Well, the last few days I've been playing adventure computer games.

re-playing adventure games. I'm such a loser.

For anyone who doesn't know (since the breed has largely died out) adventure games are part story, part game. You have a character, and he/she goes around solving things. And they aren't like puzzle-puzzles like Myst or something where you have to move stone blocks around to make a pattern, they're logic puzzles, where you go around talking to people and picking up stuff to meet your mission. The most popular of these is probably the KingsQuest series, if that rings a bell.

Anyway, I miss those so badly...(they don't come out much anymore, so I re-play a lot of the old ones) Arcade things where you just kill things really aren't my style, I have trouble getting into them (not that killing things occaisionally in the game is bad, the Quest For Glory series is one of my favorite). Adventure games are so great, because they tell a story, and challenge your brain. Sierra's (the biggest name in Adventure games) has largely discontinued all of their popular series, though they obviously must not be as popular as I thought (anymore, anyway) because otherwise they wouldn't discontinue. Their most popular series, Kings Quest--they made the last game into one of the video games I've mentioned above, pretty much ruining it. Quest for Glory was brought back for one more game, from popular demand. This last "extra," very nearly was another crappy video game*, as was one of the SpaceQuests (especially unsuited for the video genre, it's charm was largely derived from humor and the goofy protagonist, space Janitor Roger Wilco). that ended up being canceled altogether,

Lately, I've been playing the funny ones. Revolution Software's Broken Sword: Circle of Blood and Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror are the best. Circle of Blood does not sound humorous, but it makes me laugh so hard. The basic premise is: You're this guy named George Stobbart, and this guy gets murdered by a clown right in front of you, and then you're determined to solve it, (some spoilers after this, if you ever plan to play the game) and you trace it to this ancient order of assassins, the hashiashin(sp?) from which the actual term assassin came from, only it turns out the clown (who also murders another guy, dressed up as a pixie instead of a clown this time) is a good guy, because the people he's killing is this crazy cult bent on world domination based on the ancient order of Christian knights, the Knights Templar. (The Knights Templar are kind of french people's king arthur. One of their kings made the pope excommunicate and burn all sorts of them at the stake just to get their money, but the templar treasure was never found.)

So as well as the humor, it has "history dork" element that I appreciate. One of my favorite parts is you keep carrying around this used tissue and showing it to people, and they keep being like "you freak!" and in the sequel, you put this whole tripod thing down your pants. And people keep saying weird things in funny accents.

I'm also enjoying LucasArts Monkey Island series. Mucho amusing.

Yep. My life is that boring.

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* Not all video games are crappy, but the ones Sierra attempts are not a credit to the Video genre, or any genre.