Feature Friday: I <3 Classic Adventure Games

We interrupt a previously planned feature for this love note to classic adventure gaming.

I had a whole feature idea planned out about sexism in video games, and at the last minute I decided that I would pocket that one away for a rainy day — or at least a day where I was able to put more thought into it.

Last night I watched one of my favorite movies of all time: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. This is the third movie in the Indiana Jones Trilogy — er, Quadrilogy (thanks, Crystal Skull), and it’s Indiana Jones at his finest.

As I was watching the beginning of the movie, where Indy avoids the flood of students and faculty, all there to meet with him — seems that Dr. Jones has a tendency to disappear on expeditions from time to time and not grade his papers — and he sneaks out of his office window to escape. It immediately made me think of an computer game that I hadn’t thought of in a long, long time. The LucasArts point-and-click adventure version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Between Sierra Online and LucasArts, it’s a tought toss-up who made the best adventure games during the mid-to-late 80s and throughout 90s. However, when I do think of LucasArts adventure games, I tend to give The Secret of Monkey Island the gold star — which it rightfully deserves, because it’s awesome, but for a game based on a movie franchise, LucasArts’ The Last Crusade was pretty damn good!

I won’t bore you with the details of how I found myself remembering more about the computer game’s version a particular scene, rather than focusing on the movie itself. But I did.

It got me thinking about how much I loved classic adventure games — it didn’t matter if you had to type in your commands or if it was of a more modern design, where you could use a mouse to simplify the action.

It seems that the adventure genre has these ebbs and flows, as of late, with the influence that TellTale games has had on the industry. It started awhile back with the serialization of the Sam & Max games, another LucasArts title, gained some popularity of the past decade, and then slowed again until just recently when The Walking Dead series was released and took everybody by surprise, and earned a lot of recognition for game of the year — including mine personal choice for GOTY.

I am interested to try out their new adventure series based on the Fables graphic novels, A Wolf Among Us, as it looks to be pretty good, and the word-of-mouth has been positive.

So, next week’s feature will be something a little more thought-out, rather than this impromptu stream-of-consciousness about how much I love classic adventure games (and the movies that accompany them).