The article's over ten years old, and since then there's been a sorta revival of the genre. There are all the Telltale games, the Monkey Island remakes, and more recently the brilliant Machinarium. Digital distribution services like Steam have helped, of course.
I just started replaying the Monkey Island games this week after about 15 years since I last played the original. Definitely one of the "best of breed". Sam & Max were enjoyable, as well as the Indiana Jones games, but Monkey Island was perfect in that it never took itself seriously so it didn't suffer from the "why the hell do I have to do this?" factor that some adventure games did.
In general, I think LucasArts was probably the best at this in the 90's.
Problem is that games like Machinarium are still just "hunt the live pixel". You have to hope you get close enough to the active object in order to notice it/grab it/operate it. On a larger resolution, this can be quite maddening.
Game Designers: How about making the useable objects more noticeable (like a glimmer or something). Also having the puzzles make sense goes a long way.
Yeah, that's the route we took with Scarlett on the iPhone as well — there's just an icon you can touch to highlight everything of interest. I'm not sure why it hasn't been a standard feature of the genre; maybe some people enjoy pixel-hunting?
Oh, dang. I am sitting here waiting to pay my big adult bucks for the HD remake of Space Quest and they had to revive that girly knock-off quest... jeez :)
I enjoyed Machinarium, but I have a hard time calling an adventure game without dialog brilliant. It's pretty and whimsical, and fun at times, but I just don't see what's so great about it.
It's very much like those flash "room games" with high production values, and those aren't very good most of the time.
