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These early games generally weren't playtested except by the dev team (Sierra was a bit progressive in that from the very beginning the game's designer wasn't also the programmer, writer, artist, etc - even Mystery House had the development divided between Ken and Roberta Williams) that built them. This created an echo chamber effect where tasks that seemed perfectly fine in-house (because the person that created a maze or puzzle usually finds it far easier than it actually is) were extremely difficult to the consumer.
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Jun 7, 2017 01:25
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OAquinas posted:
He has some decent points, but the main gist of the article is "I didn't read the manual, didn't pay attention to anything in the game, and don't get what's going on. This game sucks!" The Adventure Gamer's overview (begins [url=https://advgamer.blogspot.com/2012/03/game-13-police-quest-i-introduction.html]here[/i]) is a lot more fair.
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Jun 8, 2017 20:20
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Even the earliest SCUMM games had nothing close to Sierra's bullshit. There are very few ways to die in Maniac Mansion, they all take place instantly, and always require you to do something fairly stupid. There are a few ways (besides getting one or two of the kids killed) to put you in a walking dead state, but those were mostly accident that Lucasarts made an extreme effort to stamp out in later titles.
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Jun 9, 2017 22:13
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I might be willing to give an LP a try, although I was always better at text-based adventure games than graphical ones.
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Jun 10, 2017 21:38
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The sound isn't too bad in Tandy mode, if whatever setup you're using supports that. Standard PC speaker is pretty bad.
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Jul 6, 2017 18:25
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mauman posted:This is indeed true. My (or me and my brother's) copies came exactly like this. That was standard for quite some time. Including two sets of disks in each package was cheaper than having to deal with the headache of maintaining two separate product versions, and the hassle of customers buying the wrong one. Pretty much all the legit games from my grandmother's Tandy (my family had a C64 until 1993 or so) were like that.
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Jul 28, 2017 01:20
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5.25" Single Density diskettes held ~320 kilobytes of storage. Even when they were common, this was not very much.
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Jul 28, 2017 04:39
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Find some way to share that shield through the whole kingdom, and then you'd have a point. As it is, however, even if he has a reliable way to kill the dragon it would still do immense harm to anybody not bearing the shield.
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Jul 29, 2017 23:45
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The very earliest version of the SCI engine only supported EGA, and KQ3 was the first SCI game. KQ5 was the first VGA King's Quest game.
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Aug 12, 2017 14:14
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Infocom's Plundered Hearts (1987) featured a female protagonist. Critical reviews were good, but it sold poorly because the romance genre didn't really appeal to Infocom's largely male fanbase.
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Aug 12, 2017 21:01
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Glazius posted:What's the ogre even want golden eggs for?
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Aug 28, 2017 03:38
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Those ARE the three Fates from Hercules. Or, more accurately, the Graeae of Greek Mythology that inspired the characters in Hercules (the Disney film combined the Graeae and the Moirai). In the myth, Perseus stole their eye to force them to help him learn how to kill Medusa. The three witches from Macbeth did not share an eye.
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Aug 29, 2017 03:45
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Roberta Williams didn't play video games, so she didn't always have the easiest time seeing things from the players point of view. This was the age before playtesting for non-technical issues was common, so nobody was in a position to take her to task for it. This is also where a lot of the more ridiculous puzzles came from - they made perfect sense to Williams, and nobody else had much of a look at it.
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Aug 29, 2017 05:02
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Fat Samurai posted:Wait, so the three witches have one eye each AND they need the glass eye to see? That's not how the myth works and it's also dumb. That is exactly how the Greaea of Greek mythology worked - three old hags that shared one eye and one tooth. Rosella stealing the eye is taken directly from the myth of Perseus.
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Aug 29, 2017 14:14
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The thing I remember most about 3.5" floppies (since I went straight from using a C64 and a Tandy 1000 (both of which systems used only 5.25" disks in the configuration available) to a 486 with a hard drive and CD-rom) is how absolutely garbage they became in the last couple years they were made. Taking a brand-new disk out of the package at school, saving on it, and having the file be corrupt when I got home was common enough that I usually used four disks to make sure I got one good copy of the file.
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Aug 31, 2017 00:37
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klafbang posted: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. Just Wolfenstein. DooM did not have lives. Part of the reason the KQ games get so much flack is that even Sierra itself was otherwise on the way to a better game design path with other titles. But King's Quest was Roberta's baby, and she's the perfect example of why someone who doesn't play games has handicaps in designing them.
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Sep 1, 2017 20:58
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If you know what you're doing, most Sierra adventure games can be breezed through in a few hours or less. If, however, you're playing "legitimately", you could easy spend days or weeks figuring things out. The games did get longer as the series wore on - by the SCI era customers had a lot more options for their adventuring dollars, and they needed to get their $60 worth out of a game if they were going to buy the next one.
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Sep 7, 2017 18:02
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Nidoking posted:To be slightly fairer about the "pixel hunt" nature of the silver coin, it does glint fairly frequently to draw your attention, so it's not as difficult to spot as the still frame makes it seem to be. Am I the only one who thought that it stood out like a sore thumb? The barrel, not so much, but the coin might as well have had an arrow pointing to it.
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Sep 13, 2017 19:54
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Not in the slightest. Dead Man Walking scenarious are extremely easy to create by accident. There are two basic approaches to designing a game. The first is designing each puzzle in isolation, and then try working them into a cohesive whole. The other is to mimic the player's path, and design outward. In the first method, all it takes to create a dead man walking scenario is to add extra logic to one puzzle without thinking. If you're going back and revising puzzles, it can make perfect sense to think that item B is just as logical as item A to solve Puzzle A, but not remember to update Puzzle B with an alternative solution. In the second method, you can easily forget that Puzzle A could use Item A or Item B, and make a Puzzle H that requires Item B.
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Sep 22, 2017 01:37
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