News Lucasarts looking at reviving adventure games?

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/06/02/lucasarts-looking-at-reviving-adventure-games/1

Lucasarts could be looking at reviving the adventure game genre if only the hardware wasn't a problem. Wait, what?

 

THE Chuck Norris?

 

Chuck Norris? He must get a lot of jokes.

Maybe he meant the later games like Grim Fandango.

 

That was my second thought.

My first was: revive adventure games? Yes, please.

 

If there's one man that can make it happen, then it would be Chuck Norris

 

I was waiting, waiting, waiting....... and then yes, finally, he mentioned Monkey Island. Everyone's waiting for the next Monkey Island. And it'll be so much more fun than Crysis.

 

My bad. The guy's name is actually Chris Norris. Don't know why I got it wrong. Maybe Chuck Norris was psychically influencing me.

 

If the cartridge isnt big enough why not put the game on 2. Sure would be possible or not? Would love to see Indiana Jones atlantis as i STILL have not finished it

 

How big is a DS cart? Remember that most of the more recent Lucasarts titles came with hours and hours of spoken voice. Fate of Atlantis, for example, clocks in at around 160Mb, 95% of which are the voices. Cool news none the less though.

 

Could easily be Text only though, just like Monkey Island, Loom, Maniac Mansion, Zack McCracken etc...

 

Wait.. oh, psychically. I read that as physically.

I'd have thought they'd be doing something for the new Indy flick.

The DS/Wii would suit a point and click perfectly, imo. I wonder if the honours are going to another hand-held console though?

 

None of which, save Monkey Island, are particularly well known outside of point-and-click fan circles, and none of which, save Monkey Island, are the titles that people will be after if Lucas Arts rereleased their back catelogue.

It'd be like id releasing their back catelogue onto the DS, but only providing Wolfenstein 3D, it's sequal, and the custom port of Mario that Jonh Carmack did when he was 17. Better not to do it at all than only release the more obscure titles.

 

(1) compression has moved on a loooong way since Fate of Atlantis etc.

(2) you don't need super ninja high quality audio for a DS game, so could compress aggressively.

(3) I'd imagine DS carts vary in size according to the size of the game. 160MB of flash would cost you about 3p nowadays, and you can fit 16GB in an SDHC card, so there's no technical or economic reason why something the size and cost of a DS game couldn't have enough space.

 

It'll be perfect for the DS.

 

I think Maniac Mansion and the early Indiana Jones games are perfectly well know. Besides, if audio was THAT much of a problem then you could just run DOTT and Sam and Max in text modes anyway. The only games I can see them having trouble moving to DS would be Curse of Monkey Island and Full Throttle since they have higher quality visuals and full audio.

 

bring back the smell of asphalt, siphoning petrol and trapping savage dogs with crushed cars!!!

full throttle would be an awesome game for the DS

 

You can play them on the DS and I have done!

The ScummVM DS emulator (http://scummvm.drunkencoders.com/) can play the vast majority of lucasarts games (not monkey island 3 and beyond), and the games are at most 60MB. I think it's just the audio that would take up space, but that can easily be compressed. There are also DS cartridges as big as 256MB, although only seen in Japan, but 128MB is pretty common in Europe and North America.

 

With todays techniques like Mpeg layer 3 compression the voices would be reduced to almost nothing. They all are mono 16bit 22khz anyway. so they would be reduces to max 20mb or something. Then make a compressor for the whole code and you could decompres on the fly when the game is loading parts.

 

Problem is, LucasArts are too busy milking dry the Star Wars universe to work on anything that is non Star Wars related.

 

well star wars galaxy's is pretty much dead in the water now... so that is one game they don't have to worry about