With occasional exceptions. Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is a perfectly fine novel, but it’s not the all-time classic that Francis Ford Coppola’s movie is.
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I’m not dying to see another game from Infocom’s more prolific authors, but I’ve dreamed about another Amy Briggs game ever since I played Plundered Hearts. I still think that’s an underdog candidate for the best game that company ever made.
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Yes, I’d like to see what they can come up with.
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No graphics is why a book is always better then the derivative movie.
I don’t know that I’d say it’s the cause of the fact that the book is usually better than the movie. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was originally published with the John Tenniel illustrations, and Carroll’s earliest manuscripts for the novel include sketches of illustrations, some of which (IIRC) were adapted fairly closely for Tenniel’s illustrations. In a sense, Alice in Wonderland has always been primarily an illustrated book. But it’s still better than the wacky Disney adaptation. It’s true for less-influential novels, too: there’s a nicely illustrated edition of Stephen King’s 'Salem’s Lot, which is still better than either of the film adaptations.
I tend to think it has more to do with the fact that film is a poor medium for things that novels do well, and that good novels rely heavily on. Voiceover, for instance, is a poor substitute for interior monologue in a lot of ways, and an even worse one for providing backstory. You get really amazing thumbnail sketches of characters in a very short space in Oliver Twist (and the rest of Dickens, for that matter), and that’s part of the joy of Dickens, but all Oliver! has to offer is musically glib orphans. But the problem there isn’t that there are images at all; it’s that film is a poor medium for adapting what’s good about good novels. Adding illustrations by Hablot Knight “Phiz” Browne didn’t turn Oliver Twist into Oliver!. It just added something less-than-central to a good novel without damaging it. (I tend to think that this is also why Stephen King has some really good writing moments but that every film adaptation I’ve seen is disappointing: the writing tasks he’s good at are kind of Dickensian, and don’t adapt well to the screen.)
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Well, I do see it as a major factor in the phenomenon that causes people to tend to prefer the book to a filmed adaptation, especially if they read the book first.
Films are basically a definitive medium, books less so. We all put the book’s story together in our own unique way in or heads as we read it. Then we see the film and are presented with someone else’s particular version of it, which may be not much like the one we came up with, plus there’s usually compression and changing of the material we invested in, and other possible adaptation issues.
People usually sum all this up with, ‘The book was much better.’ And they usually mean that they liked the book experience better than the film one, rather than that they believe the book was objectively better as a book than the film was objectively good as a film… and it’s because the way we receive books causes them to win this fight in most comparisons, even though the phrase ''The book was much better" doesn’t mention any of this.
I know what you mean with King. These things where he writes the history of a whole town or piece of land over hundreds of years in a chapter. They’re unfilmable.
Maybe that’s why the best King adaptation is the least like the book 
(I’m all for Kubrick’s The Shining and didn’t much like King’s book.)
-Wade
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I’d absolutely buy it, just as did Bob’s game.
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Probably yes. Though of course it also depends what it is about! I’m not necessarily interested in all books by my favorite book authors either. I don’t think I’d do it just for “old time’s sake”, I just as well like to support new artists.
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Oh come on!
That’s like asking if it’s Skeleter or Skeletor.
It has to have that ominous “…OooR”-rumble at the end.
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I have a pretty strong bias against any and all “gettin’ the band back together” efforts because they historically underwhelm.
However, from the department of “other things which peaked in 1984”, Cobra Kai is transcendant and is the exception which proves that personal rule.
So I would buy an ex-Infocom title if it promised to be on par with Cobra Kai.
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