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Your first adventure game?

OracleX

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The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble and Goblins 3 were my first non demo CD-ROM adventure game.
 

Sceptic

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King’s Quest 2. Somewhat of a miracle I stuck with the genre after that.
Some years ago I was digging through old floppies to see what was worth keeping and came across my KQ2 floppies. I'm not sure if it was my first but it seems to be the oldest that I still have on original media. My earliest include a Scott Adams game (pretty sure it was Pyramid of Doom) but I can no longer remember which one was actually first.
 
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King’s Quest 2. Somewhat of a miracle I stuck with the genre after that.
Some years ago I was digging through old floppies to see what was worth keeping and came across my KQ2 floppies. I'm not sure if it was my first but it seems to be the oldest that I still have on original media. My earliest include a Scott Adams game (pretty sure it was Pyramid of Doom) but I can no longer remember which one was actually first.

I sadly sold off/gave away pretty much all of my games on floppies when I went to college in 2000. I had just bought a new computer for school, and floppy disk drives were absurdly expensive due to the advent of superior storage formats. Fast-forward to 2021, and I can buy a USB-to-Floppy attachment for $20, but what I really miss is just the experience of flipping through all of my old floppies, stored alphabetically and labeled in my terrible pre-teen penmanship, and feeling like I was a librarian for the next epoch of history.
 
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The soundtrack and stages is burned in my memory forever. I've finished later on earlier parts, but they weren't as good.
Goblins series is great, because it's not language heavy, so you can easily experiment without repercussions and dead ends involved.

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The Legend of Kyrandia 2 - The Hand of Fate. Thanks to the polish version released back in the days, I could play it until the ending.
There are moments where you can die, but HoF taught me the very important lesson, to keep multiple saves just in case you need to reload.
Fantastic graphics and music (swamp theme!), and Zanthia as a main heroine. I need to replay it along with Goblins 3 this year.
 

Darth Roxor

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I've finished later on earlier parts, but they weren't as good.

Strongly disagreed. Goblins 1 is a shit game that is best disregarded, but Goblins 2 is ace, and it even does a few things better than 3 (such as the interactions between the two characters in puzzle solving).
 
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sq1agi-c__medium.png


First played this in December 1988 on a 286 with a Hercules piss-yellow monitor. Great times. Back home we bought a 8086 XT in 89-90 or so, with a greyscale EGA monitor, 2 5 1/4" floppy drives and no HD. Played most of the classic AGI and SCI Sierra adventures on that box. Loved every minute.
 
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Morpheus Kitami

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Myst, know it like the back of my hand.
Strongly disagreed. Goblins 1 is a shit game that is best disregarded, but Goblins 2 is ace, and it even does a few things better than 3 (such as the interactions between the two characters in puzzle solving).
Really? Goblins 1, while the whole health system was crap, wasn't bad beyond that, but Goblins 2 had a lot of filler that really dragged the game down.
 

MRY

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King's Quest II was the first I played, at a friend's house. My strongest recollections from that experience were not being able to get the item that was on the mantelpiece (?) because we couldn't guess the noun and the weird Batmobile cameo.

The Hobbit was the first I owed, but like Darth Roxor, I never beat it. I think I typically got stuck pretty early on, like at the goblin escape sequence maybe? Loom was the first I owned, and the first I beat. I then bought and beat King's Quest II (~4 years after first playing it). Then played Hero's Quest (before it became QFG), Zack McKracken, KQV, SQIV, KQVI, and several others at a friend's house. (Including Goblins, which I never really viewed as an adventure game.) Monkey Island at another friend's house. Bought Kyrandia and Monkey Island 2, both of which I liked a lot. Played Kyrandia II at same friend's house. Then sometime in college I think I went back and played the whole pantheon.

It's kind of weird, in retrospect, how few adventure games I played to completion or owned at the age when I first committed to making an adventure game (~12). The commitment was made with the same friend who I played most of the above-listed games with, and what really pushed us to do it was Hugo II, Whodunit? (He and I also aspired to make an RPG together.) We managed to make a parser-based adventure, "Quentin Quester."

I think Loom and Hugo II are really the foundational things for me -- the first because it was such an amazing experience, the latter because it suggested that making my own adventure was not impossible.
 

Dexter

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Not sure about the "first". One of the first games I remember playing is Cauldron for the C64 but I'm not sure if I've ever played any Adventure games on that. But the game that really "hooked" me on Adventure games as a genre throughout the 90s was Simon the Sorcerer II. It's for me what for other people seems to be Monkey Island.
 
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When my cousin got his computer around '98 he got several free games with it (I got minesweeper).
The list of games included, Total Annihilation, Fallout, and Blade Runner (I had only played FPS at that point).

Blade Runner. An adventure game where you can actually shoot folk, and isn't plagued by bizarre logic puzzles, and has some level of randomness to the investigation. To my dismay, most adventure games weren't like that and didn't bother much with the rest of the genre.

But I guess I could say the same about Fallout and TA.
 

KazikluBey

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A Swedish text adventure for a DEC PDP 10 mainframe from the 70s: Stugan/The Cottage, inspired by the 1976 Adventure/Colossal Cave Adventure. Stugan was rereleased in the 80s for MS-DOS and became a mainstay among computer users well into the 90s.

220px-Stugan_cover.png
 

Bumvelcrow

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I think it was probably Philosopher's Quest on the Beeb. I had even less patience then than I do now, so I didn't get very far. First one I bought myself was probably The Hobbit. I didn't get very far on that either. It turns out that I don't actually like adventure games that much, unless they're very special like Trinity or Stationfall.
 

Darth Roxor

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Really? Goblins 1, while the whole health system was crap, wasn't bad beyond that, but Goblins 2 had a lot of filler that really dragged the game down.

Goblins 1 was pretty bad and not just because of the health system. It also had shitty "puzzle" design that mostly involved lolrandom deaths and pure guesswork (guess wrong = deff), and I don't think I have to explain why this is bad in a game where you can take only 3 or something "wrong" decisions before you die. A good example of that is in I think level 2 or 3 where you are in some cavern and the brawny fellow has to jump onto a stalactite. Well there are three stalactites and they all look the same. But if you don't pick the right one, you lose health. I believe these things are also randomised on each restart, but I'm not even sure anymore.

As for Goblins 2, I wouldn't say that it had a 'lot' of filler, but yes it did have some, the one level close to the end with a giant definitely comes to mind. But other than that the game is great, and it probably has the best and most consistent use of two different characters in the history of adventure games. Fingus and Winkle interact with stuff differently and use items in different ways, but they are also two actual protagonists, without one being the other's sidekick. This was changed in Goblins 3 where you have only 1 protagonist with a sidekick - the sidekick usually can't interact with the same things Blount can and he also can't use items, while in some levels you don't even have a sidekick to begin with.

Also, this is now a Goblins appreciation station. Which is why I will reiterate that Goblins 3 is the best gaem evar in nearly all aspects, including the soundtrack.

 

Morpheus Kitami

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Goblins 1 was pretty bad and not just because of the health system. It also had shitty "puzzle" design that mostly involved lolrandom deaths and pure guesswork (guess wrong = deff), and I don't think I have to explain why this is bad in a game where you can take only 3 or something "wrong" decisions before you die. A good example of that is in I think level 2 or 3 where you are in some cavern and the brawny fellow has to jump onto a stalactite. Well there are three stalactites and they all look the same. But if you don't pick the right one, you lose health. I believe these things are also randomised on each restart, but I'm not even sure anymore.
I remember that level being pretty bad myself too, not just because of the spiked hat. The whole level was annoying. I've gone through it a could of times and I honestly can't remember any bullshit on par with that level. I assume you're talking about the mummy level, I think in-game that's level 5, but its the 4th unique screen.
As for Goblins 2, I wouldn't say that it had a 'lot' of filler, but yes it did have some, the one level close to the end with a giant definitely comes to mind. But other than that the game is great, and it probably has the best and most consistent use of two different characters in the history of adventure games. Fingus and Winkle interact with stuff differently and use items in different ways, but they are also two actual protagonists, without one being the other's sidekick. This was changed in Goblins 3 where you have only 1 protagonist with a sidekick - the sidekick usually can't interact with the same things Blount can and he also can't use items, while in some levels you don't even have a sidekick to begin with.
I don't think you remember it as well as you think you do. In the areas just before you rescue the prince to the end there's always some stupid "puzzle" you have to accomplish to get across the screen. As nice as the psychedelic areas are, they're extremely guilty of having this. That darn cannonball thing is my strongest memory of the game, because of just how many times you have to deal with it. Both games are very fond of making you restart levels, but 2 is like, oh, you put the wrong goblin in that location, have fun starting over. Or that stupid ass mayo puzzle. Not to mention how much pixel-hunting there is. Don't get me wrong, I like Coktel Vision a lot, but both games have very distinct flaws that needed correcting.
 

Sceptic

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I don't hate Gobliiins as much as Roxor does, but it's telling that I remember very little of it despite having finished it. I have MUCH more vivid recollection of Goblins 3, and even of Gobliins 2 despite never finishing that one.

I really like the double-protag experiment of Gobliins 2 and how well it's developed, but despite being more traditional and less original I do think Goblins 3 is the better game.
 

CryptRat

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That's why I love the three games, puzzles in 1 are exactly how Roxor describes them, looking for spots which are not spots where something happens, and then the 3 completely unique characters doing "random" things in the right order. It's really stupid in some way, but, if I'm sure in practice it's not, it's something which from my own experience is very unique to this single game. It's a very unique game, by far the most unique among the three, it's also already very funny, and yes when you lose health you failed and you reload, I like death in my adventure games, here it's just losing health instead, I'm fine with that. Also the level with the mummy is fun to solve.

2 & 3 are much more conventional, 2 with still very unique interactions to each characters, and the beginning when the guy let you enter because you bothered him enough I've always loved, and 3 is mostly just a very classic but very good adventure game, with awesome parts like the one in the dark with the colour things.
 

Norfleet

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My first adventure game was ADVENT, the first adventure game. It's the reason why the genre is even CALLED "Adventure Games". You damn kids, get off my lawn!
 

Darth Roxor

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I remember that level being pretty bad myself too, not just because of the spiked hat. The whole level was annoying. I've gone through it a could of times and I honestly can't remember any bullshit on par with that level. I assume you're talking about the mummy level, I think in-game that's level 5, but its the 4th unique screen.

The level I was referring to was this:

DOS_03.gif


The mummy level is of course another prominent example of bullshit. But the most shameless is probably this:

goblins7.gif


SEVEN CARROTS TO CHOOSE FROM. SOME ARE DEFF. WHICH ONES? WHO KNOWS! CHOOSE WISELY : - )

I also remember getting consistently frustrated by stupid lethal missclicks, like when the craftsman guy gets a hammer. If you use the hammer on anything wrong, OOPS, HE BASHES HIMSELF IN THE HEAD, THERE GOES YOUR HEALTH

I don't think you remember it as well as you think you do. In the areas just before you rescue the prince to the end there's always some stupid "puzzle" you have to accomplish to get across the screen.

I do in fact remember that these areas had something dumb to them. That's why I mentioned the giant.

Both games are very fond of making you restart levels, but 2 is like, oh, you put the wrong goblin in that location, have fun starting over.

Both? Try all 3 :M

"This zero represents the nothingness within us all" :M

Not to mention how much pixel-hunting there is.

Really. If there is one thing I've always appreciated about the Goblins series is that it had almost no pixel hunting whatsoever. IIRC even those things that are literally the size of a pixel always clearly stick out from the background.
 

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