Wow, great comic.
As far as the general discussion goes, it gets to the gist of things. At one time gaming existed mostly as an intellectual exercise, as the people using computers were very smart. Today with gaming going mainstream and drawing in the lowest human denominator who are after immediate, flashy grafication, and more of an easily understood reflex challenge (if any challenge is to presented at all) things have changed.
Oh sure, the tech for text adventures is pathetic today, I'm not defending it on those grounds, however the fun of those games was to figure them out, and as the solution always made a degree of sense it was fun to be going "dur! I should have seen that all along" once you finally figured it out.
When it comes to things like Sierra's "Quest" games, you also have to realize that they depended on the "nerd factor" of the people playing them, and people to either have (or obtain) a given body of knowlege. For example in "King's Quest IV" knowing the story "The Frog Prince" makes it easy to deduce what your supposed to do with a golden ball knowing that your character is a princess.
Also in both of these types of games there was copy protection of a sort involved in that the games only acknowlege certain verbs/action words, and some of them are not straightforward. The Docs would tell you which words the game was likely to accept and this made things much easier as one of the two or three ways of saying something in the docs would typically function for obvious things. Guys bringing these games back without the docs seem to have missed this to be honest.
The point is kind of valid though, your typical "Call Of Duty" gamer is not going to have much interest in actually solving puzzles, or derive much satisfaction from figuring them out. Even puzzle gamers today usually less free form things like pattern recognition games (puzzle quest) and the like, rather than having to figure things out on their own.
I think the number of people involved in gaming has changed the standards, and is why things like RPGs and actual "adventure games" are dying (or at least no longer the focus of the industry). I suspect this will change a bit when the current "mainstream" gamers who are pretty young grow up and slow down, but things will never go back quite like they were before.
As far as the old "adventure game logic" of using every item you have on every part of a screen, well as someone who really played those games as opposed to talking out of my keister about it, I will say that this was not as effective a technique as many people seem to think (and only became remotely viable when you had mouse/icon based games). It worked sometimes, but typically the developers thought of that and there were some amusing ways to get killed by using an item in a certain place that nobody would have thought of unless they were doing that paticularly. Not to mention the whole issue of needing to combine objects in inventory, or use items in a specific sequence.
As far as being able to mess up games permanantly, I have mixed opinions about that, but in general with most of the old adventure games they weren't all that big. Once you knew the solution to a problem it was easy to blow through, the playtime coming from puzzling things out. So if you really did wind up getting yourself stuck later on down the road and figured it out, replaying the game to that point was annoying, but typically not the game busting occurance it would be now because it probably wouldn't take all that long.... of course there were execeptions. For me the timed portions at the beginning of "King's Quest 3" and walking up and down the path from the wizard's house was the most annoying thing ever.
