Lol, if you put it like that… :P

I’m really happy about this little AG resurgence, but i think modern AGs need to not be limited by the past. There is no reason AGs can’t be 1st/3rd person, or use physics puzzles, or incorporate other ideas from other genres (or new ideas).
Some of the best AG moments i’ve had recently have been in non-AG games..

and making everything about combining OBJECTS is dumb… Discworld Noir had the right idea in making it about finding information or clues. Though you could do both of course…

Advocating potentially ‘non-sensical’ actions is basically going to result in a veritable storm of Guide Dang It moments (to borrow TV-Tropes’ wonderful phrase), that usually do nothing more than frustrate players. And if all the player is doing is trying every action on every object then you might as well just write a script to search all the permutations for you until you find the answer. Isn’t the point of a puzzle to solve it, not try every possible combination until you get it right? Brains versus brute force.

The way I see it, every challenge in any game — and this isn’t limited to adventures — should have a reasonable chance that the player would overcome it on the first encounter. I think this is why everyone hates QTEs so much. But I digress. I think your idea bears merit, but it would take some very clever implementation to not fall into the same pit to which adventure games with lots of verbs often succumb: having verbs that you only ever use once.

That said, I agree wholeheartedly on the witty response front. Often the most hilarious moments in adventure games is where the game makes fun of you for trying to do something stupid — unless it’s a Sierra game, of course, in which case it would probably just kill you out of the blue.

For example, yesterday, when I was trying out BTDT, it felt weird having to read every word of dialogue. Especially in that silly font. Especially in the super-tiny resolution. Then, someone came into the room and asked me something, I turned my head for a moment and missed something that could have been important.

Overall, I hate badly done voice overs, but as a concept I think it is a feature that must be present in all modern games.

While I got excited that LucasArts would re-release its old titles, the truth is this move won’t do anything to promote the genre. Most will buy them out of nostalgia and maybe show them to their kids, but I can’t imagine many 12 year-olds will actually play them. Same goes with most of the indies such as BTDT and TGP!, which I adore, but their target audience definitely isn’t a new gen of adventure gamers.

Back in the early 90’s, adventure games succeeded by being on the forefront of graphic and design technology. Now this only applies to FPS and action games. A new generation of gamers accustomed to the technical quality of such games will frown upon the poor adventures which, even if supposedly story-driven, have poorly rendered scenes, terrible dialogues and even worse voice-overs.

When the stories are a series of cliches or poor excuses for puzzle connection, what’s left to the game? I’d rather play an action-adventure if I like to search around for doors to unlock (or just move to a new area, for that’s what most puzzles have become) or play Cogs if I want slider puzzles (I love that game).

As for the most horrid aspect, item-based puzzles, please come to your senses, game designers! If the game is set in a surreal wtf world, I won’t mind much having to come to terms with the silly combos I’ll have make up as solutions. When you set the game on the real world though, giving us “realistic” characters and settings, for god’s sake make the puzzles rational.

Let the character carry what’s possible for a human and interact with as many as possible items in the surroundings. For example, no character should run around with no cash, a credit card, id and possibly a cell phone. If the main character needs to ask a simple question someone in the game, let him/her use a phone! I won’t make an hour drive to a colleague’s house to make a 3-min conversation! Or search across the town to gather components to make a fishing-pole-gizmo to grab at something that’s in knee-deep water (perhaps the character has some rare and lethal allergy?).

I’ll myself point out that older adventure games weren’t any better at the above points, but the issue is how no-one cared to move things forward. Doom didn’t have realistic physics or a great targeting system, but these got perfected over the years. When your system only relies on puzzles, there should be progress in their design.

Since games like System Shock 2 or the Fallout series, it seems other genres have invested in the story and atmosphere so much as to make adventures seem bad in what was their supposed main selling point. Coupled with downright silly puzzles and a slow pace, there’s no way a young gamer would give adventures a chance anymore.

Perhaps the only way for them to return to a mainstream audience (and not making me feel an idiot for still trying to find excitement by playing new ones) is to go for what no other genre can integrate so well: comedy. And by comedy I definitely don’t mean “Scary Movie” crap, but “Spaced”-quality contemporary comedy (you lucky Brits, it never got shown on TV here). Since there seems to be a lack of good comedies in cinema, it’ll be even harder for game developers to find good writers. The Zombie cows guys are a hope though… (some big studio please hire them?)

Man, that game won me over the moment he took a lucky piece of coal.

Remind me to pick up this sometime.

My only gripe is a technical one, in that the text is a little hard to read. Is there any way of altering the resolution/size etc?
(I noticed this was possible for ‘Time Fentlemen, Please!’ but couldn’t find the same settings in ‘BtDt’)

I guess in a way, a lot of adventures are more limited in interactivity than the average FPS. Only being able to do MacGyverish puzzles in a limited way on certain things isn’t more free than only being able to shoot things.

It’s nice to at least have descriptions for different actions even if they aren’t always implemented, like the Ben & Dan games. I liked how it acknowledged what I was trying to do when I USED every person, and the running joke of talking to inanimate objects and having Ben say “please help me out, object” and how that never works.