The in-depth look at a variety of puzzle forms moves from the premise that puzzles are so integral to adventure games, bad ones can easily ruin a game:

Adventure games are different–in that the core features of gameplay cannot be effectively evaluated without actually playing it or giving so many details away as to detract from the experience of playing the game. In many respects, the quality of an adventure game depends upon the quality of its puzzles, whether they are ingenious and rewarding or just frustratingly illogical. Having been told an explanation to how a puzzle works means you will never be able to play it as intended, since a big part of the experience is the enjoyment of figuring it out for yourself. You can evaluate the art, voice acting, and even the story or humor present in an adventure game to a certain extent without diving too deep into it, but an adventure game with terrible puzzles can make all those other elements irrelevant, since you likely will never have the patience to finish the game in the first place.

In this article, I will be taking a closer look at the various types of adventure game puzzles, how they relate to the gameplay, and even how some of these basic forms relate to other game genres.

From two basic classifications (’self-contained’ and ‘key’), a wide variety of puzzle types appear; the analysis is interesting and the article is worth plowing through if you’re interested in the nitty gritty of game design.

Adventure game puzzles: unlocking the secrets of puzzle design [Adventure Classic Gaming via GameSetWatch]

Chapelle takes a look at the legal issues, but the piece is more concerned with the people who love these forgotten games; it’s a fun essay on a curious bit of gaming culture. On the issue of legality, Chapelle points out that most of the websites are more than happy to comply with cease and desist orders:

And on the occasions when publishers do ask for material to be taken down, abandonware websites have a steady track record of complying with removal requests. Earlier this summer, when Valve’s Steam service began offering the full X-COM series for download, Abandonia pulled all related downloads the day after Steam’s went live. Latis recalls that when Sierra produced Sierra Classics offering Police Quest and King’s Quest among others, those links were simply removed from XTC.

“Most webmasters I know are serious down-to-retro people, heeding removal requests from their respective companies,” Bakkelun says. He adds that in some cases webmasters may contact the intellectual property holders themselves to let them know they are hosting the files, and offer to remove them immediately if the games ever move away from abandonware status.

In many cases, the decision for a company to re-release its older titles is met with praise by the abandonware community rather than annoyance at losing a popular download. Indeed, they take an almost cheerful view of it, finding new games to upload and take their place.

Having spent many an hour gleefully hunting for re-releases of old films, I’d love the same opportunity for more of those classic titles I remember from younger days. Here’s hoping more publishers catch on to the desire for relative antiquities.

The Vintage Game Preservation Society [The Escapist]

True, this mod could have been done with pretty much any small plastic box, but choosing a Nintendo Entertainment System to house a retro gaming PC is the kind of crowd pleasing coup-de-modding that is difficult to surpass, save by hollowing out a Vectrex or performing electronic taxidermy on an actual anthropomorphic hedgehog.

The beast contains a Windows XP PC loaded with the GameEx emulator front-end and a metric shedload of NES, SNES and N64 games – all of which, I am certain, are fully licenced and were purchased alongside their original packaging.

NES Console Modded as Retro Gaming PC, With Video [Slashgamer]

The latest is the “Missile Command Docudrama” although its message is, surprisingly, kind of serious. Tof from Retro Sabotage explained to me in an e-mail: “We wanted an “anti-sabotage” to celebrate the 20th release, and it’s kind of a mirror to Mockumentary (though we got mails of people who somehow believed in that one)”.

In the past I know we’ve linked to some of their other clever redos of classic arcade games. The Xevious Autopsy in particular is worth a look, and I think it’s new since RetroSabotage last got a mention here.

Missile Command Docudrama [Retro Sabotage]