Bugger. I should have written “Jane Jensen” instead of “Roberta Williams”.
But since I’m here adding this, I’ll include this quote from the OMM introduction:
How does one play Myst or Riven on newer machines? I have them, but it sure seems like the Quicktime isn’t backward-compatible and the graphics don’t work.
You can get both those games at www.gog.com - it’s a website that specializes in selling older games in versions that work on modern hardware. They have Myst, Riven, Real Myst & Myst 5 for $5-10. GoG is short of Good Old Games.
Yeah, that’s an epic takedown all right.
My patience with such games evaporated pretty quickly, when my delighted friends introduced me to the gameplay:
EXAMINE KEY
–You can’t do that
USE KEY
–You can’t do that
TRY KEY
–You can’t do that
OPEN DOOR WITH KEY
–I don’t know that
OPEN DOOR
–You can’t do that
OPEN KEY
–You can’t do that
TURN KEY
–You can’t do that
KEY–>LOCK
–I don’t know that
KEY:LOCK
–I don’t know that
KEY: DOOR
–I don’t know that
Ah, The Longest Journey! Loved that game. 
(Still love that game!)
The difficulty of the puzzles was pretty uneven from game to game. I think Riven probably had the most difficult legitimate (i.e. non-arbitrary-moon-logic) puzzles. If I recall correctly, one puzzle required you to deduce from the contents of a classroom that the D’ni numbering system was base-5, then use base-5 arithmetic to determine the correct way to do…something-or-other.
Typical math education for most people in the US does not include base-N mathematics, as far as I know, or it did not at the time. Therefore, many people simply did not have the background knowledge necessary to solve the puzzle “properly”. That seems to qualify as being “beyond” them–not because they weren’t sufficiently intelligent to solve it, but because they lacked the necessary framework to start from. (People who were already into computers, however, were often more aware of base-N via dealing with binary and hex.)
To me, that’s no more of a dealbreaker than a book I’d only want to read once or a movie I’d only want to watch once—provided the enjoyment I get out of that one play is enough to justify the money (and time) I spent on it.
On the other hand, those just-a-google-away walkthroughs can enable one to get more out of an adventure game, by eliminating the unfun flailing around and giving up in frustration.
Even better is when it’s something like:
OPEN LOCK WITH KEY
–“You try to open the lock, but you feel like you’re missing something. Maybe a key…?”
There’s no lack of dumb design in games today. I just played Amnesia:The Dark Descent for the first time, and spent half an hour fumbling around because the designers don’t know what the word ‘transept’ means.
There is an easily accessible section named “nave”, which includes two rooms in the transept and a chancel (possibly even named as such) at the end. Another character tells you to look for some important items in the choir and transept.
Turns out he’s talking about a section named ‘Transept’ that is a random unconnected room behind an unmarked door that can only be opened by solving another puzzle. Also of note, the ‘Choir’ is a large underground chamber.
Just want to point out it’s a good game overall; the level layout (if not the names) are wonderful, and it 's wonderfully fear-inducing.
It may actually be that part of the decline was really the result of the lack of good designers making the games. And eventually you did need to add something beyond just figuring out their intent. The UHS (Universal Hint System) is a great help but that can’t be the whole game anymore.
Its empahsis is more on adventure than action. They threw some action in there for variety’s sake. But it is about the story, about figuring out what happened, and is there really going to be cake. Just because the game has some blending does NOT kick it out of the genre… :eek:
Surely you remember the infamous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game. Where, at the beginning of the game, you had to feed a cheese sandwich to a dog. To prevent him from chomping on a tiny spaceship. Which was you, halfway through the game, traveling back in time and miniaturized. And if you didn’t do that at the beginning, you automatically lost the game and had to restart.
The game was full of this sort of nonsense, and the only way to find out that you should have performed an action hours earlier was to lose the game and restart.
This was the last text adventure game I ever played. Must have been 1987. Bastards.
I think the Hitchhiker’s Guide game was one of the first to intentionally take advantage of the players to frustrate them. Realizing that players would keep trying to find solutions despite their illogical basis eventually was taken too far.
For me, I first soured on adventure games with a puzzle in The Lurking Horror. My 12-year-old self could not fathom that a person would have the strength to
pry open a closed elevator door using a crowbar.
That’s another failing - they worked best only when the players thought much like the designer.
What is interesting is that sadistic puzzles like that did have something of a resurgence in ARGs. There, the wisdom of the crowd actually worked rather well in finding solutions. Thus, making them super-difficult wasn’t as much of a hindrance.
Also, I realized what I said of Amnesia I was slightly off.
The section I thought was called ‘Nave’ was actually labeled ‘Chancel’ though it looked the most like a church. The ‘Nave’ section was a series of rooms including a makeshift insane asylum, massive spiral staircase and a laboratory.
No, you didn’t. At a certain point in the game, you could go back in time and redo that section.
The bad puzzle was getting the Babel fish, which I never did without a walkthrough.
You’re right; it wouldn’t. But that’s not what Portal is. It’s not just one section of the game that requires a bit of timed gameplay. The entire game works that way. There are numerous portions of the game where you must make a split second movement to do something. That’s not an adventure game.
Portal is a first person platform puzzle game. Maybe you could argue it has adventure elements, but it’s not an adventure game.
I don’t think you’re really disagreeing. Those very things are the things that you could expect the typical computer user to be okay with. People who got their computers to work well had to be able to keep working at a problem, trying esoteric solutions, and dealt with frustration well. These type of people are no longer the main owners of computers.
Plus there’s so much variety that you don’t want to waste your time figuring out one game when you can be having fun doing something else. This is the reason I think platformers got so much easier, too.
I’m pretty sure the primary reason platformers got easier is that developers finally realized that they weren’t trying to suck quarters out of kids at an arcade. Even so, there’s been a resurgence of platform hell games like I Wanna Be the Guy and Super Meat Boy which are harder than even most nintendo hard games of yore – the only thing that makes them seem easier is unlimited retries (and even then, I Wanna Be the Guy has the insanity difficulty for the truly masochistic). In those old games, you had to bang your head against the wall at certain sections, but what made it hard is that after your 3 lives were up, your muscle memory had time to forget what it had already learned. That is when the games weren’t outright buggy (collision detection problems was the big one).
The Babel Fish puzzle, though rightfully infamous, was a good one that my uncle and I between us managed to figure out to our great satisfaction. What stumped us for over a decade was getting through the Haughty Door. I know the trick now, but we never noticed the quirk of the game that made it possible. As for the bit with the dog, yeah, as I recall, you can get back to feed the dog the same way you get into the ship. But it’s still tricky.
Anyway, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is milk run next to Discworld. It all makes sense, really, but the sense it makes is so twisted that if you made it through to the end scene without a walkthrough, then congratulate your mom for having raised a big fat liar. One of the items you have to gather requires you to give a guy the squirts so that he will get molested by a squid doped with love potion, so you can steal his belt.
I do think it’s far better to design adventure games so that you can’t die, and you can’t get past an area you can’t go back to without getting everything you need. But I don’t fault the original innovators for not having thought of something that seems obvious in hindsight.
Did you wander into the wrong thread? Isn’t this about adventure games?
But if there’s a platformer thread, point me to it!
I was responding to BigT’s assertion that “This is the reason I think platformers got so much easier, too.” In the post above mine