I vote for the Babel Fish puzzle in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
What’s your take?
Babel fish.
The game that developed my skill at typing “screwdriver” at top speed without looking at the keys.
Yeah, that one was pretty bad. I was always restarting, when I realized I’d forgotten the bloody junk mail, again.
There was a piece of IF done within the past few years about retrieving all the “adventuring junk” from a house, so that it could be demolished. (Yeah, that’s vague enough. I can’t recall the name, but it must be on my hard drive someplace.)
On the… second floor of the house were four rooms, north, east, west and south. In each room, only commands which started with the same first letter as the room’s cardinal direction were valid.
That one was pretty clever.
[sub]In the northern room, you had to “nab” or “nick” the item in question, in the southern room you had to “steal” it… getting out of the rooms was a bit tricky, too.[/sub]
Unless you were in the east room
The Babel Fish was the first thing I thought of when I read the thread title, even before I opened the thread.
Skeezix, you’re thinking of Ad Verbum by Nick Montfort, which came in 4th in the 2000 IF competition. Fun game.
As classic as the babelfish puzzle is, I’m going to have to go with the language puzzle in The Edifice. Those who have played that game with know exactly what I’m talking about.
Funny, Skeezix’ post made me think of Ad Verbum too, but as I recall it was not linked to the first letter of the direction you’d gone. Rather it had to do with finding the right combination with another word/verb.
I actually had great trouble with Pick up the Phone Booth and Die. Then last month I tried again and got it in the third try. :rolleyes:
Actually, Skeezix was right. For example, if you go west…[spoiler]White Wardrobe
Wee warehouse warily warded wearable wares - when wares were within. Wan, whitewashed walls wait without woolens. Wooden, weathered wainscoting wobbles weakly.
Within: …wooden weapon.
> WIELD WEAPON
Won.
[+5].
> WHACK WAINSCOTING WITH WEAPON
Whack! Wall wavers. Wall wobbles wildly. Wall warps. Wall was withholding … weird widget!
> WIELD WIDGET
Won.
[+9].
> WITHDRAW[/spoiler]And back to the Initial Lobby.
Just did a quick check… I was confusing Ad Verbum with Verb, which was part of the Textfire hoax. Sorry about that.
No problem. I recall the Textfire hoax fondly, too. 
Man, I’d forgotten about the Babel fish puzzle.
What about the marble puzzle in Riven, that you had to solve to power up the linking books? Or is that just “stupidly difficult and tedious” rather than “fiendish”?
Nothing, nothing compares to the Babel Fish puzzle.
Can someone post it here? All I find when I search for it is raves about how good it is.
You can find a link to the game and the solution at Baf’s Guide to the IF Archive. The puzzle appears near the beginning, just after the main character (Dent) awakes in the Vogon ship. If you must, read the solution.
Crap. My last post is wrong. Some other dude decided he’d name is adventure in the same way.
Here is a link to an online playable version. I can’t find a walkthrough right now. You might check the IF archive.
Well, a walkthrough is here. But I suggest not read it before you’re actually at the puzzle.
In brief, the puzzle is as follows. You are in a room with a Babel Fish dispenser. If you try to get one, the fish falls on the floor and is cleaned up by the mechanical cleaner. You must find a way to get a fish.
That’s all. The solution is not long but is very hard to find out on your own.
Babel Fish.
I still recall when I had the brilliant idea to tie the sleeves shut on the shirt I was trying to use to catch the fish (this was several steps into the puzzle). The fish came out somewhere else (the neck?) and in the description it added, parenthetically, ‘nice try, though’.
The hardest puzzle I’ve ever seen(and I’d say I’ve played a good amount of games) is the microscope puzzle in the 7th Guest.
It was a simple game you played against the computer, but was extremely difficult to win. I wish there was a online version of it.
Mahaloth: that game is commonly known as “Ataxx”. That may help you find a version of it to play.
While it’s not as hard as the Babel fish puzzle, I thought the sandwich puzzle in The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy was grossly unfair – you had no real clue of what you had to do, and if you didn’t do it, you couldn’t finish the game. So you could easily end up going through two-thirds of the game, and then getting impossibly stuck because you didn’t solve the sandwich puzzle early on… :mad: