Your first adventure game?

[catfood]

 

[CryptRat]

Gobliiins has a lot of trying things out (with funny results at least), a lot of trying each character's interactions in some levels. Don't get me wrong, there's also a good deal of both learning to play the game overall (at the beginning you get stuck at "invisible plates" and such, at the end you don't anymore) and figuring out levels, eventually you don't manage to complete a level by chance, you beat a level only when you really got it, but there's definitely a lot of required experiment compared to most traditional adventure games, and if you don't like that then you're going to hate the game.

Therefore it's 100% possible to hate Gobliiins but like 2 & 3 anyway which are more traditional adventure games, I really don't deny that, it's just that personally I like it too and I particularly like that it's really its own thing, completely unlike Lemmings and such and completely unlike traditional adventure games too (it's not about filling your character's bag with items ...). I think it's fun to figure out a level piece by piece and finally do it. Note, anyway, if you've not played the game, that it takes place in small one-screen levels, so you'll beat the game eventually, it's not particularly hard to beat, much easier than a Sierra game (and slightly easier than the sequels, I guess?).

It's fine to stop playing 1 and go to the next if you don't like it but I would not recommend skipping it without trying.

I feel like some levels feel a bit redundant when there are empty and you're simply jumping onto a border spot, clearly not all levels are as memorable as the mummy one or this one :

I like the story and the way it's told in 2 and especially 1 more than in 3 (not saying 3 is not the best of the bunch) which is mostly due to the multiple protagonists. The environment in 3 are great, but possibly the ones in 1 with all these giants and witch huts are even more to my taste.

One problem I had when playing 2 is that it took me about the entire game to figure out when to react to the other character's action, ultimately it's very logical from a gameplay view, you need to click just when the other character did his action but for a very long part of the game I wanted to take into account the controlled character's animation time and always did it too early, restarting 10 time and managed by chance because one time for some reason I probably did not react too early. Ultimately it killed my playthrough a bit, I think it's the only reason why I enjoyed 2 as much as the other games instead of more, it's maybe the best in reality.

3 is great, but yes it's classic, with parts where you're alone and when you're not it's often not as a big deal as in 2, also yes when I see the screenshot above with the 3 characters waiting the settings, story, tone are really even more to my taste than 3. Yet in 3 it's really brillantly served.

Love the 3, can't decide of one. Also, never played Woodruff, need to.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Most of what you say is true, and my opinion of Goblins 1 would probably be much different if not for the stupid health bar. The thing that, to me, is one of the more important parts of the Goblins series is to watch the characters suffer terrible cartoony accidents that also happen to be patently hilarious - and G1 is no exception, because the failures mostly tend to be freaking funny. BUT on balance, losing health in stupid ways and being forced to restart for stupid reasons is frustrating and takes away too much of the hilarity. If the game remained exactly like it was, with even the same trial-and-error design philosophy, but WITHOUT the health bar, I would probably find it fun. But as it is now, it's really just an exercise in frustration, at least to me.

Also, never played Woodruff, need to.

You should. Woodruff is pretty great, it has an excellent 'seamless adventure game world', though navigating it is a bit of a pain at first. In fact I should revisit it too, I never finished the game because the last time I tried, I played some shoddy scummvm version that had a gamebreaking bug, and I was so far in when I'd noticed it that I was too disenchanted to restart.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

The level I was referring to was this:

I know what you're talking about. I didn't mind those as much as dealing with the potion. That was straight-forward compared to the potion.

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

I get what you're trying to say, but I usually remember negative bits like this rather strongly. Its like, I remember the mummy, I remember the potion, I don't remember this screen very well. Maybe I just got lucky, maybe its because trial and error, when its all laid out in front of you just doesn't bother me.

Both? Try all 3

I haven't actually played 3 in like ten years, so I don't remember it very well. I'll take your word for it.

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.

Can't remember if there was anything later, but the talking tree area was definitely guilty of throwing pixel hunting multiple times.

Most of what you say is true, and my opinion of Goblins 1 would probably be much different if not for the stupid health bar. The thing that, to me, is one of the more important parts of the Goblins series is to watch the characters suffer terrible cartoony accidents that also happen to be patently hilarious - and G1 is no exception, because the failures mostly tend to be freaking funny. BUT on balance, losing health in stupid ways and being forced to restart for stupid reasons is frustrating and takes away too much of the hilarity. If the game remained exactly like it was, with even the same trial-and-error design philosophy, but WITHOUT the health bar, I would probably find it fun. But as it is now, it's really just an exercise in frustration, at least to me.

Coktel Vision had this weird problem around this time, where they seemed really sold on this password system for their games. Inca has it too, they are probably more with it. I'm willing to bet, if G1 offered a traditional save and load system, instead of writing down a password and restarting the whole game every time, the problem would be mitigated to the point where it isn't as annoying as it is now. Either way, nobody's going to do that for G1, since I doubt the official owners care and a fan remake would get hit with a cease and desist hard.

You should. Woodruff is pretty great, it has an excellent 'seamless adventure game world', though navigating it is a bit of a pain at first. In fact I should revisit it too, I never finished the game because the last time I tried, I played some shoddy scummvm version that had a gamebreaking bug, and I was so far in when I'd noticed it that I was too disenchanted to restart.

I haven't played this yet either, but there are two things of note. It was originally going to be Goblins 4, something that people probably can tell anyway. Secondly, I think its just a shame no one did more pixel art games, back in the day, like that. Its just so cool seeing actual high-res pixel art from back in the day. New stuff is nice, but it almost always comes off as subtly wrong.

 

[Dreed]

The very first adventure game I remember playing was Inca 2 from Coktel Vision (RIP ):

And the second one was probably Woodruff, I replayed it and the Gobliiins games a few years ago, but I haven't touched Inca in more than 25 years, I should get on it.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

The very first adventure game I remember playing was Inca 2 from Coktel Vision (RIP ):

And the second one was probably Woodruff, I replayed it and the Gobliiins games a few years ago, but I haven't touched Inca in more than 25 years, I should get on it.

wow, I remember Inca very vaguely.

these...head things...

 

[Zann]

 

[North Gibraltarian Dog]

It's not the absolute first, that probably was some previous shitty microcomputer shovelware "adventure" or few early classics played casually on some friend's most powerful systems, but one of the first adventures I owned, played extensively, completed and that I still remember with reverence was this:

La Abadía del Crimen (The Abbey of the Crime), released at 1987 on MSX, Spectrum, Amstrad and a bit later on DOS. A spanish cult classic isometric crime-solving adventure inspired by Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (and the previous year Annaud's film), with very good graphics for the date and some original mechanics and world design: the control of two characters, a obedience/faults system, some snitch monk running phisically to tell the Abbot about your faults, the fatal consequences of many actions, a dark zone to explore with torches, big highly detailed "pseudo-continous" map, etc. The game wasn't fully release outside Spain. The usual distribution and marketing problems in so many good spanish games (Severance, e.g.) hurt sales and prevented an eventual international publishing. The original lead designer Paco Menéndez, a very peculiar "creative genious" kind of programmer left the industry after only 3 games (developed from high school to middle of his University education), to have a tragic ending few years later wich increased the fame of the game in Spain as brilliant but cursed title*.

There is a 2008 remake for windows and much more recent, free and "extensum" version, available in four languages (eng, spa, ita, fre) with some modern pixel art graphics more or less faithful to the original, but I didn't play this version yet so I don't know how good it is: https://store.steampowered.com/app/474030/The_Abbey_of_Crime_Extensum/

* From a spanish newspaper + mobygames biography + wikipedia:

Spoiler

According Juan Delcan fellow dev and friend "he had a very particular way of programming. He never did it in front of the computer, instead, he used to wander with his hands crossed behind his back, just thinking. He could do this for an hour, sometimes even more, and then suddenly you would see a spark in his eyes. He would then sit down in front of the computer and immediately begin to type lines of code so fast that you would think he was possessed. It was like watching someone playing the piano: his head wasn't thinking any more, he was simply executing what he had already decided."

After completing "La Abadía del Crimen", he joined Opera Soft, one of the great Spanish video game studios of the eighties, where he only lasted a few months. He couldn't bear the corset of office hours and the demands of a small business. Paco suddenly decided to leave the field of game development because of the progressive commercialism in the videogame market. Bad experiences with Mikro-Gen's "Sir Fred" distribution also didn't help.

He began doing research in parallel data processing. He was after a chip that allowed to divide the information processing to speed up the process. "If you think about the entrances to a compound, Menéndez wanted to open all the doors for the public to distribute themselves instead of doing it through a single door," explained Gonzo Suárez, creator of Commandos and who shared an office with Suárez at Opera. but the idea, lost its revolutionary aspect over the years, as the importance of processing power fell in favor of other aspects of hardware.

In 1999 Paco Menéndez committed suicide jumping from his apartment in Sevilla. He was aged 34.

 

[Anthedon]

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. I played it a lot but I'm pretty sure I never finished it way back when.

 

[Galdred]

I got two Sierra games in a bundle (three actually, but never played the third):
Conquest of Camelot, with its lore riddles, whose answers were in the manual, because who doesn't love copy protection? It also had a lot of action parts. It was still pretty cool overall.

Iceman
I thought that piloting a nuclear submarine would be cool, but I didn't expect it to be a copy protection scheme(see a trend?). This one was much inferior, because you were forced into taking a serie of arbitrary actions, or it could mean game over much later (like check that the guard returned your own ID card, or discover 6 scenes later that you are screwed because you don't have the correct one...).

 

[Luzur]

I think....it was Hugo, or Space Quest 1 on Amiga

 

[turbo elephant]

Probably this one:

This. Now why has there never been a remake with 'more realistic models'? I'd pay some € for that

 

[Dexter]

This. Now why has there never been a remake with 'more realistic models'? I'd pay some € for that

https://store.steampowered.com/app/...y_in_the_Land_of_the_Lounge_Lizards_Reloaded/
https://af.gog.com/game/leisure_suit_larry_reloaded?as=1649904300
?

 

[Adidas-Clichèd Cringe]

Might still have the original CD somewhere.

 

[Neuromancer]

For me it was The Pawn by Magnetic Scrolls on my Atari ST.

I still remember starting the game for the first time and seeing the fantastic title screen (well, fantastic for its time ):

The adventure itself and its story were a little bit strange.
Some of the puzzles were a also somewhat far-fetched and my very poor English didn't help much.

So I only managed to complete it at that time with a walkthrough that someone had printed out on matrix printer paper.
(Where they got that from, I have no clue.)

 

[Neuromancer]

Blazing Dragons!
...
One of the first one to ever reach consoles iirc.

Not only that, but as far as I know, it was released ONLY for consoles.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

It would probably be The Hobbit, the text adventure, but I'm not sure it makes sense to mention it given that I was a kid who couldn't understand shit for English so obviously I didn't get very far.

This was exactly my experience. I was a kid at the time and wasn't able to solve it.

I re-played recently its 128K update:

The first adventure game that I solved by myself was Deja Vu on the Amiga:

 

[Cyberarmy]

Either The Last Crusade or Loom. Both are fantastic and made me love the genre.

 

[JarlFrank]

Monkey Island 1 and 2. Played them with my dad when I was 4 years old or so. Loved them to bits, we didn't get past the first island in either game until we bought hint books years later, but I loved just exploring the island and talking to NPCs. Didn't even care about making progress at that age.

Later dad would get other adventure games and it became our favorite genre. The two Indiana Jones games, some Leisure Suit Larrys (for which I was definitely too young at that point ), one or two King's Quests, Day of the Tentacle...

I started with Lucas Arts adventures and played Sierra titles only after them, and my overall impression was that Sierra games were worse in every way.

 

[Keshik]

Police Quest 2, really helped improve my typing skills.

 

[Lady Error]

The first one may have been a pirated copy of Space Quest 4, which was a rather... questionable experience (other than the pretty graphics for the time).

The first two games I bought were Wizardry 7 and this one:

 

[Red Hexapus]

I just remembered a funny little quirk about "The Secret of Monkey Island" that I played. The first part of the game is called "The Three Trials" where you have to complete these 3 quests to become a pirate.

The box of the game I got came with a short black booklet/manual translated into Polish. Whoever the translator was, I guess he/she never have seen the word "trial" nor played the game so the Polish translation was: "The Three Triangles" and the manual went on how you have to find those triangles to win the game...

 

[Lady Error]

The German translation of the Monkey Island games was done very well - and the guy went on to become a famous game tester, creating his own successful magazine and then becoming the X-Box boss at Microsoft in Germany. Quite a career.

 

[Sòren]

pretty sure it was this.

 

[Mark Richard]

Space Quest II. Maybe. My dad owned a DOS computer back in the day and has always loved games & sci-fi, so it's hard to pin down exactly when I graduated from watching to playing. Even watching was participation of a sort - excitedly shouting orders from my adjacent chair like a starship captain. If the order resulted in success, I got full credit. If not... my dad clearly didn't follow my instructions properly and took the blame. Win-win.