NBR Adventure Gamers

In the eighties and nineties, text-based, then parser (type your command), and then point-and-click adventure games were a dominant force in the emerging video game scene. Around the turn of the century they lost quite a bit of ground, but they've been making a significant comeback in today's increasingly-diverse gaming scene, with Germans leading the way in clamoring for classic-style point-and-clicks while the casual gamer segment gobbles up a variety of casual adventure games, not to mention the indie developers like Frictional and The Chinese Room bringing adventure gaming into unprecedented levels of gameplay and storytelling. Then there's GOG.com off in the corner bringing more and more of the classics back out of the dustbin and onto our (virtual) shelves.

We know from the discussions here that there are a ton of RPG gamers, MMO gamers, Stealth gamers, and Shooter gamers here, but other than crossover hits like Amnesia, we don't get much adventure discussion here. Who here plays adventure games? What's your flavor? What are your favorites? Recommendations for fellow adventure gamers? Reviews of your latest adventure game experience? Backlog questions?

If this thread takes off, we'll have a place on NBR to talk about our gaming niche. If not, I might resurrect it once in a while to share a delightful or horrible experience anyway.

 

Many of my first significant gaming experiences were with adventure games. My dad bought our first computer in 1990 and the first two games he bought were Stellar 7 and King's Quest V. I experienced some of the joy and frustration of parsers not much later with the Hugo games, Zork, and the Laura Bow games, among others, but I've always had a hard time getting very interested in those kinds of games due to limitations with the parser systems, and with the graphics of many of the early EGA adventures where important items are often represented by unrecognizable blobs of pixels.

All through my gaming life, I've turned back to adventure games of all stripes; I occasionally hit up a couple flash game sites for ongoing entries in some flash adventure series I've played in the past (though I can't recall any of them right now because it's been so long); I still go back to my favorite old games occasionally; I buy and play the games I've missed in the past, and I pick up the occasional new game as well.

My big confession is that there are very few adventure games that I've ever finished without a walkthrough. When I was a kid I would get impatient after failing at the same sequence of events in the same way for hours on end. Now I consider my priorities and accept that spending hours on an obscure or hideously roundabout puzzle (getting the motorcycle in Gabriel Knight 3, which I'm currently playing, or the main puzzle in the greenhouse train stop in Syberia, which supremely disappointed me) is just not worth it to me anymore.

Recently, I've played Phantasmagoria, Phantasmagoria 2, about half of Botanicula (love it but haven't picked it up in a while), LA Noire (an adventure game at heart), and I'm playing Gabriel Knight 3.

My current backlog is huge, but Myst V is probably the highest priority. I fiddled with Myst on my grandpa's computer as a kid, but never acheived much. I bought the Myst-Riven-Myst III DVD-ROM pack in college and got really into the series, though I needed heavy walkthroughs on the first two. Myst III, Myst IV, and Uru were easier, and I was excited for Myst V but a combination of lukewarm reviews and greater-than-$20 prices kept me from buying it until it had vanished from stores. I finally picked it up on GOG a few months ago, though, so I'll probably be off to the races soon.