recommendations for REALLY GOOD adventure games open.
(DS and PC/MAC and WII)

Monkey Island! Grim Fandango!

Zelda and Okami are great on the Wii

Grim Island! Monkey Fandango!

final fantasy 7/8

NO RPGS

I've heard good things about Okami too.

Also - can it, Echoman!

Hero's quest/quest for glory.

Ok, well you just cut the adventure gaming possibilities in half with that prerequisite. Kings quest 8?

Full Throttle is the only one you'll ever need to play.

All the Monkey Island games, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, The Dig, and The Space Quest Series come to mind.

If you can get ahold of it, "Dust: A tale of the wired west" is one of my most memorably favorite games. Monkey Island is laugh-out-loud fun.

Syberia was quite a good modern one from what I've heard.

Grim Fandango is the penultimate adventure game. It's so good that it literally killed the genre -- no other game after it has been as good. If you had to play ONE adventure game in your life, Grim Fandango would be it. The writing is unbelievably good, really. The dialog and voice acting rival much of the cinema from the film noir era.

The Space Quest series is also phenomenal. Hilarious, morbid writing and a fun story. Monkey Island is wonderful too. Also check out both Longest Journey games, as well as Full Throttle, The Dig, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle, Beneath a Steel Sky and pretty much any of the Top Dog listings on The Underdogs.

If you don't mind action adventure, also try Psychonauts and Beyond Good & Evil.

RPGs are good and fine, but they are not adventure games. The old LucasArts and Sierra adventure games are pretty much the best in the entire genre.

King's Quest V and VI were the best in that series. VII and VIII were rather terrible.

Gobliiins, Gobliins 2 and Goblins 3 were also fun adventure games!

Has anyone played the newest Sam & Max games? They look really good, but do they compare to Sam & Max Hit the Road?

Also, way back in the day I was part of a Monkey Island fan group (along with Flirbnic, which is how I discovered massassi!), and yet we also played a lot of Quake, so we had a Monkey Island Quake Clan. I'd entirely forgotton about this until this thread!

ZAK MCKRAKEN

BRB NOSE GLASSES AND ALIENS IN FLYING CADILLACS PLAYING GUITARS

How did no one mention Day of the Tentacle?

or Leisure Suit Larry

Does Myst and Riven count? Wikipedia calls it a Graphic Adventure!

Definitely play Riven if you haven't before, it's probably the best of the entire series of Myst games.

You know, I played Psychonaut's when Emon recommended it, and it was really really great, one of the games I enjoy the most. Beyond Good & Evil, however, was a bit different... it was a hell of a lot of fun, the gameplay was neat, the setting was pretty cool, but it felt sliiiiightly hollow in that the number of locations you could visit, and the actual content of each location, was kinda small... Did anyone else feel this way? That it was picturesque but a bit thin in spots?

Despite that complaint, I would still definitely recommend it.

I guess I'm referring to the way that the game world state is updated at certain points in the plot, like

World State 1 (just after the attack, people rebuilding, shops are open, etc)
World State 2 (Gov't is guarding the town, shops are closed, things have been rebuilt)
World State 3 (You are in space and you cannot re-enter the world)
&c., &c. ...

This gives more depth than a completely static world, but depending on the pace at which you play the game (and I like to play a bit slowly to soak things in) it starts to seem less like an actually developing setting and more like various Acts in a play. Because of the aforementioned limited depth of each location in the world, each new State had a limited number of "updates" that could be witnessed before it became familiar and, eventually, boring.

In Pyschonauts, I felt like the world was large enough, or that there were enough little vignettes (2 campers sitting around talking, someone throwing a paper airplane around, the 2 cheerleaders scheming, the day/night cycle, the areas opened up/closed off) that with each update of the world, there was more to experience if you chose to take it slowly, so that the content of each new state wouldn't be exhausted soon enough for the world to seem thin.

+1

Definitely, definitively Full Throttle.
However, note that it, like most of the games mentioned here, is what you call a point and click adventure.
Y'know, click on something, click look/take/push or whatever.

If you don't want point in click, I'd go for Psychonauts on the pc, or good ole Zelda on the Wii. I've heard good things about Okami too, but haven't played it myself.
Oh, and for sidescrolling adventure look no further then Paper Mario on the Wii

If the wii store is selling them, the Banjo and Kazooie series.

Glover was also a pretty fun/challenging adventure-puzzle game, again, if its in the wii store.

If you have not already played this. please die.
you can escape dying by playing them NOW.
thank you

Anachronox! It's not really an rpg anyway...

Really liked Dreamfall too.

Full Throttle would be my #1 choice.

Anachronox was an RPG in my opinion, but still an incredible game. I just started watching the "anox movie" which is stored on my external HD. brought back memories.

I never played Grim Fandango, always wanted to.

And from what I understand, Kings Quest 8 killed the series?
I only played 4,5,6, and 7

Zork.

I only played 8, and loved it.