Charles Herold

cherold@timedigital.com

Game philosophy: A good adventure game has at least two of these: Ingenious puzzles, an involving story, interesting dialogue, stunning visuals and sound. More than two and it's a great game. The thing that can most easily make an adventure game suck is poorly designed puzzles. A bad puzzle for me is one where the solution can only be found by trial and error, or where the logic is overly convoluted, where there is no logic, where the puzzle goes against real world logic without creating it's own explicable inner logic, where there is needless busywork, or where you are not given proper feedback to be able to solve what might in other circumstances might be a decent puzzle. Puzzles must be fair and show ingenuity. If you want to see what games I think are best, check my index by rating.

Personal info: I write the New York Times's Game Theory column every other week, alternating with Peter Olafson, (links to reviews here) and review technology gizmos for Time Digital. Once upon a time I dreamed of being funny and famous, check out Another self-indulgent home page to see the remnants of that. Deskchair Adventurer is my site. Reviews are all stored in Microsoft Access and turned into HTML pages with a Visual Basic script that I am constantly tinkering with.

Game reviews by Charles Herold:
Alone in the Dark
Amazon: Guardians of Eden
AMBER: Journeys Beyond
Amerzone
Arcane
Atlantis II
Azreal's Tear
Aztec
Bladerunner
Broken Swords II
Burn:Cycle
City of Lost Children
Comer
Companions of Xanth
Curse of Monkey Island
Day of the Tentacle
Death Gate
Dig, The
Discworld
Discworld II
Dracula Resurrection
Dreamweb
Ecoquest
Eric the Unready
Faust
Flight of the Amazon Queen
Full Throttle
Gabriel Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers
Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within
Gateway
Gateway 2: Homeworld
Goblins 1, 2 & 3
Grim Fandango
Hopkins of the F.B.I.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Isabelle
Jack Orlando
Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time
King's Quest VI
King's Quest: Mask of Eternity
Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
Lightbringer
Lighthouse
Loom
Lure of the Temptress
Manhattan Apartment Hunter
Monkey Island 1 and 2
Morpheus
Mummy: Tomb of the Pharaoh
Myst
Nancy Drew: Stay Tuned For Danger
Nightfall
Obsidian
Omikron: The Nomad Soul
Pajama Sam 3
Pepper's Adventures in Time
RAMA
Realms of the Haunting
Resident Evil 2
Return to Zork
Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender
Riven: The Sequel to Myst
Sam & Max Hit the Road
Sanitarium
Shivers
Star Trek:Borg
The 7th Guest
The Crystal Key
The Dame Was Loaded
The Last Express
The Legend of Lotus Spring
The Longest Journey
The Neverhood
The Space Bar
Timelapse
Toonstruck
Traitor's Gate
Ween
Wild Wild West: The Steel Assassin
Zero Critical
Zork Nemesis
Zork: Grand Inquisitor
Zork: The Undiscovered Underground