UPDATE: The project has already been funded! The good news is, the more money they get, the more of budget they will have for multiple platforms, music, and voice over. So don’t let their “funded” status deter you if you want to help fund an awesome project!

You claim to like adventure games, but are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? Tim Schafer and Double Fine have started a Kickstarter campaign to allow fans a chance to show they are willing to pony up the dough to have a new, original point-and-click style adventure game made.

Not content to take their fans’ money and lock themselves away at their Top Secret San Francisco based headquarters while they crunch away on those video game bits and bytes, they have hired 2 Player Productions to create a documentary about the experience. They’ll be covering the entire process, from start to finish. That way we can see their meteoric rise to the top, or alternatively their crash and burn culminating in a close up on Schafer with a single tear rolling down his cheek.

Either way, they promise it will be quite entertaining. Click past the break for their video intro to the project. Also, go donate. For reals.

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Hot off the heels of their Back to the Future game, Telltale is back with another license close to the heart of my youth: Jurassic Park. It takes risks, leaving behind the traditional point and click interface of their past games for something a little different.

The first of the two demos I played was exclusively an action scene. Several of the game’s protagonists were stuck on a roller coaster and I had to prevent them from being eaten by a pack of dinosaurs. The solution? Successfully complete a lot of quick time events including button presses and quick flips of the analogue stick. You could sum up the entire action demo simply by saying “Space Ace”.

But there was a weird layer of detachment added to this scene. The character whose actions were affected by my inputs constantly changed. This made me feel less involved with what was happening on screen since no singular character represented the player. Occasionally I’d fail and watch a death scene before snapping back to the last checkpoint. I watched my cart go on the wrong track into a pack of dinosaurs, a young girl falling out of the car to her death and more, all while my death counter rose.

If this was all the game was, I’d be pretty sad. Thankfully the second demo I played was far more interesting, though still different than Telltale’s previous games.

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“Friday Old Games” is a series of articles in which we review a game from the older generations of consoles, share why we picked it, and whether or not it holds up with time.

In 1992, when adventure games still reigned supreme with PC gaming nerds, LucasArts released one of their most beloved titles, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. It had everything a fan of both the adventure genre and the Indiana Jones movies could want.

You get to play as Indiana, traveling the world, fighting Nazis and solving the mystery of a lost civilization. What more could a fan ask for?

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Telltale has just made the first episode of Back to the Future: The Game free.

You read that right.

The are assuring everyone that this is no April Fool’s prank and that there is no expiration or cut off date. So if you’ve been on the fence about trying their latest episodic adventure, you are officially out of excuses.

You can head over to the Telltale games website right now and download Back to the Future The Game: Episode 1: It’s About Time. If you like what you play, the complete five episode series is only $24.99.

Fans of the Kings Quest series have a lot of reasons to be happy right now. Telltale just announced a deal that will allow them to do their own take on the series, and the fan-made game, The Silver Lining is still going strong.

In fact, Phoenix Online Studios just launched the third episode of The Silver Lining, titled My Only Love Sprung From My Only Hate, which can be downloaded for free from their website.

The Silver Lining tells the tale of King Graham once again fighting the forces of evil, this time to save his now cursed family. In case you missed them the first time around, all the episodes can be found here. (more…)

As a device, the iPhone’s touch screen lends itself well to many games that would normally use mouse clicks for interaction. It is sort of a no-brainer that many adventure games are being brought over to the device. Largely, these are ports of older, “classic” games in the genre.

While it’s nice to be able to whip out The Secret of Monkey Island whenever you want, I was curious when we were finally going to see some new games in the genre show up on the iDevices.

Launching Pad Games thought the same thing, which leads us to a completely original iPhone Adventure Game, specifically designed for iPhone, Scarlett and the Spark of Life: Episode 1.

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Dr. Hugo’s Factory for Making Robots might be the strangest factory on Earth. First off, the entire factory seems to employ only five people, and each of them seems to be responsible for making a single adorable robot. Dr. Hugo is hoping to get all the robots ready for the upcoming Christmas holiday, and is pushing his tiny crew to finish up with their tiny robots.

You will run each robot through a series of tests to familiarize yourself with their abilities, but the real adventure begins when the Hero convinces the other robots to go exploring. You’ll unlock a plot of sinister proportions as you explore the factory.

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Snakes of Avalon is a new indie point-and-click adventure game in the classic Sierra/LucasArts style. You may have noticed the word “indie” in the previous sentence. This means that the game was produced as a labor of love by a small team for no money.

As is typical for this type of production, its artistic ambitions are much loftier than most commercially produced fare. It takes place in a nuanced world with a rich atmosphere, and it’s about something larger than its plot. As is not typical of this type of production, the technical aspects are very slick.

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Sometimes, a mystery is surrounded by a puzzle; sometimes dozens of small, intricate puzzles that would confound and befuddle your average government agent.

Hidden away in the depths of FBI headquarters is the office of Nelson Tethers. Tethers is the top (and only) agent in the bureau’s Department of Puzzle Research. When a conundrum is too discombobulating for the rest of the FBI, it is up to Agent Tethers to elucidate the situation in Telltale’s latest, Puzzle Agent.

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"The next evolution of the Trauma Center series."

I’ve always really enjoyed the concept behind the Trauma Center series. Performing surgeries, whether it be with a stylus or a Wii remote (depending on which game), felt fresh and satisfying. Still, I never saw any of the games through to the end until Trauma Team came along.

While previous games attempted to keep things interesting with each surgery, I would inevitably lose interest after extended playing. This is where Trauma Team excels. Rather than have you perform surgery after surgery, Trauma Team‘s missions are divided between six different characters; only one of which is a general surgeon. Thanks to the great sense of variety this provides, I never found myself getting bored.

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