Brain Not Brawn Please!

I wonder when it happened, but it certainly has. The adventure game has degenerated into a simplified hack and slash.

I remember a time when adventure games actually involved a concept of adventuring. How many of you share fond memories of the Scott Adams Adventures, or the Level 9 games, Collossal Adventure et al. In my opinion, this was the golden age of adventuring. As players we had to use our brain to solve puzzles that furthered the plot. There were no graphics to get in the way of a healthy imagination and I often found the text would suck me in deeply into a world like a fine novel. There were of course clunkers, with single line descriptions for locations, but the carefully crafted adventures would have reams of evocative stimulating text that would lift me from reality and carry me into the world of the author's devising.

The main pre-requisite for such gaming was a brain to mull over the puzzles and a pencil and paper to map out each location as it was encountered. How I yearn for a return to gaming where intellect replaces reflexes.

Now we see games marketed as adventures that involve walking around a landscape pressing the fight button and seeing if we survive. This is not adventuring in my book, but simplified, dumbed down gaming for the masses who are now assumed to have both attention deficit syndrome and a lust for violence. This new trend of gaming is quite apparent in both single player and multiplayer gaming and the really scary thing is that it sells! It seems there are hordes of gamers out there who are happy to play these simplified games.. We had games more complex than this on the days of the Amiga. The arrival of the consoles seemed to have sparked a terminal regression in gaming.

I am not against combat in games, far from it, but currently game developers seem to be working hard at making it the focus of games and ensuring that it is as simple as possible to conduct wholesale slaughter.

Thank heavens that there are still games around that stretch the imagination. The success of Killer Betties with our recent focus on puzzle gaming shows that there is still a large proportion of us who would rather flex our synapses than our virtual muscles. I always believe that it is a huge mistake to under-estimate the gameplaying public and the terrific response we have had to puzzle discussion on this website proves just that. Long may Killer Betties remind us that not all of us need blood and gore to enjoy computer entertainment!

Anklesock

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