The personal blog of game designer, programmer and Cand. Scient. Informatics, Jimmy Marcus Larsen. Currently working as a game designer at Cego ApS.
February 9, 2010 at 21:34
It has been almost a year since I wrote my last blog post! I better write something interesting right away.
I’ll write about hidden object games, because I have been playing those a lot during the last year. Before that, I actually thought of them as irrelevant games in a larger perspective. Sure, they were popular and all, but did they bring our medium forward? No way, I thought - maybe even backwards. They were like dumped down adventure games. Adventure games without puzzles - and without hours of walking around not being able to figure out what to do, until you finally get that big eureka moment when you solve the problem. Instead you are mindlessly staring at pictures looking for hidden objects, which are actually quite easy to find if you have just a little patience. But I have started to realize that these games are not irrelevant at all. They are slowly teaching a new generation of gamers how to play adventure games. These days, there are hidden object games with inventories and puzzles similar to those in adventure games (combine these, use this, turn that etc.), and the stories are often just as important as in an adventure game. I don’t think it will be long before the last missing ingredient - the “walking around between scenes with your avatar” element is added to a hidden object game, and when that happens we are really close to a big time revival of the adventure game genre.
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