Quote:
Originally Posted by BagginsKQ
Well, they also had those stupid arcade mini-games in the early Sam and Max games... Shooting at things while driving down the streets/car chase...
I think there were some other carnival type gun shooting sequences in later games too.
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Yeah, forgot about those. Arcade and on-rails driving games don't really qualify a studio for full-fledged action-adventure development, though.
I
liked the driving games in Telltale's Sam & Max. They were a totally franchise-appropriate addition, well implemented and fun. Even though mini-games are not strictly adventure-game-type puzzles, they add welcome variety IMO when used sparingly and suitably.
Quote:
Originally Posted by exo
The car shooting sequence in the early Sam and Max felt tacked on (simply because the original had car surfing). It was also incredibly boring and a waste of time.
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Seems to me that's exactly the kind of thinking that took Telltale from Sam & Max to JP:TG and TWD. Now, I understand that not every player is going to find every segment of a game to be fun. But a waste of time? That's Telltale's attitude toward anything that doesn't contribute to the linear delivery of the cinematic experience they want all players to have, where gameplay is dictated by each story element, leading to ad hoc, one-at-a-time "activities" instead of interconnected challenges in an interactivity-rich gameworld.
The Sam & Max driving/arcade sequences are an example (a minor one) of what I mean when talking about how so much variety in adventure gaming has been lost since the 1990's. Each studio had their own twists that expanded -- and sometimes went beyond -- the base of traditional adventure puzzles. (I believe Telltale operated in that vein during the early Sam & Max years, bringing some creativity to puzzle design -- derivative of Lucasarts, yes, but with a style of their own -- and it's why I became such a huge fan of the company.) It's the adventure gaming community itself that demanded standardization and left us with nothing but cookie-cutter games.
Even today when I see discussions of what an adventure game should be, someone always posts a long list of puzzle-types and other elements that must always be excluded and I just have to barf. In this very forum we have repeated calls to eliminate dead-ends, "unfair"
deaths, "obscure"
puzzles, precarious mobility situations, yadda yadda.
Hammer that fucker down until it looks like a right and proper twenty-first century generic adventure!
Meanwhile other character-in-gameworld-based genre fans (though obviously not all developers and publishers) have embraced variety and cross-over gameplay. I don't even outright object to judicious use of QTE's in adventure games. In fact, the QTE's associated with dinosaur encounters were the
only redeeming feature of JP:TG IMO. (My objections have always been about its linear and non-explorable gameworld and its simplistic and isolated puzzles.)
Oh, wow, I went off on another gameplay/design philosophy tangent. Sorry. I'll stop now, go hop in the De Soto, and head for Memory Lane.
