GeekStrike

Do you love old games? Are you a veteran gamer who grew up playing Pong? Or are you a new gamer who yearns to know how this wonderful gaming industry was like just in the last two to threee decades? In RetroStrike, we play through games of the past and aim to let gaming veterans reminisce about the past and gaming newbies learn about this short but vast and often fascinating history of video games. In this first installment of RetroStrike, we will take a look at one of the genres which have been a staple of gaming: adventure games.

With the recent announcement of a new Monkey Island series and a remake of the Secret of Monkey Island, can the adventure games genre be resurrected again? Lucasarts tried to do it with Sam & Max: Freelance Police but left it for dead soon after. So, is Monkey Island going to be any different?

I would say that starting off with Monkey Island is an excellent choice. It may not have been the first adventure game but it is popular enough in its time to spawn a series of sequels and has garnered a loyal following. But what made adventure games so popular back then, particularly the Lucasarts games?

Don't worry, you're not dead. This is just one of their pranks.

The Lucasarts adventure games followed a very effective game philosophy. You can never die or come to a point where progressing is impossible, unlike other adventure games. I still have ‘fond’ memories of Return to Zork.  I swear, that LUD thing in Zork had me banging my head in frustration… Yes, death is a very frustrating thing to happen to a player. Worse still, if death is used as a way to ‘punish’ players for making ‘wrong choices’, it doesn’t make the game fun anymore. Of course, not being able to die doesn’t make you unbeatable. Rather, it makes players unafraid to try out new things, enabling them to fully use their creativity to solve the puzzles.

That said, the puzzles are also very well designed and do not require the player to have Einstein-level IQ to solve them. Yeah, the Sherlock Holmes adventure game was one that actually gave me a horrible headache. I wonder if anyone still remembers them. Anyway, there’s always a main objective and in order to achieve it, you must solve a series of puzzles that will lead up to it. The secondary objectives are sometimes vague, but subtle enough that you would figure it out eventually, which is what I like about it.

For example, Guybrush needs something sharp in order to cut through the thick bushes to reach the other side of the island. A walk into the barber shop and the player will eventually notice a pair of scissors stuck to the ceiling. Perhaps that could be of use. But how do I get it? There’s a barber seat directly under the scissors. Now if the player has been to a barber before, he/she would know that the height of the seat could be adjusted. But there’s a man having a haircut in the very same seat at the moment. So how do I get him out?

The game drops all these little hints by either talking with characters or examining the environment around you. And when I do solve it, this sense of satisfaction rivals anything I have ever played. Now, don’t get me wrong. Head-shotting players in CS is indeed fun but when I can actually progress in a game not through simple, straightforward violence but through intellect, it offers a much greater sense of achievement.

Fine leather jackets...sounds like a certain Indiana Jones game

However, what I liked most about them was the witty, humorous dialogue. It is full of satire, sarcasm, pop culture references, cross-game references, jokes, puns and even pranks (the Stump joke) on the player. Never has a game got me to simply explore the whole game world, examining every single thing that can be interacted and talking to every single person just to get a funny response either from the main character or the NPCs. Sure, examining stuff and talking to NPCs are a core part of the game-play, but the game actually gives you another reason to do this: because it’s funny. And this is not just in Monkey Island alone, but present in all of Lucasarts adventure games, something which gamers have called the Lucasarts brand of humor.

Unfortunately, it is this very same game-play that also caused its decline. The traditional adventure games have very slow paced progression compared to other genres like FPS or even RPGs. If you got stuck in an adventure game, it could take a while to figure out the puzzle, and would only make the gamer more frustrated. The game-play also makes multiplayer impossible, which is often used to prolong the shelf life of a game. Grim Fandango was Lucasart’s greatest adventure game, winning praise from critics and getting rave reviews by almost every gaming publication, but its sales paled in comparison to Half-life, which was released the same year and also had many positive reviews from gamers the world over. And from Half-life would come the wildly popular Counterstrike multiplayer mod, which people are still playing today.

Faced with this problem, most ‘adventure’ games of today are now evolved versions of the last era. Most have action elements and had their puzzles ‘streamlined’. The Longest Journey was an excellent point-and-click adventure game but its sequel, Dreamfall, added action sequences in and the puzzles were too easy and unimaginative compared to the first. It had a good story but was hamstrung by horrible game-play.

To me, Lucasart’s adventure games have always been what a good adventure game should be. Not too difficult puzzles, interesting story and engaging dialogue. If there is any game that can resurrect the genre, it has to be something of that caliber. Monkey Island is a good first step. Here’s hoping the newest generation of gamers can learn to enjoy what I enjoyed an era ago.