The State of Adventure Games

                A personal view by Lol Oakes

What is happening to the world of adventure games recently? It
seems that the story content and particularly the puzzle content
ARE taking a back seat to what wonderful graphics and sound the
writers can produce as machines continue to get more powerful.

A perfect example of this occurred with a game called "Lighthouse"
which received wonderful reviews by the "popular" magazines. When
I played this game the first major puzzle I encountered, namely
the "opening of the safe", was so convoluted to say the least that
it didn't inspire me for the rest of the game. Obviously I
couldn't do the puzzle and had to resort to looking up the answer,
alas the solution didn't work either.

For the benefit of readers who haven't played this "masterpiece"
let me give you a brief synopsis of what the puzzle entailed. You
walk into an office and discover, after a bit of searching a wall
safe with a combination lock.  "Aha," you cry, all I have to do is
search said room and discover the combination, so far so good.
After finding the combination you require [simply 3 different
numbers] you only have to work out whether you turn the dial right
or left - wrong it's not that simple. I consulted an adventuring
colleague of mine who had actually got past this puzzle only to be
told that it involved about 87 turns of the dial to get the
blasted door open!! As she [Anne Potter] couldn't remember what
the hell she did, I gave up this wonderful piece of software and
promptly gave it to the children next door to use as a Frisbee.

There are many examples of writers who are trying to make games
more challenging by inventing obscure and totally inane puzzles to
try and fool the player. I have just finished playing "The Black
Dahlia" and thought the story content and atmosphere the game
created was first class. Most of the puzzles were very good,
ranging from the easy to the damn near impossible. Unfortunately
the unfathomable puzzle [hereafter referred to as the "up"] reared
its ugly head and if I hadn't have had the cheat off SynTax, this
game would never have been finished, which would have been a shame
as the rest of it was very good. I can almost see a meeting
between games writers to discuss writing their latest adventure as
going like this:

     "Right chaps and chapesses, let's get this adventure off the
     ground. First I presume that you 65 people sat at the head
     table are the team from U.P.  Good, you are the most
     important people here today. What we want is puzzles, puzzles
     and even more puzzles we can't have the player finishing this
     game in 5 months can we?  'What about the story line?'
     someone from the back asks. Well what about it? This is an
     adventure game, it's supposed to be filled with puzzles, if
     they want a story let them go to the library and get a book
     out."

I think the main problem with the industry at the moment is that
the people writing these adventures are not adventure gamers and
never have been. Can you imagine what is going to happen in the
near future when DVD drives are commonplace, they hold about 65
squillion meg of data, games are going to look fantastic, you'll
be required to press your left mouse button about once a
fortnight!!!!

Thank you for listening to a thoroughly pissed off gamer.















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