I agree as well - i cannot understand why games previously mentioned simply don't have an option to turn the voice off and show a text box instead. There's nothing worse than reloading a game after you somehow managed to kill yourself and having to listen to alllll the speech again. Personally, i like to explore the many deaths that can happen in various adventure games (king's quest series springs to mind) and having to go through the speech over and over again is tedious at best.
And on the item descriptions - what in the heck were they thinking? Talk about a waste of time! :/ Not just in inventory, but all the "look" descriptions in the various rooms... Add to that the rather long (and normally humorous) descriptions become such a pain that i frequently find myself not bothering to look at anything and just walking to the next screen.
Pigggy did mention Grim Fandango - and that's certainly one game that got it right! A true gem! And afaik, it's also one of the last adventure games ever released by a major software company. (now if only there was a way to fix it so that it plays fine on fast computers...
)
Maybe we're all just too old school. Maybe the next generation of gamers can't read. Or perhaps it was a sign of the death of the adventure game genre... Who knows?
-uIX