Is anyone else bummed about the lack of good Adventure games nowadays?
What I mean when I say Adventure games are the old point-and-click games where you guide your 2D sprite character over colorful landscapes while amassing sometimes pointless items that you must use together in order to solve puzzles.
My very very earliest memory of an Adventure game was an old game where Mickey Mouse inexplicably ends up on Pluto (the planet, not the dog). That was in 3rd grad, and our tiny classroom computer had that as one of the games the “good” kids could play. Unfortunately, I was never a good kid and was often sent to detention or something, so I never got to play it 
My next earliest memories of Adventure games came from companies like Sierra and LucasArts. Sierra had the Quest for Glory series and LucasArts had Indiana Jones and the Secret of Atlantis. I enjoyed collecting irrelevent baubles and trying to use them together to make items or solve riddles. To this day I still like the old-school games where you had like half a dozen options you can do with items. “Using” and item and “opening” an item were two very different things and you could sometimes die if you selected the wrong option. I loved Quest for Glory 4, and wish I still had it.
About the same time the NES came out with some fun point-and-click Adventure games like Shadowgate and The Uninvited (I never played Deja Vu). Talk about pointless items! I would say that 70% of the things you could pick up in The Uninvited were useless, or not essential to the quest. Still, some of my favorite memories came from trying to solve the Sphinx’s riddle or figuring out what to do with that troll that was guarding the bridge.
Friends pirated some Space Quest games and those were fun too, and at this time I thought these games would last forever since they were so fun. Too bad I had no idea these were the glory days of the genre.
I got the Kyrandia series a little after they came out (no internet at the time) and I devoured those. I loved part 2 especially, and nothing gave me greater satisfaction than solving that fiendish puzzle at the end with the 5 layer pyramid. I also stumbled upon a terrific little gem at this time too: The Flight of the Amazon Queen. If you can find it, it is an absolutely terrific little game. I think it was made by some tiny company that isn’t around anymore, but they did such a great job that I’ll always remember that game for everything that’s good about Adventure games.
Of course, after that, other genres exploded in popularity. Fighters had begun to come into its own with Street Fighter 2 and RPGS followed when Final Fantasy VII crashed the scene. It seems to be that by the time the Playstation came out, Adventure games were already dying. The only ones you’d find were small, no-name ones made by subsidiaries of bigger companies, or independent ones that can’t really put a lot of time and money into it.
Of course I think every modern Adventure fan knows about The Longest Journey. That was a great step for the genre back into relevence. But these newer games catered, like many games did after the PS made video games no longer a niche entertainment, to the casual market. TLJ was very limiting in terms of what you could actually do. First of all, you couldn’t even die, so even if you were stuck, you couldn’t run around looking for new ways to kill yourself. Items glowed if it can be used on another item or on some element of the background, so if you were stuck, all you had to do with try using every item on every other item. Yes there are challenges, but things weren’t the same anymore.
Nowadays, I see The Adventure Company valiantly trying to keep alive what used to be a thriving genre. However noble their efforts, I find their games lacking. Like TLJ, they use a simple one-pointer interface; click on something and you’ll either use it or pick it up. No “exam”, “use”, “move”, “throw”, “hit”, etc. Just click on it. TLJ got away with that because of the long quest and great story, along with some memorable dialogue and events. After Myst ruined Adventure games by sticking pretty but static (ie. almost no interactivity at all) screens in as the norm, many of these other companies followed suit. I even tried one of those Nancy Drew games but their interface is absolutely horrible!
Maybe I’m in the minority, but you can take your first-person perspective Adventure games and shove it. I prefer ones where you can see your character walk along the screen, or games where at least you could do more than one or two things to an item. Shadowgate and The Uninvited got that right 15 years ago, I’m shocked and angered that The Adventure Company can’t do it now.
Pardon the rant, but its hard to witness one of your favorite genres dead or dying. I guess I can console myself with the Monkey Island series, or replay The Longest Journey, or see if I can get my DOS emulator working on XP for those older games. I wish I still had the Quest for Glory series, or Indiana Jones, or the Flight of the Amazon Queen. To me, those games are how Adventure games should be. Expand them, make them 3D, give us more interactive backgrounds, but don’t tell me Scratches is supposed to be a good Adventure game because its not.