Graphic Adventures TV-Based Game Console

Retroplayer wrote 07/11/2015 at 05:54 1 point

Graphic adventure games. This has always been my favorite genre.  I am talking the classic point-and-click 2D games of Sierra and LucasArts all the way up to the more modern and beautiful graphic adventure games put out by so many independent houses.

I've always felt that this genre suffered from a few things:

1. The games were very engaging and the stories addictive, but once you completed the game, that was it. You put it back in the box and there it stayed until it bit-rotted away.

2. Inconsistent UIs, sometimes very unintuitive. Part of this, I feel, is due to limitations in the platforms they were designed on.

3. Puzzles. Yes. Unfortunately the death-knell for this genre was the inclusion of myst style puzzles that were clearly meant to lengthen gameplay simply by forcing the player to get stuck. Long gone were the inventory based puzzles where you had to figure out how to combine items and be resourceful. But even some of those were ridiculous.

3.5 A .5 because this is related to the number 3 above. How many times did you have a hammer in your inventory that you used for one puzzle and then later encountered a glass window you needed to break only to find that the hammer was not the tool the game wanted you to use? That is something that has been on my mind since the early 90s. People should be able to solve the puzzles in various ways as long as it logical. I'd love a game where you needed to actually understand some science and physics principles in order to solve the puzzles.

But anyway, I wanted to mainly discuss number 2. What would a game console look like that was especially built for graphic adventure games? What would an optimal UI (both software and hardware) look like instead of a keyboard and mouse (and we all know what it was like when they tried to adapt these games to controllers!!)

Is there anyone interested in this genre that would like to see a comeback? Maybe an opensource hardware system and game engine for creating and running these stories?

I know I am not asking a specific question, but I am looking to open some discussion on this and see what people might have to add. The discussion can go in any direction, but the framework is how to revive this genre, how to convert it to a TV-based console platform that is intuitive to play, and how to focus on the story-telling and lengthen the experience without gimmicks.

Anyone?