Graphic Adventures TV-Based Game Console
Retroplayer wrote 07/11/2015 at 05:54 • 1 pointGraphic 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?
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I might not have much to add as far as the UI goes, since most of my experience was on the Apple IIe, so Alpine Encounter on up to Might and Magic were some of my favorites. But I do remember part of the fun was figuring out the verbs and working with your inventory as you mentioned.
For a TV based solution I'd think that voice commands make the most sense. How the Amazon FireTV App uses voice input to the Firestick would be ideal IMO. Input could also use directional commands from remote or app. A smart phone app could also be a place to view inventory, attributes, etc. reducing screen clutter. The LG TV Magic Motion Remote (Air Mouse) seems like a good option, but it would make more sense for the smart phone app to offer an air mouse/touchpad to interact. Voice is ideal because I could see myself playing half unconscious horizontally on the couch and not worrying about my orientation as related to the game.
I imagine what is on the screen could be anything from Retro-quality on up to the interactive movies they had on laser disc, but I just took a minute to watch The Walking Dead game and while I like the graphics and view points, I'm not a big fan of picking from 4 predetermined actions. Wasn't it Hitchhiker's that gave such entertaining responses as you searched for the right question?
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I wasn't impressed with the Walking Dead UI either. Seemed far too cumbersome. Not to mention, he had a million chances to pick up some type of weapon in the game to fight the zombies with, but that wasn't the plan of the game designer. Yet the stuff was lying right there.
Loved the graphics though
I also love your idea of using a smartphone as a secondary display and control.
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I've always like adventure games ever since I first played a game called Adventure (the Crowther and Woods game). Later I moved on to Zork and many of the other Infocom adventure games, and in more recent days, the Myst/Riven series and Uru. I would rather play an adventure game over almost any of the games I see advertised on TV. It seems almost all of the new games are combat based. I did play Doom and Doom II back in the day but I'm so over games involving combat.
What I like about Adventure style games is being able to explore a world and having to exercise the little grey cells in order to solve a puzzle in order to get further in the game. My favourite games were the ones by Infocom that claimed to use the best graphics device available, your own imagination. In the early days you needed to create your own mental picture of the world you were exploring. Later the company succumbed to using graphics so that aspect of the game play was taken away from you. The use of graphics also took away some of the game play as it became point and click to perform actions required to further you in the game instead of you thinking of a command to type (e.g. take lamp).
The Infocom games had varying degrees of difficulty in the puzzles you had to solve. Some were quite complicated or were of the type where, when you read a cheat sheet on solving a stumper of a puzzle, you find you might not have ever thought of the solution. On the whole, a lot of care had been put in to the Infocom games and how you could go about solving the challenges encountered. There wasn't always one way to approach a problem.
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So far, it seems the consensus is that there is nothing wrong with what already exists?
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Most of the UI changes over the course of the LucasArts catalog were simply improvements. The goal was basically to get rid of verbs.
If you look a Maniac mansion, you have a bunch of buttons at the bottom of the screen, and this continued for the Indiana Jones, and DoTT. Get to Sam and Max and The Dig, and you start getting mouseover verbs, and this is what's been used in adventure games made since then. It's not so much a *hardware* limitation; mouseover verbs could have been done with any system with a mouse. It's a UI/UX limitation - someone needs to have the insight to build it like that.
If you want to see what a modern adventure game UI looks like, play The Walking Dead. That's the state of the art in the genre.
It's not impossible to imagine mouseover verbs (like The Dig) being patched into older games. I'd look at the SCUMMVM docs and code. Bonus: since these games were 4:3 and you're cutting off the 'verb box' at the bottom, you can re-do it for widescreen.
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Indeed. I absolutely loved the mouseover upgrades and it certainly lead the way after that. I think what I was really trying to get at though, was keyboard/mouse as the limitations. If we are talking about playing the game on a TV, a mouse and keyboard is probably not the right type of controller. So, I am thinking, what type of controller would fit into this scenario? But maybe that goes around in a circle, since the software UI was designed for a mouse and keyboard. (And BTW, The Dig was one of my all-time favorite LA games.)
Which Walking Dead game, Brian? There are several in different genres. I'd like to take a look at it.
Love the idea of converting the UI in older games using SCUMMVM. I'll add that idea to the list along with making a more touchscreen-friendly version of ScummVM.
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What was before the mouse then? I think a pointing device with binary actuators is perfect (just like a mouse) but in a more open environment where you're viewing a TV then the mouse needs to operate without being on a (flat) surface. Oh and [Benchoff] prefers to be referred to by his chosen screen name.
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TV based platform doesn't really mean that much today. Most TV's have every input from RF though to HDMI and often include VGA.
On the other hand there is more of a restriction on the other end. Most PC's don't have the old TV signal standards - often just VGA / DVI or HDMI.
This is something that I think would go together well on a rPI or something like that. I don't think you will get any consistency in the software platform if you opt for custom (non-standard) hardware. However the software options on something like a Linux based platform would provide a greater range of software platforms to choose from.
Having said that, here's a simple one that I like -
http://www.abc.net.au/gameon/chasm/chasmgame.htm
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Some questions to get things started: What made these games great? What made these games suck?
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It depends, sometimes it's the story, sometimes the characters, sometimes the dialogues (look ,a three-headed monkey!) and so on... there's no good answer to such question.
Techinically speaking though, what may have made these games so great was the fact that they were plain easy to play, I mean you literally just had to click stuff to make things happen (at least lately).
To the downsides, having half monitor cluttered with inventory and verbs/actions thus eating precious sucked. That's why later on less menu space (or none at all) became a thing.
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