Also, don't forget Zarf's Cruelty Scale of Interactive Fiction:
Merciful: You only ever need one save file, and that only if you want to turn the computer off and go to sleep. You never need to restore to an earlier game, because there's no way it ever becomes unwinnable.
* Say that there is a large button on the wall, with a sign above it that says 'Inorganic Vaporizer Ray'. When you try to push it, the game says something like 'You'd better not. You'd lose that nifty pocket screwdriver'.
Polite: You only need one save game, because if you do something fatally wrong, it's very obvious and you'll know better than to save afterwards, often because you can't.
* There is a large button on the wall, with a sign above it that says 'Inorganic Vaporizer Ray'. When you push it, all your stuff gets vaporized, including your pacemaker, and you promptly suffer cardiac arrest.
Tough: There are things you can do which you'll have to save before doing. But you'll think "Ah, I'd better save before I do this."
* There is a large button on the wall, with a sign above it that says 'Inorganic Vaporizer Ray'. When you push it, all your stuff gets vaporized, and you can't finish the game.
Nasty: There are things you can do which you'll have to save before doing. After you do one, you'll think "Oh, bugger, I should have saved before I did that."
* The same as Tough, only there's no sign.
Cruel: You think "I should have saved back in the third room. Now I'll have to start over."
* The same as Nasty, only you just hear a humming noise when you push the button, and there are two buttons beside it that do other, plot-important things. Then, fifty turns later, you type 'inventory'... "Hey, where's all my stuff?"
Evil: You think "How could I have known that was a mistake?" The unwinnable situation looks so similar to the winning path that you probably saved right after making the game Unwinnable.
* Like Cruel, except the unmarked button that works the inorganic vaporizer ray also opens the door that leads to the next area. The only way to open the door without activating the ray is to press the other two unlabeled plot-important buttons in the room in the correct order before pressing the door/vaporizer button. The ray itself is just as subtle as in Cruel.
Hell: You have to go to the walkthrough to find out where you went wrong, because you aren't even sure which room you made your mistake in.
* Same as Evil, except it's a time-delayed vaporizer ray attached to the door. It will (depending on which version of the game you're playing) do one of these two things:
1. Silently vaporize the stuff then in your inventory exactly one hundred turns after you push that button if you don't take the right steps to defuse it.
2. Silently vaporize the stuff then in your inventory exactly when you enter the room in which you will need the most critical item likely to be in your inventory then.
Most games nowadays don't go past Tough.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
I would say KQ5 is Evil. There are a couple of instances that spring to mind, like being able to pay with the golden needle to see the gypsy, but then not being able to trade it for the fur coat to survive in the mountains, or eating the pie or both bites of mutton when you have to eat in the mountains, therefore making the yeti or the roc kill you. Both of those seem to pass the puzzle, only to screw you at a later puzzle.
I would say KQ5 is Evil. There are a couple of instances that spring to mind, like being able to pay with the golden needle to see the gypsy, but then not being able to trade it for the fur coat to survive in the mountains, or eating the pie or both bites of mutton when you have to eat in the mountains, therefore making the yeti or the roc kill you. Both of those seem to pass the puzzle, only to screw you at a later puzzle.
Yeah, that's bullshit and very insidious. KQ5 was absolutely mean on so many different levels.
Possibly less insidious but more hated by me due to personal experience is when you're just walking around trying to figure things out near the beginning of the game. At one point you see a cat chasing a rat through the town. They're only on the screen for a short time and if you didn't save your game before, you only have a small window to save during the event. You have no way of knowing that it will never be repeated or that you must immediately act in this situation.
You must have the boot or stick in your inventory (but it's highly likely that the stick has already been used, and the boot is on the in the middle of the god damn vast desert) and throw one of them at the cat in order to save the rat. You have no way of knowing that the rat is the creature you absolutely must help.
Later in the game, you are required to be a total idiot. You walk into a building occupied by thugs who knock you unconscious and tie you to a chair in the basement. If you saved the rat earlier in the game, it chews through your ropes. If you didn't... game over. Better restart.
There was a group (Infamous Adventures) who were making kind of the polar opposite of those games, Quest For Infamy, where you're an aspiring villain, and it sounded like a fuckawesome idea, but I don't think it ever got off the ground
EDIT:
The nice thing about QFG is that many times simply having high enough skills was enough to get you through a puzzle
There were exceptions, but there are far fewer unwinnable situations in QFG, unless you were a total moron and weren't being a Hero throughout the game
Save
Enter screen
"Phew, nothing here"
Save
Enter screen
"RAWWWWWRRRRRRRRR"
"Ogod ogod ogod get away get away"
Get eaten
Load
Enter screen
"RAWWWWWRRRRRRRRR"
"AHHHHHHHHHHH!"
Get eaten
Load
Enter screen
"Phew, nothing here"
Save
Enter screen
"RAWWWWWRRRRRRRRR"
Wow. The more you guys talk about these games the more I swear never to go near them with 10 foot adventuring pole. If it's above Polite on that thar scale then I aint interested.
Do keep discussing them though. Experiencing their bullshit by proxy is quite entertaining.
Wow. The more you guys talk about these games the more I swear never to go near them with 10 foot adventuring pole. If it's above Polite on that thar scale then I aint interested.
The settings are great, the characters are interesting (if it's not a Roberta Williams story) and the puzzles are usually well-constructed. If you look online or ask what the major pitfalls are, you go in forewarned and they don't sting you. Sierra games are the product of a bygone era, where one adventure game had to last you until the next one came out. So yeah, there was some fake difficulty in there, but it was just part of the puzzle back then.
I'd say start with Quest for Glory. There really aren't any ways to make the game unwinnable if you're paying attention.
Oh I almost forgot, the troll is in a maze too, so you're not only stuck in a dark cave with a randomly appearing troll you can't see or escape from who will eat you as soon as he touches you, but you have to find your way through the maze too! Good luck!
Take Space Quest V, there's a puzzle in the game where you need to pick the right adapter plug for a device, the thing is you don't find out which plug you need until the end of the game and the plug is randomly generated, so the only way to solve the puzzle is to save it and then reload and play through again from that point once you've found out what the plug will be.
What
I always just held off on buying the plug, went to Space Quest XII, entered the maze and looked at the plug before the death droid came, snuck back into the time pod, went to the mall again and bought the part I needed
I never had to save the game and keep playing only to have to replay a big chunk of the game
Space Quest IV, not V. V was the awesome one where you had control of your own spaceship.
I don't remember a plug puzzle in 5 that required you to save scumm
I just always played it straight through, in fact I could probably win the game without saving or dying to this day
If he was talking about 4, it doesn't seem correct either
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
King's Quest 3 is still my favorite, mainly for nostalgic reasons. It was one of the first computer games I ever played. I still enjoy playing through it every now and then (and actually, I'm about due for another round). Can't remember if I played the remake or not, though I know I downloaded it.
The remake was pretty good. I remember hating the timer, but once you had the random teleportation stone it was a lot tougher to make the game unwinnable.
Well.... that was interesting. I guess it wasn't bad for a fan-made game, all 10 minutes of it. It was fun to see the Green Isles again briefly. I can't complain too much since it was free. I hope the other episodes are a bit longer though.
Not much adventuring going on there though. I think I picked up 3 things and two of those things went to the same person. I also didn't like the way Graham walks. It really looks like he's goose stepping, and not the silly variety.
Edit:
According to their forums here Episode 1 is just an intro and the "real" story starts in episode 2.
Yeah you do. A bunch of games are far more beloved for their second installments than their first.
I've heard some pretty bad stuff about this game and I don't expect it to really be anything special, I'm just saying.
They are beloved by about 30% of the audience.
Because the rest of the audience had the good sense to not come back.
Yeah? I didn't know so few people played Street Fighter 2.
That is changing the subject and you know it, or are being deliberately difficult, or are really stupid.
Its not like Street Fighter was recieved poorly while Capcom was campaigning "oh just wait until you see the second one!"
o_O I said that a lot of games are poorly received in their first installment and succeed afterwards, and then I provided an example. If you think this is a different subject then I don't know why you responded in the first place. But it sure seems both relevant and true to me.
And yeah, there are counter examples. But word of mouth alone can turn around opinion and get people to play a sequel/part 2.
So about that Silver Lining Episode I. I finished it yesterday, and:
+ They've nailed the look.
+ Really digging Graham's voice actor, and I liked the humor of the back-and-forth between Graham and the narrator.
- It's short. Really, really short. There are exactly three inventory items and not many interactive objects. And a fair bit of the playtime, like the entirety of the
Isle of the Sacred Mountain (other than walking up the stairs, and potentially drowning Graham, like you do) and everything on the Isle of the Mists
is cutscenes.
- Oberon's voice actor. Gah.
- Some of the narrator comments do go on. Remember the bit every time you drink in the desert in KQ5? "Ah, life giving water, nectar of the gods" etcetera? These are at least twice as long. And are sometimes the "room description" when you eye-icon something that isn't explicitly defined, which can happen a lot.
- The narrator's voice sounds oddly distant. I don't have any problems with her delivery necessarily, it's a weird sound mixing thing.
- The text when you pick conversation options is unnecessarily small.
Yeah, that's a lot of minuses and not a lot of pluses. But I didn't dislike it, and it's extremely high quality for a fan effort. But as was implied by the dandruff shampoo above, if they were trying to impress with their first episode, they failed. Really wish they'd marketed this as a teaser rather than an entire episode.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
I would recommend holding off on playing episode 1, as it gets you fired up for some adventuring then leaves you hanging.
And whats with the walk way around the garden? There is nothing up there and it takes a good 30 seconds to a minute to walk around. Just seems like an area they should make inaccessible.
Yeah the acting is pretty bad, but most early FMV and VO in adventure games were even worse.
I don't understand why you would discount the game based on that video, I mean it doesn't even show any gameplay.
Don't get me, the Gabriel Knight series had it flaws, but there are a lot of things those games did that were very right. Well 3 kind of sucked, but the first two had interesting narratives, huge dialogue trees and a sense of place that is rare in gaming, even in modern games.
I played all three for the first time recently. My judgment is that the first one is good, the second one is ok (it WAS the style at the time), and the third one is TERRIBLE in every way.
The problem with the third one that it is all build up and no pay off. The first two games felt like they have a long build up but then things get all supernatural and the games pace picks up. The third game just feels flat.
But then again it has been like 10 years (however long ago it came out) since I played it.
Posts
Most games nowadays don't go past Tough.
Yeah, that's bullshit and very insidious. KQ5 was absolutely mean on so many different levels.
Possibly less insidious but more hated by me due to personal experience is when you're just walking around trying to figure things out near the beginning of the game. At one point you see a cat chasing a rat through the town. They're only on the screen for a short time and if you didn't save your game before, you only have a small window to save during the event. You have no way of knowing that it will never be repeated or that you must immediately act in this situation.
You must have the boot or stick in your inventory (but it's highly likely that the stick has already been used, and the boot is on the in the middle of the god damn vast desert) and throw one of them at the cat in order to save the rat. You have no way of knowing that the rat is the creature you absolutely must help.
Later in the game, you are required to be a total idiot. You walk into a building occupied by thugs who knock you unconscious and tie you to a chair in the basement. If you saved the rat earlier in the game, it chews through your ropes. If you didn't... game over. Better restart.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
There was a group (Infamous Adventures) who were making kind of the polar opposite of those games, Quest For Infamy, where you're an aspiring villain, and it sounded like a fuckawesome idea, but I don't think it ever got off the ground
EDIT:
The nice thing about QFG is that many times simply having high enough skills was enough to get you through a puzzle
There were exceptions, but there are far fewer unwinnable situations in QFG, unless you were a total moron and weren't being a Hero throughout the game
Save
Enter screen
"Phew, nothing here"
Save
Enter screen
"RAWWWWWRRRRRRRRR"
"Ogod ogod ogod get away get away"
Get eaten
Load
Enter screen
"RAWWWWWRRRRRRRRR"
"AHHHHHHHHHHH!"
Get eaten
Load
Enter screen
"Phew, nothing here"
Save
Enter screen
"RAWWWWWRRRRRRRRR"
GOD DAMMIT
Do keep discussing them though. Experiencing their bullshit by proxy is quite entertaining.
The settings are great, the characters are interesting (if it's not a Roberta Williams story) and the puzzles are usually well-constructed. If you look online or ask what the major pitfalls are, you go in forewarned and they don't sting you. Sierra games are the product of a bygone era, where one adventure game had to last you until the next one came out. So yeah, there was some fake difficulty in there, but it was just part of the puzzle back then.
I'd say start with Quest for Glory. There really aren't any ways to make the game unwinnable if you're paying attention.
Space Quest IV, not V. V was the awesome one where you had control of your own spaceship.
Zeboyd Games Development Blog
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire, Facebook : Zeboyd Games
I just always played it straight through, in fact I could probably win the game without saving or dying to this day
If he was talking about 4, it doesn't seem correct either
Not much adventuring going on there though. I think I picked up 3 things and two of those things went to the same person. I also didn't like the way Graham walks. It really looks like he's goose stepping, and not the silly variety.
Edit:
According to their forums here Episode 1 is just an intro and the "real" story starts in episode 2.
Still probably one of the higher quality fan productions I've ever played. The face look terrible, but I can't fault them too much for that.
The
I never understood why
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wvFG5byctA
猿も木から落ちる
Do you know why this is an appropriate image?
猿も木から落ちる
I've heard some pretty bad stuff about this game and I don't expect it to really be anything special, I'm just saying.
They are beloved by about 30% of the audience.
Because the rest of the audience had the good sense to not come back.
猿も木から落ちる
Yeah? I didn't know so few people played Street Fighter 2.
That is changing the subject and you know it, or are being deliberately difficult, or are really stupid.
Its not like Street Fighter was recieved poorly while Capcom was campaigning "oh just wait until you see the second one!"
猿も木から落ちる
YouTube has all the evidence anyone needs to know how wrong you are.
猿も木から落ちる
o_O I said that a lot of games are poorly received in their first installment and succeed afterwards, and then I provided an example. If you think this is a different subject then I don't know why you responded in the first place. But it sure seems both relevant and true to me.
And yeah, there are counter examples. But word of mouth alone can turn around opinion and get people to play a sequel/part 2.
+ They've nailed the look.
+ Really digging Graham's voice actor, and I liked the humor of the back-and-forth between Graham and the narrator.
- It's short. Really, really short. There are exactly three inventory items and not many interactive objects. And a fair bit of the playtime, like the entirety of the
- Oberon's voice actor. Gah.
- Some of the narrator comments do go on. Remember the bit every time you drink in the desert in KQ5? "Ah, life giving water, nectar of the gods" etcetera? These are at least twice as long. And are sometimes the "room description" when you eye-icon something that isn't explicitly defined, which can happen a lot.
- The narrator's voice sounds oddly distant. I don't have any problems with her delivery necessarily, it's a weird sound mixing thing.
- The text when you pick conversation options is unnecessarily small.
Yeah, that's a lot of minuses and not a lot of pluses. But I didn't dislike it, and it's extremely high quality for a fan effort. But as was implied by the dandruff shampoo above, if they were trying to impress with their first episode, they failed. Really wish they'd marketed this as a teaser rather than an entire episode.
I just watched the clip you posted and thought, "Man, Gabriel Knight 2 is awesome." So there.
And whats with the walk way around the garden? There is nothing up there and it takes a good 30 seconds to a minute to walk around. Just seems like an area they should make inaccessible.
Yeah the acting is pretty bad, but most early FMV and VO in adventure games were even worse.
I don't understand why you would discount the game based on that video, I mean it doesn't even show any gameplay.
Don't get me, the Gabriel Knight series had it flaws, but there are a lot of things those games did that were very right. Well 3 kind of sucked, but the first two had interesting narratives, huge dialogue trees and a sense of place that is rare in gaming, even in modern games.
I played all three for the first time recently. My judgment is that the first one is good, the second one is ok (it WAS the style at the time), and the third one is TERRIBLE in every way.
But then again it has been like 10 years (however long ago it came out) since I played it.