And for all good Monkey Island lovers, I'd recommend the indie adventure game Jolly Rover. It's creators were definitely big fans.

Who* not that.

?

Yeah been playing that lately...good game, found out bout it cause the creators are helping Corie and Lorie Cole with Hero-U

An english video interview with Gilbert.

He talks about "Walking Dead", "Monkey Island" and of course "The Cave".

http://www.gamersglobal.de/news/62022/ron-gilbert-macht-gamersglobal-zur-hoehle-interview

Yes, I´ve played that one too, I liked it a lot. There can´t be enough of these stories.

It should be me that owns Sacrifice...

I think he meant who isn´t a "The Secret of the Monkey Island" lover, haha.

No, it should be me.

I think the problem with a lot of adventures is that their creators are not just fans but fanboys of classics like Monkey Island. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Jolly Rover, too, but it wasn't all that original. When people say "adventure games are dead", it doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't any adventure games anymore, just that the genre has hardly evolved since the 90's, and it's also due to all those parodies, hommages and same old jokes over and over again. Even the later sequels in the Monkey Island series itself suffered from that.

That being said, there are far worse offenders in this regard than Jolly Rover. It doesn't do anything new, but it's fun nevertheless.

I don´t think "adventure games are dead", to the contrary, as of late I think in some part (a big one) due to the indie breakout, there´ve been appearing good adventure games, take for example Gemini Rue, Resonance, Lost Horizon, Machinarium to name a few, and they are bringing the focus again to the classics like Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, etc.
Even when adventure games lost the focus, as the space simulators did (Descent Freespace :D) there´ve been always some great adventure games that got out, just like to remind us they were all but dead, like Syberia, The Longest Journey, The Broken Sword, etc. Like with all things they had a golden age, then a decadence and a resurgence.

Though I agree with you, when referring to pirate misadventures, all games that came after Monkey Island seem to borrow something from it, or, maybe it´s just that Monkey Island has all the ingredients (no, not rerring to a strand of hair, body fluid and a personal clothing ;P ) that make a classic pirate story good, at least to me, that is. So I don´t know how much can they deviate from those before stop being a nice pirate story, but, I´d like the same as you to see where it can lead to : )

When it tries to evolve in any way people tend to hate on it for not being what they are used to.

And I stopped playing Jolly Rover 3 minutes in because you couldn't stop the hot-spots from fucking blinking and it drove me insane.

It's not so much the gameplay that has to evolve in adventure games, I just feel that a lot of them have had too little ambitions regarding the story and setting (and in some cases also regarding the humor). You'll never surpass the classics by parodies. Back in the days the stories were fresh and original, and they were funny on their own, without referring to other adventures and breaking the fourth wall all the time. Always repeating what people already are familiar with, and most of the time in worse ways than the original games, made a lot of adventure games feel stale and not original anymore.


Actually, I never really agreed with the "Adventures are dead" thesis, I'm just trying to understand why people might have held that opinion until a few years ago. Because when people say "Rock is dead" or "Hip Hop is dead" or whatever, most of the times it doesn't mean that the genre has vanished but that it has stopped evolving and that the newer stuff doesn't live up to the originality of the "golden era".

Anyway, I'm a great fan of Wadjet Eye Games' adventures, and I've had lots of fun playing AGS games even before WEG was around, so to me the genre was never dead; it's just that IMO the better adventures were found among the indie freeware titles that Dave Gilbert partly managed to commercialise and professionalize now. If adventure games are still alive, I think we also have to thank Chris Jones, the creator of the AGS engine, for it, because he gave ambitious "amateur" authors a chance to let their imagination run wild, when most commercial releases brought nothing new to the table.

Looks like he's interested in talking to Disney about the game rights.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-12-11-monkey-island-creator-plans-disney-talks-ahead-of-new-game