A recurring theme in the forums is control systems. Which is your favourite? What do you think of this new game's setup? Isn't point-and-click an antique that should be consigned to history? For me, all of these questions miss two vital aspects of player character control that are both more important than the mere mechanics.

The first is that the control method should be easy to use. This goes some way to explaining the enduring nature of point-and-click. Since it simply makes use of the mouse in a way that users apply in all aspects of computer operation, it is arguably the most intuitive control system available. Adding a variety of icons accessible by clicking the right mouse button, you can even allow for a wide variety of actions to be undertaken with the same left-click. This is not to say that I'm inextricably wedded to the point-and-click interface. Back as far as Grim Fandango I've used a variety of control methods and found myself ultimately comfortable with many of them. My sole requirement is that, after a brief learning curve, I should be able to achieve everything without having to think about it. If I have to break off from a game to check the manual for the talk key then the designers have failed.

Secondly, and far more importantly, I must actually have control. This is an area where adventure games tend to suffer much more than most other genres. A first-person shooter will allow you to run into a patch of open ground in front of a machine gun nest. A strategy game will allow you to march your troops into the enemy base one at a time. Even racing games will allow you to potter along at 10 miles an hour if the fancy takes you. By contrast, adventures are all too often full of situations where the PC will refuse to do something. There's nothing interesting down that street, I don't want to talk to that person, and no earth-shattering emergency is going to make me reach into a muddy puddle to grab a key. I appreciate that the story-driven nature of adventures makes diversions a lot more work than just an extra bit of map. However, every time a player runs up against one of these blocks, they are jarred out of the game world the authors have tried to create. Allowing players to perform actions that are dumb or even outright suicidal reinforces the realism of the game for them. It is my prerogative to open the hold of a sunken submarine, even if I know a hideous creature from beyond, intent on destruction, lurks inside. (Prisoner of Ice allowed me to do just that, and yes, the creature did kill me immediately)

Developers won’t capture my interest in controls alone; I do still demand more from a game than that. But if they get that part right, they’re well on their way to getting me lost within their world.

We've just introduced some new ways for readers to stay up-to-date with Adventure Gamers. Firstly, we are now firmly on the Twitter bandwagon! If you are an existing Twitter user and wish to receive links and responses to the latest adventure game news, you can now follow us. Our Twitter name is, appropriately, @AdventureGamers.

Facebook is another social networking community where we've set up an official presence. By becoming a fan of Adventure Gamers on Facebook, you'll receive regular updates to your Facebook stream.

However, these are two-way streets. More than just update feeds, we set up these channels for additional reader interaction and participation. If you direct tweets or Facebook messages to us, we'll receive them. Sometimes we'll re-tweet links or updates that are of interest to other adventure game fans.

To top it off, Adventure Gamers now has streaming videos. It has been a long time coming but we've finally begun putting trailers on YouTube and embedding them in our news posts. Take a look at the Ace Attorney Investigations, Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper and Another Code R trailers.

For now, videos appear only in our news posts, but we're hoping to eventually integrate them with other pages. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel and automatically see new trailers as they're uploaded by us.

We hope you'll join us at these sites! If there are other places where you think we should be represented, let us know.

Since I finished my three-part “sky is kinda falling” blog series a while back, we’ve mourned a major publisher going bankrupt, witnessed the high-priced Wii and DS launch of Broken Sword Director’s Cut, and seen 432 hidden object games be released… Okay, that last one may be an exaggeration, but casual titles are out in full force these days, so between the three issues raised, I guess I wasn't too far off. Now, for the record, even I wasn’t expecting some of the changes to happen this quickly, and I still contend that the real effects of deep-rooted issues have yet to truly be felt. The games releasing now are all the tail ends of the previous “generation” of production cycles, after all. Those were all greenlit under the assumption of a still-healthy market 12 or 18 months, even two years ago. It’s the new generation I’m more worried about. Will as many games get started at all in the current climate, or be seen through to completion? I’m convinced the answer is “no” (I know of some concerning evidence already, though I’m not really at liberty to discuss details). “How many?” is the question that really remains to be seen.

But that’s the despair just getting rehashed all over again. When I first wrote those articles, it was always my intention to follow it up with a message of hope, which I tried to indicate still existed, though perhaps that particular message was drowned out previously. Unfortunately, it took until now to actually get back to the blog, so the negativity lingered a little longer than I intended. I’d joke that it took me this long just to think of any reasons for hope, but while there’s probably a bit more truth in that than I’d like, really it’s because I was sidetracked with other things. Between an overwhelming number of new previews, interviews, reviews, and of course the inaugural Aggie Awards, my time has been pretty much taken up with current site content. And really, isn’t that a symbol of hope right there? Even while discussing dark times, there’s still a steady stream of new games to deal with, and there are always some good ones to celebrate at each year end. Whatever challenges the genre faces, I expect no different when the 2009 Aggies roll around.

Maybe that’s just blind optimism, though. What legitimate hopes are there really? There are no guarantees, of course, and perhaps the answer falls something short of tangible proof, but I think it qualifies as reasoned confidence. Here’s a bit of rationale for that faith.

Global popularity

While the genre always seems to be teetering on the brink of disinterest in major English language markets, it actually seems to be picking up steam in some parts of the world. Germany and France have long been leaders in this regard, but now that influence seems to be spreading out even farther. The Nintendo DS has made Japan a significant player on the worldwide adventure stage, and new game announcements seem to be coming from everywhere: in recent months alone, a whopping FOUR games from Italy, one from Malaysia, another from Israel, plus plenty more already in development throughout eastern Europe.

Now, these (mainly) independent development teams will face all the same challenges of any fledgling company in a niche business, so it’s unlikely the games will all come to fruition. But the encouraging part is simply the interest itself. If more games are being made worldwide, it simply stands to reason that more of them will succeed. That still leaves the not-so-minor issue of localization if they’re ever to benefit us, but the first goal is to have games to localize, and with enough developers in enough countries trying, some are bound to see their way clear. Our English language markets may be the genre slackers that rely on the efforts of other nations, but hey, so long as someone’s taking the lead, there’s something positive to follow.

UK publishing strength

When discussing the plight of North American publishers early in this series, I mentioned that the strength of the UK publishing market wasn’t strong enough to support the (English language) genre on its own. And while I still contend that’s true in the long run, I’ve been surprised and duly impressed by what I’ve seen out of Britain in recent months. Kalypso Media has really stepped to the plate with Ceville and the upcoming Gobliiins 4, while Ascaron continues its solid contribution with the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Fenimore Fillmore’s Revenge. It’s not a lot, but it’s encouraging nonetheless. By no means is it a good thing that North American publishers are disappearing, but it does force one’s attention to alternatives, and maybe the UK will play a bigger role in a new, more Euro-centric adventure landscape.

Digital distribution

I already touched on this in one of the earlier blogs, so I won’t discuss it in detail again. I’ll just say that its time has apparently come. Not “on the horizon”, not “slowly building momentum”. It’s arrived, with not one, not two, but FIVE games released exclusively through digital distribution since the last blog entry. Gamers may embrace it only reluctantly for a while yet, but if one wants the likes of Emerald City Confidential, The Legend of Crystal Valley, and Ankh 3 today, it’s download or bust… Or perhaps waiting many long months in the hopes of a boxed release – a release, which, if it ever comes at all, will come only on the shoulders of its downloadable success. We’re only at the very beginning of the digital future, but the future is apparently now, whether we like it or not. Not all publishers are on board yet, but the short-sighted holdouts are getting fewer and farther between.

De-saturating the genre

This may sound like a backwards step – and it is – but hear me out. While it’s long since stopped being a mainstream market force with AAA-headliner titles, the adventure genre has nevertheless seen relatively good times in recent years. As AG staff veterans will attest, it was once a struggle even to find ten worthwhile names just to fill up the Hype-o-Meter. For the last several years, it’s been a question of which games to leave off. In other words, though clearly not the genre heyday of old, there have been lots of interesting adventures of late.

So far so good.

More games mean more potential sales, of course. And there’s nothing that piques a publisher's interest like more sales, so more publishers began getting involved. Then more developers saw opportunity, and so more games were announced. Gamers just lapped it all up as good news, and for a while there it was. But, just like all unrealistic expectations of unending growth inevitably collapse, so the genre hit its ceiling somewhere along the way. See, more games didn’t mean more gamERS. Or at least, not nearly as many as would be required to sustain that kind of ongoing expansion. At some point, then, the same niche market became over-saturated with adventures. I’m pulling simple numbers out of a hat for example, but where once only two adventure games were released, a fan could afford to buy both. When three were released, they could still afford two. When five were released, they still bought two, and three went unpurchased. And those three unpurchased meant trouble for their companies. And since gamers made different choices of their two, it meant shared trouble for every company. It’s basic math: when there’s less money to go around than there are products requiring it, some or even all of those products are destined to fail.

I don’t know when exactly we hit that point, but hit it we did. There are no reliable sales figures for games (and even if there were, those would tell only a small part of the story), but enough adventure companies have indicated (to me, unofficially) the financial challenges to know that they weren’t alone in feeling the pinch. Lighthouse is only the most extreme example (so far, but let’s hope it doesn’t spread much beyond that). Sure, the failure of their UK distribution partner (uh oh, there’s that problem back again) and the troubles of their parent company were the final nails in the company coffin, but they weren’t bought out in the first place because they were thriving, but struggling fiscally. Underselling products will do that.

I know, I know, this sounds like the downer stuff all over again, but the point is, it was time to scale back anyway. As much as ideally the thought of more games, more selection is better all around, the reality is that we’re all better off with fewer games better made. And hopefully that’s one of the secondary benefits of the obstacles facing the genre today. Instead of flooding the market with so many games that few can succeed, perhaps fewer games will mean all can succeed. The challenge, of course, is to ensure that it’s the BETTER games that get picked up and endorsed, but for that we’ll just need to hope that current developers continue to hone their craft and publishers show they’re brighter than they act sometimes.

There are other reasons for hope beyond these points, some of which have been mentioned previously. The casual market could yet broaden the adventure game fanbase, while indies will continue to provide a solid contribution that isn’t so dependent on fluctuating market forces. And who knows, the belt-tightening for other publishers might just make lower risk (albeit lower payoff) investments like adventure games worth a closer look in future. Wishful thinking? Sure. Impossible? Definitely not.

I realize that none of these reasons amounts to anything more than a silver lining in a dark cloud, but that’s the reality we face, and isn’t that better than grumbling about the lousy weather?

It was 1997. On a sunny afternoon, near the end of the summer, two seemingly unrelated things happened in my house that, in hindsight, proved instead to be indivisibly connected. First, after a sleepless night, I finally finished A Gabriel Knight Mystery: The Beast Within. Secondly, convinced by a friend of his, my father subscribed to our first – extremely slow – internet connection.

Let’s focus for a moment on the first thing: I was so mesmerized by the end of the game that I played it four times in a row, just to absorb it all. Each and every time, when I heard the melody accompaning Gabriel and Grace’s final dialogue on the bridge over Neuschwanstein, I was reduced to the verge of tears: I spent countless summer nights with them, sharing their struggles and joys, and the one thing I knew for sure was that I wanted more. So, later the same day, I fired up the newly-established connection and searched three simple words on AltaVista: Gabriel – Knight – Sierra.

The first displayed result was the Official Gabriel Knight Site, which – in an elegant crimson and gold layout – informed me that a sequel (what a relief!) was indeed in production. There, I also gathered some information about the first Gabriel Knight game, which I hadn’t had the chance to play yet. Without hesitation, I begged my father to buy it for me on his next trip to Milan and after a few weeks, there it was, in my hands. I installed it with trepidation and then, much to my discouragement, I found that it was completely in English, a language I wasn’t very good at back then (or even today, some can argue).

With the aid of an old, tattered English dictionary, I managed to play through the game but sometimes it was hard, no matter what: Jane Jensen’s descriptions, which today sound so poetic and rich, were almost incomprehensible to my younger self, so I decided to register on the Gabriel Knight board and seek help. I wrote a brief presentation post, explaining my problems, and the response from the community was outstanding: they welcomed me warmly and tried hard to help me, clarifying the hardest passages for me – like Gabriel’s dream of the Dragon, which wasn’t even subtitled – and giving me hints on how to proceed when I was stuck (the Voodoo Code puzzle can really be difficult, sure, but try it without understanding the majority of the words!).

When I finally finished the game, I posted my thoughts to share them with other fans and hear their opinions. Then, we patiently waited together for the release of Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, speculating over any tiny bit of info the developers gave us, and when it was released I remember how envious I was in having to wait another three months for the localization, and at the same time how happy I was reading on the boards how good the game proved to be.

Unfortunately for me, after those two years I lost touch with the community: academic commitments and strict deadlines greatly reduced my free time, so I had to put it aside. Then, almost a year ago, I discovered Adventure Gamers’ community and immediately felt at home: I almost forgot how great it is to have a passion and to share it with other kindred spirits. My fellow Adventure Gamers started to introduce me to the newer adventure games, but I never lost my fascination with the heyday of Sierra, and I began to wonder about that old board: would it still be up? Would I recognize anyone? So, motivated by the fun I was having on this forum, I set out to find what happened to my other beloved and too-long-abandoned community.

Not only did I find what I was looking for, but a few months ago I rejoined and instantly felt like time had never passed. The community I remembered and loved was still there, even without new games to wait for and play, sticking together just because it was good. Nonetheless, at least one important thing had changed from the past: the atmosphere.

As many people know, Sierra was acquired first by Cendant and then by Vivendi S. A., which later became known as Vivendi Universal. The new management didn’t seem to care at all for the requests of board members and fans of that certain genre they weren’t producing anymore; they stuffed all the boards in a generic “Classic Games” directory and made pretty clear that they weren’t supporting them anymore. Still, in spite of everything, the community persisted, continuing to keep alive the glories of those beloved series whose intellectual rights lay forgotten and dusty, and which are – again, despite every attempt to keep them dormant – still alive and kicking even nowadays. Jane Jensen – the “Last Dinosaur on the Block” as she called herself in an open letter to Sierra – was right when she said that those stories, those characters would never die.

This doesn’t mean, however, that one can’t try to kill them, and Vivendi tried hard to drive the final nail into the community’s coffin. In fact, after the recent corporate merger that created the colossus Activision Blizzard, it was made public that only a few forums would be transferred to the new server; that is, only the boards dedicated to the Sierra franchises that Activision Blizzard planned to continue producing. The other forums were to be taken down and discontinued: King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest, Police Quest, Quest for Glory, Gabriel Knight, Phantasmagoria, Laura Bow…

As of today, these boards are no more. They have welcomed fans and adventurers from all around the world for more than a decade, and today they are closed.

One would think that after Chainsaw Monday, after all these years of neglect, the fans would finally give up. But that assumption would be wrong. Ever since news of the closure spread, fans have outdone themselves. They have stored old memorable threads, they have created mailing lists to keep everyone in touch, and moreover, have begun to work on a new project entirely of their own: a Gateway Community that will once again bring together all of Sierra’s most devoted fans, regardless of genre and game. Where a cleft once divided the community into smaller groups of members dedicated only to a particular game or series, now there is the chance to bring all of them back together and rebuild the huge, wonderful community that it used to be.

This new community will consist of a network of different boards, such as the Gabriel Knight 4 Campaign, the Quest for More Glory, the Sierra Help Pages, Sierra Chest and other dedicated sites. This new endeavour is not only a way to keep alive the memory of the series we continue to love and in which we continue to believe and hope for future developments, but it’s more importantly a way to keep together groups of people that have a passion in common and who, through that passion, have met and made friends with each other, if only on the net. My best wishes go to this new Gateway project, with the hope that – like the mythical Arabian Phoenix – from the ashes of the old forums an even broader community may rise. And if some day our beloved series do come back, we will be vindicated. In the meantime, it’s a pleasure to be a part of such a strong community.

When it comes to adventure game ports to consoles, many struggle to make the transition from the PC format without some sacrifice in quality. Recent adventure games for the Nintendo Wii have fared better in this respect – in particular the Sam & Max and Strong Bad series suiting the console and its remote point system well – but for every decent release, there have always been a handful of poor imitators waiting in the wings. This was particularly the case back in the ‘90s, where many PlayStation/PlayStation 2 adventures struggled with poor controls (the gamepad truly wasn't a good substitute for a mouse) and developers failed to adapt the games to suit the console.

Yet it is with some interest that I'm looking forward to the release of Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars – Director's Cut on the Wii and DS, curious to see how the game will make use of each platform’s unique control systems. The reason being is that Revolution Software has been one of a handful of companies that have managed to port computer-based adventure games across to a console successfully whilst bearing in mind their various strengths and weaknesses. Broken Sword is already a great example of this, and although the PlayStation version was a decent conversion only slightly hampered by loading times, it is the Game Boy Advance release that impresses the most.

If consoles are a particularly tricky subject for adventure crossovers, handheld machines have even more limitations regarding memory and graphical prowess. Where Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion was an appalling port that tainted the franchise's reputation by using a poorly implemented control system, grainy graphics and scaled down puzzles, Broken Sword was an almost perfect conversion. Revolution managed to take into account the limitations of the Game Boy Advance and fit the game to the system, rather than mindlessly porting it across. With the realization that the handheld wouldn't be up to the full challenge, voices were kept out in favour of subtitles and despite shrinking the graphics and animation down in resolution, it's so expertly done that it's barely noticeable. Rather than eliminate the cutscenes, they are presented in a series of stills that do a good job of portraying events to the player. The master stroke, and a move that actually improves the game, is the ability to move George Stobbart with the control pad rather than pointing and clicking, with the buttons carrying out examinations or actions. It's a decision that really suits the system and shows that with some adequate planning, adventure ports can work on most console platforms. Even now, although getting on in years and only possible to find in the second hand market, it's still worthy of your time and attention.

Then again, it’s probably just easier to wait for the Director’s Cut versions at this point, since they should be out later this month. Having seen footage of the Wii version, it already looks visually better than the original game and seems to make good use of the remote's capabilities. Hopefully we'll find out soon whether the Director's Cut on both the Wii and DS will live up to the game's illustrious pedigree and improve on an already well-received adventure, but I’m confident that if any developer can pull it off, it’s Revolution.