12-30-2011, 06:41 PM | #201 | |
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Agreed on Hand of Fate, great game and it could have replaced one of the QFGs. |
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12-30-2011, 06:48 PM | #202 |
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12-30-2011, 07:03 PM | #203 |
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12-30-2011, 07:31 PM | #204 | |
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Heresy!
Quote:
Also, King's Quest had two games on the list (1 and 6).
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12-30-2011, 08:04 PM | #205 |
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Time for more stats!
Ooh, shiny! We all know that the most important element in an adventure game is the graphics. So let's look at what the games in the top-100 had, starting with the technical side of the question: I really would have thought that 2.5D would be much higher, but I guess all the Myst-clones, FMV games, and SVGA 3rd-person games ended up being the largest part of the list. Note also that real-time 3D is at 19/100. It's still not the dominant tech, but it's being slowly assimilated by the genre. So you people who think the definition of "adventure game" is "a game that can run on my 10-year-old computer", know that you're missing some good games. The other factor is the style of the graphics: Note how you have far more games with FMV characters than FMV/photo environments. That's mostly all those ugly FMV games with live actors pasted over cheap 3D renders of the room. (Not that all those games were bad; the Tex Murphy games, for instance, were brilliant. But green screen on crude 3D is something that always takes me a bit of time to get used to.) Unsurprisingly enough, the top-100 confirms the genre's love of hand-drawn graphics. I found it extremely weird that there were slightly more games with hand-drawn characters than environments. It would seem weird to stick hand-drawn characters in, say, 3D environments. And then I realised that there are actually two games that do just that: Hotel Dusk and its sequel Last Window. The true Golden Age of adventures When looking at the years at which the games were released, it's useful to have both the raw number of games (top) and the results weighted by rank (bottom): I think those graphs are absolutely amazing: they give a perfect picture of the history of graphic adventures. We may have our gripes about some games on the list, but I think these graphs confirm that the top-100 is a very fair and accurate representation of the genre. You can clearly distinguish several periods:
A last one for the road Finally, a fun (or depressing, depending on your point of view) little stat. It is well established that adventure gaming has a larger-than-average proportion of female gamers. But you wouldn't know that from the gender of the player characters in the Top-100: (For those wondering how many Myst-clones there are on the list, you have your answer here: 14.) Bearing in mind that Kate Walker and Chell are counted twice, that makes a grand total of eight women who had the honour of having a game of their own in the Top-100... Then again, I'd be hard pressed to name 8 female adventure game designers, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Discuss.
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12-30-2011, 08:21 PM | #206 |
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@K - Nice charts! I mean it. That took some work. But do have one issue with one of your comments: "Sierra and LEC had failed to see the potential of the CD-ROM"
One of the complaints about Sierra, in the day, was that they were the ones that continually pushed the envelope requiring better machines to play thier games. They were the first to push games from 2088 to 386 to 486 to 586 and beyond. Several Sierra games in the compendium were the "last of their kind" for a given platform. Example, Freddy Pharkus Frontier Pharmacist was the last Sierra game to play on a 486 platform. You wanted to play newer games, it required a system upgrade. I'll say the same about CD-based games. I don't recall what the last disc-based game was, but once Phantasmagoria was released you never saw another disc-based game from Sierra. They may not have exploited the medium, but they certainly were among the first in line to adopt it.
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12-30-2011, 08:39 PM | #207 | |
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Quote:
Spoiler: |
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12-30-2011, 08:48 PM | #208 |
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Agreed. When I bought KQ5, I unknowingly got the CD version. I had to wait 3 years before I could play it
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12-30-2011, 09:20 PM | #209 | |
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Quote:
The first Sierra game that tried to do that was (I think) King's Quest VII (of course, it had to be a King's Quest!), trying to bring the game closer to a Disney movie with a cuter, more whimsical style. But even that was not fully realised, with the gameplay design never managing to decide whether it wanted to be a fun, story-driven, easy-to-play adventure or a battle of wits between the player and the designer. Phantasmagoria and GK2 were the first Sierra games to successfully embrace the CD-ROM, but that was 2 years after Myst.
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12-30-2011, 09:33 PM | #210 |
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Hello, new here. I've been lurking here for many years, but this list made me register and share my opinions here.
The major shock for me was seeing Gabriel Knight 1 on such a "low" place as #16. I fully expected it to be in the top 5, over Broken Sword 1 which is similar but just not as good. It was nice to see GK2 on 3rd place, though I'd switch their places - for me, the first installment had more memorable music, art direction, tense moments and just a plain incredibly strong atmosphere and style. GK2's story was interesting, yes, but the first one was more fun. Fate of Atlantis is a game that I find somewhat overrated. It has great music and the branching gameplay is a good idea, yes, but I found the story very weak. The relationship between Indy and Sophia was clichéd and predictable, and most of the story consists of solving machine puzzles in various Atlantean ruins. The voice acting in the CD version (what I've seen of it, I played the floppy version) is pretty bad, too; Indy and Sophia sound quite monotonous and many other characters cartoony - Ubermann sounds like a parrot! I was disappointed to see The Dig as low as #92 - a game that I find is MUCH better than Fate of Atlantis. Even though it has also loads of machine puzzles, it has a much more interesting story and absolutely gorgeous music, even better than FoA's. |
12-30-2011, 09:50 PM | #211 |
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Hey everyone,
I organized the Top 100 list into an Excel spreadsheet with the "You might also like" suggestions for each ranking. It's like a one-stop resource for tracking games you've played or want to play. If you're like me you do this already, but this Top 100 list adds a great, clear, concise summary of the big picture. Download it here: http://www.mediafire.com/?ru6c7k492khwu6a
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12-31-2011, 12:05 AM | #212 | |||
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Damm i was really looking forward to writing something really angry, but funny at the same time. Perhaps they changed the list at the last minute out of fear of what i would write Or perhaps its just that their qualities are so obvious, that no one in their right mind would not rank them right at the top. But seriously - Gabrial Knight 2 at 3. place, whats that about? I understand many love this one, and I actually like the whole GK series myself, but I have always thought that "the beast within" was the weakest in the series, and i never really felt that FMV in AG worked very well. (I wont mention Riven at 5. since i know there are many Myst lovers out there, though I'm not amoung them) More importantly - It seem like TellTale has been grossly overlooked in this list. Is there really no one in the AG Staff that likes TellTale as much as i do? Quote:
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Totally agree - Lets have a readers choice of this. |
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12-31-2011, 12:18 AM | #213 |
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btw: Thanks to the AG Staff for making this list. (Even though i was a bit sceptical)
And thanks to Kurufinwe for the statistics. (Not really a big surprice that Sierra & LucasArts is behind most of the top 100 games) |
12-31-2011, 01:01 AM | #214 |
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Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers on 16th place - thats a sin of the AG staff writers
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12-31-2011, 01:16 AM | #215 | |
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Quote:
EDIT: Oh wait... Victoria must be in the "both" section. Stupid Fien. EDIT2: But April must be counted twice then. Two female protagonists in Dreamfall. |
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12-31-2011, 03:08 AM | #216 |
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@Kurufinwe,
Super graphs, very interesting. The tech/graphics overview is interesting, but especially for this one I would also make one that includes the weight factor of the ranking. It should become even more interesting given the fact that both nr 1 and 2 are in fact 3D model with preredendered background games. In fact, quite a few if those are ranked high, eg Syberia etc... |
12-31-2011, 03:38 AM | #217 | |
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I just glanced over the list for the first time and if I didn´t make a mistake I counted 36 games I finished or rather played almost all the way through. Another 18 games are on my have to check it out list.
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12-31-2011, 05:11 AM | #219 | |
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I would only add, that characters in Hotel Dusk and Last Window were rotoscoped - as well as characters in The Last Express, who were put to 3D computer rendered background. In adventure games genre, that is pretty much everything that has been done by this animation technique (at least to my knowledge). Of course, plenty of older arcade games (most notably Prince of Persia 1 and 2), but also Another World, used this technique. In these 3 adventure games, I think it really works fine. Btw I love how rotoscoped games, movies (check out Ralph Bakshi's films, from contemporary: Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, or Renaissance, Chico and Rita, Alois Nebel), series, music videos and commercials look all so different in result. http://lastexpress.markmoran.net/production.html big-sized pics, click if you want to see them. http://img846.imageshack.us/img846/7447/alexei.jpg http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/8509/71779644.jpg Last edited by veruncheek; 12-31-2011 at 05:23 AM. |
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12-31-2011, 06:56 AM | #220 | |
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Quote:
@ The AG staff: congrats on a great list! @ Kurufinwe: they should add your stat-posts to the article. Essential adventure game knowledge, imo...
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