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Poil posted:Restore, Restart or Quit is pretty much the Sierra slogan. Codename: Iceman, made by Jim Walls, aka "ex-cop who thinks he knows how to design games." He's actually right, so long as he remembers to include "really, really bad" as a modifier in there somewhere.
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Jun 6, 2017 20:58
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Poil posted:Wasn't it the same arrow button? Or did it differ from game to game? You could also do that. Direction + same direction tap would stop the character....but you still had the same reaction time before you took a fatal swim. The "Good News" that the OP omits is that even the earliest version of these games had variable game speeds. You could slow things down to a crawl before moving, which made those several-pixel-width bridges much more tolerable. KQ1's moat was bad, but if you wanted the Maximum Sierra Bullshit puzzle involving movement, you needed Space Quest 2.  Look at that. Look at it. Touching any of them is an instant game over. Edit: and you had to go through it twice. OAquinas fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Jun 7, 2017 |
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Jun 7, 2017 01:09
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One thing I was somewhat looking forward to (that's now 100% dead and will never happen) was the LSL remake of LSL2. That game had puzzles designed to be dead-man-walking that you had to iterate through multiple times. Not just one or two, but half the damned game. And it's not like they were the "choose a decision and immediately go back and choose the right one" (there were a few of those too) but the "get an item from the start of the game and take it with you the entire run" variety. Al Lowe was unhappy with how that one turned out and one of the goals of the remake was to severely cut down or remove those issues...which again, being as they were half the game meant that it would get a substantial rewrite. No more, now...welp. Sierra was highly entertaining, but also high frustration--but as mentioned, this was during a far more masochistic era of gaming. When you look at the games, they're only a few hours long if you know how to beat the puzzles; having deathtraps, backtracks, and obfuscated puzzle solutions not only kept the helpline kitty full but it also padded the game to let people feel they got their $$ worth. I'll bag on them all day, but only because this was my childhood. Terrible design decisions in retrospect, but I can clearly remember reading about how a new X Quest game was coming out and feeling excited and planning how to save to get a copy from the mall electronics store. So I guess they were doing something right, for the era they were in.
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Jun 7, 2017 19:51
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Poil posted:Sierra did the Police Quest series too, right? One of my friends was/is into that. Yeah, PQ could get away with being more silly since its schtick was trying to be quasi-real w/r/t police procedures. Playing it straight was the emphasis, and it worked fairly well. Jim Walls was brought in because he was off active duty due to a shooting, and Sierra basically made him "lead designer" with no prior programming experience. Makes me wonder who really did the heavy lifting, since PQ1-3 were actually playable. After Daryl Gates (of the goddamn LA Riots fame) was handed the series, Walls felt he could still do game design and made Blue Force. You haven't heard of it, because even by 1993 standards it was utter poo poo. He tried game design again with a Kickstarter for another police game, which was ended early since he couldn't break $90K. Edit: Good writeup here: http://www.linehollis.com/2014/02/08/line-on-sierra-police-quest-i/ Edit2: Yeah, it's a little unfair about some of the gameplay/mechanics, but a lot of the history and commentary are on point. OAquinas fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Jun 8, 2017 |
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Jun 8, 2017 20:00
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Psychotic Weasel posted:About 90% of the time spent playing games like this is you wandering around aimlessly or doing brute force trial-and-error to try and figure out what the hell is going on. They really knew how to pad things out back then. The hint books with the awesome scented markers. Ah, memories...
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Jun 14, 2017 16:58
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Yeah, Early Sierra game design objectively sucks, but they were the trailblazers. But for some perspective, KQ is also their oldest (recognizable) property, so it's going to have the roughest edges--KQ2 was released a year and a half before SQ1 and 2 years before PQ1, for example. QFG1 was fully 4 years after it. That's a helluva lot of time to refine the process and get better writing talent, and it shows. KQ1 and 2 would basically be called tech demos these days.
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Jun 27, 2017 15:46
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Erpy posted:Basically this. In the day, it was somewhat semi-official in that the author was in contact with Sierra, but not so much that his overarching narrative was ever incorporated into later games. The last edition covers KQ1 to 7. It's also over 600 pages thick. Didn't realize Sanderson did KQ fanfic.
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Jun 29, 2017 16:51
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OK, what's the deal with the bridge? I'm guessing it collapses after N crossings? Keep seeing people rail on it and I haven't had the pleasure of playing this game before. And yeah, KQ6 was probably the greatest. I remember being half-heartedly scolded by my parents for beating the game before my brother did since it was his gift.
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Jul 5, 2017 16:21
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Tandy computers had a "3 voice" sound chip capable of doing decent midi playback, that's why. The tradeoff is that you had to deal with their "Not-EGA" Tandy graphics that not everyone supported.
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Jul 6, 2017 19:05
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That video someone posted elsewhere had the candle being able to be lit by the sconce on the same stairwell from where you got it. Having to look again for the pillow seems like an obvious trap, though I guess you can't advance too far w/o that gold key.
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Jul 7, 2017 23:12
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After seeing this, the box art makes a lot more sense Just a multi-door hanging in the air, yep.
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Jul 8, 2017 04:19
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wait, what even did you need all those damned sapphires for, anyway?
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Jul 10, 2017 05:06
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HardDiskD posted:I thought that you had to collect all the sapphire treasures and hand them over to Valanice at the end, or you would get a bad ending because you didn't have them all. That would be something. The other treasures in KQ1 had some utility after you got them. These are just "pick up and forget" outside of the point counter.
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Jul 10, 2017 14:46
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Item Getter posted:King's Quest III was originally distributed on vinyl records I remember those load screens. "Please flip to Side B and press play on turntable"
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Jul 11, 2017 16:45
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Zeniel posted:Hmm the constant wall hanging punishments makes me wonder if its time dependent, maybe he does different punishments only occur on different days perhaps? Maybe. Could just be an RNG with a healthy range for that particular punishment.
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Jul 20, 2017 05:16
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Erpy posted:Yeah, in the AGDI remake, Medusa (or Smaude, as the game called her in the credits because the writer had a bit of an anagram fetish) wasn't a random encounter in the desert. Instead, in the northern part of the desert area (the remake's map didn't loop around) was a cave with a walkway around a glowing pit and a few alcoves with petrified people. Near one corner of the cave is Medusa (hidden in the shadows), who orders you to leave. If you try to take the amber stone, which in this game was in Medusa's cave rather than in the oracle cave or stuck around too long, she'd slither into the light and you'd get petrified. You could deal with her by using the mirror to petrify her or you could do the suicidal thing and approach her, which prompted her to tell you that if you would look upon her, you'd have to answer her questions from your heart. You'd get five questions, all of them could be answered by picking the goodie-two-shoes answer, centered around the aesop of true beauty lying within. If you got enough answers right, she'd be uncursed and turn human again. She'd tell you that she used to be a sorceress who tried to use the amber stone in a ritual to become more beautiful than any other woman. Her vanity tainted the spell, causing her to become hideous instead. She'd then let you take her treasure in exchange for your hand mirror. That's a hell of a lot better than "Surprise--random desert medusa!"
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Jul 22, 2017 01:33
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grandalt posted:And that detail about having go up and down that path is one of the hardest parts of this game. Such a pain in the neck. It's a legit timesink. You get like 20-25 minutes of free time, but expect to drop 10%+ on navigating the path (going down and back up).
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Jul 25, 2017 18:45
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Glazius posted:I imagine all this fine cursor navigation was regarded as an acceptable challenge in those early days of gaming. Can't think why. Yeah. It's not like platformers were ever a thing, or remotely popular.
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Jul 26, 2017 03:34
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SQ3 actually has a vendor with useless items, but you probably have enough buckazoids where it doesn't matter.
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Jul 27, 2017 01:51
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The nice thing about this is that you could have the player do just about literally anything and it would still be better than the actual game's sitting around and doing nothing.
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Aug 4, 2017 19:41
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gegi posted:Funnily my greatest hatred of a tricky climbing segment in King's Quest comes from a screen that can't actually kill the character... but might kill the player out of sheer frustration. Love that they were totally aware of this and parodied the hell out of it in LSL3
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Aug 6, 2017 17:08
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Aces High posted:well thanks for that Prism, I don't ever want to own a cat now If you think cat hair everywhere is bad, don't even begin to think about cat butt exposure on various/all surfaces.
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Aug 8, 2017 06:35
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DoubleNegative posted:KQ4 begins later this evening. But until then, have a shot of the game over screen... Image aside, that's a pretty common GO message for that era of Sierra games.
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Aug 11, 2017 17:48
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Yeah, VI was downright cinematic for the time. Great design, some bullshit but orders of magnitude less than V. Multiple endings and a really interesting setting....we'll get there, I'm sure. Definitely my #1 for the series.
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Aug 18, 2017 04:14
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Aces High posted:there was a game based on The Black Cauldron? gently caress that must have been dire It was...odd. Take KQ3, remove the timer and BS waiting, make it darker, and add a few more puzzles. Not the worst thing in the world in comparison to its contemporaneous brethren, but since the source material didn't exactly take off either...yeah.
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Aug 21, 2017 13:49
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I think in the AGI engine games what you type out in the parser stays between screens, so you might be able to pretype the throw bone command. Though if it auto-transitions you when you open the door then you'd be screwed. "throw bone" might work as a short, quick command. You might even be able to shorten it more--in police quest at least, "open door" can be shortened to "o d" and the parser will recognize it. A similar contraction may work here too. Also, yep, bullshit game mechanics ahoy. It's good to be the company head's wife...KQ has always been the least fun/well written of all the Sierra series. SQ and QFG had their humor, PQ had some dry charm (or at least a semi-coherent plot). LSL was bursting at the zipper with gags (and yeah, lots of bullshit in the earlier ones). KQ was warmed over fables strung together on the loosest of plots, with loads of bullshit--even bullshit trailblazing. It was basically a cattle ranch in that regard. Not to take away anything from Roberta's effort--you can see the bones of interesting ideas there. It's just the execution that sorely needed refinement.
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Aug 29, 2017 06:23
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Dr. Fetus posted:
As was mentioned earlier in the thread, this was the era of "nintendo hard"--games were challenges to be overcome with blood and (mostly) tears. Player frustration wasn't exactly the goal, but it wasn't something to avoid either. Contemporaries of KQ4 were starting to get better about this; KQ just lagged the pack. Badly. Edit: VV That too. Notice the amount of backtracking and waiting. Couple that with easy-fail/deaths requiring a reload, and you've padded your game with an hour+ for very little effort. OAquinas fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Aug 29, 2017 |
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Aug 29, 2017 06:41
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That's just complete and utter bullshit. Did they actually want players to win back then, or were they just trying to see how much they could frustrate players?
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:KQ1 came out in '83 and KQ4 came out in '88. That's five years to think about what you're doing and what you're trying to accomplish here. It's not that they didn't understand how to design videogames. This poo poo was intentional. Here's the list of games that Sierra released right before, during, and right after KQ4: 3-D Helicopter Simulator 1987 Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards 1987 Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel 1987 Mixed-Up Mother Goose 1987 Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge 1987 Thexder 1987 Gold Rush! 1988 King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella 1988 Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places) 1988 Manhunter: New York 1988 Police Quest II: The Vengeance 1988 Silpheed 1988 Codename: ICEMAN 1989 The Colonel's Bequest 1989 Hero's Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero 1989 Hoyle's Official Book of Games: Volume 1 1989 Leisure Suit Larry III: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals 1989 Manhunter 2: San Francisco 1989 Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon 1989 There is a massive jump in quality from 87 to 89. KQ5--peak bullshit--was released in 90.....yeah.
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Aug 30, 2017 17:24
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Yeah, I've been fairly quick to call out the series' BS, though (I'd like to think at least) I've been trying to temper it with historical context. Each game pulled the industry forward in some regard, and there are interesting concepts and ideas there along with some genuinely good art and writing. It's just that they're sometimes/often buried under questionable implementation. And interesting ideas are not always good ones--sometimes innovation just produces new and unique bullshit. Up until around this point the KQ series has been the solitary trailblazer in the genre from Sierra, but (actually starting at KQ3) the other -Quest series have been established and can be used as comparison foils for the game...and it's difficult to assert that most of them don't come away looking favorable to KQ. KQ5 is even worse. 6 though...they did everything right there.
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Sep 1, 2017 20:02
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Rangpur posted:Hope is in the box but will flee after an invisible timer reaches 3.1 seconds, rendering the game unwinnable. Note that there is zero indication this happened, or that you can even type 'close box' in the text parser during the animation. Compounding things further, if you type 'close box' before at least 1.8 seconds pass, Hope will be trapped in the box along with Gluttony & Sloth which will also render the game unwinnable as the spirit of Hope gets too fat and lazy to do its job when you need it. Stop reading from the dev notes!
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Sep 3, 2017 21:27
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Eshettar posted:.........Owl's Quest? On the one hand, actually playing as Cedric. On the other, there's no possible way his sidekick could be anywhere near as obnoxious as him. They decided to lift a page from 90s-era microsoft. 
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Sep 9, 2017 20:29
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Pieuvre posted:I understand the Cedric hate, but also think his design is really cute. He's an owl with a vest! And a monocle! Well, if we're actually giving 1990 Sierra a budget and a clue for voice actors, I vote Malcolm McDowell.
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Sep 11, 2017 22:38
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Glazius posted:You'd think Graham would have gone walking with some money in his pockets. Why? Dude's King. He's just off for a constitutional in the woods, then returning to his warlord fortress. Maybe take a flask of water/wine, some bread or cheese. Plus the ability to pull gold from thin air has caused ridiculous inflation; he'd need a wheelbarrow to buy anything.
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Sep 14, 2017 04:05
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Psychotic Weasel posted:I love how he just kinda drops dead mid stride - perfectly fine one second. Dead, face down in the sand the next. Interestingly enough, gradually dying of thirst is handled MUCH better by a game that came out one year earlier-- LSL3 progressed the player from walking to slumped to crawling.
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Sep 19, 2017 03:44
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Glazius posted:And the thing is, it takes more effort to turn the player into a dead man walking than not. You have to deliberately plan out the two dozen ways people can gently caress themselves over and learn almost nothing from the experience. It does, sort of. DMW depends on not having [item] or doing [action] before a screen/part of the story. So you set up the failure conditions for the player to find. That's just normal problem solving (for the time) and in itself isn't terrible. The problem is many of the items are able to be used for other actions. That's where you really get screwed over, and where the extra dev effort goes. Sure, the fortune teller and the stores will accept all kinds of gold things, but using the wrong one fails your game (eventually). I can see where they wanted to be flexible and creative with item usage, but their ridiculous inflexibility elsewhere (or an ability to mitigate the 'nonstandard' usage) is what sinks that. We haven't even seen peak "multiple options, but pick the wrong one and die" yet. This game is really the nadir of Sierra game design.
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Sep 22, 2017 01:34
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While there are a lot of "NEED to pick up this thing NOW" events that characterize that sort of "gate" issue that speak to issues putting the game together, it's the self-inflicted issues that really exacerbate the problem. For every item that can be used incorrectly, they have to code the interaction and enable the player to do so (as opposed to a generic "that doesn't go with this" or "I can't accept that" blurb). So while it's great that they allow this sort of experimentation--a lot of the items could logically be substituted--they don't follow through and allow a remediation for the intended path. So to take the Mario story as a metaphor, they didn't address the small enclosed space issue by avoiding them or creating the "ejection" behavior. They instead made the entire game small enclosed spaces and turned awkwardly navigating them into a part of the game. Edit: VVVV Oh yeah, definitely those are the majority of the DMW issues, but they're basically puzzles put together in the game that weren't properly meshed together by the devs--a lack of effort to communicate to the player, essentially. You don't know if you have everything essential from one area at any given time. My point was more about the times when the devs actually expended effort at creating situations that screw you over--enabling item interaction to put you in a failed state (and again, generally not warning you). The player not getting an item is one thing; creating a puzzle that can use a second/third item as a solution within the bounds of logic/reason and then going the extra mile and allowing that to happen and gameplay to continue while DMW is quite another. Passive vs Active screwing over the player. OAquinas fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Sep 22, 2017 |
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Sep 22, 2017 19:57
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Nidoking posted:Let's not forget that some of Sierra's other series had done similar things long before this point - Space Quest I (the rather vital cartridge at the start of the game that you might well not stumble into finding, not to mention that jetpack) and Leisure Suit Larry II (just about every item in the dang game) leap to mind immediately as games where you're constantly moving from place to place and probably missing important things at every step of the way, not to discover it until you've gone so far that you won't make the connection to the specific, obscure thing you were supposed to do. Hint books were a very lucrative business back then. LSL 2 was a sore spot for Al Lowe--he really wanted to redo that one specifically with the new refreshes. Pity they died horribly due to infighting after the first one. While it had a lot of legit DMW scenarios, some of them were designed as iterative puzzles requiring frequent save/reloading because you simply couldn't know what was going to happen/what was needed. The beach and the lifeboat, especially.
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Sep 23, 2017 22:38
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Not to interrupt all the reminiscing, but we still have this game design abortion to push through before digging into some KQ6 goodness.
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Sep 24, 2017 02:42
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:As a matter of game design philosophy, many people feel that puzzle games should be beatable through careful thought and observation, without ever reaching a failure state. The problem with the genie is that it means the game requires the player to die at least once (or use spoilers) in a given playthrough to learn what the genie does, i.e. failure is not only expected but mandatory. Blue. Pate. Special.
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Sep 26, 2017 16:41
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I think Graham was an established knight ("Sir Graham" after all) for the gnat-tiny-seeming country, so he was probably mid-20s to early-30s in KQ1. Still on the young side, but not too young. So that plus a year or so for KQ2, then 18-20 years for KQ3, then a year gap after KQ4, and he's pushing 50 or in his early 50s. which seems to line up with the "graying, but still vital" aesthetic they have going on in KQ5. As for his health, "Magic Fruit" plus vigorous hiking.
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Sep 26, 2017 20:56
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