Best Adventure Game Ever!

General chat related to ScummVM, adventure gaming, and so on.

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Sedryn
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Post by Sedryn »

King's Quest IV for me.

I was totally blown away the first time I played that game.

King's Quest VI is a close runner up, but no adventure game has a place in my heart like King's Quest IV. Back in 1988, I'd never seen anything like it. I don't think there was anything like it. I remember looking at the picture of Roberta Williams on the packaging box where she boasted that King's Quest IV was the largest sized game ever made at a whopping 3 megabytes! Excuse me while I drown in nostalgia. : )
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Jimbob
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Post by Jimbob »

Lechuck wrote: Wonder why they didn't release a AGA version?
They probably couldn't be bothered to rework the graphics. Monkey Island probably came out before the AGA machines were available.
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Lechuck
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Post by Lechuck »

Jimbob wrote:
Lechuck wrote: Wonder why they didn't release a AGA version?
They probably couldn't be bothered to rework the graphics. Monkey Island probably came out before the AGA machines were available.
The game was release a year before the AGA 256 color Amigas came out, but did they have to rework the graphics? I mean didn't the PC version have 256 colors? Then it was just to use the PC graphics on the AGA version, so it wouldn't be much of a rework.
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Jimbob
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Post by Jimbob »

Lechuck wrote: The game was release a year before the AGA 256 color Amigas came out, but did they have to rework the graphics? I mean didn't the PC version have 256 colors? Then it was just to use the PC graphics on the AGA version, so it wouldn't be much of a rework.
Why release it with more colours when the original 32 colour version is virtually identical to the PC version anyway (some more screenshots here). Anyway, more people had the Amiga 500 and 600 than the A1200 so it makes sense to just keep it with just 32 colours (it'll run on any machine).
slypie
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Post by slypie »

I would have to say Monkey Island 1 as it was the first adventure game I remember playing as a kid on the Amiga and I still have fond memories of it closely followed by Monkey Island 2 and Day of the Tenticle.
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glokidd
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Post by glokidd »

I would also have to say MI 1 is my favorite of all time, i play this game often (like once or twice a month at least) despite the fact that it came out 15 years ago. It was the first game i ever completed by myself. It's funny, because i was like 8 at the time and my 16 year old brother was so stuck. Then i told him that you could train the monkey to pull on the totem poles nose, and he was all like, WTF, and completly gave up on the adventure genre to start playing strategy games religously. Quitter :D
db92
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Post by db92 »

toonstruck was and still is the one for me. ruled and still rulez when i run it in win98. wish it'd go into scummvm one day so i could play it on my psp and my new pc without any issues. even though i had monkey island for quite a while and sure enjoyed it, i still like toonstruck more. strange thing, isnt it :D
grasp
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Post by grasp »

Hard to choose between monkey island 2 , sam&max and grim fandango . They are all great games :)
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JKing
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Post by JKing »

Unlike Erik, text adventures were a little before my time, so I never really managed to get into them, but to me the best adventure game is one that has some replay value. Of course all good adventure games have some replay value simply because we love them, but games like Quest for Glory IV, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and King's Quest VI---among others, I'm sure---have differing ways of reaching either the same or different ends, and I like that. With that in mind, I'd nominate Indy as it's either that one or Quest for Glory IV for me among the ones I've played, but the latter had many irritating bugs.

That said, I do have other games close to my heart that I'd say are my favourite, though not necessarily the best. Namely, I've always really liked Return to Zork for quirkiness and fantastic visuals, and also Myst IV for its sheer atmosphere. In the same vein, Uru really gave one a sense of being there, despite its being third-person. Perhaps being able to customise your avatar somewhat helps. :)
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raina
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Post by raina »

Lechuck wrote: But yeah everything looked smooth because of the TV-style monitors.
Plus did the resolution have anything to do with it? The Amiga 1200 ran at 640x480, didn't most PCs run at 320x240 in the old days when MI2 was released?
Typically the used resolution was 320x200. I remember this "way too crisp a picture" issue when I watched my friend play some games on his 286. Sure there were cool new games like the Sierra's Quests, Loom and Dynablaster but Arkanoid for one looked so much better on the C64 screen than on the PC.

And back to the subject. Loom, MI, DOTT, S'n'M, FT and Dig from Lucas are especially dear to me while I enjoy BaSS and the 'Swords from Revolution just as much. Like Adventureguy, I'm eagerly waiting for both the sequels to BS and since the running number in the series also dictates the order of superiority so far, it's the 2.5 I'm more excited about. That and the 2D vs. 3D thing. New favorites might come along and probably will as I have yet to finish some of the classics. Some I've not even started playing yet and thanks to ScummVM I can just as well enjoy some 90s goodness for the first time in my sixties or so! :) Toonstruck also seconded, too bad I felt it was too hard to finish the first time around without any clues, which then ended up spoiling some of the fun. Oh, well..
Tinkerer
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Post by Tinkerer »

My personal favourite is , and will remain, Beneath a Steel sky, with The Feeble Files as a close second.
Of course, these are the old games, from back when they hardly needed movies and other hi-tech to make a good game!
As for the newer games, nothing can touch the 2 Syberia's.
cappuchok
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Post by cappuchok »

clem wrote:
Here's a comparison of MI2 for Amiga (left) and PC (right) made by a friend of mine: <snip>
It might be only my opinion, but I think the PC's graphics are slightly better.
I assume your friend made these screenshots using an emulator? While the Amiga generally has less colors available than the PC, the gfx might look smoother on the real thing because of the Amiga monitors (which looked as far as I remember more like a TV monitor than a PC monitor)
That would be because the old Amiga "computer-in-a-keyboard" models (not the desktops like A4000) used real TVs for their output, hence taking advantage of the lower sharpness of the TV screens but also making Workbench hard to work with (because of the higher resolution which a normal small TV at the time just couldn't handle). If you were lucky enough to find a real Amiga monitor (which looked just like a PC monitor but with different inputs, and were sort of hard to come by and also very expensive) you would have seen every pixel just as clearly as on a PC and would quickly notice the 32-colorness of the Amiga version versus the 256-colorness of the PC releases. However, prior to Monkey Island 2 (and certain special versions of Monkey Island, Loom and Zak on FM-Towns and CD-ROM) the Amiga versions were graphically superior because the PC versions were EGA (16 colors).
cappuchok
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Post by cappuchok »

Lechuck wrote: But yeah everything looked smooth because of the TV-style monitors.
Plus did the resolution have anything to do with it? The Amiga 1200 ran at 640x480, didn't most PCs run at 320x240 in the old days when MI2 was released?
To be completely correct here, a typical Amiga 1200 with a TV set would run Workbench at 640x256 (640x240 in NTSC land, I think, but I'm not sure) unless you were willing to risk a headache by running 640x512 (640x480 in NTSC land?).
Lucasarts, like most companies, ran their Amiga games in 320x256 mode in PAL land but used only the same resolution as the PC originals (320x200) resulting in a rather big black letterbox border at the bottom of the screen.
An Amiga 1200 was also capable of some 65,000 colours on-screen, rarely used and especially not by Lucasarts who, iirc, never released even a 256-color version of anything for Amiga but stayed with 32 colours (hence running on everything back to the Amiga 1000) until they gave up and left the Amiga market.
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Jimbob
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Post by Jimbob »

cappuchok wrote: An Amiga 1200 was also capable of some 65,000 colours on-screen, rarely used and especially not by Lucasarts who, iirc, never released even a 256-color version of anything for Amiga but stayed with 32 colours (hence running on everything back to the Amiga 1000) until they gave up and left the Amiga market.
Yes, I think this was a special HAM screenmode (from memory) and I believe it could display 262,144 colours but again I could be wrong. Older Amigas could display 4096 colours using a HAM screenmode. The HAM screenmodes weren't very useful at all, there were limitations to the display mode. HAM stood for Hold And Modify.
cappuchok
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Post by cappuchok »

Jimbob wrote:Yes, I think this was a special HAM screenmode (from memory) and I believe it could display 262,144 colours but again I could be wrong. Older Amigas could display 4096 colours using a HAM screenmode. The HAM screenmodes weren't very useful at all, there were limitations to the display mode. HAM stood for Hold And Modify.
True, but even without HAM you could squeeze a lot of colors from an AGA chipset by using different overlaid layers, each with their own palette. Worms, for example, used this to great effect in both the OCS/ECS and AGA versions, as did many parallax-scrolling platformers.
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