From: Michael Edward
J.
Subject: Hall of Shame Choice.
This might be a controversial choice, but it's my personal belief that
'The
7th Guest' should top the Hall of Shame list.
Seriously, now. I think
I'm entitled to say this. I'm not some pink-bottomed johnny-come-lately
fan whose only exposure to gaming
is Grand
Theft Auto. I've been playing and collecting for well over fifteen
years.
I've played everything from the original 'Thexder' to 'The Blue
and the
Grey' to 'Leisure Suit Larry 5." The history and broad trends
of gaming are
no mystery to me, and so from a technical perspective, I think
I can make a
reasonable argument.
I'm also a young guy.
I'm a law student in my early twenties, and I became
a gamer during the golden age of adventure games. Just from the
timing of
my interest in games, I think I'm well-suited to take a step back
and look
at what f*cked everything all up.
I blame The 7th Guest
for a large part of the death of the adventure game.
There were a lot of other factors -- the rise in popularity in
other genres,
the move to icon-based game engines, and, really, the popularity
of gaming
itself -- as computer games became more popular and more mainstream,
they
were much more ripe to "go Hollywood" and cater to a
less demanding audience
that just wanted to shoot stuff. But, I do think that The 7th Guest
killed
what we would call the classic adventure game with what has to
be a tool of
Satan, himself -- forced story-integrated puzzle solving.
I remember when real
companies made games -- companies with names like
Sierra On-Line and Lucasfilm (or Lucasarts, if you must). There,
the
puzzles had something to do with unravelling the story. You could
imagine
them occurring in real life. They weren't straight-up inventory
puzzles
where one item used on one problem solves the situation. But they
involved
searching the environment, engaging in dialogue, thinking creatively
(which
was very necessary given old parsers), and having fun. Imagining
yourself
BEING there.
Sure, there were mazes,
and every now and then you'd be called upon to solve
the Towers of Hanoi puzzle AGAIN, but it was mostly very creative,
very
thoughtful, and even-brained. 'Myst' paved the way for The 7th
Guest by
creating a game where unapologetic logic puzzles were relevant
to the
environment. Mind you, I don't think Myst is much fun at all, but
at least
those verdamnt puzzles were reasonable for the type of world Myst
tried to
create. Gears and charts and all that crap.
Whereas, there was no
reason to make The 7th Guest as mind-numbing as it
was. The Cake Puzzle does it for me. You're in a haunted house.
Okay.
There's loads of ways you can make fun, story-relevant puzzles
out of that.
You come into a room where there's a cake on the table. And what
do you
have to do? Arrange the cake into pieces so that every piece has
an equal
number of symbols on it?
Okay, THIS is what really
gets my goat. When I want to play with a Rubix
Cube, I will, thank you very much, and I won't need to spend $39.95
to do
it. Similarly, if I want word-puzzles straight out of one of those
crossword books you can get at the drugstore, I can find cheaper
means of
satiating myself, also. The designers took a question straight
out of the
SATs and gave it the thinnest of veneers so they could put it in
their
rotten game.
And what was the consequence?
Well, boring as it was, The 7th Guest was a
very pretty game, especially for its time. I loaded it up this
last summer,
actually, and I was amazed at how good it still looked. Heralded
as a
breakthrough in the industry (also the first game I got on CD-ROM,
if that
means anything). So, it got a lot of press. And, pretty soon, misguided
folks were calling it an adventure game. It got so that every game
you
bought that didn't purport to be a World War II simulation or a
3D shooter
was crammed full of these idiotic puzzles. Even Sierra bought into
it, so
you got shameful little works like 'Shivers' and 'Lighthouse.'
Lucasarts
held out for a while...Sierra had long since given in to the masses
and
started making tripe like that one Diablo rip-off with the samurai
when
Lucasarts made what I hold to be the last, true adventure game:
Grim
Fandango. A masterpiece. A swansong, really.
And, like I say, very
important other factors played a role in killing
adventure games off. But I think that most games stopped being
fun after
The 7th Guest. Companies (mistakenly?) discerned that that sort
of puzzle
was what the consumer was looking for, and they just cranked out
load after
load of pushy logic puzzles. Those aren't fun -- who the hell wants
to take
an IQ test for fun -- and so whatever new gamers might have become
interested in this great genre were turned away.
Thanks,
Mike J.
