Syberia looks really interesting. I've never heard of it before but it definitely looks like the sort of game I could get into.

I apologise if my attempts at conversation and engaging with members here has irritated some. Again...disability. I definitely don't want to come across like I'm trolling. Just here to have fun on this cool website like everybody else. If it helps I will indeed try my best not to respond to posts here unless asked, as you say my posts may come across as argumentative. But I agree let's leave it here and move on.

I appreciate all your comments. I can understand why perhaps you never got around to playing many Star Trek games. CBS hasn't exactly referenced or acknowledged their existence which is a shame as some of those games were very good. But hey I liked Star Trek: Borg so what would I know? 😁

I got confused for a bit about Syberia being an adventure. I thought you guys were referencing an old rail shooter game. Turns out that was Cyberia. Doh!!!

@slider1983 - We are all here to have fun and chew Bubble gum!! And we're all outta gum!!

Duke Nukem 3D quotes aside, if we all keep our commenting to the contents of the post then all is good. If anyone wants to discuss separate topics, like this adventure thread which kitsunebi opened rather than bogging down the release threads for example, by all means open another post on the forums. That's part of the reason why I moved to PHP-Fusion because it's far easier to track your posts, or threads you re into etc compared to Kunena on the old Joomla based site.

I too continue to look forward to reading your posts. Living on the other side of the world, insights into the UK side of things is interesting to me, as is hearing about the USA/Japan market from people like @kitsunebi.

The first videogame I ever bought was an adventure, Mission Impossible from Scott Adams on my Vic-20. It was hopelessly simple compared to anything that followed it, but it sure felt good beating it as a kid.

I'm waiting for my Spectrum Next, and I think the first things I'll play are some of the Magnetic Scrolls games. They've been remastered for the Next with graphics ripped from the ST and Amiga versions

https://strandgames.com/projects/zxnext and best of all, free to play!

@Kiwi, "graphic adventure" is a very specific genre of game which will rarely be confused for belonging to any other genre (though there are hybrids, like the graphic adventure/RPG series "Quest for Glory" ). They focus on interactive storytelling based on exploration and inventory-based puzzle-solving. The name of the genre come from being the direct successor to text adventures like the Zork series, which were quite popular in the stone ages of gaming. Then in 1980, Roberta and Ken Williams got the idea of adding graphics to a text adventure, and BAM, the graphic adventure was born. Later, in 1984, Roberta Williams would design the first King's Quest game, which was the first graphic adventure to allow your character to move about the screen, in front of and behind other objects, thus giving birth to the 3D graphic adventure genre. Their first game for the Apple II, Mystery House, was sold out of ziploc bags, but their success would snowball, and their company, Sierra Online, would become one of the most successful software companies of the 80s/90s (selling for $1.5 billion in 1995).

Pretty much every graphic adventure ever made stands on the shoulders of Sierra's games. Then in the late 80s, Lucasarts would revolutionize the genre by doing away with text parser input and switching to mouse control, giving rise to the "point-and-click" adventure. And in 1990, beginning with Loom, Lucasarts introduced a design philosophy that would do away with player death and would make sure that at no point could the player perform any action that would dead-end their character and require them to restore to an earlier save.

People who didn't get into computer gaming until Doom may not realize this, but in the early days, graphic adventures dominated the sales charts. Believe it or not, but they used to be seen as the most technically advanced genre of gaming. But as PCs became more and more powerful, gamers became more and more entranced by fancy 3D graphic engines that could run action games at blisteringly fast framerates, which is something which just doesn't apply to the much more cerebral and slow-paced graphic adventure genre. So sales declined in the late 90s and eventually the genre all but died out. Luckily, graphic adventures were one of the first genres to be embraced by the emergent indie game scene, and today the genre is once again popular with a stable and loyal fanbase, even if it isn't likely to set the sales charts ablaze the way it used to.

I think I got totally put off adventure games by playing something called Red Moon on the Atari 800. That may qualify as a graphic adventure but in all honesty I was too into arcade games to devote any sort of time to trying to figure out the puzzles to move to the next location.

Pretty sure I had The Pawn later for the Amiga but Kiwi had left the building way before then for the greener pastures of shoot 'em ups. I had some multi-disk Zork game for the PC too!! Never left the packet!!

I'm sure there are plenty of people into those sorts of games which is really great. I'm just not one of them that's all!!

I'd never heard of it until just now, but yeah, Red Moon is a graphic adventure. Of course, Red Moon, The Pawn, and pretty much every graphic adventure made in the UK during the 80s belongs to the subgenre of "graphical text adventure." These games showed a single-screen image which was typically static and from the first-person perspective. The player then input commands with a text parser. Once the 3D graphic adventure was born with King's Quest in 1984, the subgenre of graphical text adventure became passe in America, but in the UK, companies like Magnetic Scolls thrived on it throughout the rest of the decade.

"Graphical text adventures" or "text adventures with graphics" differ from the 3D graphic adventure and point-and-click adventure by being much more text-heavy (and text-driven.) They really were exactly as their name implies - text adventures with some graphics added. I'm personally not really a fan of this subgenre, but I've played my share of them.

Sierra was never that popular in the 80s in the UK (and Australia) as the PC was not taken seriously as a gaming platform until VGA became widespread. There were lots of Apple IIs around, but they were mostly in schools as they were ridiculously expensive compared to other 8 bit platforms.
It didn't help that the platforms that were popular here such as the Amiga and ST got awful, lazy ports of Sierra games. Lower adoption rates of HDDs too made playing some of these games impractical.

I remember Monkey Island on the Amiga had a crazy amount of disk swapping if you didnt have a HDD, but at least they made great ports.

LOL, yeah, I've read about the crappy ports of Sierra games to the UK platforms. Another drawback was that they were often ported years after they were originally released, without any improvements, making them look hopelessly outdated.

And yeah, disc swapping...My first computer was a Tandy 1000 SX (IBM compatible) with dual 5.25'' drives...but no hard drive (OK technically, my first computer was a Vic20, but that was more like a videogame system with a keyboard than a real computer. You hook it up to your TV, for crying out loud..) Anyway, I remember playing Hero's Quest (later re-titled as Quest For Glory I) which came on 10 low-density 5.25" discs. I must have had the patience of Job back then to put up with that...I bought the sequel a year later only to discover that it came on high-density discs which my system couldn't run. There was an option to mail them in to Sierra for low-density replacements, but it would have been something like 15 discs and required a hard drive, so I ended up just returning the game LOL.

I think it might be inaccurate to say that America took the PC seriously as a gaming platform in the 80s (certainly not until the late 80s at the earliest). Following Atari's videogame crash in 1983, no one took games seriously at all. Games continued to be released for the various computers at the time (not PCs, but rather the Apple II and Commodore 64, primarily), but most kids I knew didn't play games AT ALL from the time of the death of Atari until the rebirth of the video game when NES sales took off in 1988 or so. No one ever bought a PC to play games back then - they were far too expensive, and there were far too few games available for it. But adults who bought a PC for productivity work eventually began to seek out games to play in their free time, and so step by small step, gaming on PCs grew, if for no other reason than that most people who owned a PC had no desire to own a video game system, and no need to own a cheap entry-level computer like the C64, so the PC was the only platform they had, even if it wasn't well-suited for gaming. For years, even in the USA, the PC was probably the worst possible platform to play games on. Though that would obviously not be the case for long.

Anyone who ever wanted to try a (relatively) modern adventure game (a French one, no less) has no excuse, as GOG is now giving away Syberia I & II for the next couple of days.
https://www.gog.com/

I grabbed them although there's little chance of me playing them as I don't have much time for games at present, let alone for games that take a year to complete.

Wait, what? A year to complete? They're graphic adventures, not RPGs. Most graphic adventures can be finished in a few hours if you already know what to do. Of course, the whole point is that you DON'T know what to do, not the first time you play them, that is. So it's the exploration and trial and error at finding solutions to the various obstacles you encounter that give you your money's worth.

That said, I hear ya. I don't have 5 minutes to spare for games, let alone a few hours.