Adventure Games and Crackfic
Yeaaaaaaah, anyone who follows me on Twitter will have noticed that I've been thinking about adventure games this weekend. Specifically, Telltale Games' adventure games. Even more specifically, Back to the Future, Monkey Island and King's Quest. Also Sam and Max, but I didn't tweet about them. xD My thoughts were too long for just a tweet or two, so I thought I'd better try and organise them here.
For those who don't obsessively follow adventure gaming news like I do, Telltale had said a while back that they were going to announce five new projects this week. MixNMojo, a collection of LucasArts fans who now follow a variety of companies and their projects, speculated that one of these games might be Monkey Island, based on circumstancial evidence concerning Guybrush's voice actor being busy with 'work', or Sam and Max, based on the fact that they'd already had three successful seasons and a fourth is bound to show up eventually. Neither of these was true. In fact, of the five announcements, only one was of a game I'd heard of. That game, as you've probably guessed, was King's Quest.
Like most LucasArts fans, any Sierra game and I have a tenous relationship. I can acknowledge their importance in gaming history, but I can't play them and enjoy them at all without a walkthrough to ensure I won't constantly fall prey to the completely random deaths prevalent in the majority of Sierra games... Not to mention the often random and completely illogical puzzles they can contain!
Although I grew up mostly on Monkey Island, I did play other adventure games when I could. Day of the Tentacle was one of these, which I adored, but on the other hand, a small number of Sierra games, specifically Roberta Williams' Sierra games, were also ones I played, and absolutely hated.
Yeah, I never mentioned this before. Hardly surprising, considering even I forgot about them until Dad happened to mention we had the King's Quest games at one point and dug them out to prove it.
Anyway. Of the King's Quest games, I didn't play much. Of course, everyone knows that, when reading a book, you start with number one and read through in chronological order, so I opened up game number one as a kid, and... instantly got lost. I can't remember playing it back then, but I must have surely suffered a random death in trying to explore the way a LucasArts game would allow and given up. The game didn't age that well, not even ten years later with the enhanced version! The one game in the CD pack any of my siblings and I played to any extent was Mixed Up Mother Goose, and even that I have strong memories of walking around trying to solve random puzzles, mostly based on nursery rhymes I'd never heard of, and always ending up lost and with no way to proceed. As this was the days before easily accessable online walkthroughs, we didn't know that we had probably missed picking up some small thing and were thus trapped in an unwinnable game. It was a lesson in frustration and one we didn't appreciate. The LucasArts design philosophy, which they were very proud of, was that they would never punish the player for exploring. The Sierra design philosophy, as far as I can tell, was that they would find every conceivable way the hero could die and implement it into the game. I think you can see why I'm still a LucasArts fangirl through and through.
This is why I'm not sure how to react to Telltale doing King's Quest. Yes, I know King's Quest 1 was one of, if not the, first graphic adventure games, and apparently one of the later ones was the first to support a sound card, but I have never agreed with the horrible design philosophy behind the puzzles. Telltale is made up of former LucasArts employees, and their catalog so far has proven that they stick to the same philosophy their former home did... that is, until the recent info about the Jurassic Park game came out.
Quick time events and the possibility of dying (As in getting a game over. I discount the finales of TMI and S&M:TDP!) are both new elements in a Telltale game. I don't know if the market considers them this, but I see them as action game elements with no place in an adventure game... Well, so what, Jurassic Park is an action movie, I never liked the series, I won't be buying the games. But then you consider, Telltale is preparing to kill off main characters, often. That's exactly what Sierra games do. That's exactly what King's Quest does.
I will certainly be watching the news of the new King's Quest 'reboot' as it comes, and will most likely buy the game when it becomes available for pre-order, but I'm still not sure how to feel about it.
Now, what does crackfic have to do with this, I hear you ask?
Okay, this is a bit I'm kinda ashamed of. xD As people might have guessed from my That Guy With The Pokemon fanfic, I tend to take weird ideas and run with them very easily. Most of them, for some reason, seem to come from badfic or just horribly executed movies, shows or episodes, but that's another story! The inspiration for this came from a throwaway puzzle solution at the end of Curse of Monkey Island, the bit where the game was clearly rushed and bogged down trying to fix the mindscrew ending of LeChuck's Revenge. Basically, as proof to Dinghy Dog that Guybrush is twenty and not actually a child, he pulls out an ID card, and Dinghy reads aloud something along the lines of "SCUMM Actors Guild, Guybrush Threepwood, Age 20?" For some reason, my mind ran with this and it expanded to a rather weird and slightly epic sort of crackfic that involved all the LucasArts adventure game characters and slowly expanded to also try and include Sierra characters too. I say 'try' because I still didn't know anything about any of them, and Sierra made more adventure games than LucasArts before the bottom fell out of the market and killed Sierra off... not to mention, LucasArts had things like Star Wars they could make other games with that made tonnes of money, but that's going offtopic.
But. Scumm Actors Guild. That's the name of the crackfic, and I think you can see an idea of what it's about. It also has slight roots in Who Framed Roger Rabbit too, because of the idea of fictional characters existing in reality opposite their creators. Oddly enough, I had ideas for a storyline that would end up with some Sierra characters joining the Guild, which I stopped working on when I lost all my work after Ati crashed last year. Telltale doing this provides the PERFECT plot point for said storyline.
WHY AM I THINKING ABOUT THIS FIRST WHEN TELLTALE ANNOUNCES IT?
Excuse me, I am going to wander off into a corner to think about what I've done. And I won't regret a single bit. xD
For those who don't obsessively follow adventure gaming news like I do, Telltale had said a while back that they were going to announce five new projects this week. MixNMojo, a collection of LucasArts fans who now follow a variety of companies and their projects, speculated that one of these games might be Monkey Island, based on circumstancial evidence concerning Guybrush's voice actor being busy with 'work', or Sam and Max, based on the fact that they'd already had three successful seasons and a fourth is bound to show up eventually. Neither of these was true. In fact, of the five announcements, only one was of a game I'd heard of. That game, as you've probably guessed, was King's Quest.
Like most LucasArts fans, any Sierra game and I have a tenous relationship. I can acknowledge their importance in gaming history, but I can't play them and enjoy them at all without a walkthrough to ensure I won't constantly fall prey to the completely random deaths prevalent in the majority of Sierra games... Not to mention the often random and completely illogical puzzles they can contain!
Although I grew up mostly on Monkey Island, I did play other adventure games when I could. Day of the Tentacle was one of these, which I adored, but on the other hand, a small number of Sierra games, specifically Roberta Williams' Sierra games, were also ones I played, and absolutely hated.
Yeah, I never mentioned this before. Hardly surprising, considering even I forgot about them until Dad happened to mention we had the King's Quest games at one point and dug them out to prove it.
Anyway. Of the King's Quest games, I didn't play much. Of course, everyone knows that, when reading a book, you start with number one and read through in chronological order, so I opened up game number one as a kid, and... instantly got lost. I can't remember playing it back then, but I must have surely suffered a random death in trying to explore the way a LucasArts game would allow and given up. The game didn't age that well, not even ten years later with the enhanced version! The one game in the CD pack any of my siblings and I played to any extent was Mixed Up Mother Goose, and even that I have strong memories of walking around trying to solve random puzzles, mostly based on nursery rhymes I'd never heard of, and always ending up lost and with no way to proceed. As this was the days before easily accessable online walkthroughs, we didn't know that we had probably missed picking up some small thing and were thus trapped in an unwinnable game. It was a lesson in frustration and one we didn't appreciate. The LucasArts design philosophy, which they were very proud of, was that they would never punish the player for exploring. The Sierra design philosophy, as far as I can tell, was that they would find every conceivable way the hero could die and implement it into the game. I think you can see why I'm still a LucasArts fangirl through and through.
This is why I'm not sure how to react to Telltale doing King's Quest. Yes, I know King's Quest 1 was one of, if not the, first graphic adventure games, and apparently one of the later ones was the first to support a sound card, but I have never agreed with the horrible design philosophy behind the puzzles. Telltale is made up of former LucasArts employees, and their catalog so far has proven that they stick to the same philosophy their former home did... that is, until the recent info about the Jurassic Park game came out.
Quick time events and the possibility of dying (As in getting a game over. I discount the finales of TMI and S&M:TDP!) are both new elements in a Telltale game. I don't know if the market considers them this, but I see them as action game elements with no place in an adventure game... Well, so what, Jurassic Park is an action movie, I never liked the series, I won't be buying the games. But then you consider, Telltale is preparing to kill off main characters, often. That's exactly what Sierra games do. That's exactly what King's Quest does.
I will certainly be watching the news of the new King's Quest 'reboot' as it comes, and will most likely buy the game when it becomes available for pre-order, but I'm still not sure how to feel about it.
Now, what does crackfic have to do with this, I hear you ask?
Okay, this is a bit I'm kinda ashamed of. xD As people might have guessed from my That Guy With The Pokemon fanfic, I tend to take weird ideas and run with them very easily. Most of them, for some reason, seem to come from badfic or just horribly executed movies, shows or episodes, but that's another story! The inspiration for this came from a throwaway puzzle solution at the end of Curse of Monkey Island, the bit where the game was clearly rushed and bogged down trying to fix the mindscrew ending of LeChuck's Revenge. Basically, as proof to Dinghy Dog that Guybrush is twenty and not actually a child, he pulls out an ID card, and Dinghy reads aloud something along the lines of "SCUMM Actors Guild, Guybrush Threepwood, Age 20?" For some reason, my mind ran with this and it expanded to a rather weird and slightly epic sort of crackfic that involved all the LucasArts adventure game characters and slowly expanded to also try and include Sierra characters too. I say 'try' because I still didn't know anything about any of them, and Sierra made more adventure games than LucasArts before the bottom fell out of the market and killed Sierra off... not to mention, LucasArts had things like Star Wars they could make other games with that made tonnes of money, but that's going offtopic.
But. Scumm Actors Guild. That's the name of the crackfic, and I think you can see an idea of what it's about. It also has slight roots in Who Framed Roger Rabbit too, because of the idea of fictional characters existing in reality opposite their creators. Oddly enough, I had ideas for a storyline that would end up with some Sierra characters joining the Guild, which I stopped working on when I lost all my work after Ati crashed last year. Telltale doing this provides the PERFECT plot point for said storyline.
WHY AM I THINKING ABOUT THIS FIRST WHEN TELLTALE ANNOUNCES IT?
Excuse me, I am going to wander off into a corner to think about what I've done. And I won't regret a single bit. xD