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DoubleNegative posted:
This is a reference to the Zork series, specifically 1-3, in which you will always find an elvish sword of great antiquity as an early weapon. DoubleNegative posted:
I believe the dwarf is a reference to Adventure, the ur-adventure game, in which you will be menaced by various threatening little dwarves. OAquinas posted: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. Police Quest 1 is basically "read the manual, because the solutions to 90% of the puzzles are literally just written right in it". Nobody has to like that, of course, but not reading the manual out of spite is obviously going to harm your enjoyment of the game. To add some detail to the history, Walls was on leave because he fatally shot someone. (It took a bit to track that down, back in the day; they were generally pretty nonspecific about it but I found a couple of early interviews which admitted it.) As for the development of the game itself, to the best of my knowledge it was mostly done by Al Lowe of Leisure Suit Larry fame, with later entries by Mark Crowe. You can kind of see Al at work in the puzzle referenced earlier in the thread where the solution is "don't try to have sex with a speeder". idonotlikepeas fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Jun 11, 2017 |
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Jun 11, 2017 07:37
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: This is a fine silver dagger, with a very sharp edge! Graham can't read the runes on the blade, but it appears to be an elvish dagger of great antiquity.
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 04:35 |
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At least with the thief in Zork 1, you had a chance to get everything back eventually, assuming you didn't lose your only light source. In fact, one of the puzzle solutions required you to let him steal a particular item from you, because it was locked, and you couldn't open it without wrecking the contents, while he could.
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Jun 11, 2017 07:46
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That puzzle was one of the first things I ran into in this game. As a lad, I tried a good couple dozen potential solutions to it at various points. I never connected the clue in the house to this puzzle in the first place, and even if I had, I never would have gotten the answer right. (This was the EGA version.)
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Jun 12, 2017 23:20
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The sword literally has a snake on it. It's a deliberate attempt to mislead the player here.
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Jul 3, 2017 20:39
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Almost certainly, although you can't bring the bird to see this one.
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Jul 3, 2017 20:57
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sfwarlock posted:Points. Adventure game design was still in the "Zork era" where you got points for grabbing random treasures. (Never mind that Daventry has a magic chest that provides unlimited gold.) Which is especially funny, since even Zork was entirely out of that era by the third game. Some traditions die hard, though.
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Jul 11, 2017 00:35
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Police Quest 1 has a set of stairs just like that near the end, which you need to follow a guy up. I actually got stuck on them and lost the game unintentionally while trying to record that part. You'd think that of all the hazards in Sierra games, "goddamned stairs" wouldn't be near the top of the list, but, well. I think the reason stairs are difficult has to do with the fakeouts that the AGI engine does to pretend it has real layering, part of which involves where you're drawing the actual stuff on the screen. Basically, to render objects closer to the camera, you have to assign them a special priority, and what priority value is necessary can change depending on the positioning of the object, which means it can be hard to make a continuous object that moves a long way forward or backward on the screen, which stairs almost inevitably end up doing. Combine all that with the fact that the walkable area is only a few pixels wide and the stairs almost never line up exactly with the straight diagonal movement direction and every staircase becomes an impassible nightmare zone. You'd think they'd just learn to use elevators in their games instead. Incidentally, you actually created the priorities of different objects, along with the triggers that activated scripts, by drawing in a separate screen that mirrored the visible one but used different colors for different priorities. Here's what one screen from KQ1 looked like on the priority layer, for instance:  I believe there's a debug command that shows that in-game.
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Jul 17, 2017 23:33
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It's an attempt to simulate a living, dynamic world. It was a pretty common way of doing that back when the developers didn't have the resources to run a dozen counters like the one that keeps track of the wizard in this game. Having it be random can make it seem like the denizens of the game are moving around on their own mysterious schedules if you don't get how it works. You're not supposed to just reroll the screen, you're supposed to see that the bears are in, go do something else, wander by a different time, and see that the situation has changed. People caught onto the trick really fast, though.
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Jul 24, 2017 10:45
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DoubleNegative posted:This is, without a doubt, the worst part of the game. So put on some appropriate music and """enjoy""" the boat sequence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9bXjttMxKY
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Aug 4, 2017 03:27
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Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986), also by Infocom, let you pick a female protagonist. If you want to include non-story games, Ms. Pac-man was from 1981.
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Aug 12, 2017 16:41
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Prism posted:Several let you pick a female protagonist. I skipped those or I'd have to go all the way back to Wizardry and Might and Magic-style games, which also let you pick the gender of your party. I don't think Leather Goddesses falls into the same camp, because you actually get a different story for picking a female protagonist; it's not just a cosmetic thing or a switch on a character sheet. Having poked around a bit now, though, the earliest one I can find is from a game called Lady Bug, also in 1981. If you restrict it to just human beings, the earliest one I've found so far is from Sega Ninja in 1985.
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Aug 12, 2017 17:02
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mauman posted:I remember Police Quest 2 being particularly bad in the closeup portrait department. I have no idea what you could possibly mean. 
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Aug 14, 2017 05:17
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 04:35 |
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Peas wouldn't even work for that gag! They're nowhere near round or hard enough, they'd just end up getting crushed. Yeah! Those stupid things aren't good for anything!
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Oct 25, 2017 17:20
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