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Is the graphical text-based adventure game genre completely stone dead?

T

TheNamelessOne

Member
Some of the first games I played, enjoyed and actually learned a lot of my english from are the old graphical text-based adventure games, most notably King's Quest 1-4, The "Hugo" trilogy, and Space quest and Lesiure Suit Lary. These games evolved and differed from the interactive fiction genre in that they had graphics with characters and environments before the point-and-click interface became standard in the genre.

What I'm wondering is mostly if there still is some kind of indie-development (as the AGS stuff) or such for games like these, or have they faded into oblivion as but memories? In some cases I'd say this interface is better for the genre than using a mouse.

Any (contemporary) love for games like these still?

Hugo's House of Horrors
9187-HugosHouseofHorrors2WhoDunnit.jpg


King's Quest
scummvm_3_3_12-full.png
 
B

Brandon F

Well congratulations! You got yourself caught!
Hector is pretty funny. On iOS and Steam.

Actually Steam has a bunch out there, but I haven't tried many. Gemini Rue is quoted as being one of the better ones for example.

Edit: If you are explicitly wondering if about 'text-input' versus mouse control...then yea probably not many options.
 
T

TheNamelessOne

Member
Brandon F said:
Hector is pretty funny. On iOS and Steam.

Actually Steam has a bunch out there, but I haven't tried many. Gemini Rue is quoted as being one of the better ones for example.
Click to expand...
Never heard of Hector, have to check that out. Gemini Rue is a point-and-click game though.

Billychu said:
Graphical text adventure? Is it graphical or text based?

I don't think of King's Quest as text based
Click to expand...

That's why I called it "graphical text-based" since it both uses graphics and text-input :)
 
M

mclem

Member
Brandon F said:
Hector is pretty funny. On iOS and Steam.

Actually Steam has a bunch out there, but I haven't tried many. Gemini Rue is quoted as being one of the better ones for example.
Click to expand...

He's specifically not talking about point and clicks, but instead referring to ones which had graphics and movement - but a text parser.

And, strictly speaking, I don't think it really matters. The focus on interaction has changed from being verb-based to being noun-based. That is, in a text parser, you might have:

> ENTER DOOR
> CLOSE DOOR

...and a point-and-click parser would instead boil them down to:

> USE DOOR
> USE DOORKNOB

That's not *really* a vast difference, it's just offering a context-sensitive set of 'words' to interact with the scene rather than a full lexicon - but a good puzzle shouldn't be reliant on a sufficiently obscure phrasing.


Edit: That said, if we *were* to have a graphical adventure with a sufficient quantity of well-written interactions to justify a full-text parser, that'd be great - except *if* the prose is so well written, wouldn't it make more sense to go full IF instead?
 
P

PuppetSlave

Member
I hope so. Freaking Larry 3 and weaving freaking grass shirts.


But kidding aside a more modern one with a much more flexibel parser could be pretty cool.
 
S

StarEye

The Amiga Brotherhood
I loved the text-parser games as well, Leisure Suit Larry 3 is one of my favourite games of all time.

The first text adventure games were all text, then came those with still images that showed you the environment, an earlier form of the graphic text adventures. Then Sierra (were they first perhaps?) came with their interactive graphic text adventures, where you could interact with the graphics as well as type in the commands you needed to do.

So yes, graphic text adventures, as opposed to the text-only ones (Infocom).

I'd love to see a new game try this old Sierra approach, as opposed to using the typical SCUMM variant.
 
T

TheNamelessOne

Member
kruis said:
http://www.ifarchive.org/

http://ifdb.tads.org/

http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Recommended_games
Click to expand...
These are all links to IF-games and not really what I'm after - somehow the IF-genre is still alive today, but the graphical games I'm talking about seem to be dead.

On that topic tho, everyone should watch Get Lamp, a wonderful documentary about IF.

StarEye said:
I loved the text-parser games as well, Leisure Suit Larry 3 is one of my favourite games of all time.

The first text adventure games were all text, then came those with still images that showed you the environment, an earlier form of the graphic text adventures. Then Sierra (were they first perhaps?) came with their interactive graphic text adventures, where you could interact with the graphics as well as type in the commands you needed to do.

So yes, graphic text adventures, as opposed to the text-only ones (Infocom).

I'd love to see a new game try this old Sierra approach, as opposed to using the typical SCUMM variant.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I would love to see some modern games with this kind of input. If there really aren't any at the moment - indie devs get on it!
 
D

Deleted member 59090

Unconfirmed Member
Don't Shit Your Pants is the only one I can recall in recent history...
 
D

discoalucard

i am a butthurt babby that can only drool in wonder at shiney objects
I don't know of many of the type you're looking for. Some of the Chzo Mythos games use a text parser similar to Sierra's SCI0 games like Space Quest III, which is about the closest you'll get, I think. Adventure Game Studio supports it but developers rarely use it.

I developed my own game last year, but it's more of a straight text adventure with still graphics, like the Scott Adams' adventure games from the mid-80s:

http://hg101.kontek.net/quepasaperro/quepasaperro.htm
 
Haunted

Haunted

Member
Yahtzee's Trilby's Notesis the last text parser graphic adventure I played.

I'm firmly in the point and click camp, though, so there might be some niche text parser stuff I've missed.
Lucasarts > Sierra. :p
 
D

Deleted member 17706

Unconfirmed Member
I never understood the appeal, even when I was much younger. What's fun about trying to guess what phrase will work and typing it correctly?

Am I missing something?
 
M

Mr_Zombie

Member
TheNamelessOne said:
Strong Bad playing games, lol.

Didn't know Facade had text input, I just wrote it of the instant I saw it because I can't stand the art...
Click to expand...

Facade is a great game to experiment with. On one of my playthroughs the moment the guy opened doors I told him to fuck off. He made a shocked face and slammed the doors right in front of me. I didn't expected that :D.
 
J

jimi_dini

Member
You can't do this in point+click adventures:

xmquB.jpg


no, that's not some common "don't know what you are talking about"-window. The game actually reacts on that specific input

but to answer the TC's question: yes. dead. really dead. Sadly.
 
L

LamerDeluxe

Member
I was always surprised that those Sierra adventures seemed to have a cool response to almost anything you entered. Recently I read in an interview that the beta testers received a floppy and every time they typed in something the game didn't understand it was saved to the disk. Afterwards they would add responses to almost all of that input.

Oh and Larry 2 and having to type "swim", those bastards. Also:

> look ceiling
Yup, it's still there.
> look wall
Staring at walls, are we?
> kick door
My, my, what a little savage you are.

etc.
 
T

TheNamelessOne

Member
LamerDeluxe said:
I was always surprised that those Sierra adventures seemed to have a cool response to almost anything you entered. Recently I read in an interview that the beta testers received a floppy and every time they typed in something the game didn't understand it was saved to the disk. Afterwards they would add responses to almost all of that input.

Oh and Larry 2 and having to type "swim", those bastards. Also:

> look ceiling
Yup, it's still there.
> look wall
Staring at walls, are we?
> kick door
My, my, what a little savage you are.

etc.
Click to expand...

This.

This is what makes these games so wonderful. Instead of hunting pixels you are hunting words.
 
L

LamerDeluxe

Member
TheNamelessOne said:
This.

This is what makes these games so wonderful. Instead of hunting pixels you are hunting words.
Click to expand...

When I was a kid, the lady living across from me was addicted to adventure games, one day when I came over at her house she said to me "I've been hanging from a vine for hours and I don't know how to get down", I looked at her thinking she had lost her marbles until she walked over to her computer and showed me Leisure Suit Larry hanging from a vine. I typed "let go" and he came down. She told me she had typed in half the dictionary and I got it right the first try. (this is in the Netherlands). Talk about word hunting LOL.

It is even harder for people outside the US, especially Larry's questions to find out if you are an adult, they are so US centric that foreign adults often don't know the answers.

But yes, I really miss being able to type in anything and getting a funny response as well.
 
M

Mistle

Member
phoenix-wright-objection.jpg


I think PW is pretty close to the genre you're describing. I mean, yeah it's different, but it's all text and requires puzzle solving.
 
GhaleonQ

GhaleonQ

Member
By every reasonable definition of "stone dead," yep. I think it's for the best (they don't have the virtues of either text or graphic, and Japanese-style and visual novels fill their aesthetic place), but I wish there were SOME around.
 
J

jimi_dini

Member
LamerDeluxe said:
It is even harder for people outside the US, especially Larry's questions to find out if you are an adult, they are so US centric that foreign adults often don't know the answers.
Click to expand...

Or you could just press Ctrl-Alt-X and be done with it.
Especially nowadays the questions are almost impossible to answer.
 
M

Mistle

Member
LiK said:
not even, it's more of a visual novel with point and click aspects. you can't really type in actions to experiment with reactions.
Click to expand...

Ah, well I haven't played the games he gave as examples, and didn't realise you actually type in commands. I was visualising the text/graphic adventure games with static environments, much like PW games.
 
L

LiK

Member
Mistle said:
Ah, well I haven't played the games he gave as examples, and didn't realise you actually type in commands. I was visualising the text/graphic adventure games with static environments, much like PW games.
Click to expand...
yea, the old games allowed you to type really random stuff like 'kiss x person' and you get funny reactions. it was fun but also made games more challenging.

this type of game is so dead that people are confusing them with pointNclick and visual novels. I can't blame them tho.
 
S

Saroyan

Member
jimi_dini said:
You can't do this in point+click adventures:

xmquB.jpg


no, that's not some common "don't know what you are talking about"-window. The game actually reacts on that specific input

but to answer the TC's question: yes. dead. really dead. Sadly.
Click to expand...

I have so much nostalgia for Quest for Glory, it was one of the first pc games I ever played, along with King's Quest IV
 
S

SmZA

Member
One time I had a little splinter and I was looking around for my tweezers. I was hunting everywhere but couldn't find my tweezers. The splinter wasn't that painful, I was more annoyed I couldn't find my goddamn tweezers. Then I realised I don't own tweezers, I just had them in my inventory in an adventure game I was playing.
 
A

ArjanN

Member
Zefah said:
I never understood the appeal, even when I was much younger. What's fun about trying to guess what phrase will work and typing it correctly?

Am I missing something?
Click to expand...

Yes.

The best ones, like the infocom stuff, actually allowed you much more freedom than point and click games and had more than one solution to puzzles, or at least a ton of unique responses to doing the wrong thing.

Like interactive fiction, they're generally also more challenging because you actually have to think about solutions to problems, where in point and click games you can almost always brute force your way through by just clicking on every hotspot and combining every item.

And no, this genre is completely dead, although on the bright side there's probably a bunch of old games in this genre you haven't played.
 
J

Jay Sosa

Member
LiK said:
yea, the old games allowed you to type really random stuff like 'kiss x person' and you get funny reactions. it was fun but also made games more challenging.

this type of game is so dead that people are confusing them with pointNclick and visual novels. I can't blame them tho.
Click to expand...

kiss x person? Yeah right ;D
 
T

tomakasatnav

Member
Commercially?
Yep.

Fan made?
Nope.

I made one using AGS. There's an AGI plugin (so you can get the double width pixel style of early Sierra Online adventures) and you can make (or borrow) a Sierra style GUI.
 
mdtauk

mdtauk

Member
As long as Ghost Trick, and Ace Attorney games continue to be released, then no - the genre is not dead.
 
K

Krilekk

Banned
Zefah said:
I never understood the appeal, even when I was much younger. What's fun about trying to guess what phrase will work and typing it correctly?

Am I missing something?
Click to expand...

No. Are there any FPS with keyboard only controls? Or did the genre die? Why do racing games still offer gamepad support when we have those nice cursor keys? I do think parser adventures would be a good thing so that kids would learn to write the language again. Between listening to audio books, playing video games and watching TV there's not much where they actually learn useful stuff.

The reason why parser input is dead is because we have much better input methods now. Back then a mouse was not standard. The Lucasfilm Games adventures had full keyboard control as well, but instead of typing in what you wanted to do you moved a cursor on the screen and built sentences by clicking on verbs and subjects. And this was better because the developer knew the nine or twelve verbs that could be used and wrote the game with that in mind. In a true text parser game you'd have the same nine verbs but an infinite of other options that would all lead to the same result: "Sorry, you can't do that."
 
H

HisshouBuraiKen

Member
ArjanN said:
Like interactive fiction, they're generally also more challenging because you actually have to think about solutions to problems, where in point and click games you can almost always brute force your way through by just clicking on every hotspot and combining every item.
Click to expand...

In defense, the good ones would also have you die about a million times if you went that route.

Also, no mention of the MacVenture series? Shadowgate was my first exposure to the genre and will always hold a special place in my heart.
 
F

Fine Ham Abounds

Member
I used to try to make these games as a kid on my Tandy Trash-80, mainly because I can write and not much else.

It blew my mind when I was 8 just how quickly these got complicated if you didn't want something that just said "I don't know what that means" 99% of the time.

I miss these, but I got hooked on Dungeons of Daggorath around the same time, and ended up more inclined towards Wizardry style games.
 
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