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When comparing Sierra games to Lucasfilm Games’ ditto, don’t forget that Sierra literally invented the genre of graphical adventures, and that most of the Lucas games people remember are a decade later than many Sierra games. Lucas’ games before 1990 have just as many “gently caress you”s as Sierra games (try playing Maniac Manision, Zak McKraken or even Indy 3 without a walk through). That of course doesn’t make it nice, but it was born out of necessity (KQ1 came on a single floppy with only space enough to fit 4 screenshots from this LP). Quick death was a necessity, because there was simply no room for another scene. Lucas of course greatly improved this, both with checkpointing you and not allowing death. Those things were just not invented as solutions yet, even if they seem so obvious now. Of course, Lucas makes fun of this in Monkey Island 1, where the second of the two possible deaths refers to Sierra’s love for random death (“rubber tree!”) KQ1 didn’t originally come with EGA graphics, by the way. It was originally a PCjr game - another dead attempt by IBM to make the PC great again. The first version you could play on a regular PC had CGA graphics (both the ugly kind most people think of when they hear CGA and the much less used but by far nicer comnposite CGA, making Graham much less Simpsony): (spoilers after around the 4th minute): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km7UB9CRMyE
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Jun 9, 2017 17:37
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 03:11 |
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MM came out over 3 years after KQ1. It’s more a contemporary to KQ4 or LSL1, which are a lot less bullshitty. Let’s just ignore KQ3 and LSL2, because those would undermine my statement 
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Jun 9, 2017 22:23
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Most of the indy3 fights cold be avoided (some you could sneak past, some you could bribe, some you could bluff your way past “I’m selling these fine leather jackets”). Much fairer than the early 80s games from Sierra, but a heck of a lot more bullshit than day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island and many of the examples most people remember fondly. There was a quite clear evolution. KQ1 was one of the first games using an actual game engine, btw. Sierra decided that coding it in assembler would be too hard and wrote AGI to help. It was made by request from IBM to promote their upcoming PCjr line of computers.
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Jun 10, 2017 09:36
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If only we had gone with killing the dragon back in KQ1 instead of going for maximum points...
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Jul 29, 2017 23:53
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Eh, sounds like the Oracle is just an inexperienced swordsman. Tell him he fights like a goat.
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Jul 30, 2017 00:10
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Is there a death or something if you arrive without getting your stuff and the shovel? That would kind-of explain the thought-process behind the delay - there to give you enough time even if you don’t know what to do.
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Aug 4, 2017 13:26
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 03:11 |
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A big problem is that it is incredibly difficult to forget later inventions. Sierra deaths were less a gently caress you to players and more a solution to the problem of a branching story exploding if you actually provide content for the "wrong" branches. Instant death solves that, but so does "no, you can't do that" as later invented by Lucasfilm Games (they still had gently caress-you deaths at this time). They all tried and abandoned things around the time (such as close contemporary Indy3's health bar and the gently caress-you blimp). Heck, Wolfenstein 3D had gold pickups awarding you points. For no reason at all (except awarding you and extra live every 20000 points). It was just what games did (because in arcades that served as an incentive to spend more money), and it wasn't until Doom thy thought they could get away with that. Wolfenstein and Doom also had lives, because nobody had realized yet that wasn't really necessary when you weren't paying for gameplay in bundles of 3 lives. Even if it's 30 years ago, two games just 3-5 years apart had huge differences, and comparing KQ4 to Day of the Tentacle makes no sense. I was always more into the LSL series over KQ, because Roberta was a bit of a hack writer.
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Sep 1, 2017 20:20
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