@adventuregames Test posting from Mastodon. Please ignore this. I'm new to this and vulnerable, like a faun in the woods... but tough, like a faun with a machine gun!

My band Error 47 sat down with two legends — Graeme Devine and George Sanger — and chatted for an hour about the music of these iconic CD-ROM games. Lots of cool nuggets in here, including how Trilobyte took a massive chance in supporting General MIDI, and how we might not have gotten Nine Inch Nails' beloved Quake soundtrack if it hadn't been for Graeme's programming wizardry.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3710782

Broken Sword Parzival’s Stone will be the first new entry for the iconic point-and-click adventure games in a decade, and it’ll be preceded by the arrival of a 4K reinvention of the beloved first game in the series. Alongside the new Broken Sword Parzival’s Stone, Broken Sword Shadow of the Templars Reforged is set to arrive in early 2024, and developer Revolution Software says it’s aimed to be a perfect introduction for newcomers and a nostalgia trip for long-time fans alike.

Credit to my fiance with a special interest in evolutionary biology and the history of human domestication of other species (and who is also currently HIGH AS HELL).

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/980903

https://www.scummvm.org/demos/

also https://www.scummvm.org/demos/director

use ScummVM itself to play them or the full games if you own them https://www.scummvm.org/downloads/

reboot of (Twinsen's) Little Big Adventure, team will focus on the remastering of both classic games

developer update

@adventuregames@lemm.ee

#TLBA
#TLBAremastered
#littlebigadventure

GOBLiiiNS5 - The Invasion of the Morglotons Point'nClick adventure game in 2d. French and english version. 16 great levels full of puzzles, characters and humor.

OP's comment: one of my old faves, hope it holds up to the originals!

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/784516

This legendary article used to be on Gamespot

https://web.archive.org/web/20070106183628/http://www.gamespot.com/features/btg-tri/index.html

Need a screwdriver? Better hope there's one lying under a brick in a back alley somewhere!

I know that simply buying every solution you need would make for a terribly silly game, and I can pretty easily ignore how little sense that makes while playing, sure. This isn't a complaint, exactly. Just something that went through my head earlier.

ScummVM dev Sluicebox just blew the doors to the Sierra kingdom wide open. He wrote a decompiler that annotates the decompiled scripts flawlessly so there's no more guesswork as to "uh, I wonder what 'global34' does."

A real game-changer for code-spelunkers!

Check the attached video from OneShortEye for a brief explanation, or go straight to the source: https://www.benshoof.org/blog/sci-scripts

The Steam Summer Sale is on and there's plenty of threads asking for great deals and hidden gems. So let's jump on that bandwagon! Anybody spotted any good deals on adventure games in the Steam sale?

Here's a few cheap and good experiences I spotted:

Broken Age: $3.74

Sam and Max Hit the Road: $2.09

Space Quest Collection: $6.59

The 7th Guest 25th Anniversary Edition: $7.49

What's your favorite interface in adventure games? Doesn't necessarily have to be the most perfect or easy to use; just the one that you're the most partial to.

Off the top of my head, a couple of low-hanging fruit suggestions (feel free to add more):

• LucasArts "9 verb" interface (Monkey Island 2, Day of the Tentacle, etc.)
• LucasArts "verb coin" (Monkey Island 3, Full Throttle)
• Sierra "icon bar" (King's Quest V, Space Quest IV, etc.)
• Revolution "Left does/right looks" mouse buttons (Beneath a Steel Sky, Broken Sword, as well most Wadjet Eye titles)

Mine is actually the one in Leisure Suit Larry 7. You click on something and up comes a contextual menu of appropriate verbs. If it's a door, you can "open" it; if it's a button, you can "press" it; etc. — and it also has an optional text parser for inputting your own verb.

I was nudged towards looking into Matrix, the fedi-alternative to Discord, to see if I should set up a chat space for adventure game fans... and it turns out I didn't have to. One already exists!

Now, I don't know who set it up to begin with, and it's pretty much crickets in there at the moment, but maybe we could change that? I'm in there, FWIW.

Edit: Link here, because the preview link on this post looks like a turd sandwich: https://matrix.to/#/#adventuregames:matrix.org

Edit 2: If you're intrigued but have no idea wtf Matrix is or how it works, get the Element client. There's an Android app for it, too. https://element.io/

Edit: It's solved! I'M BACK! Original post follows for posterity:

I'm sorry for not having kept up with this place in a few days. I've been trying to leave comments on people's replies and posts but my Lemmy app keeps giving me error messages ("language_not_allowed") — and, no, I'm not swearing my head off. 😅 I think it's a borked language setting.

I'll look into finding a better solution.

Has anyone read this? It exclusively covers text games, but goes a lot into the development of graphics in parallel, including when Infocom was a major competitor in the adventure gaming marketing.

I got an advance copy from Aaron to review and was expecting it to be a fluffy/coffee table book, but it turned out to be really good. My reaction is here.

Curious what other people's thoughts are.

Ross goes on vacation in Kyrandia.

If you are not familiar with this guy, he makes opinionated longform videos about bygone/obscure games and analyzes pointless minutiae in a humorous manner. Videos take months to years to come out.

Mine is hands down the green alien fart cloud in The Pandora Directive. For three simple reasons:

1. I don't like being chased.
2. I don't like being on a timer.
3. It scares the crap out of me to this day.

I usually panic to the point where I forget everything I need to do, despite having played the game a million times, and I spam the everloving hell out of the hint system.

Runner-up, also from the Tex Murphy series: the GRS "eyeball droid" in Under a Killing Moon. For some reason Access just felt compelled to put one pants-crapping sequence into each of these games...

Yes this is outside the scope of "Adventure" and "Point-and-Click" games, not really sure if the Narrative genre would be something different from visual novel.

I played two games by NeiLei on itch.io that were a little over an hour long each. Funny and the art was nice. Most of the games were watching the dialog, there was very limited player input but it was there.

Any suggestions for similar games that are 99% story, with different endings?

There's a lot of great commercial adventure games being made today but with so many free games coming from the community, I thought it would be fun to have a place to give shoutouts to those.

I will start with Elsewhere in the Night. I'm a fan of the people involved with this one and the Manhunter-inspired artwork is really cool

What's that one adventure game you can just boot up and have a great chill time with? Mine would probably be Day of the Tentacle. It's such a wonderful, colorful world to inhabit, and all the characters are lively and oozing with personality (no Sludge-o-Matic pun intended). I could spend hours just walking around talking to characters and not even think about solving any puzzles.

What's the one game you'd boot up to just relax with?

One of the things that have always endeared me to adventure games above all other types of fiction (books, movies, etc.) is that they give the player the opportunity to shape the story and unfold it at their own pace. While some games are content to have a linear story (and no slight against that — some absolute classics have only one straight solution), I am truly fascinated by the games that play up the "interactive" part of the medium.

While games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Westwood's Blade Runner games did a bang-up job of giving us ample replayability value, I feel nothing comes close to the sheer mind-bogglingly malleable story of Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive. How they managed to cram all that game content onto "just" 6 CDs is beyond me.

And what I truly love about it is that it's not just a case of "pick your path," like in Fate of Atlantis, but that the game keeps track of how you respond to NPCs and shapes the story accordingly. If you're kind and generous to people, you get put on the good path. If you're an opportunistic dick, you get sent on the bad path. And if you wibble-wobble between the two, you get sent on the middle-road path. And each path has multiple endings of its own!

What are some of your favorite games that let you experience the story in multiple ways?

I've been picking away at a pen-and-paper choose your own adventure graphic novel ever since I found some similar things in the local game store. I went through a ton of options looking for tools to make plotting the thing simpler.

So what's your favorite tool, software, technique or advice for crafting a cyoa in your favorite medium?

I mean, obviously I'm biased, but Space Quest III just had one of the most amazing kick-ass soundtracks. Composed by Bob Siebenberg, the drummer from Supertramp!

There's so many adventure games being created right now and I was wondering what you're all excited for. Here's some games I'm hoping to play in the next year. I'm leaving a few out just so this doesn't turn into a gigantic list

The Crimson Diamond - loved the demo and the dev streams for this have been fun to watch
Rosewater - same dev as Lamplight City and I liked that
Old Skies - new Wadjet Eye game! The art looks fantastic too
Dreamsettler - Love Hypnospace Outlaw and Slayers X, which was released this year. I'm excited to see this universe grow
I doesn't exist - Really curious to see how they innovate on text adventures
A Highland Song - Kind of a stretch since it's an adventure platformer but I really like Inkle

Do you have a YouTube or Twitch channel about adventure games? Do you run a blog? Maybe a Discord server? Do you post interesting things about adventure games someplace I can't think of right now because hot damn there are a lot of social media right now?

Drop us a link and a description of your content and let's check out your stuff!