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145-646: Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is a 2004 adventure game developed by Retro Studios and published by Nintendo for the GameCube . The sequel to Metroid Prime (2002) and the first Metroid game with a multiplayer feature, Echoes was released in North America, Europe and Australia in 2004 and in Japan under the name Metroid Prime 2: Dark Echoes in May 2005. The story follows bounty hunter Samus Aran after she

290-642: A minigame from another video-game genre, which adventure-game purists do not always appreciate. Hybrid action-adventure games blend action and adventure games throughout the game experience, incorporating more physical challenges than pure adventure games and at a faster pace. This definition is hard to apply, however, with some debate among designers about which games classify as action games and which involve enough non-physical challenges to be considered action-adventures. Adventure games are also distinct from role-playing video-games that involve action, team-building , and points management. Adventure games lack

435-469: A quest , or is required to unravel a mystery or situation about which little is known. These types of mysterious stories allow designers to get around what Ernest W. Adams calls the "Problem of Amnesia", where the player controls the protagonist but must start the game without their knowledge and experience. Story-events typically unfold as the player completes new challenges or puzzles, but in order to make such storytelling less mechanical, new elements in

580-639: A visual representation of sound . Echoes features the parallel dimensions Light Aether and Dark Aether; changes in either dimension often reflect changes in the other. Although the maps in both dimensions have the same general layout, rooms often vary in their designs, creatures, and objects. Dark Aether's atmosphere is caustic and damages Samus' Power Suit, requiring the player to move between "safe zones" that allow Samus' health to slowly regenerate. Safe zones are either permanent, or need to be activated by firing certain beam weapons at force field generators. Power Suit upgrades can reduce or nullify damage caused by

725-612: A "respected designer" felt it was impossible to design new and more difficult adventure puzzles as fans demanded, because Scott Adams had already created them all in his early games. Another factor that led to the decline of the adventure game market was the advent of first-person shooters , such as Doom and Half-Life . These games, taking further advantage of computer advancement, were able to offer strong, story-driven games within an action setting. This slump in popularity led many publishers and developers to see adventure games as financially unfeasible in comparison. Notably, Sierra

870-405: A coherent environment". GameSpot and IGN praised the campaign as a lengthy and rewarding adventure and appreciated the minimum 20 hours required to complete the game. The game was considered suitable for players of any age by Computer and Video Games , which called Echoes essential for anyone who owned a GameCube. The theme's dynamics between dark and light was lauded by GamePro , along with

1015-477: A conspiracy theory website that featured grainy QuickTime videos of Metroid Prime 2 as if it were footage of extraterrestrials; Orbis Labs, which sold a "self-contained armored machine" called "Battle Sphere", similar to the Morph Ball; and Athena Astronautics, which advertised sending women into space, featured a blog , and offered job positions for bounty hunters on Monster.com . Athena Astronautics gave

1160-459: A deflated inner tube on a cactus to create a slingshot, which requires a player to realize that an inner tube is stretchy. They may need to carry items in their inventory for a long duration before they prove useful, and thus it is normal for adventure games to test a player's memory where a challenge can only be overcome by recalling a piece of information from earlier in the game. There is seldom any time pressure for these puzzles, focusing more on

1305-707: A drenched swamp area that houses a partially submerged hydrosubstation; and the Sanctuary Fortress, a highly advanced cliffside fortress built by the Luminoth filled with corrupted robots that serves as the Ing hive in Dark Aether—to retrieve the Light of Aether and return it to the Luminoth temples. Samus fights Space Pirates, Dark Samus, and monstrous Ing guardians on her mission. After Samus retrieves three pieces of

1450-477: A fashion in the title realMyst . Other puzzle adventure games are casual adventure games made up of a series of puzzles used to explore and progress the story, exemplified by The Witness , Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective , and the Professor Layton series of games. Narrative adventure games are those that allow for branching narratives, with choices made by the player influencing events throughout

1595-550: A few other first-person-shooter games. Overall, bunny hopping is a technical exploit allowing the player to move faster or more nimbly than normal. The earliest (and most advanced) method of bunny hopping that utilized strafing controls exists in Quake , the Quake III Arena mod Challenge ProMode Arena , and their derivatives such as Warsow and Xonotic ; Half-Life (version 1.1.0.8, released in 2001, introduced

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1740-409: A graphics window with interactive clickable hotspots and occasional animations, drop-down menus for the player to select actions from, and a text window with a text parser and a log describing the results of the player's actions. Planet Mephius , released in 1983, had a keyboard-driven point-and click interface (see § Early point-and-click adventures (1983–1995) below), but Enchanted Scepters

1885-599: A heavier focus on story-telling and new gameplay mechanics. Nintendo launched a viral marketing campaign that included several websites written as if taking place in the Metroid universe. The single-player mode was acclaimed for its graphics, atmosphere and music, though its steep difficulty and multiplayer mode were met less positively. Echoes received several video game industry awards and spots on "top games" lists by Nintendo Power and IGN . More than 1.10 million copies were sold worldwide. In 2009, an enhanced version

2030-485: A high rate, e.g. with a machine gun . Circle strafing is especially effective when lag negatively affects the players' ability to hit their target. When latency is high and the game does not have client-side hit detection, this can lead to two players circling each other, both missing all their attacks. Many shooters will allow players to aim down the sights of a gun or use a scope, usually exchanging movement speed and field of vision for greater accuracy. This can make

2175-423: A list of on-screen verbs to describe specific actions in the manner of a text adventure, but newer games have used more context-sensitive user interface elements to reduce or eliminate this approach. Often, these games come down to collecting items for the character's inventory, and figuring when is the right time to use that item; the player would need to use clues from the visual elements of the game, descriptions of

2320-622: A mainstream adult audience. Myst held the record for computer game sales for seven years—it sold over six million copies on all platforms, a feat not surpassed until the release of The Sims in 2000. In addition, Myst is considered to be the "killer app" that drove mainstream adoption of CD-ROM drives, as the game was one of the first to be distributed solely on CD-ROM, forgoing the option of floppy disks. Myst ' s successful use of mixed-media led to its own sequels, and other puzzle-based adventure games, using mixed-media such as The 7th Guest . With many companies attempting to capitalize on

2465-480: A means of achieving funding. The 2000s saw the growth of digital distribution and the arrival of smartphones and tablet computers , with touch-screen interfaces well-suited to point-and-click adventure games. The introduction of larger and more powerful touch screen devices like the iPad allowed for more detailed graphics, more precise controls, and a better sense of immersion and interactivity compared to personal computer or console versions. In gaming hardware,

2610-441: A mirror image of herself. The developers considered Dark Samus a "natural choice" because it fit in well with the "dramatic feel of dark and light". Whereas Metroid Prime was intended to familiarize players with the control scheme, Retro made Echoes more challenging. They targeted more hardcore audience, making the player "always worried about his health", and added more unique boss fights. Two bosses were made more difficult in

2755-440: A new audience to adventure games. Circle strafing Strafing in video games is a maneuver which involves moving a controlled character or entity sideways relative to the direction it is facing. This may be done for a variety of reasons, depending on the type of game; for example, in a first-person shooter, strafing would allow one to continue tracking and firing at an opponent while moving in another direction. Strafing

2900-454: A novel "verb-object" interface, showing all possible commands the player could use to interact with the game along with the player's inventory, which became a staple of LucasArts' own adventure games and in the genre overall. Graphical adventure games were considered to have spurred the gaming market for personal computers from 1985 through the next decade, as they were able to offer narratives and storytelling that could not readily be told by

3045-498: A number of hybrid graphical adventure games, borrowing from two or more of the above classifications. The Zero Escape series wraps several escape-the-room puzzles within the context of a visual novel. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series has the player use point-and-click type interfaces to locate clues, and minigame -type mechanics to manipulate those clues to find more relevant information. While most adventure games typically do not include any time-based interactivity by

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3190-406: A player more vulnerable to circle strafing, as targets will pass through their field of vision more quickly, they are less capable of keeping up with a target, and their slow movement makes dodging more difficult. Circle strafing has also spread to some 3D action and adventure video games that involve melee combat. Circle strafing in melee combat can be made easier with a lock-on system that snaps

3335-518: A plot that focused less on the Space Pirates and Metroids of other Metroid games. The theme of light and dark originated from "something that everyone understands: the conflict between good and evil". Senior designer Mike Wikan said: "We wanted a push and pull, the whole game is pushing and pulling you back and forth between the dark and the light. It ended up being that we wanted something that would feed into that dichotomy, that conflict between

3480-399: A precise combination of mouse and keyboard inputs. The exact technique involved depends on the game in question. In several games, there are entire maps devoted to this, much like obstacle courses. The controls are typically as follows: Done correctly and continuously, this will gradually increase the player's speed. Mastering this technique requires much practice. Sustained strafe-jumping

3625-519: A publisher right now and pitch an adventure game, they'd laugh in my face." Though most commercial adventure game publication had stopped in the United States by the early 2000s, the genre was still alive in Europe. Games such as The Longest Journey by Funcom as well as Amerzone and Syberia , both conceived by Benoît Sokal and developed by Microïds , with rich classical elements of

3770-500: A random selection of 25 people who replied to the offer an "interactive training manual", which was in fact a free copy of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes . A promotional game disc was also released leading up to the game's launch, containing a brief demo and trailers for the game, as well as an interactive Metroid timeline. A Metroid -related spoof of "I Love Bees" appeared online in October 2004, to which Nintendo reacted by stating that it

3915-452: A response from the game character. These conversations are often designed as a tree structure , with players deciding between each branch of dialog to pursue. However, there are always a finite number of branches to pursue, and some adventure games devolve into selecting each option one-by-one. Conversing with characters can reveal clues about how to solve puzzles, including hints about what that character wants before they will cooperate with

4060-482: A scene, to which players responded by moving a joystick and pressing a button, and each choice prompted the game to play a new scene. The video may be augmented by additional computer graphics; Under a Killing Moon used a combination of full-motion video and 3D graphics . Because these games are limited by what has been pre-rendered or recorded, player interactivity is limited in these titles, and wrong choices or decisions may lead quickly to an ending scene. There are

4205-418: A separating point. Its development was considered a break-through in technology, utilizing the first fixed-camera perspective in a 3D game, and now recognized as the first 3D survival horror game, going on to influence games such as Fatal Frame , Resident Evil , and Silent Hill , with its influence seen within other titles such as Clock Tower and Rule of Rose . Myst , released in 1993 by Cyan Worlds ,

4350-561: A speed cap limiting the effectiveness of bunny hopping ) and many of its mods and sibling games such as Team Fortress Classic , Team Fortress 2 , Dystopia , and the Counter-Strike series; Painkiller , Dark Messiah of Might and Magic , Kingpin: Life of Crime , Titanfall 2 , and Apex Legends . Wallstrafing is a movement technique used to gain speed in GoldSrc engine and its successors by exploiting how speed

4495-400: A variety of input types, from text parsers to touch screen interfaces. Graphic adventure games will vary in how they present the avatar. Some games will utilize a first-person or third-person perspective where the camera follows the player's movements, whereas many adventure games use drawn or pre-rendered backgrounds, or a context-sensitive camera that is positioned to show off each location to

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4640-462: A vile trans-dimensional duplicate of Aether, where she is attacked by a group of dark creatures called Ing, who capture Samus and after stealing the weapons from her suit, throw her back through the portal. Upon returning to Aether, Samus learns that the Marines were attacked and killed by Ing-possessed Splinters, and decides to enter a nearby alien temple structure to look for clues. When she reaches

4785-448: A war over the planet's energy — whichever race controls it is capable of destroying the other, since if one world gains control over all of the planet's energy, the other will perish. Around this time, Space Pirates set up a base on Aether after detecting the mutagenic substance Phazon on the planet. The Pirates had previously tried to weaponize the substance after it contaminated the planet of Tallon IV, but their efforts were thwarted by

4930-483: A whole subgenre informally entitled "Russian quest" emerged following the success of Red Comrades Save the Galaxy (1998) and its sequels: those games often featured characters from Russian jokes , lowbrow humor , poor production values and "all the worst things brought by the national gaming industry". Israel had next to a non-existent video gaming industry, nevertheless Piposh (1999) became extremely popular, to

5075-403: Is also a popular tool known for adventures such as MOTAS and the escape the room genre entries. Following the demise of the adventure genre in the early 2000s, a number of events have occurred that have led to a revitalization of the adventure game genre as commercially viable: the introduction of new computing and gaming hardware and software delivery formats, and the use of crowdfunding as

5220-476: Is also included to unlock the original bonus content, as well as the ability to take snapshots of gameplay. The difficulty of the boss battles in Echoes was also lowered. The Wii version of Echoes was released in North America and Europe on August 24 as part of the compilation Metroid Prime: Trilogy , which also includes Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption . Both Prime and Echoes contain all of

5365-457: Is an action performed by the player at the start of strafe-jumping, giving an initial burst of speed. It uses the same mechanics as strafe-jumping, but on the ground before the first jump, and requires faster mouse movement. The controls are as follows: Bunny hopping is an advanced movement method used in some first-person shooter games which relies on exploiting movement mechanics by combining strafing and jumping. For instance, In games utilising

5510-419: Is calculated. The technique is executed by aligning yourself with a wall, turning away from the wall slightly, and walking both forward and toward the wall. This allows you to move faster than the default speed cap. While wallstrafing, increased frame rates result in an even higher speed. Wallstrafe Jumping is the technique of using wallstrafing in combination with jumping and allows the user to gain speed in

5655-414: Is considered one of the genre's more influential titles. Myst included pre-rendered 3D graphics, video, and audio. Myst was an atypical game for the time, with no clear goals, little personal or object interaction, and a greater emphasis on exploration, and on scientific and mechanical puzzles. Part of the game's success was because it did not appear to be aimed at an adolescent male audience, but instead

5800-425: Is controversial, and many developers now either avoid it or take extra steps to foreshadow death. Some early adventure games trapped the players in unwinnable situations without ending the game. Infocom 's text adventure The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has been criticized for a scenario where failing to pick up a pile of junk mail at the beginning of the game prevented the player, much later, from completing

5945-450: Is expected to be known and used by the player to overcome the challenges. This sets the puzzles apart from Logic puzzles where all the information needed to solve said problem is presented within the context of the situation, such as combination locks or other machinery that the player must learn to manipulate, though lateral thinking and conceptual reasoning puzzles may include the use of logical thinking. Some puzzles are criticized for

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes - Misplaced Pages Continue

6090-409: Is mainly a matter of muscle memory , as both the required range and precision of mouse movements increase as the player builds up speed. In Quake III Arena and some games based on its engine , such as Call of Duty and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory , slight increases in jump height can be achieved by playing the game at specific frame rates . The pre-strafe (also known as circle jumping)

6235-415: Is not possible in all games; modern game engines make it very easy for game developers to clamp the player's speed and acceleration to a uniform maximum when moving in any direction. Strafe-jumping is a technique used to increase a player's movement speed in computer games based on the Quake engine and its successors , most of which are first-person shooters, by jumping and turning one direction or

6380-835: Is reactive to the player. Most Telltale Games titles, such as The Walking Dead , are narrative games. Other examples include Sega AM2 's Shenmue series, Konami 's Shadow of Memories , Quantic Dream 's Fahrenheit , Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls , Dontnod Entertainment 's Life Is Strange series, Supermassive Games ' Until Dawn , and Night in the Woods . Walking simulators, or environmental narrative games, are narrative games that generally eschew any type of gameplay outside of movement and environmental interaction that allow players to experience their story through exploration and discovery. Walking simulators feature few or even no puzzles at all, and win/lose conditions may not exist. The simulators allow players to roam around

6525-470: Is sent to rescue Galactic Federation Marines from a ship near Aether, a planet inhabited by a race known as the Luminoth. She discovers that the troops were slaughtered by the Ing, a hostile race that came from an alternate dimension of Aether. Samus must travel to four temples to ensure the destruction of the evil Ing, while battling them, wild creatures, Space Pirates , and her mysterious doppelgänger Dark Samus. Retro sought to differentiate Echoes with

6670-405: Is the military practice of attacking ground targets from low-flying aircraft using aircraft-mounted automatic weapons . Circle strafing is the technique of moving around an opponent in a circle while facing them. Circle strafing allows a player to fire continuously at an opponent while evading their attacks. Circle strafing is most useful in close-quarters combat where the apparent motion of

6815-457: The Descent series) is a technique that allows a player to run or fly faster through levels by zig-zagging (moving forwards and sideways at the same time). The game combines these actions and the player achieves roughly 1.4 ( square root of 2 ) times the speed they would moving in a single direction. The method used by the game can be demonstrated using vector addition. Pathways into Darkness

6960-665: The 8th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards , Echoes received nominations for " Console First-Person Action Game of the Year ", and outstanding achievement in " Art Direction " and " Visual Engineering ". It was rated the 174th best game made on a Nintendo system in Nintendo Power ' s Top 200 Games list, the 74th best game by GameFAQs users, the 15th best GameCube game by IGN , and the 13th best by GameSpy . Echoes sold 470,000 copies in North America in December 2004. It

7105-469: The Quake or GoldSrc game engines or their derivatives, bunny hopping is a technique which leverages strafe-jumping, allowing for a player to accelerate beyond the intended maximum movement speed and quickly change direction while in mid-air. Similarly, jumping on sloped surfaces while strafing into them to gain speed can also be called bunny hopping in games such as The Elder Scrolls Online , Portal 2 and

7250-651: The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford at the time, to modify and expand the game, eventually becoming Colossal Cave Adventure . Colossal Cave Adventure set concepts and gameplay approaches that became staples of text adventures and interactive fiction. Following its release on ARPANET, numerous variations of Colossal Cave Adventure appeared throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, with some of these later versions being re-christened Colossal Adventure or Colossal Caves . These variations were enabled by

7395-674: The camera 's (and the player character's) focus on one particular target, guaranteeing that most of the player character's attacks will land a direct hit on the target. It enables the player character to concentrate on moving around the enemy to dodge their attacks while staying automatically focused on the enemy. This can be a crucial strategy against bosses and powerful enemies, and is notably employed in many The Legend of Zelda titles, starting with Ocarina of Time . Particularly in early first-person shooters , strafe-running (known as speed-strafing among players of GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark , and as trichording among players of

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7540-521: The "simple, quirky, and ridiculously addictive" multiplayer mode. Echoes ' graphics and design received significant praise; GameSpot considered it some of the best on the GameCube, and IGN called it "gorgeous" and "one of the prettiest GameCube titles". The Guardian ' s Nick Gillett found the game entertaining and stated that its maps, terrain, and bestiary made for an amazing epic space adventure. Bryn Williams from GameSpy complimented

7685-402: The 1970s text computer game Colossal Cave Adventure , often referred to simply as Adventure , which pioneered a style of gameplay which many developers imitated and which became a genre in its own right. The video game genre is therefore defined by its gameplay, unlike the literary genre , which is defined by the subject it addresses: the activity of adventure. Essential elements of

7830-466: The Light of Aether, she enters the Ing's Sky Temple and faces the Emperor Ing, the strongest Ing who guards the remaining Light of Aether. Samus defeats the creature and retrieves the last remaining energy, causing Dark Aether to become critically unstable and begin to collapse, but her path out of the temple's gateway is blocked by a horribly altered and unstable Dark Samus. After defeating her foe in

7975-497: The Marines from communicating with the Federation. Samus finds the troops dead and surrounded by hive creatures called Splinters. The deceased Marines suddenly rise and attack her, apparently possessed, and she fights them off. Samus then encounters her evil doppelgänger , Dark Samus , for the first time, and after a small skirmish Dark Samus jumps through a portal. Samus decides to follow her through it and ends up on Dark Aether,

8120-863: The Rapture , and What Remains of Edith Finch . A visual novel ( ビジュアルノベル , bijuaru noberu ) is a hybrid of text and graphical adventure games, typically featuring text-based story and interactivity aided by static or sprite -based visuals. They resemble mixed-media novels or tableau vivant stage plays. Most visual novels typically feature dialogue trees , branching storylines , and multiple endings . The format has its primary origins in Japanese and other Asian video game markets, typically for personal computers and more recently on handheld consoles or mobile devices. The format did not gain much traction in Western markets, but started gaining more success since

8265-689: The Screw Attack, which allows Samus to somersault in midair and off certain surfaces , and new beam weapons that have limited ammunition. The head-up display simulates the inside of Samus' helmet and features a radar, map, missile ammunition meter and health meter. Several visors are available, and each performs a different function. One, also seen in the previous game, is a scanner that searches for enemy weaknesses, interfaces with mechanisms such as force fields and elevators and retrieves text entries from certain sources. The others reveal and highlight interdimensional objects or cloaked enemies, and create

8410-523: The Wumpus (1973), but lacked a narrative element, a feature essential for adventure games. Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), written by William Crowther and Don Woods , is widely considered to be the first game in the adventure genre, and a significant influence on the genre's early development, as well as influencing core games in other genres such as Adventure (1980) for the action-adventure video game and Rogue (1980) for roguelikes . Crowther

8555-530: The action-oriented gameplay concepts. The foremost title in this genre was Adventure , a graphic home console game developed based on the text-based Colossal Cave Adventure , while the first The Legend of Zelda brought the action-adventure concept to a broader audience. The origins of text adventure games are difficult to trace as records of computing around the 1970s were not as well documented. Text-based games had existed prior to 1976 that featured elements of exploring maps or solving puzzles, such as Hunt

8700-423: The atmosphere. Echoes also features a multiplayer mode that allows up to four players to engage in combat using a split screen . It has six arenas and two modes: Deathmatch , in which players attempt to kill their opponents as many times as possible within a set amount of time; and Bounty, which focuses on collecting coins that injured characters drop. Multiplayer in Echoes features the same control scheme as

8845-693: The best effect. Text-and-graphics adventure games (also called illustrated or graphical text adventures) combine interactive fiction-style text descriptions with graphic illustrations of locations. These games sometimes use a text parser, as in the Magnetic Scrolls games; a point-and-click interface, such as the MacVenture games; or a combination of both (e.g., Tass Times in Tonetown ; Enchanted Scepters and other World Builder games). Point-and-click adventure games are those where

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8990-527: The bounty hunter Samus Aran . A Galactic Federation Marine Corps patrol ship encounters one of the Pirates' supply ships leaving the planet and an altercation follows. Both ships suffer heavy damage, and after the Federation loses contact with the Marines, they call Samus to investigate. While looking for the Marines near Aether, Samus' ship is damaged by severe lightning storms from the planet. Said storms have caused electromagnetic interference that prevented

9135-399: The circle strafing player is much greater than that of their stationary enemy, and thus the chance of making the enemy lose track of their target is higher and/or the enemy is required to lead the target when firing. The effectiveness of circle strafing is mitigated when the opponent's weapon fires projectiles that travel instantaneously (also referred to as a hitscan weapon), or fires at

9280-478: The company during this time. Sierra developer Lori Ann Cole stated in 2003 her belief that the high cost of development hurt adventure games: "They are just too art intensive, and art is expensive to produce and to show. Some of the best of the Adventure Games were criticized they were just too short. Action-adventure or adventure role-playing games can get away with re-using a lot of the art, and stretching

9425-503: The company's co-founder Roberta Williams and programmed with the help of her husband Ken , the game featured static vector graphics atop a simple command line interface, building on the text adventure model. Roberta was directly inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure as well as the text adventure games that followed from it. Sierra continued to produce similar games under the title Hi-Res Adventure . Vector graphics gave way to bitmap graphics which also enabled simple animations to show

9570-406: The early hits of Electronic Arts . As computers gained the ability to use pointing devices and point-and-click interfaces, graphical adventure games moved away from including the text interface and simply provided appropriate commands the player could interact with on-screen. The first known game with such an interface was Enchanted Scepters (1984) from Silicon Beach Software , which combined

9715-453: The enhancements found in their Japanese New Play Control! counterparts. The compilation was re-released on the Wii U 's Nintendo eShop on January 29, 2015. In December 2019, review aggregator GameRankings ranked Metroid Prime 2: Echoes as the ninth best GameCube game and the 281st best game of all time. Comparing it to Metroid Prime , GameSpot ' s Brad Shoemaker said that Echoes

9860-400: The experience. Comedy is a common theme, and games often script comedic responses when players attempt actions or combinations that are "ridiculous or impossible". Since adventure games are driven by storytelling, character development usually follows literary conventions of personal and emotional growth, rather than new powers or abilities that affect gameplay. The player often embarks upon

10005-400: The final battle, Samus is surrounded by a group of Warrior Ing desperate to save their world and their lives; she escapes to Aether through a newly revealed portal just before Dark Aether and the Ing disappear forever. Returning to U-Mos, Samus finds that the Luminoth were in a state of hibernation but have now awakened. After a brief celebration, Samus leaves Aether in her repaired gunship. If

10150-401: The final days of development following a request by producer Kensuke Tanabe to "make it tighter". Wikan regretted this decision, and when adapting the game for compilation Metroid Prime: Trilogy took the opportunity to make those battles easier. The developers found it more difficult to develop than they had expected, and Retro president Michael Kelbaugh said: "We wanted to expand and add to

10295-433: The first Prime due to time constraints. Another element considered for the previous game was the multiplayer component. Since the game was a first-person adventure and its deathmatch mode could not easily replicate other shooting games, Retro just tried to "make a multiplayer experience that fans of Metroid games would instantly know and recognise". The staff opted for a more immersive storyline, with more cut scenes and

10440-406: The first sound films , games that featured such voice-overs were called "Talkies" by all the major adventure game companies, including LucasArts, and Sierra . Use of the term continues to this day, for example by GOG.com on its page about Revolution Software 's Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon . Mark J.P. Wolf, professor at CUW , in his Encyclopedia of Video Games : In some genres,

10585-445: The first half of the 90s. Non-commercial text adventure games have been developed for many years within the genre of interactive fiction . Games are also being developed using the older term 'text adventure' with Adventuron, alongside some published titles for older 8-bit and 16-bit machines. The first known graphical adventure game was Mystery House (1980), by Sierra On-Line , then at the time known as On-Line Systems. Designed by

10730-401: The first- or third-person perspective. Currently, a large number of adventure games are available as a combination of different genres with adventure elements. For markets in the Western hemisphere, the genre's popularity peaked during the late 1980s to mid-1990s when many considered it to be among the most technically advanced genres, but it had become a niche genre in the early 2000s due to

10875-494: The form of visual novels , which make up nearly 70% of PC games released in Japan. Asian countries have also found markets for adventure games for portable and mobile gaming devices. Japanese adventure-games tend to be distinct, having a slower pace and revolving more around dialogue, whereas Western adventure-games typically emphasize more interactive worlds and complex puzzle solving, owing to them each having unique development histories. The term "adventure game" originated from

11020-654: The franchise sold by 2006, enjoying great commercial and critical success while the genre was otherwise viewed as in decline. Similar to the fate of interactive fiction, conventional graphical adventure games have continued to thrive in the amateur scene. This has been most prolific with the tool Adventure Game Studio (AGS). Some notable AGS games include those by Ben Croshaw (namely the Chzo Mythos ), Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator , Time Gentlemen, Please! , Soviet Unterzoegersdorf , Metal Dead , and AGD Interactive 's Sierra adventure remakes. Adobe Flash

11165-567: The game environment and discover objects like books, audio logs, or other clues that develop the story, and may be augmented with dialogue with non-playable characters and cutscenes. These games allow for exploration of the game's world without any time limits or other forced constraints, an option usually not offered in more action-oriented games. The term "walking simulator" had sometimes been used pejoratively as such games feature almost no traditional gameplay elements and only involved walking around. The term has become more accepted as games within

11310-414: The game play." Traditional adventure games became difficult to propose as new commercial titles. Gilbert wrote in 2005, "From first-hand experience, I can tell you that if you even utter the words 'adventure game' in a meeting with a publisher you can just pack up your spiffy concept art and leave. You'd get a better reaction by announcing that you have the plague." In 2012 Schafer said "If I were to go to

11455-506: The game's controls and level design, commenting that the game was challenging but fair. A major criticism of Echoes focused on the game's high difficulty, with Game Informer declaring that "not only are the boss fights unforgiving, the environment is sometimes difficult to follow". Some reviewers found it difficult to search for the Sky Temple keys. GameSpot criticized this mechanism and called it "a scavenger hunt much tougher than

11600-480: The game's difficulty was "because the save system is poorly implemented and downright cheap". Echoes won an award in almost every category it was nominated for at the 2004 Nintendo Power Awards, and won awards for Best GameCube Game of 2004 from IGN , Electronic Gaming Monthly , and GameSpy . The game was a finalist in GameSpot ' s 2004 "Best Action Adventure Game" category across all platforms. During

11745-458: The game, Schafer and his team at Double Fine made this puzzle's solution more obvious. More recent adventure games try to avoid pixel hunts by highlighting the item, or by snapping the player's cursor to the item. Many puzzles in these games involve gathering and using items from their inventory. Players must apply lateral thinking techniques where they apply real-world extrinsic knowledge about objects in unexpected ways. For example, by putting

11890-420: The game, so the player usually knows that only objects that can be picked up are important. Because it can be difficult for a player to know if they missed an important item , they will often scour every scene for items. For games that utilize a point and click interface, players will sometimes engage in a systematic search known as a "pixel hunt", trying to locate the small area on the graphic representation of

12035-418: The game. Adventure games contain a variety of puzzles , including decoding messages, finding and using items , opening locked doors, or finding and exploring new locations. Solving a puzzle will unlock access to new areas in the game world, and reveal more of the game story. Conceptual Reasoning and Lateral Thinking Puzzles form the majority of the gameplay, where extrinsic knowledge gained in real life

12180-425: The game. The adventure games developed by LucasArts purposely avoided creating a dead-end situation for the player due to the negative reactions to such situations, despite this, some fans of the genre enjoy dead ends and player death situations, resulting in divergent philosophies in adventure games and how to handle player risk-reward. Text adventures convey the game's story through passages of text, revealed to

12325-472: The game. While these choices do not usually alter the overall direction and major plot elements of the game's story, they help personalize the story to the player's desire through the ability to choose these determinants – exceptions include Detroit: Become Human , where players' choices can bring to multiple completely different endings and characters' death. These games favor narrative storytelling over traditional gameplay, with gameplay present to help immerse

12470-490: The genre gained critical praise in the 2010s; other names have been proposed, like "environmental narrative games" or "interactive narratives", which emphasizes the importance of the narration and the fact the plot is told by interaction with ambient elements. Examples of walking simulators include Gone Home , Dear Esther , Firewatch , The Vanishing of Ethan Carter , Proteus , Jazzpunk , The Stanley Parable , Thirty Flights of Loving , Everybody's Gone to

12615-406: The genre include storytelling, exploration, and puzzle-solving. Marek Bronstring, former head of content at Sega , has characterised adventure games as puzzles embedded in a narrative framework; such games may involve narrative content that a player unlocks piece by piece over time. While the puzzles that players encounter through the story can be arbitrary, those that do not pull the player out of

12760-511: The genre still garnered high critical acclaims. Even in these cases, developers often had to distance themselves from the genre in some way. The Longest Journey was instead termed a "modern adventure" for publishing and marketing. Series marketed to female gamers, however, like the Nancy Drew Mystery Adventure Series prospered with over two dozen entries put out over the decade and 2.1 million copies of games in

12905-469: The gradual adoption of three-dimensional graphics in adventure games, the critically acclaimed Grim Fandango , Lucasarts' first 3D adventure. Alone in the Dark , released in 1992, and which is now referred to as a "survival horror" game, was originally considered among other graphic adventure games by critics of the time, and significantly influenced the development of then new genre, being looked at now as

13050-493: The handheld Nintendo DS and subsequent units included a touch-screen, and the Nintendo Wii console with its Wii Remote allowed players to control a cursor through motion control . These new platforms helped decrease the cost of bringing an adventure game to market, providing an avenue to re-release older, less graphically advanced games like The Secret of Monkey Island , King's Quest and Space Quest and attracting

13195-440: The increase in microcomputing that allowed programmers to work on home computers rather than mainframe systems. The genre gained commercial success with titles designed for home computers. Scott Adams launched Adventure International to publish text adventures including an adaptation of Colossal Cave Adventure , while a number of MIT students formed Infocom to bring their game Zork from mainframe to home computers and

13340-403: The interactive medium and may eschew complex puzzles associated with typical adventure games. Readers or players of IF may still need to determine how to interact appropriately with the narrative to progress and thus create a new type of challenge. Graphic adventures are adventure games that use graphics to convey the environment to the player. Games under the graphic adventure banner may have

13485-672: The key from the desk". Notable examples of advanced text adventures include most games developed by Infocom , including Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . With the onset of graphic adventures, the text adventure fell to the wayside, though the medium remains popular as a means of writing interactive fiction (IF) particularly with the introduction of the Inform natural language platform for writing IF. Interactive fiction can still provide puzzle-based challenges like adventure games, but many modern IF works also explore alternative methods of narrative storytelling techniques unique to

13630-421: The late 2000s. Some adventure games have been presented as interactive movies; these are games where most of the graphics are either fully pre-rendered or use full motion video from live actors on a set, stored on a media that allows fast random access such as laserdisc or CD-ROM . The arcade versions of Dragon's Lair and Space Ace are canonical examples of such works. The game's software presented

13775-400: The location on screen that the developers defined, which may not be obvious or only consist of a few on-screen pixels. A notable example comes from the original Full Throttle by LucasArts , where one puzzle requires instructing the character to kick a wall at a small spot, which Tim Schafer , the game's lead designer, had admitted years later was a brute force measure; in the remastering of

13920-414: The multiplayer mode because of its inclusion of the lock-on mechanism, considering it a feature that made multiplayer too simple. IGN was critical of Echoes ' graphics and noted that the textures sometimes blurred when viewed up close, and the frame rate occasionally decreased. Publications including IGN and The Independent considered the gameplay too similar to Metroid Prime , while GamePro

14065-443: The narrative are considered examples of good design. Combat and action challenges are limited or absent in adventure games; this distinguishes them from action games . In the book Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design , the authors state that: "this [reduced emphasis on combat] doesn't mean that there is no conflict in adventure games ... only that combat is not the primary activity." Some adventure games will include

14210-601: The numeric rules or relationships seen in role-playing games (RPGs), and seldom have an internal economy. These games lack any skill-system, combat, or "an opponent to be defeated through strategy and tactics". However, some hybrid games do exist and are referred to as either Adventure games or Roleplaying games by the respective communities. Finally, adventure games are classified separately from puzzle video games . While puzzle video games revolve entirely around solving puzzles, adventure games revolve more around exploration and story, with puzzles typically scattered throughout

14355-483: The obscurity of their solutions, for example, the combination of a clothes line , clamp , and deflated rubber duck used to gather a key stuck between the subway tracks in The Longest Journey , which exists outside of the game's narrative and serves only as an obstacle to the player. Others have been criticized for requiring players to blindly guess, either by clicking on the right pixel, or by guessing

14500-437: The other with the mouse and using the strafe keys. Strafe-jumping was a result of a bug in the code base of the 1997 first-person shooter video game Quake II . In sequels it was decided to be kept intact, as it had become a standard technique used by players. The exploit relies on an oversight in acceleration and maximum speed calculation: when pressing a movement key, the game adds an acceleration vector in that direction to

14645-568: The planet stable, and begs her to retrieve it, for if either world gains control over all of this energy, the other will perish. To reclaim the parts of Aether's energy taken by the Ing, she makes use of an energy transfer module, which the Ing that possessed the Alpha Splinter she fought just before the structure just so happened to have. Samus goes to three regions—the Agon Wastes, a parched, rocky, desert wasteland region; Torvus Bog,

14790-421: The planetary energy. The split creates another world in an alternate dimension, Dark Aether, a mirror version of Aether that is dark, arid, and has a poisonous atmosphere. Dark Aether becomes home to the Ing, cruel shapeshifting creatures who intend to destroy the Luminoth, and are able to possess bodies of the living, the dead, and the artificially intelligent beings. Eventually, the Ing and the Luminoth engage in

14935-466: The player completes the game with all of the items obtained, Dark Samus is shown reforming herself above Aether. After the success of Metroid Prime , Nintendo asked Retro Studios to produce a sequel. They decided against recycling the features of the first game, and instead used new sound models, weapon effects, and art designs. They also implemented the Screw Attack and wall jumping features seen in previous Metroid games, which were not incorporated in

15080-426: The player in response to typed instructions. Early text adventures, Colossal Cave Adventure or Scott Adams' games, used a simple verb - noun parser to interpret these instructions, allowing the player to interact with objects at a basic level, for example by typing "get key". Later text adventures, and modern interactive fiction, use natural language processing to enable more complex player commands like "take

15225-458: The player into the game's story: gameplay may include working through conversation trees, solving puzzles, or the use of quick time events to aid in action sequences to keep the player involved in the story. Though narrative games are similar to interactive movies and visual novels in that they present pre-scripted scenes, the advancement of computing power can render pre-scripted scenes in real-time, thus providing for more depth of gameplay that

15370-508: The player to figure out how to escape a room using the limited resources within it and through the solving of logic puzzles. Other variants include games that require the player to manipulate a complex object to achieve a certain end in the fashion of a puzzle box . These games are often delivered in Adobe Flash format and are also popular on mobile devices. The genre is notable for inspiring real-world escape room challenges. Examples of

15515-607: The player to the side by one unit, the overall distance moved is 2 {\displaystyle {\sqrt {2}}} . Thus, in games with such behavior, moving sideways while simultaneously moving forward will give an overall higher speed than just moving forward, although the player will move in a direction diagonal to the direction being faced. This feature is even more enhanced if moving along three axes (e.g. forward + left + up), providing 3 {\displaystyle {\sqrt {3}}} (roughly 1.73) times greater speed, in games such as Descent . This technique

15660-450: The player typically controls their character through a point and click interface using a computer mouse or similar pointing device, though additional control schemes may also be available. The player clicks to move their character around, interact with non-player characters, often initiating conversation trees with them, examine objects in the game's settings or with their character's item inventory. Many older point-and-click games include

15805-403: The player with a secondary goal, and serve as an indicator of progression. While high scores are now less common, external reward systems, such as Xbox Live 's Achievements, perform a similar role. The primary failure condition in adventure games, inherited from more action-oriented games, is player death. Without the clearly identified enemies of other genres, its inclusion in adventure games

15950-428: The player's ability to reason than on quick-thinking. Adventure games are single-player experiences that are largely story-driven. More than any other genre, adventure games depend upon their story and setting to create a compelling single-player experience. They are typically set in an immersive environment , often a fantasy world , and try to vary the setting from chapter to chapter to add novelty and interest to

16095-435: The player's commands into actions. As personal computers became more powerful with better graphics, the graphic adventure-game format became popular, initially by augmenting player's text commands with graphics, but soon moving towards point-and-click interfaces. Further computer advances led to adventure games with more immersive graphics using real-time or pre-rendered three-dimensional scenes or full-motion video taken from

16240-437: The player's current velocity. When the player has reached a maximum speed value, further acceleration is prevented. However, the movement speed limit is only applied in relation to the acceleration vector's direction and not the direction of the overall velocity, meaning that precisely manipulating the angle between overall velocity and this acceleration vector lets the player break the intended speed cap. Strafe-jumping requires

16385-546: The player, some do include time-based and action game mechanics. The Telltale Games licensed episodic adventure games , and some interactive movies, such as Dragon's Lair , include quick time events. Action-adventure games are a hybrid of action games with adventure games that often require to the player to react quickly to events as they occur on screen The action-adventure genre is broad, spanning many different subgenres, but typically these games utilize strong storytelling and puzzle-solving mechanics of adventure games among

16530-651: The player-character moving in response to typed commands. Here, Sierra's King's Quest (1984), though not the first game of its type, is recognized as a commercially successful graphical adventure game, enabling Sierra to expand on more titles. Other examples of early games include Sherwood Forest (1982), The Hobbit (1982), Yuji Horii 's The Portopia Serial Murder Case (1983), The Return of Heracles (which faithfully portrayed Greek mythology ) by Stuart Smith (1983), Dale Johnson 's Masquerade (1983), Antonio Antiochia's Transylvania (1982, re-released in 1984), and Adventure Construction Set (1985), one of

16675-418: The player. Other conversations will have far-reaching consequences, deciding to disclose a valuable secret that has been entrusted to the player. The primary goal in adventure games is the completion of the assigned quest. Early adventure games often had high scores and some, including Zork and some of its sequels, assigned the player a rank, a text description based on their score. High scores provide

16820-432: The point where 20 years later a reboot was released due to a grassroots fan movement. Whereas once adventure games were one of the most popular genres for computer games, by the mid-1990s the market share started to drastically decline. The forementioned saturation of Myst -like games on the market led to little innovation in the field and a drop in consumer confidence in the genre. Computer Gaming World reported that

16965-598: The popularity of first-person shooters , and it became difficult for developers to find publishers to support adventure-game ventures. Since then, a resurgence in the genre has occurred, spurred on by the success of independent video-game development , particularly from crowdfunding efforts, from the wide availability of digital distribution enabling episodic approaches, and from the proliferation of new gaming platforms, including portable consoles and mobile devices. Within Asian markets, adventure games continue to be popular in

17110-666: The release of many adventure games from countries that had experienced dormant or fledgling video gaming industries up until that point. These games were generally inspired by their Western counterparts and a few years behind in terms of technological and graphical advancements. In particular the fall of the Soviet Union saw countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia release a string of popular adventure games including Tajemnica Statuetki (1993) and The Secret of Monkey Island parody Tajemství Oslího ostrova (1994), while in Russia

17255-415: The rest of the game", and 1UP.com said that the only purpose it served was to artificially extend the game's length. The game's multiplayer mode was also considered by some to be unsatisfying. GameSpy called it a "secondary feature", The Age ' s Jason Hill called it "bland and dull" and Eurogamer said that the single-player features did not translate well to that mode. Game Informer criticized

17400-561: The rich assets afforded by the CD format could be integrated more intricately into the gameplay, for example, "talkie" revised editions of popular adventure games with digitized voices, like King's Quest V (1992) or Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1993), in which the queries or other conversations selected by the player were fully acted out. The 1990s also saw the rise of Interactive movies , The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery , and

17545-402: The right verb in games that use a text interface. Games that require players to navigate mazes have also become less popular, although the earliest text-adventure games usually required players to draw a map if they wanted to navigate the abstract space. Many adventure games make use of an inventory management screen as a distinct gameplay mode. Players are only able to pick up some objects in

17690-431: The single-player mode, including the lock-on system for circle strafing while targeting. Echoes takes place on Aether, a planet inhabited by a race known as the Luminoth. The Luminoth lived peacefully, protecting the planet's natural energy, which they call the "Light of Aether". Five decades before the game's events, a Phazon meteor collides into the planet and leaves a scar, causing environmental damage and splitting

17835-424: The state of graphical hardware at the time. Graphical adventure games continued to improve with advances in graphic systems for home computers, providing more detailed and colorful scenes and characters. With the adoption of CD-ROM in the early 1990s, it became possible to include higher quality graphics, video, and audio in adventure games. This saw the addition of voice acting to adventure games. Similar to

17980-403: The story may also be triggered by player movement. Adventure games have strong storylines with significant dialog, and sometimes make effective use of recorded dialog or narration from voice actors. This genre of game is known for representing dialog as a conversation tree . Players are able to engage a non-player character by choosing a line of pre-written dialog from a menu, which triggers

18125-431: The story. This sub-genre is most famously used by the now-defunct Telltale Games with their series such as Minecraft: Story Mode and their adaptation of The Walking Dead . Escape room games are a further specialization of point-and-click adventure games; these games are typically short and confined to a small space to explore, with almost no interaction with non-player characters. Most games of this type require

18270-420: The structure, she meets U-Mos, the last remaining sentinel of the Luminoth, an alien race that have fought against the Ing for decades and are now on the verge of defeat. He tells Samus that after a meteor struck Aether, it created "Dark Aether", from which the Ing spawned. He also tells Samus that the Ing have taken virtually all of the 'Light of Aether', the entire collective planetary energy for Aether that keeps

18415-493: The subgenre include MOTAS ( Mysteries of Time and Space ), The Crimson Room , and The Room . Puzzle adventure games are adventure games that put a strong emphasis on logic puzzles. They typically emphasize self-contained puzzle challenges with logic puzzle toys or games. Completing each puzzle opens more of the game's world to explore, additional puzzles to solve, and can expand on the game's story. There are often few to no non-playable characters in such games, and lack

18560-474: The success of Myst , a glut of similar games followed its release, which contributed towards the start of the decline of the adventure game market in 2000. Nevertheless, the American market research firm NPD FunWorld reported that adventure games were the best-selling genre of the 1990s, followed by strategy video games . Writer Mark H. Walker attributed this dominance in part to Myst . The 1990s also saw

18705-509: The text adventure genre and would also be used as an early form of copy protection . Other well-known text adventure companies included Level 9 Computing , Magnetic Scrolls and Melbourne House . When personal computers gained the ability to display graphics, the text adventure genre began to wane, and by 1990 there were few if any commercial releases, though in the UK publisher Zenobi released many games that could be purchased via mail order during

18850-412: The themes used for the same areas on Light Aether. Some remixes of music from the previous Metroid games were also used, with the escape theme being a remix of Metroid ' s "Escape" theme, the "Hunters" multiplayer theme taking on Super Metroid ' s "Upper Brinstar" theme, and the theme for the underwater Torvus region, the "Lower Brinstar" theme from the same game. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

18995-440: The title, and not just slam out a sequel. Nintendo doesn't do things that way". Some features, such as a hidden version of Super Metroid (1994), were canceled for lack of time. Tanabe later said that Echoes was only about thirty percent complete three months before the deadline Nintendo had set for a 2004 holiday release. The music was composed by Kenji Yamamoto . The themes used for areas on Dark Aether are dark variations of

19140-640: The two, and how the player's basic abilities reflect that". The developers sought advice from the producers of the Nintendo game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past , which also used the theme of parallel worlds. For Dark Samus, Retro wanted to create a character that was similar to Samus and be the same size, as opposed to the enormous monsters of Metroid Prime . One inspiration was a boss battle in Metroid: Zero Mission in which Samus fights

19285-434: The type of inventory puzzles that typical point-and-click adventure games have. Puzzle adventure games were popularized by Myst and The 7th Guest . These both used mixed media consisting of pre-rendered images and movie clips, but since then, puzzle adventure games have taken advantage of modern game engines to present the games in full 3D settings, such as The Talos Principle . Myst itself has been recreated in such

19430-549: The various items, and dialogue from other characters to figure this out. Later games developed by Sierra On-Line , including the King's Quest games, and nearly all of the LucasArts adventure games , are point-and-click-based games. Point-and-click adventure games can also be the medium in which interactive, cinematic video games comprise. They feature cutscenes interspersed by short snippets of interactive gameplay that tie in with

19575-468: Was a commercial success. Infocom later released Deadline in 1982, which had a more complex text parser, and more NPCs acting independently of the player. Also innovative was its use of " feelies ", which were physical documents unique to the game itself which aided the player in solving the mystery, which also resulted in the higher cost of the game at the time of its release relative to other text adventures. These feelies would soon become standard within

19720-577: Was an employee at Bolt, Beranek and Newman , a Boston company involved with ARPANET routers , in the mid-1970s. As an avid caver and role-playing game enthusiast, he wrote a text adventure based on his own knowledge of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky . The program, which he named Adventure , was written on the company's PDP-10 and used 300 kilobytes of memory. The program was disseminated through ARPANET, which led to Woods, working at

19865-449: Was as good as its predecessor, and delivered everything he expected. IGN ' s Matt Casamassina called the gameplay "superb" and "nearly flawless", and Vicious Sid of GamePro praised Echoes as "an extraordinary return to form". Echoes was considered one of the best single-player experiences on the GameCube by Kristan Reed of Eurogamer , who also considered the story to be "intricately designed and elaborately constructed into

20010-625: Was not involved with it. The campaign featured similarly named domain names such as ilovebeams.com, which each had an image of Samus with the caption: " All your bees are belong to us . Never send a man to do a woman's job". Echoes was re-released in Japan in 2009 for the Wii console, as part of the New Play Control! series. It has revamped controls that use the Wii Remote 's pointing functionality, similar to those of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption . The credit system from Corruption

20155-514: Was one of the first games to allow strafe-running. However, strafing was available as early as 1991 in Catacomb 3D and became even more popular in 1992 in Wolfenstein 3D . The games in which strafe-running can be employed treat forward motion independently of sideways (strafing) motion. If, for each update of the player's location, the game moves the player forward one unit and then moves

20300-649: Was released for Wii in Japan and as part of Metroid Prime: Trilogy internationally. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is an adventure game "with heavy action elements and an emphasis on complex puzzle-solving" in which the player controls the Samus Aran from a first-person perspective. It takes place in an open-ended world with interconnected areas. Gameplay involves solving puzzles to uncover secrets, platform jumping , and shooting enemies. Progress requires both dimensions to be explored, using power-ups that Samus acquires over time. Equipment players collect include

20445-601: Was released for the GameCube in North America on November 15, 2004, Europe on November 26, and in Australia on December 2. The PAL version lacked the standard 50 Hz mode, and offered 60 Hz mode only. In Japan, it was released on May 26, 2005 as Metroid Prime 2: Dark Echoes . Nintendo launched several websites to initiate a viral marketing campaign for Echoes , with inspiration drawn from Halo 2 ' s alternate reality game I Love Bees . The websites included Luminoth Temple, an Internet forum ; Channel 51,

20590-640: Was sold to CUC International in 1998, and while still a separate studio, attempted to recreate an adventure game using 3D graphics, King's Quest: Mask of Eternity , as well as Gabriel Knight 3 , both of which fared poorly; the studio was subsequently closed in 1999. Similarly, LucasArts released Grim Fandango in 1998 to many positive reviews but poor sales; it released one more adventure game, Escape from Monkey Island in 2000, but subsequently stopped development of Sam & Max: Freelance Police and had no further plans for adventure games. Many of those developers for LucasArts, including Grossman and Schafer, left

20735-412: Was the first true point-and-click game in the sense that the cursor was controlled through the computer mouse. In 1985, ICOM Simulations released Déjà Vu , the first of its MacVenture series, which utilized a more complete point-and-click interface, including the ability to drag objects around on the current scene, and was a commercial success. LucasArts ' Maniac Mansion , released in 1987, used

20880-456: Was the ninth-best-selling game in its debut month in Japan with 16,105 copies sold, ranking it behind Yu Yu Hakusho Forever and Hanjuku Hero 4: 7-Jin no Hanjuku Hero . By August 2009, 800,000 copies had sold worldwide. The game ultimately sold more than 1.10 million copies worldwide. Adventure game Adventure games were initially developed in the 1970s and early 1980s as text-based interactive stories, using text parsers to translate

21025-471: Was unhappy that the game did not have a customizable control scheme. Computer and Video Games and The Age were disappointed that Echoes was not as innovative in terms of gameplay as Metroid Prime . The Age 's review also found the control scheme "unwieldy" and the difficulty "unforgiving". Serge Pennings of The Observer noted there were too few opportunities to save the game while playing, an aspect X-Play also criticized by saying that most of

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