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Another great gently caress you was Return to Zork. The game opened with a plant you could collect right at the start. Under the command selection you had "pull". However there was a secondary menu that has "dig"to be used with a knife. As a result the plant immediately dies and breaks a quest. But at the least you could burn it and it came back to life. The worst was later on at the end game where you had to throw all your possessions into a pit. The game's bugs often meant some item was missed, as it was possible to lose items by mistake. https://www.giantbomb.com/unwinnable-state/3015-7607/
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Aug 21, 2019 04:16
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Powered Descent posted:Probably the worst I ever got stuck in an adventure game was fairly early on in Space Quest I. You need to get past a gate made of laser beams and I just could not figure out how to do it. I finally broke down and ordered the drat hint book, which told me that you needed to pick up a shard of glass from your crashed escape pod, earlier in the game, and use that to reflect the beam. A shard of glass which wasn't visible on screen. And wasn't mentioned if you typed "look at escape pod". Unless you walked up to the proper side of the escape pod and THEN typed "look at escape pod". No other object in any other Sierra game, before or since, gave you different information for a "look" command depending on where you were standing. I remember that. I could never figure it out, so i ended up returning the game. I loved Sierra games, but their puzzles were so esoteric that it was hard as hell to have a lot of fun with them. Lucasarts was a lot more fair in that regard. Sierra kept with the typed in commands even after the rest moved to point and click controls. That reminds me, in the first Everquest didn't have any kind of quest log, you had to go to the dialog box and see what people said to you to figure out what you needed to do. twistedmentat has a new favorite as of 04:42 on Aug 21, 2019 |
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Aug 21, 2019 04:39
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I recall feeling with adventure games that I was really exploring a world, and it was a really cool feeling. Hitting arbitrary dead ends was like getting the door slammed in my young kid face and to this day I’m real wary of the genre. Nowadays if a dev does something assholish to a game, it’s just a dev being an rear end in a top hat. You can generally rely on a mod or community pressure to set things right. Back then, it felt like a betrayal.
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Aug 21, 2019 04:43
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I've played a few modern adventure games, like Kathy Rain. Only once did I have to google a solution to a puzzle and that was only because what I needed to do was not actually the direction you were given. It's funny when I finally played Myst for the first time, i was during the internet age, so I was able to do a walk through for the entire game, and it was about 10 minutes of game play. Now if I could have done that with 7th guest, that random rear end motherfucker.
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Aug 21, 2019 04:50
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BogDew posted:Many old games relied on CPU speed to time events resulting in faster processors multiplying variables. Space Quest IV had a bullshit bug involving this. There's a couple of areas where Time Cops will show up and shoot you if you hang around too long, but the timer is based on CPU cycles so, if you had a computer too fast, they'd show up after only a couple of seconds. To get around this, you could download a program that would slow down your computer by eating CPU cycles. Does anyone else remember those?
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Aug 21, 2019 08:00
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Insidious idea: sell old CPU cycle dependent games bundled with a bitcoin miner that returns results to you.
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Aug 21, 2019 08:43
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That would also give you an economic incentive to sell games that are good enough and work well enough that people keep playing - sounds like an all around great idea.
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Aug 21, 2019 09:22
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I think that already happened. https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/30/17630664/steam-abstractism-cryptocurrency-mining
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Aug 21, 2019 09:28
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Try playing the original F-16 Falcon game (CGA version) on a super fast 32mhz computer. Maybe the first time a 32mhz computer was ever too fast to play a game. Also CGA graphics were the worst thing ever. 4 shades of gray would have been better. EDIT: looking up info on CGA it looks like it actually had a decent number of colors and could look reasonably good, but for some reason every game I owned looked like this shard of glass on the eyes. 
Krispy Wafer has a new favorite as of 12:44 on Aug 21, 2019 |
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Aug 21, 2019 12:40
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You shut your mouth, CGA rules! Burn my retinas with cyan and magenta goodness!
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Aug 21, 2019 13:19
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The cyan/magenta pallet was far superior to the red/green pallet.
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Aug 21, 2019 13:27
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The only valid pallette is the SECAM Atari 2600 pallette
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Aug 21, 2019 13:29
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LifeSunDeath posted:The cyan/magenta pallet was far superior to the red/green pallet. Removing one's own eyes with a corkscrew would be superior to red/green VGA. 
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Aug 21, 2019 13:32
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I don't know if I ever had a game with the red/green pallet. I like it.
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Aug 21, 2019 13:33
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Currently wearing an actual t-shirt printed in cyan, magenta and white that honest-to-god achieves some shading and gradients, represent
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Aug 21, 2019 13:46
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Krispy Wafer posted:
It had 16 colors, but only in text mode... Graphics modes where generally limited to one of the 2 color pallets. More colors could be produced in graphics modes, but only if you had it hooked up to a composite television, and the game also needed to support composite mode CGA to take full advantage of it. This video explains it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc
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Aug 21, 2019 13:59
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I'm not sure what I'm more offended by, that the left one is supposed to be red-white-blue or the right one is supposed to be purple-white-blue.
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Aug 21, 2019 13:59
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Krispy Wafer posted:EDIT: looking up info on CGA it looks like it actually had a decent number of colors and could look reasonably good, but for some reason every game I owned looked like this shard of glass on the eyes. It had sixteen colours for text mode, but the graphics modes only allowed four and they couldn't be whichever four you wanted, you had to use one of three preset palettes. It doesn't help that VGA isn't fully backwards compatible, and if you run CGA software on VGA then one of the incompatibilities is that VGA always uses the cyan/magenta/white palette even if the software is trying to use one of the others. E: The PC wasn't really a significant gaming platform in the CGA days anyway. CGA was primitive even for the time, and a 4.7mhz 8088 wasn't fast enough to do any kind of fancy effects in software. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 14:10 on Aug 21, 2019 |
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Aug 21, 2019 14:03
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Known Lecher posted:I'm not sure what I'm more offended by, that the left one is supposed to be red-white-blue or the right one is supposed to be purple-white-blue.
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Aug 21, 2019 14:18
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:To get around this, you could download a program that would slow down your computer by eating CPU cycles. Does anyone else remember those? Yeah, I remember using them back in the day, and also had to use one recently because Central Point Backup's way of accessing the floppy disk controller to cram more data on the disk doesn't work at 166MHz. Krispy Wafer posted:Also CGA graphics were the worst thing ever. 4 shades of gray would have been better. I had to run a program called CGA2.COM to get my Hercules card to emulate CGA by dithering into different patterns of black and white pixels, so kinda 4 shades of grey. Cyan and magenta seemed really cool compared to that! quote:EDIT: looking up info on CGA it looks like it actually had a decent number of colors and could look reasonably good, but for some reason every game I owned looked like this shard of glass on the eyes. It could actually do this but nobody figured it out at the time: https://youtu.be/yHXx3orN35Y e: Sweevo posted:a 4.7mhz 8088 wasn't fast enough to do any kind of fancy effects in software.  please see above  Okay, I imagine it couldn't do that and have interactivity at the same time so you couldn't have a game that looked that good, so you're not really wrong. Buttcoin purse has a new favorite as of 14:27 on Aug 21, 2019 |
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Aug 21, 2019 14:19
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Sweevo posted:It had sixteen colours for text mode, but the graphics modes only allowed four and they couldn't be whichever four you wanted, you had to use one of three preset palettes. No fancy effects, but drat good pc speaker music (j/k it was terrible).
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Aug 21, 2019 14:39
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CGA actually looked not-horrible when it came out, everyone was using a composite tv and the games of the time used the colour distortion to make things appear really colourful. It was when the VGA era started, and all the graphical games basically had CGA as an afterthought for people that didn't have VGA video hardware, that you get that horrible mess of games that tried to do their best with just the four colours from one cga palette.
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Aug 21, 2019 15:34
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I got handed down the family 286 when I was a kid and spent hours upon hours holed up in my walk-in closet playing AD&D Gold Box games in glorious CGA, at a frame rate better measured in seconds per frame firing an arrow across a battlefield took about two minutes still barreled my way through Curse of the Azure Bonds tho, it just took a couple years
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Aug 21, 2019 15:43
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Peanut Butler posted:I got handed down the family 286 when I was a kid and spent hours upon hours holed up in my walk-in closet playing AD&D Gold Box games in glorious CGA, at a frame rate better measured in seconds per frame Red Alert on a 486 with 8 MB of RAM. The first mission is supposed to take maybe 15 minutes to complete. It typically took us closer to 2 hours. Now, we were highly efficient players, micro-managing units down to the individual burst of rifle fire, because we had plenty of time to tweak every unit between actions. We also got good at a particular trick where you could make a grenadier throw his grenade infinitely far by retargeting him after he had started his animation; it was easy because the animation took 5-10 seconds to complete.
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Aug 21, 2019 16:58
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twistedmentat posted:I remember that. I could never figure it out, so i ended up returning the game. I loved Sierra games, but their puzzles were so esoteric that it was hard as hell to have a lot of fun with them. Lucasarts was a lot more fair in that regard. I think out of all Sierra major games library, it was Leisure Suit Larry which first ditched the "unwinnable state" entirely. And even there it was one of the last proper adventure games of the series. Probably because customers wanted to see them titties even if they didn't remember to pick the toothpick from the sewer on the first screen of the game where you cannot go back. This was done obviously because before early Internet and popular BBS's, tip hotlines and books were part of the Sierra's revenue model. Funny enough, Lucasarts never had that same "unwinnable" -design approach and more or less ate Sierras lunch on Adventure genre before the first fall into a minor specialty genre.
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Aug 21, 2019 17:13
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BogDew posted:Another great gently caress you was Return to Zork. The game opened with a plant you could collect right at the start. Under the command selection you had "pull". However there was a secondary menu that has "dig"to be used with a knife. My brother and I tried to play Return to Zork straight. It was impossible. The game has almost no real game play. We ended up buying the guide. After playing it through with the guide, the whole game is barely 15 minutes of game play. There is no way you could win without buying the guide. It was straight up theft of $30 from some poor kid in the 90's.
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Aug 21, 2019 19:17
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An Infocom game I always wanted to play, but couldn't was the Mac only Quarterstaff: The Thomb of Setmoth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarterstaff:_The_Tomb_of_Setmoth  It had a map that updated as you strolled through your dungeon and the game took into account your inventory weight, which kind of blew my 14 year old mind. I eventually found an abandonware copy and like every other 1980's game it wasn't as good as I thought it would be. The only old game I still play is Sid Mier's Colonization.
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Aug 21, 2019 19:39
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Krispy Wafer posted:
True to that. Somehow the Civ4: Colonization remake made everything a bit worse and needed manual editing and mods to the degree of expansion disc to get rid of the stupidest oversights. 1:1 remake with Civ4 engine was what everyone wanted, but for some reason they decided to streamline stuff making everything a bit worse, and the game unwinnable unless you play in a very specific way which is not obvious and need you to game the system. Also OpenColonization, unlike most other open source remakes, is a complete joke of a tech demo at best and seems to revel in a level of usability and presentation which makes even the worse game jam outcomes look professional test prototypes.
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Aug 21, 2019 19:47
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Remember the timed puzzle with the forklift in the elevator in Grim Fandango? It was bugged in the CD-Version if you had a processor that was too fast or had a new feature or something. The elevator was moving faster so you missed the middle floor veeeery slightly every time.
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Aug 21, 2019 19:49
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I wondered why open colonization never felt right. I should look if I have Colonization on GOG. Do people still get joysticks for computers? Outside of flight Sim enthusiasts. An Xbox controller is by far the better choice.
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Aug 21, 2019 19:54
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I didn't realize there were that many versions of Colonization. The one I play is the original GoG and iOS version. The iOS version is a faithful port of the original to the point where it's almost impossible to play without a mouse. I will need to try out mouse support in iOS 13 to see if that helps. I've won that game exactly once. No matter what difficulty level I play on I get slaughtered the moment I declare Indpendence.
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Aug 21, 2019 21:04
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Krispy Wafer posted:I didn't realize there were that many versions of Colonization. The one I play is the original GoG and iOS version. The iOS version is a faithful port of the original to the point where it's almost impossible to play without a mouse. I will need to try out mouse support in iOS 13 to see if that helps. Yes, and they all somehow manage to be worse than game which was released in the era where full color 640x480 was considered high-def and mouse was an optional extra. The civ4col makes the independence war royalist spam even worse, btw. That's the "need to know how to game the system"-part.
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Aug 21, 2019 21:15
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Krispy Wafer posted:An Infocom game I always wanted to play, but couldn't was the Mac only Quarterstaff: The Thomb of Setmoth: Wow never heard of this game, but remember some early mac RPG games that were really great. I searched for an in browser emulation of this game but couldn't find it...there's tons of DOS games like that...anyway, it seems you can get an emulator and play this game but I'm just looking for some game footage but i can't even find that. So weird. e: oh i found some japanese dude playing it...yeah this would have blown my mind back in the day....just like wasteland did. Oh I found this, apparently no one could solve the last puzzle in Quarterstaff so they had to publish a walkthrough  Parchment and coin in question: 
LifeSunDeath has a new favorite as of 22:28 on Aug 21, 2019 |
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Aug 21, 2019 21:38
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How does "The Authentic Colonization" mod rank in the scale of Colonization versions? It is weird how detailed some of these games managed to be. I played hours of the original Romance of Three Kingdoms - marrying off daughters, training my generals, trading rice, watching enemies burn in a wave of wildfires, and trying desperately hard to raise an army when half my population just died from plague or a surprise earthquake. That game is 273kb in size.
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Aug 21, 2019 21:44
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Krispy Wafer posted:An Infocom game I always wanted to play, but couldn't was the Mac only Quarterstaff: The Thomb of Setmoth: This is the most Macintosh looking game I've ever seen. Did macs of the era only have one font?
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Aug 21, 2019 22:22
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Der Kyhe posted:True to that. Somehow the Civ4: Colonization remake made everything a bit worse and needed manual editing and mods to the degree of expansion disc to get rid of the stupidest oversights. 1:1 remake with Civ4 engine was what everyone wanted, but for some reason they decided to streamline stuff making everything a bit worse, and the game unwinnable unless you play in a very specific way which is not obvious and need you to game the system. It's unforgivable that straight remakes of SMAC that just fixed the bugs and improved the AI and updated graphics never came out.
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Aug 21, 2019 22:49
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Killingyouguy! posted:This is the most Macintosh looking game I've ever seen. Did macs of the era only have one font? Ahem, I count at least 3 different fonts in that screenshot.
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Aug 21, 2019 22:51
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Krispy Wafer posted:Ahem, I count at least 3 different fonts in that screenshot. Ah, so you're right. My apologies for my tiny phone screen
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Aug 21, 2019 22:54
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Macs had the opposite of only one font, partly because desktop publishing was a big part of their market, but mostly because Steve Jobs had sat in on a typography class or two.
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Aug 21, 2019 23:05
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The only old game I still play is Masters of Magic. Still holds up. I tried playing Darklands again and had a rough time.
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Aug 21, 2019 23:21
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