Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure (
More info?)
On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 18:59:34 GMT
Alan Fraser <alan.fraser@boltblue.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 18:43:04 +0100, LS <here!@> wrote:
>
> >Op Fri, 11 Feb 2005 09:14:39 -0500 schreef Art Weingardner
> ><artg@softhome.net>:
> >
> >>hi,
> >>i'm relatively new to the adv genre and i love comedy. so i was
> >>wondering what the funniest games were so i could pick them up when i
> >>come across them. thanks
> >
> >Twenty-five.... I'll do my best.
> >
> >Zork Grand Inquisitor
> >Grim Fandango
> >Discworld 1, 2
> >Day of the Tentacle
> >Neverhood
> >Feeble Files
> >Monkey Island 1, 2, 3, 4
> >UFOs (aka Gnap)
> >Duckman
> >Touche: The Fifth Musketeer
> >The Gene Machine
> >Chewy: Escape from F5
> >Stupid Invaders
> >Bud Tucker in Double Trouble
> >Callahan's Crosstime Saloon
> >Sam & Max
> >Drascula: The Empire Strikes Back
> >Flight of the Amazon Queen
> >GAG
> >Orion Burger
> >The Quivering
> >Rent A Hero
> >Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths
> >Toonstruck
> >Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth
> >3 Skulls of the Toltecs
> >Gilbert Goodmate and the Mushroom of Phungoria
> >
> >Most are oldies. Some are expensive and/or hard to find.
>
> What about Zak McCracken and the Alien Mindbenders?
>
> One of the first LucasArts adventure games.
>
> Alan
>
I've played it, and while I appreciate and genuinely enjoy many early games
(text adventures, sierra AGI games, etc), I simply hate Zak McKraken. It's
not particularly funny, you can get the game into an unwinnable state far
too easily, and most of the time you've got no idea what you're supposed to
be doing or what's going on. Everyone says this game and Maniac Mansion
gave birth to the classic era of LucasArts adventures, but I disagree -
Maniac Mansion was pretty good, though it also had its flaws, but Zak
McKraken is below average at best. It was a technological marvel that it
could be run even on a C64, and the interface certainly was revolutionary,
but it just isn't a good game.
In my humble opinion, the scumm system and gui was only half of the
breakthrough that made LucasArts legendary - the other was the conversation
tree, which I think they also invented, and the rediscovery of the
"examine" verb, totally abandoned by graphical games since breaking away
from the parser interface. Maniac Mansion and Zak McKraken have to rely
mostly on physical humour to entertain, as the characters remain almost
silent throughout, and the games have varying success at this.
Conversations are brief and little more than pairs of sentences most of the
time.
Moriarty's Loom reintroduced the ability to examine an interesting object
and get the player character's own thoughts and opinions on what he saw
(traditionally delivered rather dryly), and much longer, better written and
more frequent conversations, also facial expression changes in closeup.
This
gave the game and its characters vastly greater depth and made it real fun
to play, even if you weren't making much progress with the puzzles. Not
that surprising when you consider Moriarty had a very strong literary
background, and wrote some of the real gems of the text era as well.
Though almost entirely forgotten (there's a poignant reference near the end
of CMI that might bring a tear to the eye of anyone who played Loom, and
the infamous seagull cameos, but that's about it), Loom was the true
turning point.
The humourous games after Loom all used conversation trees as well as
retaining the "examine" verb, and gave the player the chance to actually
take an active role in witty conversations, choosing how to respond to
situations and picking the responses that they thought were funniest, and
watching the resulting hilarity. "OoOOoo, the Future! I'm from the Future,
look oooout!" - Hoagie, in Day of the Tentacle.
Perhaps the most obvious act of recognition of the importance of this type
of humour is in Space Quest 4, the first talkie in the series - almost
everyone agrees that, while the puzzles are average, and the story as
cheesy as any other, the game truly shines because of its humourous
dialogue. Two new, entirely useless verbs, "smell" and "taste", were added
to the interface just to give the narrator, voiced perfectly by Gary Owens,
more sarcastic things to say! Pity the game was so mercilessly fond of
killing you off, breaking even Sierra's previous records for
designer-sadism, but even then you're at least rewarded with a quip about
how you died.
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