Only a Prodigy could solve this MadMaze! [2400 Baud OK]

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Only a Prodigy could solve this MadMaze! [2400 Baud OK]

«‹›18 »

Robindaybird: Aug 21, 2007; Neat. Sweet. Petite.

Least this game didn't have bullshit teleporting or worse subtle rotating floors that Wizardry and co loved to use to pad out time.

# ? Jul 22, 2018 01:14

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 28, 2024 14:56

ManxomeBromide: Jan 29, 2009; old school

kw0134 posted:

But to call it not a game seems a little unfair.

There's a reason I used the quote I did—it's from one of the designers of MadMaze.

That said, I think the initial idea was focusing on board games or abstractions thereof, and a lot of computerized entertainments likely would not pass that test...

... but if I'm being strict enough I'm not at all sure that Paranoia or TOON, by the same author, meet that definition either.

# ? Jul 22, 2018 02:36

Sum Gai: Mar 23, 2013

I'm pretty impressed by the interconnected nature of the PoPs- the game doesn't keep track of what you've done, but instead measures player knowledge. Also the fun ways it simulates having an inventory without any real way to track items.

Between the mazes, one-way PoPs, and suboptimal puzzle solutions I can't see too many people solving every puzzle legitimately, though.

# ? Jul 22, 2018 04:01

Mad Jaqk: Jun 2, 2013

There's also the article, linked the OP, where Greg Costikyan says that the game sucks, though that's more because it doesn't justify being online.

# ? Jul 22, 2018 04:44

Domus: May 7, 2007; Kidney Buddies

The article is also interesting in retrospect, as internet games have now completely flipped from what they were at the time. It's almost as if they followed his advice. The vast majority of "big" games these days have a dedicated community and are massively multiplayer. There are still solo games, of course, but even ones that are solo player usually try to have an online component.

# ? Jul 22, 2018 15:26

Nakar: Sep 2, 2002; Ultima Ratio Regum

Post-Mortem: The Prodigious Question of MadMaze

There is, all at once, both a lot to say about MadMaze and not much that can be said about it. Objectively speaking, this is not a landmark game even for its era. It's no DOOM, no Ultima IV, no Super Mario Bros. 3. It did not lead to a rash of maze-navigation/puzzlebook imitators, and not for lack of interest in the wander-around-and-solve-puzzles concept; just a few years later Myst would drop and revolutionize a genre. What makes it interesting, in a sense, is its uniqueness. The guys who made it are much more famous for their work in print, in the interactive pen-and-paper environment. The result is a game with some of the writing charm of Paranoia but none of what makes Paranoia so much fun: The madcap unpredictability of other people who are simultaneously working with you and against you. To compensate, many decisions were made that arguably would never be made by "proper" professional game designers of that age, decisions at least partially colored by unique circumstances of Prodigy as a platform.

Some of those decisions are neat. Some of them are cynical. And a great many of them are very, very bad.

The Mazes Aren't Mad Enough

This LP covered only in brief the overwhelming majority of the "gameplay" of MadMaze, as kw0134 points out:

kw0134 posted:

We've basically left out half the "fun" and 95% of the interactivity in that we didn't, as a thread, navigate and chart the maze itself. Arguably there is a state which is tracked and of great importance -- your actual location within the labyrinth. You may consider that filler, and certainly that is true to some extent, but mapping a dungeon is part of a time-honored tradition in gaming of this era. Around the same time you might be wandering out of Weith, you could be wandering around in Phantasy Star's first person maze, or mapping Destard in Ultima V, or the sewer in Eye of the Beholder. Even if there's no combat, the game play of being completely lost in a twisty passage, all alike (okay, not really twisty) would have been familiar and a reasonable part of a gamer's play time. You can certainly take it or leave it, but in the broader context of the time it's hardly out of place to have it make up a major element of the experience.

The act of exploration is surely something that needs to be part of the accounting of whether this was a "good" game or even a "game."

It's a good point, but one that I think downplays just how uninteresting the mazes are compared to the Places of Power, which make up the true meat of the game. Someone joked that...

Robindaybird posted:

Least this game didn't have bullshit teleporting or worse subtle rotating floors that Wizardry and co loved to use to pad out time.

...but the fact of the matter is that those sorts of innovations were present in maze-crawler RPGs even before MadMaze for a reason. Wandering around a maze and only fighting monsters occasionally is dull. Jazzing it up with puzzling geometries and complications that make mapping more difficult adds a layer of interesting gameplay to the map itself. But in MadMaze, there's nothing. There aren't even monsters, so it's even less interesting than the least interesting Wizardry game! There are no clues scrawled on the walls -- one imagines a Dark Souls style hint system of sorts would've made this game appear prescient, but we saw only one PoP that hinted at this and the idea was abandoned -- no secret passages, no confusing and illogical geometries that would have truly made this maze, well, mad. For the chaotic realm of an insane god, the MadMaze itself is remarkably dry and predictable.

Oh, and we can't leave out the elephant in the room:

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I wonder how much money Prodigy made off of MadMaze...and how much it cost them to produce?

Zereth posted:

I notice you don't say anything about people playing it very long, which I suspect may hold the answer.

Either that or that's just the number of subscribers to Prodigy and they didn't actually track how many people specifically played MadMaze.

HardDiskD posted:

MadMaze has the dubious distinction of charging you for the minute for the privilege of getting lost in it, which is a really lovely thing to do.

One can argue that MadMaze perhaps accomplished its objective of being a moneymaker for Prodigy by sucking in the interest of fans for at least a while; most people I know who have experienced the game seem to know at least the first and part of the second level, which seems like it would represent several hours of mucking about and thus at least some money. It's impossible to know for certain just how much money the game made, but considering it remained in place on the timed section of the Prodigy service for about a decade, it probably paid for itself. How many people actually finished it is a more intriguing question. I certainly never did while it was on Prodigy; the first time I beat it was back in college on the web version. Shame we don't still have access to the ol' Scroll of Heroes.

Disconnected Design

But there's more to the game design than the mazes being boring. There's a laundry list of design problems in the game.

The mazes feel disconnected from the Places of Power at times. How does a peasant wholly enclosed by a maze even survive? Why are whole swaths of desert unenclosed for no apparent reason? How does Xavier get from his savanna to the Floating City's when they're separated my maze segments? At times the MadMaze is spoken of as though its presence is a serious nuisance or even threat to the sane world, but at other times nomadic tribes and entire cities dwell within the maze and live out their lives as though it were a minor inconvenience at worst and not even a thing at best. That the mazes themselves are, by and large, non-threatening means that it doesn't even make a lot of sense that the MadMaze would be viewed as anything more than an annoyance. People would've mapped things out ages ago, and we know there's geographic continuity because we're told so by people giving us directions, so it's not that the maze is shifting constantly.

The PoPs are highly inconsistent, especially in terms of delineating to the player what they can successfully do. There are good examples in the game, such as Valterre; by and large, from the moment the player acquires Valterre they understand that they are a match for single foes of modest size provided the enemy does not have some kind of distinct advantage like mobility, sheer size, ranged weapons, or magical powers. Killing something with Valterre might not be the right solution, but its outcome is reliable when that option is chosen. This is rarely handled well elsewhere. Options like fleeing sometimes work no questions asked, returning the player to the previous maze. Other times, retreat is instantly lethal. This would potentially be fine, if there were any way to tell the difference between safe flight and risky escape.

The Talisman might be the worst offender in terms of not making coherent sense from one PoP to another. In one instance, using Fire on a burning building allows the player to manipulate and control the element of fire, suppressing it. In another, attempting to use Cold in a cold environment is lethal to the player because the game arbitrarily decides one was attempting to summon cold instead of controlling it, even though by the game's own admission this is something the player should be able to do with the Talisman because they had the opportunity to see that in action earlier. The very first option the player has to use Time is non-representative of how the Time power works in almost every other instance, and then that particular method returns once or twice anyway despite the player coming to expect that Time stops time. Mind gives off the impression from time to time that it can be used to control minds, except it literally never works any time it's attempted until the guard on the Moon of Madness.

There's a lot of obvious experimentation in the game, with little effort paid to going back and shoring up the earlier portions of the game to make things consistent. Part of this may be due to the game being released in parts, but the fact of the matter is that the developers got better at working with the toolkit they had and these incremental improvements make some aspects of the game confusing. Even little things like being prompted which way the player wishes to leave a PoP don't crop up consistently until the third level. Pop-ups basically don't even exist for the first two levels. And then there's Iggy.

Straight White Shark posted:

Huh, I would have thought there would have been a bigger payoff for Iggy. I thought it was cool when we got a companion but he doesn't really... do anything. I guess his hints during the final confrontation are kind of useful? Oh well.

Right? What was the point of Iggy? It's not that there's anything wrong with him, but there wasn't really any reason for him to exist either. If the player had gained a companion much earlier in the game and could use them as an ersatz hint system throughout, they'd serve a much more useful narrative and gameplay function. By the time Iggy actually shows up at the tail end of the third level, the player is more than used to going the entire game without any help. Not much point in providing a hint feature 80% of the way in from a gameplay standpoint, and even less point dropping in a new character so late from a narrative standpoint. It doesn't help that Iggy is only occasionally right, without giving the player much of a way of distinguishing his good advice from his terrible advice. But I don't think the devs had even conceived of the idea until very late, and so they just threw in Iggy at the point they could get away with doing so. It seems like one of those ideas better saved for a sequel, where it could be introduced far earlier and thus actually make sense.

The lack of game state saving is probably the worst of all, however. It stabs at the heart of the game, the puzzles, and makes them utterly trivial. People you killed come back to life. Puzzles you answered incorrectly can be attempted again. Things you missed can be circled back for. Items you forgot to pick up can be yanked out of thin air as long as you can figure out their distinguishing feature. And death can be sidestepped with a single button press, which is even less meaningful than just reloading a save (speaking of saving, notice how the Cipher was just... forgotten entirely?). If you're willing to keep your hand on the Menu button, you can back-hack your way through the whole of MadMaze without even bothering to get any of the clues, or in many cases without even bothering to see most of what the game has to offer.

How bad is the cheating? On the second level, you never need to get on the River of Flame route at all, just head for the Twisted Temple and take the bypass to the final route. After the Great Stone Head on the third level, it's possible to skip every single PoP except the river crossing en route to the Prime Mother's lair. That's 30 PoPs you can completely ignore. On the Moon of Madness, you need only encounter four: The Strange Creature, the General, the Bubble Monster, and the Stuff of Madness. Everything else is skippable and anything you'd need to acquire or learn from those PoPs can simply be brute forced. You could skip most of the game by this method, easily, which leads reasonable minds to wonder...

Sum Gai posted:

Between the mazes, one-way PoPs, and suboptimal puzzle solutions I can't see too many people solving every puzzle legitimately, though.

...how many people who "beat" MadMaze did so having never brute forced anything? Sure, I made it look pretty straightforward, but I also encountered every PoP and methodically examined every single possible option. If you're navigating a maze and coincidentally find the to-next-maze PoP first, solve it, and end up in a new maze... do you even know for sure if you missed anything at all? Suppose you missed a really critical clue? What are you supposed to do? You know you missed something somewhere, but where did you miss it? In a PoP you saw, but made the wrong choice in unknowingly? In a PoP you didn't see, and don't know exists, let alone where? The game practically encourages you to brute force it in parts if you missed anything critical.

A "Classic" That Nobody Took From

ManxomeBromide posted:

My theory for its biggest hater is that it is Costikyan himself. By the definition credited to him, MadMaze isn't a game at all, as his definition of game is that it is a participatory form of art

No tokens, no resources, and in a very real sense, no decisions. With no state tracked, MadMaze is a puzzlebook, not a game.

That seems pretty narrow—I've actually just wrapped up a replay of The Fool's Errand and 3 in Three, which are also very much in the puzzlebook vein, but some of the individual puzzles would count as games by this definition and the presentation of the game-spanning puzzles is a refreshing counterpoint to the horrifically arbitrary nature of a lot of the integrate-stuff-from-a-dozen-PoP puzzles posed here.

In an old article that's been coming up a lot recently here, Greg Costikyan had some harsh words for his own game:

Greg Costikyan posted:

MadMaze sucks. MadMaze sucks because it's a solo graphic adventure. You wander through mazes, every once in a while encountering a "Place of Power" where you must solve a logic puzzle. To win, you have to get through all the Places of Power and mazes.

Okay so far. But here's the thing; even when it was designed (1989), it sucked, because you can deliver far better graphics and a far better interface in a computer game distributed on disk. So as a graphic adventure, it is inferior to other stuff out there.

And it's solitaire! The whole point of having a network is that it allows multiple players. In MadMaze, everyone's in his own little world, nobody can talk to anybody else, nobody can help or hinder the others.

This sucks.

He hits on a number of issues that have already been mentioned. The game is dated even for its time, with less power to deliver graphics and a UI hamstrung by being tied to Prodigy's service and its specific style of interactivity. Part of the reason Myst killed is exactly what Costikyan's talking about here. In Myst, the "maze" is the island itself and the various Ages (though there is an actual maze-maze in the Selenetic Age), and the puzzles -- while not always logical in why they exist where and how they do -- are integral to the world, with no sense of separation like the maze/PoP dichotomy of MadMaze. And the world looks pretty amazing for its time, with prerendered graphics at a time where that was still impressive, animations and sound effects, all sorts of things that MadMaze couldn't or didn't do. And the interface... or perhaps lack of interface was one of the most amazing parts of Myst. Inventory was kept to a minimum (basically just carrying one limited object at a time, and then only rarely), there was no real UI, and everything worked by clicking on it in a very predictable way.

The world was ready for an innovative and immersive puzzle game. MadMaze wasn't it. I think this is the biggest hit against its long-term influence, that it was simply obsolete almost before it came out. 2D games, especially maze games, had become more innovative or complex in their gameplay since. Better 3D games came out, games that were truly 3D, games that let you wander around a space, or at least that made you feel like you were doing that. Games where the transition from hallway to puzzle were seamless; I mean, even Marathon and DOOM functionally separate the killin' hallways from the big dangerous puzzle-ish rooms where you've got lava or something. Though having said that, merely fixing that wouldn't necessarily make MadMaze particularly interesting. With Unity or the like it'd be trivial to remake this game's maze segments... but would anyone really want to navigate through them? Mazes with rudimentary physics puzzles are practically the first thing people learn to make in most modern game engines, and this game doesn't even have the latter to hold anyone's interest.

Had the game done something with its online features, maybe it could be seen as influential in some way. As Costikyan mentioned, it'd be interesting if there were some way to help or hinder other players. The game was basically a notes system away from being proto-Dark Souls, from having something unique and interesting in it to act as a pedigree for games to follow. But that didn't happen. Nothing really happened. It was a solitaire game with a leaderboard, as Costikyan mocks in that article -- except there's not even a Sierra adventure game style scoring system, so the Scroll of Heroes can't even show who completed the game better or more comprehensively or with the fewest restarts, only the people who finished. Mercifully, online games would come to embrace most of the things he complained about at the time, so in that respect we've definitely improved... but MadMaze is just kind of a sad example of squandering the promises of an age that would come not long thereafter and doom it to the dustbin of game development history.

So those factors have led MadMaze to obscurity, but there is one other: The inevitable fragility of its platform. Old arcade games survive with stuff like MAME, you can still find a working NES and cartridges if you're looking for them, and digital downloads and cracks ensure that most modern PC games will exist for about as long as anybody cares to acquire them. Prodigy was obsolete by the mid-90s and defunct by the end of the decade. If not for a fan who salvaged all the screens and rewrote the entire game in Java for web publishing, MadMaze would simply not exist anymore. It'd be gone along with the only platform that could've run it, and would exist only in vague memory as people tried to remember that maze game on Prodigy and some half-recalled PoP outcome. And even then, it almost died a second time: The host for the version I played in college broke down at some point and stopped functioning correctly about halfway through the second level, rendering the game effectively impossible to complete due to crashes. If by sheer coincidence the guy at Vintage Computing hadn't happened to receive a backup copy of the web version, he'd have been unable to rehost the game in a functioning state. And who knows how long that site will last. I do have a copy myself (which I can't distribute, but you know, in case of emergency, not that I'd know how to rehost it), but this stuff can easily get lost when so few people care about it enough to preserve it. Better-regarded games don't risk disappearing like this, and that's unfortunate, because MadMaze is certainly a charming game even if it isn't an especially good one.

So hey, worst case scenario, it'll at least exist here ~~until Lowtax runs out of money~~.

So What Genre Is MadMaze, Anyway?

It's a Visual Novel. Prove me wrong. :colbert:

Nakar fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Jul 22, 2018

# ? Jul 22, 2018 20:15

Black Robe: Sep 12, 2017; Generic Magic User

Nakar posted:

It's a Visual Novel. Prove me wrong.

The visuals suck. It's just a novel. :v:

Thanks again for showing it to us, though. Experiencing it like this was fun, even if actually playing it wouldn't be.

# ? Jul 22, 2018 20:27

Zereth: Jul 9, 2003

Nakar posted:

Post-Mortem: The Prodigious Question of MadMaze
The Talisman might be the worst offender in terms of not making coherent sense from one PoP to another. In one instance, using Fire on a burning building allows the player to manipulate and control the element of fire, suppressing it. In another, attempting to use Cold in a cold environment is lethal to the player because the game arbitrarily decides one was attempting to summon cold instead of controlling it, even though by the game's own admission this is something the player should be able to do with the Talisman because they had the opportunity to see that in action earlier. The very first option the player has to use Time is non-representative of how the Time power works in almost every other instance, and then that particular method returns once or twice anyway despite the player coming to expect that Time stops time. Mind gives off the impression from time to time that it can be used to control minds, except it literally never works any time it's attempted until the guard on the Moon of Madness.

Don't forget the most important inconsistency, the plot-critical one, where Earth basically just causes earthquakes the entire time, which is never actually useful, up until you need to use the Lady's Power over Earth, which was news to me that she had it, to do... something unclear to the Archpriest, thus winning the game!

# ? Jul 22, 2018 20:47

curiousCat: Sep 23, 2012; Does this look like the face of mercy, kupo?

I'd support the VN classification for sure.

# ? Jul 22, 2018 20:49

RBA Starblade: Apr 28, 2008; Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester

Nakar posted:

Games where the transition from hallway to puzzle were seamless; I mean, even Marathon and DOOM functionally separate the killin' hallways from the big dangerous puzzle-ish rooms where you've got lava or something.

It's interesting you bring up Marathon because the entirety of Marathon Infinity is, in essence, a puzzle. You have to figure out you're in a time loop of sorts and break it. The manual is even a hint towards that; it describes a scenario you never encounter in the game itself. The end levels literally spell it out too. The correct level is Aye Mak Sicur ("I'll Make Sure"). The incorrect ones are typos.

quote:

So those factors have led MadMaze to obscurity, but there is one other: The inevitable fragility of its platform. Old arcade games survive with stuff like MAME, you can still find a working NES and cartridges if you're looking for them, and digital downloads and cracks ensure that most modern PC games will exist for about as long as anybody cares to acquire them. Prodigy was obsolete by the mid-90s and defunct by the end of the decade. If not for a fan who salvaged all the screens and rewrote the entire game in Java for web publishing, MadMaze would simply not exist anymore. It'd be gone along with the only platform that could've run it, and would exist only in vague memory as people tried to remember that maze game on Prodigy and some half-recalled PoP outcome. And even then, it almost died a second time: The host for the version I played in college broke down at some point and stopped functioning correctly about halfway through the second level, rendering the game effectively impossible to complete due to crashes. If by sheer coincidence the guy at Vintage Computing hadn't happened to receive a backup copy of the web version, he'd have been unable to rehost the game in a functioning state. And who knows how long that site will last. I do have a copy myself (which I can't distribute, but you know, in case of emergency, not that I'd know how to rehost it), but this stuff can easily get lost when so few people care about it enough to preserve it. Better-regarded games don't risk disappearing like this, and that's unfortunate, because MadMaze is certainly a charming game even if it isn't an especially good one.

So hey, worst case scenario, it'll at least exist here until Lowtax runs out of money.

This is ALSO interesting because I've heard several arguments that we're in fact in a digital dark age for the same reasons - the old hardware's decaying or forgotten and few know or care to restore or upload. Who knows what's on them?

RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Jul 22, 2018

# ? Jul 22, 2018 21:05

ManxomeBromide: Jan 29, 2009; old school

Congrats on finishing the run! Thanks for showing it, and I enjoyed the challenges I got time to attack, so the "show-your-work" presentation worked well for me.

Forumcode wobble headsup: when you quoted me above, the quote removed the part where I had quoted Costikyan, turning the first few sentences into nonsense.

On the important questions!

Nakar posted:

So What Genre Is MadMaze, Anyway?

It's a Visual Novel. Prove me wrong.

I can come up with two serious-but-flip answers to this, one for each direction:

MadMaze is a visual novel, because that term has grown to encompass all forms of illustrated interactive fiction, and structurally MadMaze fits very cleanly as a piece of illustrated choice-based hypertext (even if the bulk of the choice nodes turn out to be maze navigation).
MadMaze is not a visual novel because that term implies a lineage that takes you through Japanese Dating Sims as opposed to western text adventures, and by that standard it is a piece of outsider art. To the extent that both Zork and Paranoia are reactions to Dungeons & Dragons, MadMaze should be filed with them rather than with, say, Long Live the Queen.

Even citing Long Live the Queen as an example shows how quickly the "lineage" criterion will tangle you up, though. Perhaps a better argument can be made on the basis of default player expecatations going in. I'm breaking out the big brushes here, but I feel like I can get away with it here. By now, there's been enough crossover that the categories have merged, but that gets less true when one thinks about precursors of visual novels vs. adventure games:

Unless otherwise stated, a visual novel is a love story, but an adventure game is a treasure hunt or similar quest to go to a place and alter the location of some plot-important objects. (For games like Zork, that may be "treasures, into your pockets", but still.)
As a result of the above, the characters are the most important part of a VN, but the objects, mechanisms, and "rules of physics" of the setting are in the forefront in an adventure.
If the player is failing to reach a goal because they aren't optimizing, in a VN they need to optimize the life habits of their main character on a scale of days or weeks (wiki tells me I'm conflating VNs with "life sims" here, OK) while in an adventure you will be optimizing individual actions on a scale of seconds or minutes.

MadMaze fits neatly into the "adventure" bin on all of those. So the best argument I can make against the thesis that MadMaze is a visual novel is to insist that a visual novel is an artificial subset of the things MadMaze clearly is and thus that it is an illustrated adventure game in the Myst vein.

But I will totally admit that this is a claim much like "MadMaze is fantasy and not science fiction because there aren't enough rivets in it, even though I admit that we get sports cars and bureaucracies on the moon."

And if we're being generous about applying genres across their initial incarnations: sure, MadMaze is a visual novel. And Crusader Kings II is a dating sim. I'll happily accept zero or two of those judgements simultaneously, but never just one.

# ? Jul 22, 2018 21:51

Nakar: Sep 2, 2002; Ultima Ratio Regum

Visual novels are not necessarily dating sims, but even if one were to insist upon the issue, I have a counterpoint: We end the game with Iggy, whom we married.

# ? Jul 22, 2018 23:15

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

MadMaze sure was a thing. Thanks for playing it so that we don't have to.

# ? Jul 22, 2018 23:37

Nakar: Sep 2, 2002; Ultima Ratio Regum

RBA Starblade posted:

This is ALSO interesting because I've heard several arguments that we're in fact in a digital dark age for the same reasons - the old hardware's decaying or forgotten and few know or care to restore or upload. Who knows what's on them?

That's a point, though I think it's worse for things on old services than it is for things that can still be installed and played on modern operating systems. Windows and other OS's will persist for a while, and as long as people care to update digital media from old hardware to new we'll carry forward most things of value (until the inevitable collapse of our society leads to the complete void of all of our records, anyway). You probably wouldn't play the original Warcraft very often these days, but you still can; but for one very dedicated programmer while it was still playable, MadMaze would be kaput and there'd be not a drat thing anybody could do about it.

Granted, of all the obscure things to preserve, this game is probably not on top of anybody's list, and had it been lost it'd probably have been met with "Oh, yeah I remember that game, guess you can't play it anymore, oh well." Not exactly high tragedy. But I'm glad it existed, and that it still exists, if only to serve as a weird offshoot of the adventure-puzzle-online-hypertext-whatsit pedigree. If it's even considered an offshoot? It honestly doesn't have a lot in common structurally with text adventures (pretty sure even ironically, IF fans wouldn't appreciate empty 9x9 mazes), barely any with dungeon crawlers (no monsters, treasures, map interactivity, secrets, etc.), and it was developed by two guys most famous for RPG books.

Needless to say, this isn't the game that secures Goldberg and Costikyan's place as noteworthy game designers. It's more "Oh the guys who did Paranoia did a video game once. It wasn't very good."

# ? Jul 23, 2018 00:13

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I just mainlined this whole LP, what a hell of a ride. I'm not sure folks realized that not just the obvious ones, but basically every single proper noun or magic word in the game (levels 1 and 2 at least) is some sort of cultural reference.

Would it be worth reaching out to Greg Costikyan or Eric Goldberg, showing them the LP, and asking some questions? They're both still active to some degree, by my understanding.

# ? Jul 23, 2018 00:35

curiousCat: Sep 23, 2012; Does this look like the face of mercy, kupo?

Nakar posted:

Visual novels are not necessarily dating sims, but even if one were to insist upon the issue, I have a counterpoint: We end the game with Iggy, whom we married.

# ? Jul 23, 2018 00:40

Andyzero: May 22, 2009; I used to spoil, I'm sorry.

Nakar posted:

"The problem with a blade with a mind of its own," says the Archpriest, "is that it may decide when it shall attack. And when it meets its master--" he makes a curious gesture, as if sheathing a sword he does not carry; and Valterre sheathes itself at your side "--it may choose to side with the victor."

So the Archpriest is Valterre's master. This actually fits with what I was thinking. How could anyone have gotten to Moraziel without Valterre and the the Talisman? The answer...they did not.

Every "Candidate" got Valterre, every candidate got the Talisman. Every Candidate spoke to Insect Queen which is the only way to the Moon of Madness. If you had given up to the Archpriest, then he would have you pretending to have been captured before getting to Moraziel, the way Persephone did.

The POP really did reset every time you left them; this entire thing was to create servants for the Archpriest.

The one difference, the only possible difference, this time was that somehow the Staff of the Lady was able to be used offensively. Perhaps there was some way to bypass Moraziel's shield without it in the previous times.

Or if you REALLY want to be cynical...maybe the Lady is in on it too. She also gets servants from this deal. The Archpriest gets the ones who fail that final test, and the ones who figure how to use the Staff offensively (and what the heck, their friends too) get sent to the Lady's grove where they serve her until the Mad One "forgets about them." (Never)

We'll never know.

# ? Jul 23, 2018 01:22

Tallgeese: May 11, 2008; MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR

I'm not sure we're meant to take master like the Archpriest means "I made this and it obeys me."

The Archpriest means master like "he was able to master his environment." All he is saying is that he is more powerful than Valterre and is able to dominate it. Hence the "it may side with the victor."

Tallgeese fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Jul 23, 2018

# ? Jul 23, 2018 01:44

ZCKaiser: Feb 13, 2014

Calling MadMaze a visual novel is sort of like calling any modern game an RPG, where the latter is largely defined (mechanically) by the empowering of the player over time through statistics or abilities, but now a great many games use those metrics that most wouldn't call RPGs. It's technically a game done through text and visuals, but lacks a lot of the trappings that would be associated with the genre. Also, even visual novels can track inventories.

The best description I can think of is that it's a "visual choose-your-own-adventure", the complicated kind with things like "if you have the legendary sword, turn to page 71" and just sort of trusts that the player doesn't cheat and skip to the page without reading about how they, brave adventurer they are, acquired said sword.

# ? Jul 23, 2018 02:34

Palladium: May 8, 2012; Very Good
✔️✔️✔️✔️

Mad Jaqk posted:

There's also the article, linked the OP, where Greg Costikyan says that the game sucks, though that's more because it doesn't justify being online.

It's clear he wrote that in an age where online video game toxic infantilism was fringe at worst instead being so depressingly mainstream like today. Surely he should have an aneurysm seeing it by now?

# ? Jul 23, 2018 03:02

Epsilon Moonshade: Nov 22, 2016; Not an excellent host.

I'd argue against the VN classification if only because too much of the interactivity doesn't affect the story.

I don't have a formal definition of VNs, but from what I've seen in LPs*, I'd say they have (at least) two characteristics:
- More story than interaction.
- The majority of interactions affect the story in some way.

MadMaze fails both tests - solving the mazes would take up the majority of the game time, and how you solve the mazes doesn't affect the story.

As for what genre it would be in? One that basically doesn't exist anymore - maze games. I remember seeing them all over the place as a kid. Sure, it's broken up by story as an added hook, but the main mechanic of the game is maze exploration.

That's not to say it's good. :v:

* _{Okay, I haven't seen that many visual novels, but basing it off of the The House in Fata Morgana LP that's currently going, this seems legit.}

# ? Jul 23, 2018 03:26

Andyzero: May 22, 2009; I used to spoil, I'm sorry.

Pfft. This game was made during PRODIGY. Hell, back in the day, the only good thing about Prodigy was this game. Despite this, I remember using it every day.

I vaguely? remember reading a mystery series on Prodigy about a guy named Abel? (I think). He was a travel agent, and one of those mystery leads where people died or were murdered around him all the time. (Murder She Wrote syndrome) I remember one story's plot has someone thinking he was a hitman because of this.

Edit: Abel Adventures, guy was Tom Abel.

But for the life of me, I can't remember anything else about Prodigy. Heck, I barely remember Madmaze. I don't think I got too far because I never mapped anything, and I would get to POPs where I didn't know what to do. (In my defense, I was 10 years old.)

Andyzero fucked around with this message at 08:47 on Jul 23, 2018

# ? Jul 23, 2018 08:38

Gloomy Rube: Mar 4, 2008

MadMaze IS a visual novel.

Famicom Detective Club is usually considered one, and it doesn't take much to connect that game with old adventure games like Uninvited or Shadowgate. If FDC is a visual novel, then so is Uninvited, and MadMaze has even less interactivity, so it is one too. :v:

# ? Jul 23, 2018 13:50

Zanzibar Ham: Mar 17, 2009; You giving me the cold shoulder? How cruel.; Grimey Drawer

I personally don't think it really counts as a visual novel. As someone else said an important part of VNs is that at least some of your choices actually matter.

# ? Jul 23, 2018 13:54

Lotus Aura: Aug 16, 2009; KNEEL BEFORE THE WICKED KING!

I'd say something more important for a VN is that there are visuals, personally. :v:

You have the maze, which can be excised and nothing would be lost, and like a tiny number of images that appear a couple times each but only like once per POP and almost all text is isolated and its just... text. And more text. And then even more text.

# ? Jul 23, 2018 13:59

Zanzibar Ham: Mar 17, 2009; You giving me the cold shoulder? How cruel.; Grimey Drawer

Yeah yeah, and every game is an RPG because you always play some kinda role.

# ? Jul 23, 2018 14:00

Hwurmp: May 20, 2005

MadMaze is definitely anime

# ? Jul 23, 2018 14:12

kw0134: Apr 19, 2003; I buy feet pics🍆

To a large extent the Phoenix Wright games are like that: you have a correct action or else the game ends/loops until you figure it out. Of the first four games of the series there are a total of two "meaningful" choices and they're literally at the end when you can select the ending you get.

Now I've heard that Phoenix Wright games aren't VNs in the typical sense either so I'm curious how people would argue for or against it in light of this definition.

# ? Jul 23, 2018 14:30

Epsilon Moonshade: Nov 22, 2016; Not an excellent host.

Gloomy Rube posted:

MadMaze has even less interactivity, so it is one too.

kw0134 posted:

To a large extent the Phoenix Wright games are like that: you have a correct action or else the game ends/loops until you figure it out. Of the first four games of the series there are a total of two "meaningful" choices and they're literally at the end when you can select the ending you get.

I specifically avoided the word "meaningful" in my casual definition, just that the choices affect the story in some way. For example, going left vs. right at a maze junction doesn't affect the story told by the game, but it is interactive. It's interaction that's a lot more entertaining when you're 10, but it's still an interaction with the game.

Contrast choosing the wrong talisman power in a PoP, which is interaction and story-affecting (at least to the extent that it gives you different bits of story depending on what you do.)

I'd feel a lot better saying that this game should have been a VN than saying it is one.

kw0134 posted:

Now I've heard that Phoenix Wright games aren't VNs in the typical sense either so I'm curious how people would argue for or against it in light of this definition.

Don't you have to choose places to go with your investigation, or am I getting this mixed up with the Aviary Attorney LP? And then I guess there's the evidence presentation in the trial, but that's kinda like choosing (a thousand) words on a screen...

In all seriousness, I don't think I've ever actually played a VN - just seen a few LPed. This is more me providing a starting point for creating a definition than a "fight me" moment - I'm sure there are others who are deeply into the genre who can define it (or at least put some broad chalk lines around the borders of it.)

Dragonatrix posted:

I'd say something more important for a VN is that there are visuals, personally.

And then there's this, although I'd give it a pass considering the medium.

# ? Jul 23, 2018 15:04

kw0134: Apr 19, 2003; I buy feet pics🍆

The path in a PW game is linear insofar as you have to collect a certain number of clues and proceed to a trial stage where you have to present those clues in a particular way and order. You can choose to investigate the murder scene or the evidence locker room in either order, but visit them both you must and you cannot move to the next step until you've exhausted whatever the game wants you to do in that scene. At no point are you allowed to "get stuck" because everything you need to win/proceed is with you at all times.

# ? Jul 23, 2018 15:10

Adar: Jul 27, 2001

Andyzero posted:

Pfft. This game was made during PRODIGY. Hell, back in the day, the only good thing about Prodigy was this game. Despite this, I remember using it every day.

I vaguely? remember reading a mystery series on Prodigy about a guy named Abel? (I think). He was a travel agent, and one of those mystery leads where people died or were murdered around him all the time. (Murder She Wrote syndrome) I remember one story's plot has someone thinking he was a hitman because of this.

Edit: Abel Adventures, guy was Tom Abel.

But for the life of me, I can't remember anything else about Prodigy. Heck, I barely remember Madmaze. I don't think I got too far because I never mapped anything, and I would get to POPs where I didn't know what to do. (In my defense, I was 10 years old.)

At the time, Prodigy had two tiers, Core and Plus. MadMaze was, of course, gated behind Plus. Prodigy pricing was something like $19.99 for unlimited Core and 10 hours of Plus...followed by $3 an hour thereafter.

Every decision that has been criticized here flows directly from that. This game no doubt cost a lot of kids' parents (and quite a few adults too) hundreds to thousands of dollars. I was about ten at the time as well and am extremely confident I played a similar knockoff game on AOL's closed off network, so it definitely spawned copycats/was very profitable.

Within that constraint of $$$$/hour - no doubt imposed from management, because the developers themselves did go on to bigger and better things - the game is more interesting as a historical relic than I think the thread gives it credit for. It's not the greatest story ever told, but at least the POPs are descriptive, individually interesting and there's a decent amount of experimentation going on. A lot of the constraints like no inventory could potentially be explained by hardware requirements - Prodigy would have had next to none, so the bottom end of the userbase would have been 286's with 1 MB of RAM and 2400-9600 baud modems. Given this thing could potentially have belonged to a customer, going for the lowest common denominator made sense. Nobody would ever voluntarily play this game today, but even as a dead end, it shows where gaming could possibly have gone if the Internet had not exploded in the way it did. A lot of what it did do successfully was taken up by Sierra when they launched Yserbius/Twinion a couple of years later.

# ? Jul 23, 2018 16:39

Zandar: Aug 22, 2008

There are visual novels without any choices at all. I haven't read that many VNs, but I believe Higurashi has only one interactive segment and it's more like a puzzle than a choice (although technically the author prefers to call it a "sound novel"). The requirements for being a VN are pretty much literally being a novel with pictures in the background.

Of course, MadMaze wouldn't have been described as a VN at the time, and is unlikely to have drawn inspiration from them. I'd say it was pretty much a CYOA mixed with a maze. The more complicated CYOA books didn't track the whole game state either - they asked you to track it yourself via a character sheet/inventory, and then asked if you met certain requirements at critical points. One CYOA series even tried to simulate an open, non-linear world, using keywords to try to track which events had happened and how they'd been resolved. Of course, much like MadMaze, it was easy to brute-force these books by claiming that you had things you'd never picked up; easier, in fact, because the books couldn't afford to put in ten wrong paths for every option.

The other point of comparison would be text adventures (or interactive fiction, as they're called now). The PoPs in MadMaze make up an experience much like a text adventure without a parser, although that rather stretches the definition (and indeed, you could say the same thing about CYOAs). The only reason I bring them up is that text adventures were much more likely to have a single correct path through, requiring you to complete all the challenges set for you to access more of the game, whereas you could finish most CYOAs without seeing all of their content. Still, that's not universal - there were text adventures with branching paths, and CYOAs which were more about finding the strategy to get through their challenges than letting you choose different stories.

In any case, I enjoyed reading through it - probably much more than I would have playing it. Thanks for the great job showing it off, Nakar!

# ? Jul 23, 2018 17:36

Tenebrais: Sep 2, 2011

I'd definitely say MadMaze is an adventure game. If Adventure games are to Visual Novels what CRPGs are to JRPGs, MadMaze definitely fits the former in spirit and inspiration.

Given the rocky history of preservation, is it possible that some PoPs might not have made it into the version you were able to play? Perhaps there were some puzzles that did things like give you Throckmorton's first name, that didn't make it into the web version. If so, guess they're lost forever.

Anyway, thanks for doing this LP, Nakar! This game is about as old as I am, and it's interesting to see the breadth of what video games were like in this era, especially the ones that are outside of the fondly-remembered classics.

Just re-reading the original intro, it said Persephone went into the maze only three months ahead of us. Just how many promising youths is Weith sending these guys?

Tenebrais fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Jul 23, 2018

# ? Jul 23, 2018 18:34

Nakar: Sep 2, 2002; Ultima Ratio Regum

Tenebrais posted:

Given the rocky history of preservation, is it possible that some PoPs might not have made it into the version you were able to play? Perhaps there were some puzzles that did things like give you Throckmorton's first name, that didn't make it into the web version. If so, guess they're lost forever.

I am all but certain that this is everything that ever existed in the game. Remember, I checked every square of every map; the only possible way this could happen would be if the guy who made the Java web version both omitted PoPs and covered up their omission with new maze segments. In that case then yeah there'd be no way for anybody to know that stuff was missing, but I genuinely think the two "unsolvable" puzzles (the Ice Dragon and Throckmorton's first name) were meant to be guessed at.

In terms of the Throckmorton thing I guess they considered it semi-OK to guess because the only penalty for failure is to be ejected from the PoP. So if you don't guess Elias, you just go back in and try a second time. The Ice Dragon kills you for failing, however, and reducing a logic puzzle to a coin flip is not cool.

Overall, what would people say the most difficult puzzles in the game were? If I had to take a guess, in no particular order...

The Ice Dragon on account of unsolvability, and being pretty thorny to get through in general. If there'd existed a way to obtain the last necessary piece of info through clever gameplay or doing PoPs out of order it'd be the best puzzle in the game, but without it the aftertaste of the puzzle is sour indeed.
The geysers. A strongish logic puzzle that requires some intuition and one that can't really be cheated without being immensely tedious.
The fruits. Even with the hints, getting from that to "I need to add two numbers up to a two digit base six number, then choose the two corresponding fruits" is rough.
The Dreaded Al-Gibra. Just a straight up math problem requiring some understanding of what said problem is actually asking for before you can get to the easy part of applying the Pythagorean Theorem. A good way to confuse a simple solution process by forcing the player to understand what variables need to go where before they can employ that process, but nothing that requires such advanced math that an average person would have no way of solving it at all.

# ? Jul 23, 2018 19:35

Randalor: Sep 4, 2011

This talk of CYOA books and this game got me thinking. I know some older CYOA books that had inventory management as part of it would sometimes have a point where, if you lied about what you have, you would play through a variant of the next area, up to a certain point, at which point it would call out your cheating (I think one of the Lone Wolf books did that, where you gave your sword to an ally so they could protect themselves while you went on, and then much later on you can choose to use the sword to bypass a puzzle). I'm wondering if the game may have had something like that at one point that may have had some of the missing clues hidden away. It would explain some of the "You are sent back to the start of the level/game" "gotchas".

# ? Jul 24, 2018 16:01

Nakar: Sep 2, 2002; Ultima Ratio Regum

Randalor posted:

This talk of CYOA books and this game got me thinking. I know some older CYOA books that had inventory management as part of it would sometimes have a point where, if you lied about what you have, you would play through a variant of the next area, up to a certain point, at which point it would call out your cheating (I think one of the Lone Wolf books did that, where you gave your sword to an ally so they could protect themselves while you went on, and then much later on you can choose to use the sword to bypass a puzzle). I'm wondering if the game may have had something like that at one point that may have had some of the missing clues hidden away. It would explain some of the "You are sent back to the start of the level/game" "gotchas".

The main issue there is a game design problem. Let's look at the Ice Dragon puzzle again because it's bullshit.

It is actually possible to tell the ice bridge that you know the Ice Dragon has a family, which would be a huge hint toward the puzzle if true because it forces the Ice Dragon to be Carange (who has a mate and child) and not Balparaise (who won't even meet with other dragons). Even if you have no idea who the family is, the fact that the bridge confirms it seems to be a hint (admittedly it could have been like you said and a trap for calling out cheating, but in this case it isn't). Problem is... you can't get out of this situation alive except by having already solved the Ice Dragon's puzzle. I don't consider the use of meta-knowledge from a death to be fair puzzle design unless the game is specifically built around it in some way. For example, ManxomeBromide recently did an LP of the IF game Hadean Lands where looping actions and acquiring information from dead end gamestates was acceptable, but that's because the structure of the game is meant to work that way and you can't beat it without forcing unwinnable states, and part of the game's final puzzle is figuring out ways to stretch your resources and accumulated knowledge far enough to not render the game unwinnable en route to the part where you actually win.

In MadMaze, dying is considered to be a fail state. Thus, critical clues should not be hidden in those states, and for the most part they aren't outside of a few wry winks toward the correct course of action that you could've figured out otherwise. If you get to the ice bridge and bluff it enough to find out that the Ice Dragon has a family, you need to already know the Ice Dragon's clues and solve the puzzle on the spot with that new information to bypass the bridge. Okay, you say, so just do it that way: Talk to the Ice Dragon, get his clues, don't solve his puzzle yet, go to the ice bridge, use the info about his wife and child to narrow down the Ice Dragon's identity, solve the bridge's puzzle, then backtrack to the Ice Dragon himself.

...But see, you can't, because the Ice Dragon will only give you the clues after locking you into his own puzzle, which you cannot completely solve. You have to answer the Ice Dragon's puzzle correctly, or else you die, same as how you have to answer the bridge's puzzle correctly. There is no existing gamestate that lets you, essentially, come into this scenario blind, having never once died in the game, and get out of it without obtaining necessary knowledge by dying. The alternative is to guess and be correct, which has a 50% chance of killing you anyway. That's pretty terrible game design.

This entire sequence could be fixed by letting you back out of the Ice Dragon's puzzle, perhaps by using the Talisman to freeze time and flee (which you can do before getting the clues). You would then bluff the bridge into revealing something about the Ice Dragon it didn't want you to know, use that info on the spot to finish the puzzle, answer the bridge correctly to "prove" your association with the Ice Dragon, and then return to the Ice Dragon for the spell you need now that you're certain of his identity.

# ? Jul 24, 2018 16:21

curiousCat: Sep 23, 2012; Does this look like the face of mercy, kupo?

Nakar posted:

ManxomeBromide recently did an LP of the IF game Hadean Lands where looping actions and acquiring information from dead end gamestates was acceptable, but that's because the structure of the game is meant to work that way and you can't beat it without forcing unwinnable states, and part of the game's final puzzle is figuring out ways to stretch your resources and accumulated knowledge far enough to not render the game unwinnable en route to the part where you actually win.

got a link?

# ? Jul 24, 2018 23:04

whitehelm: Apr 20, 2008

curiousCat posted:

got a link?

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3859031

# ? Jul 24, 2018 23:44

curiousCat: Sep 23, 2012; Does this look like the face of mercy, kupo?

Many thanks.

# ? Jul 25, 2018 00:03

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 28, 2024 14:56

Randalor: Sep 4, 2011

Nakar posted:

The main issue there is a game design problem. Let's look at the Ice Dragon puzzle again because it's bullshit.

It is actually possible to tell the ice bridge that you know the Ice Dragon has a family, which would be a huge hint toward the puzzle if true because it forces the Ice Dragon to be Carange (who has a mate and child) and not Balparaise (who won't even meet with other dragons). Even if you have no idea who the family is, the fact that the bridge confirms it seems to be a hint (admittedly it could have been like you said and a trap for calling out cheating, but in this case it isn't). Problem is... you can't get out of this situation alive except by having already solved the Ice Dragon's puzzle. I don't consider the use of meta-knowledge from a death to be fair puzzle design unless the game is specifically built around it in some way. For example, ManxomeBromide recently did an LP of the IF game Hadean Lands where looping actions and acquiring information from dead end gamestates was acceptable, but that's because the structure of the game is meant to work that way and you can't beat it without forcing unwinnable states, and part of the game's final puzzle is figuring out ways to stretch your resources and accumulated knowledge far enough to not render the game unwinnable en route to the part where you actually win.

In MadMaze, dying is considered to be a fail state. Thus, critical clues should not be hidden in those states, and for the most part they aren't outside of a few wry winks toward the correct course of action that you could've figured out otherwise. If you get to the ice bridge and bluff it enough to find out that the Ice Dragon has a family, you need to already know the Ice Dragon's clues and solve the puzzle on the spot with that new information to bypass the bridge. Okay, you say, so just do it that way: Talk to the Ice Dragon, get his clues, don't solve his puzzle yet, go to the ice bridge, use the info about his wife and child to narrow down the Ice Dragon's identity, solve the bridge's puzzle, then backtrack to the Ice Dragon himself.

...But see, you can't, because the Ice Dragon will only give you the clues after locking you into his own puzzle, which you cannot completely solve. You have to answer the Ice Dragon's puzzle correctly, or else you die, same as how you have to answer the bridge's puzzle correctly. There is no existing gamestate that lets you, essentially, come into this scenario blind, having never once died in the game, and get out of it without obtaining necessary knowledge by dying. The alternative is to guess and be correct, which has a 50% chance of killing you anyway. That's pretty terrible game design.

This entire sequence could be fixed by letting you back out of the Ice Dragon's puzzle, perhaps by using the Talisman to freeze time and flee (which you can do before getting the clues). You would then bluff the bridge into revealing something about the Ice Dragon it didn't want you to know, use that info on the spot to finish the puzzle, answer the bridge correctly to "prove" your association with the Ice Dragon, and then return to the Ice Dragon for the spell you need now that you're certain of his identity.

Sorry, the original post was a phonepost. What I meant by that was if the game at one point had variant mazes that you would get sent to if you blatantly lied about what you had, complete with slightly different PoPs that would give different clues that still applied on the correct path, only to end at a PoP that punted you back to before the place where the path branched. Considering the save system and the quickly abandoned cyphers, it might explain the semi-random "You chose the wrong option, go back to the previous maze/start of the game" options.

# ? Jul 25, 2018 01:25

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Only a Prodigy could solve this MadMaze! [2400 Baud OK]

«‹›18 »