Are you an "old school" adventure gamer?
From my wonderful experience arguing with several people on this forum over various issues, I've discovered I am not apparently an "old school" adventure gamer. After much study and research I've discovered the truth about this rare subculture of America.
* If a game requires you utilize a keyboard, you quickly log onto forums and type up a storm about how operating a keyboard is so difficult
* You expect your graphics card from 1997 to be Direct X 10 compatible
* You think WASD is some form of white angelo saxonism
* You're infuriated when you find out your brand new game won't work with Windows 98
* You expect episodic adventure games produced monthly that look like Curse of Monkey Island
* You refuse to attend IMAX movies because you hate 3D
* You think adding the word "Quest" to the end of names for games, books or children is clever
* The majority of games you play weren't made this this century
* You think the best games ever made were from the nineties, and log on to complain about how Tales of Monkey Island or the Special Edition haven't been made exactly like the originals
* ...while complaining about how the sound and graphics haven't been polished to a Crysis like standard.
* You hate Guybrush's hair almost as much as you hated his nose in 1997.
* You hate episodic gaming because it's too short so you replay Full Throttle and Loom instead.
* You've burned your copy of Escape from Monkey Island over the ending, swearing to kill the originator of the concept without realizing it was one of the throw away ideas Ron, Dave and Tim came up with back in 1991 for the original Secret of Monkey Island
* You spend hours pouring over the evidence and put much thought into the truth behind the TRUE secret and are still looking forward to seeing the sequels to the Matrix
* You're waiting for the price to come down before you shell out for a VHS player.
* Your modem still downloads things at a rate of bauds per second.
* You go watch TV or read The Green Mile instead of even contemplating paying for an episodic game
* You can actually use a text parser
* You actually LIKE to use a text parser
* You're extremely disappointed after you begin playing Jak and Daxter
* You couldn't beat the default settings for Whack-A-Mole
* You give the original Half Life a D minus in your review
* You keep all your important documents like your resume and your tax information safe and secure, hidden away on password protected floppies
* You find Monkey Kombat to be INTOLERABLE and THE WORST THING EVER, and try explaining how awful and tedious it is to people who grind in World of Warcraft or repeatedly fight the Elite Four in Poke'mon
* You can't figure out why games that lack voice over, feature MIDI and blocky pixel art would need special editions
* You voted for Obama but hate all the changes made to adventure gaming because "it's different and unfamiliar"
* You call tech support because your new game shipped without its code wheel
* You make a daily habit of praying to God that the people behind Escape from Monkey Island be crushed by meteorites while occasionally replaying Sam and Max Hit the Road and the Fate of Atlantis
* You wish there was more verbs to select from in Zak McKraken and Maniac Mansion
* You think graphics killed adventure gaming - as in, actually having graphics at all.
* You refer to people who enjoy modern adventure games as "kids" universally, even the people who actually are on staff designing the game
* You confuse CDs for Frisbees
...and most importantly...
* You have a complete inability to let go of the past.
* If a game requires you utilize a keyboard, you quickly log onto forums and type up a storm about how operating a keyboard is so difficult
* You expect your graphics card from 1997 to be Direct X 10 compatible
* You think WASD is some form of white angelo saxonism
* You're infuriated when you find out your brand new game won't work with Windows 98
* You expect episodic adventure games produced monthly that look like Curse of Monkey Island
* You refuse to attend IMAX movies because you hate 3D
* You think adding the word "Quest" to the end of names for games, books or children is clever
* The majority of games you play weren't made this this century
* You think the best games ever made were from the nineties, and log on to complain about how Tales of Monkey Island or the Special Edition haven't been made exactly like the originals
* ...while complaining about how the sound and graphics haven't been polished to a Crysis like standard.
* You hate Guybrush's hair almost as much as you hated his nose in 1997.
* You hate episodic gaming because it's too short so you replay Full Throttle and Loom instead.
* You've burned your copy of Escape from Monkey Island over the ending, swearing to kill the originator of the concept without realizing it was one of the throw away ideas Ron, Dave and Tim came up with back in 1991 for the original Secret of Monkey Island
* You spend hours pouring over the evidence and put much thought into the truth behind the TRUE secret and are still looking forward to seeing the sequels to the Matrix
* You're waiting for the price to come down before you shell out for a VHS player.
* Your modem still downloads things at a rate of bauds per second.
* You go watch TV or read The Green Mile instead of even contemplating paying for an episodic game
* You can actually use a text parser
* You actually LIKE to use a text parser
* You're extremely disappointed after you begin playing Jak and Daxter
* You couldn't beat the default settings for Whack-A-Mole
* You give the original Half Life a D minus in your review
* You keep all your important documents like your resume and your tax information safe and secure, hidden away on password protected floppies
* You find Monkey Kombat to be INTOLERABLE and THE WORST THING EVER, and try explaining how awful and tedious it is to people who grind in World of Warcraft or repeatedly fight the Elite Four in Poke'mon
* You can't figure out why games that lack voice over, feature MIDI and blocky pixel art would need special editions
* You voted for Obama but hate all the changes made to adventure gaming because "it's different and unfamiliar"
* You call tech support because your new game shipped without its code wheel
* You make a daily habit of praying to God that the people behind Escape from Monkey Island be crushed by meteorites while occasionally replaying Sam and Max Hit the Road and the Fate of Atlantis
* You wish there was more verbs to select from in Zak McKraken and Maniac Mansion
* You think graphics killed adventure gaming - as in, actually having graphics at all.
* You refer to people who enjoy modern adventure games as "kids" universally, even the people who actually are on staff designing the game
* You confuse CDs for Frisbees
...and most importantly...
* You have a complete inability to let go of the past.
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Comments
As far as the graphics argument, I love good graphics; however, I also realize that amazing graphics does not a good game make. I got into this argument with Guybrush_Threepwood back before the release of the first episode of ToMI even though we eventually realized that we wanted the same thing. I never think a game is automatically bad just because it has good graphics, but at the same time I've seen too many games (specifically console games) that their main selling point is the graphics. I never want to have to choose between good graphics and gameplay, but if I HAD to...I would easily pick gameplay.
I wouldn't really say it was a shot at Loom, Loom is incredibly short and there's no arguing that.
But PK, great post.
Haha, I know, I know. I just get defensive:p.
Not all of the points are ones people will agree with, but as cohesive whole they seem very typical of the impossible to please adventure gamer who's nostalgia is blinding them from reality.
I'll post some photographic evidence of my love for LOOM and Full Throttle later.
Well, I'm the king of blasphemers because I think WASD + mouse is the best control scheme adventure games have ever had.
Additionally, it's not an American subculture - these games have collected loyal fans from around the world. I'm in Australia myself, and the old adventure games were a big part of my life.
Something very special happened in the golden age of point and click adventure games, and it's something that certain people deem worthy of keeping alive. That doesn't mean they're all ignorant fools, even if some of them do whinge on forums from time to time.
:eek:
In other news corruptbiggins has a filthy mind.
The people I'm making fun assume they are the TRUE adventure gamers who have the TRUE and ONLY good games and those who don't like it are uncultured philistines. It's not that they like old games - I do. Like I said before it's like the user assumed I was a kid too young to remember games back in the old day where you "didn't have to fight the controls" because I liked click and drag. It's kind of like buying a new car and being convinced it's garbage because you're upset with the lemon scented air freshener not being pine. "Back in my day they would shell out for the finest of scents!"
In other words I'm using the term facetiously in reference to a large amount of complaining that happened mostly a month ago that occasionally still continues. Yeah, I know. It just sounded better in my head when I wrote it that way. Xenophobia, you know how it goes - greedy capitalist pig and all that. Not what I was saying at all, Ed who happens to be Weird.
ahh, the good old times, when you had a max of 640kb main memory and everything else was extended (or expanded) memory. it got a lot easier, if you set up your config.sys to use the multi-config boot menu.
PS: And no I didn't vote Obama, but I voted man named Sauli Niinistö in the last presidential elections.
We really need text-parser control in today's game!
In any case, I didn't find this list funny. Basically just mixed some obviously infantile remarks like "You refuse to attend IMAX movies because you hate 3D" or "You confuse CDs for Frisbees" with perfectly reasonable ones like "You actually LIKE to use a text parser" or "You can't figure out why games that lack voice over, feature MIDI and blocky pixel art would need special editions" to make us old-timers look bad
You can't handle the truth! Text parsers suck, face it. We don't all have the exact same vocabulary and sentence structure as Roberta Williams, life just doesn't work that way.
The Lucasarts SCUMM engine was a million times better because you were told what the item you were pointing at was, instead of spending three hours mindlessly typing because you didn't realize that the computer was actually a terminal, or that the bowl was really a pot.
I agree that Sierra's parser wasn't very good, but there were better parsers out there like Infocom's or Legend's. Plus, in the newer Sierra games you could right click an object with the mouse and get a description of it which always contained the name of the object. In any case, I don't remember ever being stuck in a parser game for very long because I knew the solution to a puzzle but not how to phrase it to the parser.
With "look" command you usually realized what the object was because game told you that there's pot on the table when you wrote "look table". So it wasn't really a problem. Most of the time you go with simple commands like "look man" "talk man" "draw gun" "shoot man" "search body". In general guess the word problems are often less frustrating (if nothing else helps then there's dictionary) than pixel hunting some point and clicks seem to favour. But both systems are great if those are well made.
My avatar features art from a game released in 1991. My wall is literally plastered with posters of adventure games from twenty years ago. My earliest memory is a scene from LeChuck's Revenge.
I personally find text parsers incredibly annoying to operate, and I have actually tried to use them for long periods of time. I could have put "you prefer/think text parsers should still be used to today" but I didn't critically analyze my post for fear of not being politically correct. As for special editions, I just disagree. For them to have any mass marketing appeal today they have to be updated.
Some are more obtuse and less universally agreed upon than others - special editions being unimportant is obviously less silly than expecting your Commodore 64 to run TMI. I was just thinking of all the negative - some more negative than others - stereotypical things adventure gamers complain about or their attributes.
. . . .
Thanks for making me feel young!
I kind of considered myself old-school, because I grew up on the old games. But after reading over some of the technical terms in the thread and realizing they held no meaning for me, I'm going to have to re-evaluate my status as an old-school gamer. Maybe I'm just a middle-school gamer?
I prefer to think of myself as a "girly gamer." I like to have a plot, I like the controls to be easy, and I would like the graphics to be pleasing. By pleasing, I mean decent. Pixel sprites were just fine by me, and I thought the artwork for TMI was pleasing, even though the quality was not top grade.
Having been one of the annoying people complaining about controls, this is my feeling about them:
wasd and the mouse it fine. You can move with ease, and then you just have to click. It makes me happy. That is why I had an issue with the controls in TMI and trouble with other games that have alternative controls. My favorite interface was in CMI, where you still had the option to talk/chew/taste, look and pick up. I find that a lot of hints are given by having options of how you manipulate objects as opposed to click on an object and hope it gives you something useful.
Graphics? Oh boy... little rant here. I think Myst had a large part of killing the graphic adventure game. It was pretty, but unless you ordered the hint book, or read the whole library in the game, it was next to impossible to beat. I remember everyone bought it because it was so pretty and the graphics were so good, but not because of the story. I think that started the seed which caused graphics to be a higher priority, rather then game play. I'm sorry, I really hate Myst. I like eye candy, Folklore for the PS3 is beautiful AND has good game play. Soul Caliber is basically eye candy with button mashing and that is why I love it. I guess what I'm saying is that the graphics should fit the style of the game. It doesn't matter if it is 2D or 3D, it just needs to work with the rest of the game.
Actually, Myst is awesome and Riven is even better. I actually like them better than CMI, so take that CMI designers!
Anyway, I would probably be considered an 'old school' (don't like that term) adventure gamer by todays standards as I started playing them back in '89 or so (I played some before but not seriously... I was so young).
But adventure games had already been around for a long time before that.
The puzzles in Myst never made sense to me or anyone I know and the only time we solved ANYTHING was by brute forcing it. The puzzles were pretty poorly designed.
Not needed, there are always ways to play old games on modern systems.
WASD works fine for action games. I wouldn't want to play a strategy game using those controls, and I prefer mouse controls for adventure games.
I just find it more convenient, that's all there is to it.
All my Windows 98 games work fine here, using various methods like VMWare, etc.
I never liked the style in CMI too much, too cartoony and Guybrush looks silly.
I hardly ever visit theatres.
Depends on the context, I'd have to hear the full title of the book to know if the usage of that word is clever or not.
Very true in my case, except for a few exceptions like Telltale games and some others.
Most of my favourite games are from the 80s and 90s. Games have changed a lot, for better or worse. It's a personal preference.
I would never expect new games to be like old ones.
I think this is exaggerated. Asking for games to look nice doesn't automatically mean you expect cutting edge graphics. In any case, I don't care much about graphics, other than having a thing for 2D... but I would never complain about a game released these days being 3D.
I still don't like the CMI Guybrush and his hair is really ugly in the remake. Nothing wrong about pointing this out, it's a valid complaint.
I don't hate episodic gaming for being short. But they have disadvantages - recycled areas, not very many items, small worlds...
I would never burn a Monkey Island game even if I hated it, I collect them.
I don't bother with stuff like that, but inconsistencies do bother me a bit.
Why would anyone do that.
Again, why? What does this have to do with being 'oldschool'? You can download 'retro' stuff a lot faster with a fast connection.
What does episodic or not have to do with 'oldschool'?
Of course I can.
Of course. It gives a lot of freedom.
I've never played any of those games.
Why not? Old adventure games have harder sequences than that.
The original Half Life was great. Half Life 2 was decent but nowhere near as good.
That's retarded.
Monkey Kombat was stupid as hell. WoW is very tedious for me, but I can see why people like it.. the social aspect and all that.
They don't *need* special editions. But why not, always interesting to see how they turn out... and MI:SE is pretty decent.
I don't care if something is unfamiliar. Myst was very unfamiliar when I first played that, and yet I loved it.
I care if I find something inconvenient, and people always blame me (and others with similar opinions) for hating it only because it's 'unfamiliar'. Which is stupid.
I would if it was supposed to come with one.
I'm an atheist, but I do replay those two games... they're really good. Especially Fate of Atlantis.
Nope, I don't. Why would I, there isn't any use for more.
I haven't read that article so I can't comment. But there's no doubt that changing adventure games to 3D can greatly *change* them.
If they're 'killed' or not... I don't even know what that means. They're still around, so they're obviously not dead.
Nope.
Nope.
Nope. But if something is of very high quality and a lot of fun, it would be stupid to let go of it merely because it's old.
So does this qualify me as being an 'oldschool' adventure gamer?
For some reason, reading this just reminded me of all the people who think WASD movement is a hideous abomination.
I wonder how many of them sing the praises of parsers, most of which were controlled exclusively by arrow key steering.
I don't know why Valve even bothered making a sequel. Even if it was the best game ever made (which it came very close to being) everyone would still complain that it isn't "as good as the first".
Yeah, for most people nostalgia > quality. I don't understand it.
amen to that brother! But my opinion is more this way:
I didn't vote for Obama, though. I VOTED FOR RALPH NADER! YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just kidding. but I didn't vote for obama.