The International House of Mojo

I'm sorry to say this but VS is boring. I love the classic feel and 2D look of this game. It's awesome and better than in Sam & Max. But the writing... It's just not what it should be. I hope the next one will be much better and hopefully with other cast of characters. Of course, everyone should give it a try anyway.

"though again, the areas with which I take issue happen to be the most subjective"

I was thinking that same thing. To be fair I haven't had chance to play through much of A Vampyre Story at this current point, but I often hold writing and (in a humorous game at least) humour higher than puzzle and even gameplay quality. This only really applies to the Adventure genre, but it still sticks with me.

I'll have to wait and see with AVS, but at the moment it's not quite nailing the writing for me - which is why other games (like Penny Arcade Ep 2) are tempting me away.

"That reminds me to give kudos to one of the game's subtlest but most effective features – holding the tab key will display all of the interactive objects in a current location. Pixel hunting is no more!"
When I first saw this feature in Simon the Sorcerer 2 I thought it would become a part of basic functionality that would be featured in each and every subsequently released adventure game, similiarly to what would later happen to WASD layout in shooters or speeding time up in city building games. For some odd reason this didn't occur, and there's no excuse for that. Kudos to Till Biller.

I'm playing it right now. It has indeed the feel of Lucasarts, however it is certainly not as polished as those old adventure games. First of all the graphical glitches, second of all the gameplay glitches (at a certain point you can take the dry ice over and over again, even bring it to chapter 2).
And illogical stuff: for everything, you can either 1) take it directly, 2) 'remember it', or 3) not get it. However, the sugar belongs to a 4th option. So that puzzle was unfair to me. The gypsy lady cutscene was indeed way too long, and I didn't notice any lipsynching at all! Maybe it works for the German version? And then the option to skip dialogue or walking is nice, however it often doesn't work correctly.
The story is nice, no real complaints there. Just I wish Tiller had decided to use 2 months or so of extra play-testing and bug testing. What use is a Halloween release, if it's not polished?
Just my 2 cents

This game did not make a Halloween release.

true, i meant a 'near' halloween release :)

Just to be clear, I'm not making excuses for the game's glitches, I'm just saying don't accuse the parties involved of trying to rush it out the door. This game was initially announced for a release LAST Halloween.

It still feels a little off though. I noticed there were some very serious memory issues with the game where I'd play it for half an hour and it would slow to a crawl and finally crash. It was, by all means, an excellent game, it just needed more testing.

Heh. I remember there were complaints that Curse of Monkey Island was too short at the time it got released. Now it's being called a "monster adventure game".

Because it is a monster adventure game.

It certainly is very satisfying in all regards, but it doesn't strike me as one of the longer adventure games from its times. I'd say the current adventures are quite short rather than any of the old ones were monsters.

For what it's worth... Have you watched the YouTube playthroughs of old LucasArts games? Even the "really long ones," when played by a seasoned adventure game player (or, obviously, replayed by someone who knows the solutions), are often surprisingly shorter than your childhood memories would have you believe.

I think you're compairing apples with oranges here. A walkthrough of a game by someone who knows the solution is not comparable to a fresh first run through a new adventure game. For a proper comparison, you have to take into account the full number of actions a player has to perform in order to finish the game. The year the game came out, with whatever availablity of ready solutions, is irrelevant. The fact is, people can finish AVS in a matter of days, whereas games like MI1, MI2, DoTT, etcc took substantially longer (weeks, months??).

I think though that a lot of times when people do attempt to calculate the length of an adventure game they do so based on an experienced equipped with a walkthrough, or at least with help, whether they admit it or not. Knowing the puzzles to all the games you've listed, I could probably beat MI1, MI2, DOTT, and AVS in about the same amount of time...but of course once you start trying to beat an adventure game in a speedrun, the point is lost. I also don't see how someone who can beat AVS in a few days with no outside help will need months to beat the other games you mentioned.

Considering the general ridiculousness of adventure game puzzles, I do not criticize anyone who would resort to a walkthrough, but I think that we must admit that once they enter the equation, we forfeit the ability to accurately measure length or puzzle difficulty. CMI is a monster adventure game in terms of the scope, the number of locations, the amount of characters, the budget, etc. I'm sure there are games with cheap puzzles that are "longer" than CMI in that the game has more backtracking and fetch quest puzzles to pad the experience, but in terms of content, CMI is on the short list of biggest adventure games ever in my mind.

Yeah, it's clearly more about the whole subjective experience of just being in the game and how long it lasts. That's why I prefer to measure adventure games by the size of the game world rather than by the precise time needed to finish them, which varies greatly from gamer to gamer (even experienced ones) anyway.

those games were longer because they were harder! and there was no internet so nop easy access to walkthroughs.. if you got stuck you might have been stuck for a few months..

I almost always bought Jo Ashburn's Player's Guide when I bought a game. It wasn't just for the walkthroughs, although admittedly I did use them. The manuals contained a lot of information on neat stuff like deleted scenes and unused music.

If there's anything I miss about modern adventure games, it's the in-depth player guides.

I usually already had a full walkthrough in some computer games magazine before I finally bought a game.