The Most Accessible

I would like to discuss the best game I have ever played in terms of accessibility. I must preface this by saying that some of my favorite games of all time are the older games which were published in the early to mid 1990s. This was an era of real advances in the world of gaming. Arguably some of the most influential games of all time, aside from ground-breakers like Pong, were published in this time, when I was still in elementary school.

Those of younger generations may find it hard to believe who was responsible for some of the great games of the early 90s, which remain some of the greatest games ever made. Period.

Shortly before the release of the third (rather, the sixth) film in the classic Star Wars trilogy in 1983, Lucasfilm Ltd. founded Lucasfilm Games in response to the company's desire to branch out into more areas of entertainment.

Four years after its founding, Lucasfilm Games released a highly-successful game that would pave the way for the world of the point-and-click adventure game, one of the most successful sub-genres of video games. Ron Gilbert's Maniac Mansion was released in October of 1987.

As you can imagine, point-and-click games are by far the most handicap accessible games, not to mention some of the most thought-provoking, challenging, and genuinely fun.

Well, to make a long story short, Lucasfilm Games, Skywalker Sound, and Industrial Light and Magic eventually combined their creative talents to form LucasArts Entertainment Company in 1990. And yes, boys and girls, this is the same LucasArts that published the ridiculously overhyped Star Wars: The Force Unleashed last year. Believe it or not, there was once a time when the company actually made good games, like the Star Wars flight sim TIE Fighter (1994), and adventure game titles like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992). I have to admit that lately, the company's best games are made when they partner with more reputable game companies, like when they partnered with BioWare for KOTOR I.

Putting all that aside, one of LucasArts' last traditional point-and-click adventure games was released in 1995 after a rather extensive development process, one that nearly caused prospective gamers to believe that the game would never see the light of day. Conceived by the combined imaginations of Steven Spielberg, Alan Dean Foster, and Orson Scott Card, the game told a purely science-fiction story unlike any other. The game The Dig was the supposed crowning jewel in LucasArts' arsenal of adventure games. Is it really? I'll leave that for you to judge.

Anyhow, as the years went by, average home computers advanced to a point where older games like The Dig were no longer playable in their full glory, even if on CD-ROM. This perturbed me for quite a few years, as I feared that I would never be able to experience the old LucasArts games the way I had when I was a kid, as old games cannot handle modern systems without extensive technical problems.

Knowing LucasArts' reputation for keeping a firm grip on all its titles regardless of how old they are, I worried that they would never make those games compatible with modern high-end systems.

However, after I looked around the web for a bit, I came upon the name of a new entry in the critically acclaimed Monkey Island series, one of LucasArts' more successful titles. Anyhow, I discovered that an online digital distribution platform known as Steam was working with LucasArts in order to distribute some of the company's older titles.

After checking it out, I discovered that this Steam platform allows a person to buy all sorts of PC games from highly successful companies for relatively good prices. What's even better is that all these games are modified by Steam to work perfectly on modern computers.

So, after years of searching for a way to get and play compatible versions of classics like The Dig and Fate of Atlantis, I finally found the answer.

So with Steam, you just create an account, and purchase the games you want that they have available. And we're not just talking old-school games here, folks; there are even quite a few modern games available as well.

But to sum it all up in terms of handicap accessibility, The Dig and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis were very accessible to me because they open already windowed in your browser, thus making a player capable of going to the game menu with the default on-screen keyboard, and also being able to enter save game names yourself, rather than having to have someone else do it for you. This bit of information, plus the fact that point-and-click adventure games are inherently mouse controlled means that these games are quite accessible thanks to the Steam platform.

I hope this rather lengthy discourse is of some use to you.