I'm playing Broken Sword right now and given that the genre is so small these days I was wondering why smaller developers weren't making more of them. Old school style. With digital distribution, hard drives, touch screens and pointers the time is ripe to reap the rewards. 

I assumed that small teams would turn to these titles to make a name for themselves. You have a writer, some witty dialogue. An artist can do the backgrounds and characters, a few programmers. I'm not talking massive games but shouldn't you be seeing shorter Sam and Max style graphic adventures being made, in 2-D and digitally distributed?

How can such an iconic and delightful genre just die?

I thought that this would be the genre of choice for small teams or imaginative people. I mean compare making a graphic adventure to making a proper 3-D game.

I go between Paris and Ireland in Broken sword. They want to add a new location, your artist draws and colours a background. Your writer does some new dialogue. You animate some characters and have a few hotspots for clicking. It can't be that hard.

It sounds like a really cheap way to make a game and tell a good story with a lot of charm. Digital distribution should make these games ubiquitous.

http://www.agdinteractive.com/

If you like old school adventure games check these guys out.  They've been remaking old Sierra Online games and have done a pretty good job.  They've remade King's Quest and Quest for Glory II, but King's Quest II is their triumph.  They took a very bare bones game and gave it a very detailed story that fits right into the King's Quest mythology.  I highly HIGHLY recommend you download this.  It's free and is a great way to kill a weekend.

gamingeek said:

Does it have speech?

I will download it on the other comp.

Anyone remember Police quest?

I don't think so.  Don't really remember. It's been like a year or two since I've played it.

And yes I remember Police Quest.  Frankly I wasn't really a fan of the series.  The first was kind of meh, Police Quest 2 was pretty good, but three was terrible.  And then after that it changed formats when it went to Police Quest SWAT and I never considered it again.

gamingeek said:

I really want to download this free Beneath a steel sky thing. But does it have speech and is there somewhere I can get it without registering an account or credit card?

I know its legally free at some places, but I cant remember where.

good old games

i think you only have to register an email perhaps.  i'm pretty sure no credit card required

gamingeek said:

I really want to download this free Beneath a steel sky thing. But does it have speech and is there somewhere I can get it without registering an account or credit card?

I know its legally free at some places, but I cant remember where.

 Yep just e-mail. And there was sound for me. 

Lure of the Tempresse's sound dind't work for me,t hough. BASS is much better anyway.

gamingeek said:

Foolz said:

gamingeek said:

I really want to download this free Beneath a steel sky thing. But does it have speech and is there somewhere I can get it without registering an account or credit card?

I know its legally free at some places, but I cant remember where.

 Yep just e-mail. And there was sound for me. 

Lure of the Tempresse's sound dind't work for me,t hough. BASS is much better anyway.

 When I say sound I mean spoken dialouge all the way through the game. Because I remember back in the early 90s when I had these game, they came on about 15 floppy discs, each disc was like 1.5mb And then much later CD rom versions came with full speech. 

 From I can remember all the the dialogue was spoken. I might be wrong, though, and minor bits didn't have sound, but I can't be sure because I ended up reading the dialogue quickly and then skipping to the next bit of dialogue.