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I mean, after you've finished them, you can't keep playing them over and over because there's nothing really to "play."

Yet people did. And still do. People read some books over and over again. People watch some movies over and over again. The same music, over and over again. And some people, the same games, over and over again.

Grim Fandango is at the top of my short list of games I replay once a year, at least. Followed closely by Mega Man 2 and Wind Waker.

There aren't any surprises to it, just a good story, style, music, and humor. Some people like to watch certain movies over and over. I like going back to Rubacava and feeling like an ace detective when I remember Tuesday is Kitty Hat Day.

  > Wind Waker

People were mad at Nintendo for going cell-shaded, but the cell-shaded graphics hold up much better to the test of time, than say The Ocarina of Time.

Agreed. Plus, I think the only people who worry that they're going to look like kids for enjoying it are kids.

> the only people who worry that they're going to look like kids for enjoying it are kids

Exactly. Well, adolescents, really: People who are insulted by being considered childish because they still think they are and they don't want to be. They're trying to transition into the new role of adulthood and confusing them with their former role of child makes them insecure because they think they're failing.

They're also embarrassed by the less self-conscious actions of older people, who are less self-conscious precisely because nobody is going to mistake a 50-year-old for a child.

It was also a wonderful departure from the style of the previous games in the series. I loved sailing about, looking for islands and ships to explore. Easily up there in my top 10, along with similar styled games like Okami.

"Grim Fandango is at the top of my short list of games I replay once a year"

It seems work on ResidualVM is coming along, so Grim Fandango may be playable on my laptop - might finally get to finish it.

I still play Full Throttle frequently, maybe as often as once a year. I've played through The Dig around 3 or 4 times too.

Most AAA games are so linear nowadays that I'd rather replay old adventure games than recent titles.

These were very linear too though. Sure: some like Monkey Island had a map that gave you the illusion of having a whole world to explore, but there still was a fixed sequence of events that couldn't be broken.

None of the decisions you made had any effect for the future or could just flat-out prevent you from finishing the game. Some (Sierra) called that a feature, others (Lucas Arts) a bug.

Maniac Mansion 1 and The Fate of Atlantis are the only two Lucas Arts games that provided a little bit of nonlinearity. Maniac Mansion with its different ways to solve the game based on character selection and Indiana Jones with its selection of one of three quite different paths through the game.

Yeah, gameplay wise they're like manually solving a makefile's dependencies. Of course we know the whole point is not in the structure of the solution but in the written content of the story. It's in the way the game world starts living inside the player's head, where all of the action is. I remember thinking about some FOTA puzzle during a bus trip for several hours without even having the game available.

>This is a good question as the answer should be self-evident -- i.e. they were just great, well-written fun games -- but it's not. As pure gaming, they weren't "great" in the classical sense. I mean, after you've finished them, you can't keep playing them over and over because there's nothing really to "play."

And who said games should be player multiple times?

One can conceive of one-time games, and adventure games were precisely that.

> And there's always the power of nostalgia to exaggerate how good things really were back then...

I think it is a bit of nostalgia. I think those are the games we enjoyed playing, and for many, those were the first games we played. Those are always memorable, just like the first love, or first learning to drive.

I played to monkey island games for the first time a couple of years ago and think they actually are as good as the nostalgic people claim. Nostalgia clouds your memory a bit, yes, but the games are excellent.

You mention the limits which were there due to technical constraints and i agree somewhat..

However, there also was a certain degree of "limitlessnes" in a sense that you could (and at least i would) try out a lot of different things and sometimes they'd have some sort of funny effect or some unexpected result - for example if you'd open a stump of a tree in Monkey Island (or was it MI 2? Not sure after all those years) you'd be asked to insert disk #38 or something...

And IMHO it's all those little things and details that makes those games stand out in a time where everything is polished to absolute detail (in terms of GFX and CGI) and yet the worlds feel dull and unpolished...

Limits are often good things, especially when it stretches creator and player alike to imagine things outside the boundaries.

Terry Pratchett said something similar about writing - that the best stories turn on limitations.

And Mark Rosewater of Magic the Gathering design. "Restrictions breed creativity" has become a catchphrase associated with him.

If an author is told to write a science fiction story, that gives no hint or help on what to do with the request. Tell him to write a story about tigers escaping during the process of Mars terraforming, and now you've got something.

In Magic terms, being directed to design a creature doesn't push the designer in any useful direction. But "Design a small black creature that uses this set's new mechanic", and it will come to be. Much of MTG is conceptualized in such ways, right down to the color pie, where what colors can't do is even more important than what they can.

Wouldn't increased budgets actually lead to much worse stuff since you have more employees and production steps and get afraid of the average joe not getting it. You get further and further from coherent artistic visions and jokes you find funny yourself. Those games back then were not made for average people, because average people didn't even have PC:s. People who played them also had less other distractions so the games didn't need to be so in-your-face to get attention.

The title was "Indiana Jones and the Saucermen from Mars".