Well, maybe it's true to a degree what you're saying. I love point n' click adventure games, so if Beyond Shadowgate was monetarily accessible, I'd give it a spin. I brought up the original shadowgate because I feel like the change in player vantage point fundamentally changes the game itself. And for the record, the NES Shadowgate was a lot more to me than just a great soundtrack. It's one of my first adventure game experiences as a kid and a pretty formative one as well. Also, maybe saying "dungeon-crawler-esque" was a poor way to describe the 1st person perspective view, but that's all I meant by it. Of course it's not a dungeon crawler, it's an adventure game.
I'm still not impressed with Icom on the TG-16 in general though. I recently bought Addams Family mostly for the nostalgia I had pouring over the Turbo Play article about it's development process. With certain games, you can feel a lot love was put into them to make them a great experience. Addams Family definitely doesn't have that for me. All of the Icom games have a pretty stilted graphical style that I just find unappealing, personally speaking of course. I feel like the voice acting leaves a lot to be desired also - Addams Family and Shapeshifter both come to mind here. None of the Addams Family voices sound remotely close to the movie characters they were supposed to be licensing at the time, and on that note, I understand that getting visual likenesses and the actual voices of the movie stars would have been super expensive, but there is literally no trace of any of them except for the cover photo used for the manual. I don't have high expectations, but it is a movie licensed game and they went laughably cheap on it. Then the way the game action freezes whenever anyone speaks, the terribly whiny compression in the audio, the "dead room" recordings where they all sound like they are in the same sized space with the same surroundings (hint: they were, a recording studio), the still photographs (none of which feature the actors except for Tully) used as cinematics... it's just kind of a shame, really.
Yo Bro I've spent a little time playing and I can't imagine ever going easy on it or Camp California. They've been beaten to death already though.
I would give Shape Shifter more of a chance one day but from what I've seen it falls into some of the same problem areas I've described above. It's great if you can be more forgiving than I am, but it's perfectly acceptable to dislike (maybe even hate!) certain games for whatever reasons. Everything is not made with the same equal level of care, love and quality.
