The Games of my Life

In the 80s, adventure games – where you take the role of a fictional character, solve puzzles and live a story – were quite popular – never a “mainstream” genre, but one of the most successful “niche” ones. Most games then were text adventures, where descriptions were text-based (possible with a static picture at the top of the screen), and the game had a parser which was able (up to a point) to understand what you want. I’ve talked about one of them, The Hobbit, before.

In the early 90s, as more powerful computers became available, the genre shifted a bit, to graphical adventures. Many of them were from Sierra (Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc.) and from LucasArts (then LucasFilm Games) (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Monkey Island, etc.). These were much more successful, as players no longer had to do that scary thing called “reading”, or that even scarier thing called “imagining”. One of the best ones, which I’ve mentioned here before, is Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers.

But in the late 90s, adventure games mostly vanished off the face of the earth. People, it seemed, wanted only first person shooters, and endless revisions of sports games. Thinking, solving puzzles and interacting with other characters were, apparently, out of fashion.

Then, in 1999, there came two amazing adventure games which, while not making adventure games highly successful, at least were a blast to play, and sold very well for adventure games. One of them is Gabriel Knight 3, which I’ll talk about in the future (hint: “The Da Vinci Code” is but a watered-down version of it). The other is Funcom’s The Longest Journey.

And what a magical game it was.

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Ah, the hours and hours I spent with this one. Why aren’t there more games like Microprose’s Darklands?

Too intellectual, I’d guess. Or too original. People, unfortunately, do seem to want more and more of the same.

Darklands was a computer role-playing game. “Ah, another Tolkien rip-off with elves and orcs and dwarves, where you do quests and, mostly, kill monsters for experience points (XP), which make you level up, then be able to kill bigger monsters, which give even more XP, and so on”, you may think.

And you’d be right for, well, almost any other CRPG (the exceptions are those which aren’t medieval, but futuristic, for instance – and the rest of the description still applies).

But not Darklands.

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Chalk this one as another “don’t play anything else until I get to the end” game. The year was 1993, and the game was Sierra’s Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers.

Written by Jane Jensen, whose games I’ve never missed after this one, GK is a mature adventure game, set in New Orleans. The main character, Gabriel, is a horror novelist who begins to investigate a recent succession of apparently Voodoo-related murders, in order to get inspiration for the plot of his new book. Little does he know that he will get much more personally involved with them than he ever thought possible… or desired.

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This game has a big problem. The load times. For some reason, in my Athlon XP 2000 with 1 GB of RAM and a fast hard drive, they’re huge – not “read a book”-like, but, still, 30-60 seconds to load a battle and 30-60 seconds to come back to the main map are, IMO, too much. Especially since Rome: Total War, their more recent and even more detailed game, actually has shorter load times.

That’s the problem. In almost every other respect, Medieval: Total War is virtually perfect.

M:TW, like its predecessor Shogun: Total War and its successor Rome: Total War, is a historical turn-based strategy game with fantastic real-time battles. These are really wonderful – no other game, except perhaps Close Combat, simulates a battle so well – and that one was squad-based. This one, though, can have armies of 10.000 men. On each side. And they all move, shout, fight and, possibly, die.

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