/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.2276219]

ITT epic adventure games

[Anonymous No.2276227]

>>2276219

Goddamn anon, you posted the best QfG and for me even the best comedic graphic adventure.
I highly prefer the remake though.

[Anonymous No.2276234]

The Dig is still probably the most breathtaking adventure game I have ever played. Truly worth of being called epic.

[Anonymous No.2276251]

[Anonymous No.2276252]

>>2276219

Darkland, an adventure that put you against satanism, de medici greed, witches's orgies, dragons, rapist gnomes, scary as shit old ladies and the never too old baron that doesn't pay his vassals for shit etc.

Now i want to replay it.

[Anonymous No.2276282]

[Anonymous No.2276298]

>>2276252
Shit, now I want to play it too.

[Anonymous No.2276321]

I'm currently playing through Grim Fandango Remastered. So far, I'm really liking it, but I find myself getting stuck on some pretty easy puzzles (e.g., at one point, I didn't realize that the window to my coworker's office is now unlocked after a certain sequence of unrelated events, and there's an object in there that I was looking for on every other screen)

These games don't hold your hand. The Sierra games are even worse, I don't think I ever managed to get through one without some sort of walkthrough, even as a kid.

[Anonymous No.2276335]

There's a pretty epic text-based interactive fiction game called Curses. It starts out as a simple search for a tourist map of Paris in the attic of your family's British manor, which becomes a gigantic sprawl through space and time covering your entire family's lineage and history for the last couple of centuries. The attic acts as a kind-of hub which expands as the game progresses, and the puzzles range from simple bring-the-carrot-to-the-rabbit style Sierra stuff to having to really understand and apply what's going on (e.g. deducing only from her one-paragraph biography that a female ancestor from the 18th century was probably using a pen name to write her poetry without her husband knowing, then producing an anagram of her name and looking it up in the same family history book, in order to find out about her secret poetry nook in the attic) and the game itself is broad and long enough that it could take many months or even years to complete without a walkthrough.

[Anonymous No.2276350]

One of my favorites as a kid took place in early 20th-century London. You're a reporter for a failing newspaper. A woman was found murdered with a jade hairpin in a faraway rural bungalow, and the husband is missing. Immediately as the game starts, a reporter for a rival newspaper is found dead under similar circumstances in Victoria Station.

You have to explore the city, question potential suspects, sit in on hearings, follow leads and figure out the mystery within a week. Asking questions takes time, travelling to new locations takes time, observing conversations between characters takes time, and characters often move around (you can also tail them if you like). This means that the gameplay revolves around careful budgeting of time, rather than pixel-hunting or exhausting every conversational option.

[Anonymous No.2276359]

>>2276350
is it possible in this game to get the wrong person convicted and get a bad ending?

[Anonymous No.2276367]

>>2276335
Damn that sounds epic is it for dos ?

[Anonymous No.2276369]

>>2276234
Great game but the puzzles are very obtuse because it's set in an alien world and nothing makes sense

[Anonymous No.2276370]

Sierra was the shit.

I remember playing Kings Quest when I was like 10. It amazed me how open the world was, and gave me a sense of mystery and real dangers that lurked around.
>tfw I'll never get that sense of adventure again

[Anonymous No.2276373]

>>2276367
It's an Inform-engine game, which means you can play it just about anywhere, including your browser:
http://iplayif.com/?story=http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/curses.z5

It's fucking hard and extremely long though, so if this is your first text-based interactive fiction game, might be better to start off with something a little easier and shorter:
http://iplayif.com/?story=http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/905.z5

[Anonymous No.2276402]

>>2276370
Roberta Williams was a hack-fraud. Most of the puzzles made absolutely no fucking sense at all, and the plot / characters for a lot of the games were pretty much carbon-copy stereotypes. So the mystery games have stoic suspicious-looking butlers with a heart of gold and slutty French maids, the fantasy games have characters pulled straight from Grimm fairy tales (and the solutions to puzzles will also involve them), and the sci-fi games (which I'm sure Roberta wasn't even involved with but fuck it) will have a hundred Star Wars references in every location.

Oh and fuck the puzzle solutions. Everyone knows about the pie in KQ5 which is a bit tricky to get, can be eaten and removed from your inventory permanently at any time, including a puzzle early on where you need to eat something in order to survive, and you basically forget about until close to the endgame where you need it to defeat a yeti, but really that's just scratching the surface.
In Laura Bow 2 you're not only quizzed on absolutely every last fucking detail of everything that went on during the night, and if you don't answer everything absolutely correctly (among at least 20 options for each question) AS WELL AS track down every last bit of flimsy circumstantial evidence and eavesdrop on every event the game expects you to go through, you're treated to a five-minute long middle finger ending where
1) the killer gets away
2) your boss fires you for incompetence
3) your rival coworker eventually figures out what happened and takes all the credit for your work
4) your father becomes depressed and commits suicide or something
5) you get gunned in your sleep by the murderer
and so on.

Seriously fuck Sierra. Literally the only redeeming quality of their games are the awesome death montages.

[Anonymous No.2276410]

>>2276402
why were games so cruel back then?

[Anonymous No.2276435]

>>2276359
You're just a reporter so you can't actually haul anyone off to jail or anything, but there are plenty of wrong leads and red herrings, and a lot of the characters you'll question have their own opinions on whodunit which can definitely throw you off track.
There's one part where a character will get so frustrated with you badgering them about a clue that he will show up at a shop on Saturday just to prove to you that the shopkeeper doesn't recognize him, so he couldn't possibly be involved. Unfortunately, by Saturday it's too late to do anything else, so you're screwed.

This is a game you have to replay quite a few times to get everything pieced together. It's one of the few games for which I actually had to take notes on pen-and-paper, and I spent significant amounts of time away from the game trying to connect the dots.
And because characters move around and can talk to each other at any point if they're in the same room (observing takes 1 hour of in-game time) and some of them change their responses to questions over time, there are very likely still some conversations and dialogue options I haven't seen yet.

The game's plot and dialogue was co-written by Agatha Christie and other professional mystery authors. Telarium was all about actual authors writing their games.

[Anonymous No.2276447]

>>2276410
It was mostly just Roberta Williams / Sierra.
LucasArts games didn't pull this shit - although there are plenty of moon-logic puzzles, there was rarely ever any permanent death or unwinnable scenarios.
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis has a few spots where your character can die, but that game also has some replay value because there are three different paths to take.

There's one Sierra game called Gold Rush! (which for whatever fucking reason has been re-released and remastered on Steam) which will just straight-up kill you with dysentery randomly during the trip to California. There's absolutely nothing you can do to prevent this, if the game wants you dead, you're fucking dead.

[Anonymous No.2276456]

>>2276251
What the fuck.

[Anonymous No.2276492]

Here's another good game without much moon-logic bullshit. There are points where you can get into an unwinnable situation, but at least if you get trapped with a coke addict who needs her fix, the game will at least hint at the possibility of getting rid of the stash, and there's a rewind feature that lets you go back in time to allow you to figure out where it's hidden, so that the next time around, you can convince her that you know where it is so she'll let you out.
The game's difficult, but its difficulty is less about pixel-hunting and action-flag triggering and more about paying fucking attention to what's going on.

Unlike most old-school adventure games, the soundtrack is also top-notch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZCylVHEc64
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wbBDsYefBg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9SzHvG9gSo

[Anonymous No.2276509]

>>2276435
>The game's plot and dialogue was co-written by Agatha Christie and other professional mystery authors.

But she died in 76?

[Anonymous No.2276517]

Not a traditional adventure game, but close enough.
You're a bureaucrat for the 'Department of Agriculture and Fisheries', but you're actually part of a secretive branch of the UK government. Your job is to look through news reports of the day and write out forms authorizing blackmail, surveillance, sabotage, kidnappings, murder, torture, terrorist attacks, basically anything and everything to keep the ruling political party in power.
You never actually see any of this take place. You'll just read in tomorrow's newspaper that so-and-so has died of unexplained circumstances.
The entire game takes place in monochrome bleak black-and-white, there's very little sound or music except shrill notes when something bad happens, everything about the game is designed to be as bleak and sterile as possible.

If you routinely fuck up and try to go after high-profile targets, 'Mr. Garcia' will show up and throw you out the window.
If you fail to prevent embarrassing stories from sinking the Prime Minister's career, you 'voluntarily resign'.

If you manage to complete all the impossible tasks and keep your party in power, 'they' decide that you know too much, and you become 'elected' as the next Prime Minister.

If on the other hand you manage to survive while completing all the side-missions for the cabal, you become inducted as their leader, and the final image shows your character's face which looks pretty close to Hitler.

[Anonymous No.2276519]

>>2276509
Always wondered about that as a kid. Was probably adapted from one of her many, many unpublished screenplays.

Because this was back before the internet and GameFAQs and all that, I'd routinely try to look up her books in the library to try to find the solution to this game. Never found anything though.

[Anonymous No.2276575]

>>2276402
Oh man, I know what you're saying. I loved the games, but some of the puzzles were extremely unfair. I was stuck for hours trying to figure out what to do in the minotaur labyrinth on kq6 and didn't have the stupid hole in the wall in my inventory so I couldn't advance. I called their shitty 900 number to figure that one out.

The 900 number help line was god awful too. There was a numbered selection for every section in the game and it took forever to get the info you wanted because the choices were told to you in a long winded manner. I'm just glad my dad never noticed the charges on the bill.

[Anonymous No.2276596]

>>2276517
Holy shit there's a remake under works:
http://agriculture-and-fisheries.tumblr.com/

I wonder if the guy behind 'Papers Please' was influenced by this game.

[Anonymous No.2276779]

>>2276402
This. At least you couldn't die in Lucasfilm games post-Loom.

[Anonymous No.2277025]

>>2276219

Surely the Superhero League of Hoboken counts as an epic adventure game?

[Anonymous No.2277031]

Giving a shout-out to Teen Agent, because I'm the only one who ever will.

[Anonymous No.2277057]

>>2277031
Always saw this on HotU and HappyPuppy but never bothered downloading. Any good?

[Anonymous No.2277064]

>>2277031
I remember that game. Beat it a couple times at least. I wouldn't call it epic, per say; but I did enjoy it.

[Anonymous No.2277078]

I've seen a LP for this game, would've been nice to play as a kid (if the puzzles were any good).

Any other similar slice-of-life games like this one?

[Anonymous No.2277136]

>>2276252
That sounds like the ultimate game. What are the biggest drawbacks?

[Anonymous No.2277159]

>>2277136

The combat. It's a really primitive form of real-time-with-pause combat.

[Anonymous No.2277176]

>>2276370
>tfw I'll never get that sense of adventure again

You just have to keep gaming anon, it is very unlikely you've played every game that can still wow you.

I thought I was jaded in my 20s with gaming(been at it since my first NES at 4) but little did I know about the explorer highs I'd get in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Still trying new games and being pleasantly surprised.Heck, these days I'm getting into several new adventure games because when I was a pre-teen I didn't have the best patience for this sort of stuff.

[Anonymous No.2277363]

Try Fable. No, not that xbox bullshit. I'm talking about the extremely lesser-known 1996 DOS adventure title of the same name.

[Anonymous No.2277828]

Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam and Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle, Monkey Island 1 & 2, Gabriel Knight 1, Broken Sword 1, Simon the Sorcerer 1 & 2, Quest For Glory 1-4

[Anonymous No.2277862]

a-anyone?

[Anonymous No.2277881]

>>2277136

Yep, as the other anon said, it's the combat.
But it gets acceptable after a while, just like in morrowind.

[Anonymous No.2277889]

>>2276492
>>2276517
These games. Oh so fucking cool and oh so fucking unwinnable.

Another game in the same vein is "Hidden Agenda". You play as the president of a latin american nation in an interim government after the ousting of an oppressive dictator. Trying your best to help your people while balancing the different factions vying for power. Much of what happens is based on real events that have happened in latin america.
There is no truly good ending. Your nation will be plagued with civil war and economic turmoil no matter what you do. All you can do is to create some "less bad" situation

[Anonymous No.2277928]

>>2277862
Good game
Not retro

[Anonymous No.2277930]

>>2277862

Yes! This series was fantastic.

[Anonymous No.2278040]

>>2277031
I played the demo of this game and thought it was the best shit ever. Then I got the actual game and it was awful. Really, the best stuff happens in the demo, after that it's al down hill and looks like a game that some amateur did in AGS.

[Anonymous No.2278231]

>>2276350
Never heard of this one before, looks very maniac mansiony.
Gonna try it out.