![]() ![]() The first game in the series, 1989’s Mean Streets, presents a classic hardboiled premise: it’s the fabulous postnuclear year of 2033 and Tex has been hired by Sylvia Linsky to investigate the death of her father Carl the police think his fall from the Golden Gate Bridge was suicide, but Sylvia has her doubts. ![]() However, when Sierra and LucasArts realtime 3D adventure games either involved somewhat clunky and widely-criticised control systems ( Grim Fandango, Escape From Monkey Island, Gabriel Knight III) or incorporated extensive RPG elements rather than being a purist adventure, I think it’s worth looking back at Access Software’s series, since it seemed to crack the challenge of making a realtime 3D game with classic adventure game sensibilities to a level which both Sierra and LucasArts struggled with. The Tex Murphy games are more remembered for their extensive use of full-motion video (FMV) – also preceding Sierra’s own delving into the field – which has tended to obscure this aspect in discussion of them. It’s noteworthy, then, that a full 4 years before either of the big players in the genre attempted it, Access Software’s third Tex Murphy game dropped in realtime-rendered 3D environments as the main type of gameplay environment. Both companies’ experiments in taking adventure game-esque gameplay into a realtime 3D environment would have sputtered out by 2000. Sierra put out a small trickle of Myst-alikes using prerendered 3D, and LucasArts used a few prerendered 3D elements to paste over the cracks in The Dig, but it wasn’t until 1998 with Quest For Glory V and Grim Fandango that they would take the new step into realtime-rendered 3D for adventure games. LucasArts kept chugging away at traditional 2D until 1997, when Curse of Monkey Island took that approach to its peak Sierra was more interested in experimenting with the possibilities of full-motion video (FMV), yielding material like the Phantasmagoria series or the second Gabriel Knight game. (It does somewhat better on worldbuilding, mind.) Compared to 2D adventure games of the era of the sort which Sierra and LucasArts were putting out, this seemed in some ways to be a throwback to earlier eras of adventure games, where puzzles where the main draw and storytelling was much more secondary.Īs the decade rolled on, it became evident that 3D would be the future, but as we’ve seen it would take a while before Sierra and LucasArts accepted that – possibly because they that their own audience would struggle to accept it. Next to The 7th Guest, it was the first example of what you could call a “slideshow-style” 3D adventures (relying on prerendered 3D and fairly limited movement controls), and it sold astonishingly well it was also very focused on puzzles and fairly light when it comes to plot and characters. Part of this may have come down to the Myst factor. ![]() By and large, that’s become an extreme, niche perspective, and the general consensus is that you can have a perfectly good 3D adventure game, but in the 1990s the debate was much fiercer. Even today, you could probably find some who think that a real graphical adventure game has 2D art, a third-person perspective, and either a point-and-click interface or a text parser, and games which don’t offer that simply aren’t adventure games. The adventure game fandom is a particular case of the latter sort of reactionary fandom, with a golden age in the 1990s (or, if you’re a text adventure fan, the 1980s) put on a pedestal and much soul-searching as to why the hell commercial companies pursuing commercial profits spent their energy on more commercially profitable game genres instead of slightly archaic niche game types.īack in the 1990s this ended up manifesting as a deep distrust in some quarters of the use of 3D. ![]() Videogame fandoms in general can be a bit reactionary from time to time – both socially and politically when it comes to those quarters which drank the Kool-Aid on Gamergate, and in terms of the sort of gameplay and technology games use. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |