MagnetPhonics

The HG101 Top 47k games podcast this week has a great candidate, Liberal Crime Squad. The other great Bay12 game and the game Austin Walker doesn't want you to know about.

As someone who relatively recently played through all Wadjet Eye games, the Blackwell games are great but they don't hold up nearly as well as the rest of their stuff (publishing or development.) That says more about the high quality of the rest of their catalogue than the Blackwell games, but there's still only one or two Wadjet Eye games that I'd prefer over every Blackwell game. I'd say something like Puzzle Bots or the criminally obscure "Da New Guys: Day of the Jackass" would be true hidden gems of the Wadjet Eye catalogue.

The Blackwell games do fit with this thread though, as they're important historical games (transition from AGS forum freeware to high-polish commercial product,) that are sadly largely ignored outside of their niche.

There's a series of choices in Lisa: The Painful that are at first implictly framed as "noble self-sacrifice to protect others" vs "Others are harmed/killed to maintain your (Brad's) power level". But it soon becomes obvious that the former isn't the case at all and escalates to the point where it's an impossible policy to maintain.

I didn't mind the searching around too much. But it did give me a "What was I actually doing?" problem everytime I went back to it.

Some games (like Perfect Tides) go so far under the radar that I feel like a even a single voice of advocacy could make a huge difference. I backed Perfect Tides and have backed the sequel so I'm glad it's got an audience.

I need to go back to Perfect Tides (probably to restart the game over at this point tbh.) I really enjoyed what I played, but it got lost in the shuffle at the time. The writing and art are incredible though.

I'll admit I found it a bit cumbersome to play at first. I play a fair few adventure games, but it's hard to realise just how far the standard point and click interface has advanced over the last 25 years until you run into a game like Perfect Tides which basically uses the stock Adventure Game Studio interface (it uses the literal stock announcement box font in fact) as if it were literally the year 2000. But that in itself gave me a weird sense of nostalgia for the period

The Longest Journey is one of my favourite games ever, and is considered a classic for a reason. But it's always been built on rickety foundations.

I also had planned to write a lengthy blog about the Longest Journey and the other games in the series, after I finally got around to playing through Dreamfall: Chapters this year (continuing my inadvertent tradition of playing TLJ games years after release.) But I ran into motivation issues after realising how long it would need to be to convey my central thesis of potential, disappointment, bad choices and ultimately placing Ragnar Tornquist amongst the David Cage's and Sam Barlow's of the world.

If you know, I plan to rip the rubber ducky puzzle a new fucking asshole,

Good

No

It's an A.S.S.

It's closer to a Shmup or dual joystick shooter without the second joystick. Influenced by roguelikes (actual) and separately it also takes the meta-progression of so called "roguelites" to their logical conclusion.

Excellent write up.

I love Last Call BBS and 20th Century Food Court in particular. Zachtronics have (had?) a real knack for tricking the player into doing extremely difficult (low-level and/or memory constrained) programming while thinking they are actually doing a simplistic "dumbed-down" version of programming (if they know there are doing it at all.)

I do wish 20 Century Food Court had included some way to lessen the shock of running out of rack space though. Maybe an early level with a simple problem where you are limited to one shelf to ease the player into the concept of running out of space.

before: "meh, it's fine"

after: "meh, it's fine"

some time since: "meh, it's fi... *notices notification for premium autorenewing*... better make sure that never happens again without me knowing *disables* now where was i... meh, it's fine"

The 'ritual' itself was a dumb fun video. But the content itself that week is some of the worst and most cynical bullshit ever posted on this website about videogames.

@valorianendymion: The stuff you're talking about definitely happened though. Old Man Murray (run by Chet and Erik who worked on Psychonauts and Portal, etc) is considered a pioneer of this sort of humour. It's just that they were riffing off an already established falsehood.

It's difficult to date the 'death' of adventure games because it's something that never actually happened as ZombiePie pointed out.

@valorianendymion: The "Adventure games are dead" sentiment predates that style of writing.

The Myst backlash started almost immediately on release. There's a lot of people who blame the combo of Myst/Riven/et al from one side and Doom/Quake/etc on the other, for the decline of "traditional" adventure games as a big flagship genre.

The Longest Journey (1999) is grouped with classic point and clicks now. But at the time it was already considered a throwback of sorts, and even deliberately included the obtuse/terrible 'rusty grill rubber duck' puzzle as a tribute to the older games of the style.

By the time the famous Old Man Murray article (September 11 2000) on the "Cat Hair Mustache" puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3 came around, the "death" of adventure games was already established in the culture.