Although LucasArts’ poppy still prefers resting on it’s licence treasure i have the feeling there is a mid term hope for adventures. Recently released games showed a small but nevertheless noticeable increase in quality and somehow values like storytelling seem to be more attractive again.
Especially quite some of the ex LucasArts employees are involved in some of these productions. TTG announced their soon to be released Wallace&Grommit with most likely another Sam&Max afterwards, Ron Gilbert and Hotheads are working on the first episode of DeathSpank and Bill Tiller’s Autumn Moon Entertainment have done fine with their first release of A Vampyre Story as well. I’m really happy that it sold enough units and that they are able continuing their plans for the second part A Bat’s Tale which they announced recently:
One of the dissapointments was the iPhone game 1112 as the game itself (episode1) was good but the developer up to now simply just isn’t able delivering episode2, episodic gaming at it’s worst.
For a startup’s first adventure i think they did a great job with A Vampyre Story. It wasn’t on pair with a game like Monkey Island 1 but hey how many, if you really think about it, actually are?!
Pros:
It featured more than average riddles, even a few very good ones like the virgin riddle, very good main characters and dialogues, actually humour, implementation of the idea idea (although sometimes confusing), nice graphics, very good music and an interesting setting/story.
Cons:
Too short, it wasn’t on the same level all the time, a few glitches with the graphics (beware it uses Panda3D, pay me to go there and i’ll convince them to use Unity :O) and well it’s just not The Dig II.
Anyway if you’ve played some adventures you instantly feel that it’s done by LucasArts veterans and so it has a certain special touch which at least i like. It definately shines out of the pile of the more average adventures you were used to from the last years.
If you replay some of the older LucasArts adventures you’ll have to be careful because like with some older games generally your memories might have tricked you and you’ll notice that not all were this great. Of course the most excellent adventure games, beside of a few other ones like for instance Broken Sword, Portal or Beneath a Steel Sky, came from LucasArts.
The more successful they’ll get, the more money the developers can invest and maybe some day we might even see another adventure which is playing in a 9 or even 10 region. As speaking so, Sam&Max Episode 205 was a true 9, just for your information.