Don't forget the satisfaction of feeling entitled to tear that game to pieces because you completely played through it, giving it the benefit of doubt, and despite your patience it only got worse and worse, so in the end you can say your first impressions were spot on and not just a hasty judgement. ;)

I can understand the frustration both with the review, and with the reviewer. The thing is that GF doesn't actually allow you to die, or (in theory) get into any situation you cannot get out of. In defense of this, for my entire playthrough I did not encounter a single showstopping bug (just a few rendering issues).

DF put up a message at the start of the game highlighting that there was no autosave. This immediately seemed strange to me, as they prompt on exit that you need to save, so why prompt in a game you cannot lose that you should save regularly? It does suggest that there is some instability somewhere, and thus DF should have implemented an auto-save, given the point that the player has no reason to save because they cannot lose (except with a crash).

At the same time, it's really no big problem. Once you know the correct thing to do in Grim Fandango, re-doing it is a fraction of the time. A crash after twenty minutes of "play" could be reproduced in two minutes of just quickly skipping through those scenes again. I suspect those complaining are playing straight from a walkthrough, and thus twenty minutes really is twenty minutes because they aren't actually playing the game.

Yeah, a game without story will get dropped the instant the gameplay is boring or frustrating, unless I have some serious reasons to think that it will change soon. A story motivates me to trudge through the boring segments to get to the good stuff.
I think it's one of the reasons RPGs are such huge time sinks, even when the gameplay gets very repetitive.

slighty thread hijack or derailment with science off course

but why is the genre called adventure ?
with adventure games i tend to think of the likes of tomb raider and uncharted something with action and adventure not pointing and clicking

does anybody know why the genre is called adventure ?

Sometimes "loosing" (was this really lost) twenty minutes of progress is not a bad thing, good punishment for not doing the right thing. It's game after all.

I see manual saving as a more difficult setting than automatic saves and I would like to have choice between both - or at least one of them.

The only thing I do not like at all are fixed save points and no possibility to save in between if the duration between the fixed save points is more than a minute.
Yes, adventure implies action, drama, excitement. But not necessarily you have to do it yourself. You can also just witness it. It's kind of like an adventure that plays out in your mind. Like a pen and paper role playing game.

I compare it to reading a book or watching a movie. Characters are introduced, they have problems, you solve them, you uncover a story/mystery in the end. Many movies work that way too.

In the end the names are a bit arbitrary. Action-adventures or story-driven role playing game. Who cares really what the name is as long as you know what awaits you?

Not really sure, maybe before that type of genre evolve into RPG and added much more gameplay elements it is called adventure genre?

To quote Wikipedia: "The term "Adventure game" originates from the 1970s text computer game Adventure".

Adventure games were named after one of the first text-based adventure games was called Adventure (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure). The adventure tag distinguishes games that are heavily based on story and puzzles from other games that include characters having "adventures." I usually see Tomb Raider referred to as an Action (or a hybrid Action Adventure) game because although Lara Croft has adventures, Tomb Raider game play is more reliant on a player's skill in making Lara jump and shoot and so forth than a traditional adventure game.

[Darn. Ninja'd.]

Exactly. Also known as Colossal Cave Adventure. So instead of "games where you go on an adventure", the genre name most likely translates to "games similar to/evolved from (Colossal Cave) Adventure". :)

i still see the likes of tomb raider and uncharted which are heavily based on exploring tombs and ruins looking for artifacts as adventure ( or action adventure )

but thats me i suppose

Well, they are referred to as action adventures, not only by you. But that's probably because they combine elements from adventure games (focus on mostly linear story, puzzles) with elements from action games (combat, jumping etc.), not because of their setting (for example, Arx Fatalis and Oblivion would not be seen as adventure games by most, even though they let you explore tombs and ruins, because they contain enough RPG elements to make them distinct from adventure games).

I always thought that those games were called adventures because it was an adventure to find out which words the parser accepted.

Same situation with roguelikes. The genre founding game was Rogue, so now we have roguelikes.

It's interesting how many names wind up having nothing to do with the innate qualities of the thing they refer to.

Regarding the name of the "adventure" genre:

Unfortunately, the non-indicative name of the genre can--as we've seen here--cause some confusion; for example, I recall misunderstandings when asking after adventure games in shops. I suspect that It might be to the benefit of the genre and its fans if a new name were applied to it--but alas names can carry a fair bit of inertia (especially when they've been around for a while, as with the "adventure" genre), and I'm not sure that an attempt to rename the genre would be well-received in adventure-game circles.

I'm curious (genuinely): what term do you use for games in the "adventure" genre--games like Gabriel Knight, King's Quest, the Frogwares Sherlock Holmes games, and so on?