@HeavyEavy: I'm younger than you, but still old enough to remember different times when I spent days with from today's perspective primitive games. Discovering secrets in text-only games was great fun. First "adult" games with graphics, where the hot content was about ten hand-drawn softcore images in whole game, were great too. But great back then. Times change, there's much more to choose from and everything is moving faster.
It could be just me (probably not), but I'm not that much interested in gaming aspect in adult games. I like the challenge, but it works best with other kinds of games (shooters, strategies, ...) where failing few times makes you try harder and finally nail it. And it's fine, because replayability is good. But most adult games simply don't have it. They're fun when you play for the first time and discover what's there. If there's possibility of hard failure and you need to replay significant part again, it's usually not fun anymore. That's also the reason why I hate when authors break saves between versions (unless it's unavoidable like with next SHF). And same goes for searching for some very specific conditions to move forward, if gets annoying fast.
Just ripping CG is no way to go. Again, most adult games don't have visuals that would stand out by themselves. Even when some characters look great (like Sarah here, she's lovely), it's just few images and with nothing more to them, it's kind of boring. I have internet, thousands and thousands of images are just few clicks away. It's the story that glues them together and moves the whole thing to completely different level. Granted, "story" is a stretch in many cases, but even a little makes huge difference.
In short, good game should have some challenge, because it brings the nice sense of achievement, but it also should be intuitive, because getting stuck is no fun.
