The group at AGDInteractive has released remakes of King's Quest I, King's Quest II, and Quest for Glory II with the permission of the copyright holders. They pulled it off by approaching the company directly and working out a fan license. The release of those freeware games actually increased the sales for the titles in the same series, it was a boost for the fans and the copyright owners. Another fan-project, King's Quest IX got hit with a cease and desist since they hadn't done their legal homework, but they managed to work out a deal where they changed the name of the game to avoid confusion and could proceed with the permission of the parent company.

It is possible to get stuff like this to work out, and it's often in the best interests of all parties to foster a community that takes an interest in their work. Copyright-holders are also within their legal rights to shut-down fan-fiction being made about their works but it's seldom worth the bad press or harming the community that builds up around such things. But it's crazy to put years of effort into a project without exploring its legality and advertise it before completion so that it can get shut down. The worst part is the same thing already happened to another Chrono Trigger project, a 3d remake of the game called Chrono Trigger resurrection. The lawyers only swooped in when it looked like it had a chance of being completed, apparently like this title

Speaking as the author of this article, I don't think playing to win and playing for fun are mutually exclusive. Without some aspect of playing to win you're eliminating challenge from the game and making it a less interesting experience. The main distinction I want to make is that playing to win at all costs can make a game a less interesting experience. As a trivial example, if a game includes push-button cheat codes, you may be able to enter those in and win, or you could choose a different mode of play that challenges you more. If you're playing an RPG that has a particular build or tactic that dominates everything else, you might choose to avoid that broken feature just to make things more interesting for yourself, and when playing games with other people you might have other goals in mind than winning at all costs. (like the example of Once Upon A Time, a storytelling game)

You could introduce a more precise definition of what "playing to win" means, where the goal isn't to achieve simple victory as defined in the game but to achieve certain conditions, or you could just say that there can often be more to enjoying a game than meeting its conditions for victory in the most efficient way.

Time spent training is a large factor, if not the largest, in attaining a high level of skill. Good equipment helps in real-life games and sports, too. Some even insist that shell and slate stones make them play better go. Go figure. :)

Right, but the article is referring to games in which the time spent on the game is a direct factor in how powerful your character is in the game, by a process of leveling up. Obviously you get better at all games as you play them more, but some games make your avatar explicitly more powerful the more you play, so that time spent translates into both improvements in skill and advantages the game hands you for grinding your skills for hours.

Luckily jumping puzzles aren't the types of puzzles adventure games typically employ... they aren't abstract puzzles at all really, you know what you have to do, but the game mechanics make it frustrating to try to accomplish it.

Although you could also make the case that trying not to fall off of the beanstalk in King's Quest I by slowly pressing arrow keys isn't a fair adventure game puzzle either.

Leisure Suit Larry 7? I think I remember briefly panicking from the horrifying urgency of it all before realizing that they weren't about to let you die, just giving you a simple puzzle they could talk you through at the start.

Unfortunately puzzle games is also an overloaded term, it's used to refer to games that involve procedural pattern-matching, such as Tetris, Dr Mario, or Bejeweled. Those games don't involve explicitly designed puzzles in the sense that a game like Myst does. The common conception of a puzzle game is more about reflex oriented activities than explicit puzzles like crosswords or Sudokus. Professor Layton is a puzzle game that consists entirely of self-contained puzzles and riddles, but it's referred to as an adventure game, and it's much more literally a sequence of independent puzzles than Myst is.

While Myst certainly does have more than its fair share of logic puzzles standing in stark isolation to the rest of the story, there are a few examples of puzzles that meaningfully relate to the story. What to do with Sirrus and Achenar, and how to deal with Gehn. But in any case, the world of puzzle-related games could stand some better definition.

Well, we could split hairs on what we want to consider an adventure game to be. I think of an adventure game as being about puzzle-solving, where the puzzles are related through a story. In Myst, the plot and story are embedded into the environments and journals rather than being presented to you through a narrator, or revealed by interacting with other characters. In a typical adventure game there'd be much more dialog, and traditional storytelling techniques.

Myst is clearly a very different flavor of game from Day of the Tentacle, but I prefer to have a broad enough definition of adventure game to incorporate both, since the activities you're doing are still solving puzzles related to a story.

I don't know if this is an example of the LucasArts iMuse or not, but my seminal video game music experience as far as dynamic music goes was the x-wing games that Lucas Arts put out. It had music that would change based on the context of the game, for exmaple, if new imperials showed up it would transition to the imperial theme. It was the first time I was really aware of the music as a tool to understanding what was going on in the game. It was a great way to be aware of reinforcements showing up for the bad guys without needing to see them actually drop out of hyper space. It really added to the experience in a way id never realized music could before. Great Article!