RIP PC Gaming

My first experience with video games came from arcades and my Atari 2600, but it wasn't until my family got an Apple IIc that I really got into them. I was living outside the U.S. at this point, and there was this small store in a sketchy part of the city that sold computers and parts, but also had a huge catalogue of pretty much every computer game ever released, with the copy protections cracked. If you brought your own blank 5 1/4-inch floppy disk, they'd copy any game for you for only $5 each. Luckily, it never occurred to my parents that this sort of blatant piracy was wrong, so we made frequent trips.

My friends would come over and we'd play Phantasie or The Bard's Tale, each of us taking responsibility for the decisions of one of the members of our party of adventurers. Alone, I struggled through Infocom's text games like Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And when a new King's Quest or Space Quest game came out, it was the high point of my year. (Sadly, if a new King's Quest or Space Quest game came out today, it would still be the high point of my year.)

The mid-90s were a great time to be a gamer. Dark Forces, Betrayal at Krondor, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Civilization II, Warcraft, Jagged Alliance, etc. were all amazing games. I barely touched my Super Nintendo, and never even owned a Nintendo 64 or a Playstation. I didn't need one. Before Kotaku or Joystiq, there was PC Gamer magazine, which was not only the best place to find out about upcoming games, but had an incredible collection of columnists.

Then technology fucked everything up.

Publishers started focusing on graphics over gameplay, and the whole industry began tilting towards multiplayer games, which weren't really my thing. Don't get me wrong, I logged in plenty of hours of Doom II and Warcraft over my 14.4K modem, but I always preferred games with good stories that I could play leisurely, as opposed to ones with non-stop action. Unfortunately, I was in a minority, and the adventure game genre, which had been so prevalent in the '80s and '90s, slowly vanished.

There's a famous article on Old Man Murray about why adventure games deserved to die. It's pretty spot on. In my case, it's especially telling that after years of burning through various adventure games, I played the game featured in the article, Gabriel Knight III, and not once did it ever occur to me that constructing a fake moustache using a packet of syrup and cat fur was in any way strange. It was just the kind of crap you did. On the whole, Gabriel Knight III wasn't bad, but it's impossible to excuse awful details like that once you become aware of them. That was probably the last adventure game I ever played. I got the last King's Quest game, but that was as much action as adventure, and worse, it really sucked.

The demands of new graphic-heavy games became an issue, too. It used to be that when you purchased a game, you could be certain that it would work on your computer. That was no longer the case by the late '90s/early '00s. Sure, they listed the system requirements on the package, but for people like me who never bothered to learn more about computers than how to turn them on, that didn't mean much. All I knew is that a month after getting a brand new Compaq, I bought Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, only to get home and find that my system couldn't handle it. You shouldn't have to have a top of the line processor or video card just to get a computer game to work.

I was in Best Buy a couple of weeks ago, and in a moment of nostalgia, decided to check out the PC games section. It was pathetic. Most of the titles on the handful of shelves were World of Warcraft-related, with a few other MMORPGs and games aimed at young kids there also. There were other random games, but nothing that really caught my interest. Except for one:

Art of Murder? Great title! Three games for $20? What looked like some good, old-fashioned adventure gaming? Sold!

Before I bought it, it occurred to me that I should probably check out reviews for this game on my phone, just in case it turned out that you couldn't actually judge how good a game was simply by it having a cool title and a low price. But I didn't.

So I got home, installed it on my computer, and started playing. Ten minutes later, I'd quit and had gone back to Dead Rising 2 on my Xbox. The game exemplified everything that's horrible and tedious and contrived about adventure games.

It begins in the least-convincing FBI field office ever (the fact that only three people are currently working in it is explained by it not "officially" opening for a few more days). The voice acting is sub par. But I could overlook both of those. What I couldn't overlook, though, was the horrible gameplay. The excitement begins with you having to find your partner's cell phone number and call him, and then print off a report for your boss. You'd think both these tasks would be easy. So easy, in fact, that it wouldn't even be worth putting in the game. But no. The former requires you to find the number on a bulletin board, dial it, realize it's the wrong number, and have a secretary email you the correct one. The latter is complicated by the office printer being out of paper, at which point you get to go into the supply room to look for more.

Needless to say, this stretches the definition of "adventure."

Don't get me wrong, it's a great, realistic portrayal of office life. But no one fucking buys a game called Art of Murder in the hopes that it's accurate simulation of working in an office. I'm sure the game gets better later on--although, going by those reviews I didn't read when I should have, maybe not--and I'll probably give it another shot when I'm really just super fucking bored. But I'm never buying another PC game. Ne. Ver.

RIP Adventure Gaming. You gave me a lot of great years. But now I guess it's all about killing Nazis and zombies and Nazi zombies on consoles. Actually, that doesn't sound so bad.