of the issues which annoy me.