Mastermind Rational
The Greats/Epic Fails section needs to be reworked. Right now, it looks like someone's Top 30 Favorite Adventure Games list of Zero Context Examples. The point of these sections is to explain for each example which genre conventions that game implements particularly well (in The Greats), and which aspects of it should be avoided when making new games (in The Fails).
Edited by Koveras
Heathen
This seems very, very slanted towards old Sierra-style adventure games. The fact that Telltale Games doesn't get mentioned in here at all, despite doing well for themselves using the Lucas Arts model, seems pretty suspicious.
Also, well, a lot of people (myself included) are rather fond of Myst and the like, and I don't think you can make an argument that those are just "terrible games" given how successful they were.
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Anyone fancy going through this and re-writing it to fit the format of the other "So You Want To" pages? Also, I agree that it's incredibly slanted towards Sierra-style games - though I am biased towards Lucas Arts games myself. It would be nice to get some sort of mention of more recent games in this genre - Telltale Games's creations, etc. It's not quite as dead as some people think.
I'm biased towards Lucas Arts too. Hugely. Should we just cram in more Lucas Arts games and hope it balances out?
EDIT: Did just that. Somebody less biased should cut down the list though, much as I'd love to argue that every Lucas Arts adventure game ever is teh win, some still stand out more.
Edited by Sen Probably should get working on that essay now...
What is the definition of "fail"? Dreamweb may have received poor reviews in the mid-1990s, but now is frequently praised for its atmosphere, (much thanks to the music). King's Quest 3 required reading the manual a lot and enraged some fans, who wanted to play Graham, but was well received by critics. Soviet hackers liked the game so much, they recreated relevant parts of the manual using a debugger.
The list of fails needs in-depth explanations.