The thing about Space Quest, LSL, and some of the others is that dying was part of the fun of the game; some of the humor was tied up in it. In King’s Quest and such, random deathtraps were just frustrating.
One of the finest moments in gaming history for me was in the first Monkey Island. Your character, Guybrush Threepwood, (and who came up with that name, anyway?) is on top of a cliff. If you walk too close to the edge, it crumbles away and you drop to your death, complete with Sierra On-line-style dialog box. “I can’t believe it!” you say, “How cheap! And why did they use that style of dialog box, when other times it’s a completely different style?”
As you sit there pondering this mystery, suddenly Guybrush pops back up from below, landing safely back on the cliff-top. Short pause, then he says, simply, “Rubber tree.”
Yeah, I always admired Lucas Arts for avoiding deathtraps and unwinnable states in their games.
When you die in a Lucas Arts game, it’s because you actively did something that led to your death. And if the game would be put in an unwinnable state by something you did, you will die. Not find out 20 hours later that the seemingly inconsequntial item you destroyed/left behind was needed.
I never understood Sierra’s penchant for deathtraps. Death is a valid part of the game, but one should not be psychic to be able to avoid it.
I thought it was fun. I got to the final boss…who I could not beat…
The most evil deathtrap in it, though, is the evil save box. Throughout the game, the save boxes have been the only things not activly trying to kill you…except for the one right before the final boss, and right after a lengthy upscroll sequence that is very very difficult.
The LucasArt Help Desk was also supposedly rife with calls from angry people who yelled at them for not including game disks #347 and #1239 (or somesuch) in the retail box, which the game asks for at one point. Some people Do Not Get The Joke.
Note however that there is a way to die in the first Monkey Island : Guybrush repeatedly brags that he can hold his breath for ten minutes. If you for some reason get stuck when ditched underwater tied to a stone for exactly 10 minutes (it’s a super simple puzzle, so nobody would), you drown.
It’s not a game over, though. It just jumps back ten minutes to when he first got thrown in the water to let the player start again. Just like in Monkey Island 2 if you let him get dropped into acid.
My classic setup (which can’t be used in GTA4) is to use the mouse for the most important things: walking and shooting. I have the left button mapped to “fire” and the right button mapped to “walk forward”. Because of the mouselook you get a really wicked range of motion that cannot possibly be replicated by WASD or analog sticks.
I’ll have to try it with my PS2 style controller though… that lock on feature would be handy in some parts.
I love that mission! The only problem sometimes is running out of fuel.
You don’t have to strafe the vans to death, you can land and crawl up on them. They don’t start running until you start shooting.
The next Zero mission after that was proving to be stupidly tough until someone pointed out the most obvious thing. This is a mission where you have an RC chopper and Zero’s nemesis has one and you have to move a bunch of obstacles and blow things up so your car can get to the other side. The other chopper does everything it can to sabotage your efforts while Zero bitches like the whiny little girl he is. So what do you do? Fly a bomb over to the other base and drop it right on the chopper when it lands. After that you just have to blow up a couple of tanks, drop a few bridges into place, move some obstacles and you’re all set.
As I recall Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (for PC) was close to impossible. As the game went on the enemies got tougher and tougher and your character… didn’t. The storming the beach mission was damn near impossible and I think you had to die a certain number of times before you were allowed to proceed. For example, if you made it onto the beach and breached the initial defenses you had to run through a minefield to go any further. And there was no way to do it without hitting at least one mine on your first try. So it was right back to the beginning. There was also a mission where you had a slow six-shot sniper rifle and several enemies to kill (all at once) who were trying to blow up a bridge. If you missed even one of them it was mission failed. I finally gave up on that game after the tank mission where you get one lonely tank but you have to fight other tanks two at a time and they can kill you with a single shot.
The last level of the original Soldier of Fortune was a deathtrap too. You end up in a submarine pen surrounded by enemies. So you run and gun and eventually kill them all. But then the big boss man shows up and mwa-ha-has at you for a while. You pound his ass for all you’re worth and after he’s down about halfway he turns on the three big AA guns that are in the room. These guns have an invulnerability field on them before he appears and due to a glitch in the game it never shuts off. No matter where you are in the room those guns kill you instantly. I never did get past that one.
Seems like text adventures have a lot of scenarios where the player has to die over and over again to get the sequence of actions right: the most obvious one that comes to mind is the Babelfish puzzle in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
But there are some of the games, particularly later noncommercial Inform games, where I have no idea how anyone could have solved them without the walkthrough. I’m thinking in particular of one I think was called Verissima. In any case, you’re scheming to assume the guardianship of a Renaissance duke whose father just unexpectedly died, and you have to kill off 8 or 9 other claimants to the title, and if you miss one of them you end up dead. You have a limited amount of time to do this all, and there are some events where you need to be in the right place at the right time (there’s a bit where you have to turn on the monitoring equipment for a particular room for a particular time, then give the recording to another character). I’d link the walkthrough, but I’m at work and can’t go to gaming sites, but in any case you have only one or two wasted moves for the entire game - I had to go back and start over when I was following the walkthrough because I went east instead of west once. Anyway, I just can’t imagine the kind of process that would be required to win the game without using the walkthrough.
You’re thinking of “Varicella” (yes, like Chicken Pox), by Adam Cadre.
However, Varicella was intentionally hard. It was also intentionally designed to be trial and error. Each time you fail, the ending will adjust based on what you did. You literally have to visit almost every place in the palace at a certain time to get the needed event to occur, and you have to respond correctly to the event otherwise you miss it. So expect to play the game many, many, many times without help if you want to succeed. And each time you should get closer to the exact sequence of events that are needed to win.
So the game is insanely difficult, but it is fair. It also has almost every object described. Adam Cadre is of the philosophy that all games should be fair, if not easy.
He has another game where you play a dungeon keeper who has to lay traps for the hero, and they all have to be laid in a certain order or the hero will win and you will lose. It also involves painstaking trial and error.
Both these games concentrate more on the puzzle aspect of IF, whereas his games such as Shrapnel and Photopia explore more of the storytelling elements.
But I would never classify Varicella as unforgiveable. It’s very difficult, and I used a walkthrough for some of it, but nothing is really unfair.
WASD is normally used together with mouselook and is generally a better setup than yours as it allows you to move in a different direction than where your character is facing. Most commonly, A and D are not used for turning, but for moving sideways. I assume that your mouse button is set up to move forward.
Personally I can’t imagine playing FPS games with a gamepad as the other poster. A mouse offers much better precision and quicker responses.