9. Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis (1992)
Forget about midi-chlorians or nuked fridges. If I have a beef with George Lucas, it's for turning LucasArts - one of the great game studios for adventure games - into a dreary factory that mass-produced crappy, disposable Star Wars games (*). Between Lucas turning LucasArts into another teat on the udder of the cash cow that is Star Wars and the great adventure game recession of the late 90's, LucasArts died a quiet, lonely death earlier this year. But man, they made great games and told great stories. They created original worlds with the same wit and excitement that we used to expect from Lucas and Spielberg. Unfortunately, most of the LucasArts back catalog is no longer legally available (everyone look towards Skywalker Ranch and shake their fists). So for this retrospective, I had to decide between two available games: Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis and The Secret Of Monkey Island. I went with Fate Of Atlantis for two reasons. First, the current release of Monkey Island is an HD update. Second, one of these games has Indiana Jones in it, the other does not. Fate Of Atlantis is one of several adventure games for this retrospective. I wanted to talk about it first for a specific reason: it's the perfect gateway adventure game for gamers unfamiliar with the joys of pointing and clicking. Also, you can punch Nazis - which instantly makes it awesome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Tk8ELoARj0 Most adventure games are known for their trial and error, made all the more frustrating by the infuriating - and often hilarious - ways the game designers came up with to kill you. Fate Of Atlantis, like most LucasArts adventure games, allows players to solve its puzzles without the threat of death or a dead-end. With three difficulty settings that change the complexity and style of the puzzles, each version of the story is a different but equally enjoyable experience. A particular shout-out goes to Indy's voice actor, Doug Lee. He doesn't do a Harrison Ford impression and brings an old-school Hollywood charm to the role. Lee plays Indy more like an actual, you know, professor of archaeology. Most people would expect an action game from the Indiana Jones franchise, but Fate Of Atlantis, a traditional point-and-click adventure game, delivers the whole fedora and bullwhip. (*) OK, OK... there were some bright spots. Jedi Knight II is still the best Jedi action going. Knights Of The Old Republic I & II are excellent RPGs. And Haden Blackman's story for the original Force Unleashed was a reminder of the kind of stories that LucasArts - and Star Wars, for that matter - used to tell so effortlessly.