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Oh, man, how did I miss this thread's existence for so long? So I'll add in for the record a classic game, and by classic, I mean wonderful at the time and only vaguely playable now: Murder on the Zinderneuf was the game that enthralled me as a kid. Play one of 9 different detectives, each a sly parody of a famous sleuth (including Humboldt Hause, Lieutenant Cinncinatom, and Miss Agatha Marbles. I still have no idea who Charity Flaire is supposed to represent). You're on a zeppelin and shortly after you left Berlin, a passenger was forcibly ejected and you have to figure out who did it and why before you land in New York. Wonderful 1980s joystick gaming: search rooms by waggling around in them! Interview suspects by chasing them down hallways and waggling over them! Make your final accusation by chasing down the accused and waggling over them! So, yeah, the interface is terribly lacking especially in modern times, but what makes it such an amazing game to me is how great the writing was and how good the mechanics were, especially for a game released in 1983. Each detective is actually different - some of them are better at getting more clues from talking to people, and some of them get better and more detailed clues from searching rooms. In addition, each detective had multiple ways to approach a conversation, which determined how many times that person would talk to you before getting fed up; you had to experiment with different approaches and multiple interviews to get all of the information out of a person. With 15 people on the ship to interview (and being able to ask about any of the other 15) and 16 rooms to search, the time limit was absolutely a factor. Best of all, the mystery was proceduraly generated. The game had about twenty potential motives for a person to kill another, and the game writers (including Paul Reiche, who did Star Control II) made sure that characters had distinctive ways to talk about the plots to keep the characters and the situations fresh. So when you started a new game, a random passenger would be dead, a random murderer and motive would be assigned, and maybe three other potential motives would have some red herrings mixed in to keep you on your toes. It's abandonware these days, but if you decide that's your thing, check out the C-64 version where the graphics are the cleanest. The IBM version is just hard to parse, visually.
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May 24, 2023 00:16
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| # ¿ May 19, 2024 05:43 |
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OMG, I even remember reading some of those when they were posted in the Newspaper Comic Strips. I never made the connection. Thank you so much!
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May 24, 2023 01:09
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Okay, I'm almost done with The Roottrees Are Dead, but everything about Elias M. Roottree's job, his wife's name, and kid's picture and job, and November Roottree's job I'm completely lost on. Any hints? It's very solid. A lot of different paths to some of the answers, which is nice, though a bit annoying when you find the one magazine set that had all of the answers you only got to by going out on a limb with logical guesses.
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Dec 14, 2023 04:59
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Thank you both very much! Yeah, we just got it done - apparently, we figured out who Stephanie's husband was and then did no further investigation on him (why should we? we placed him and his picture!) and that was the huge mistake. What I probably needed was a table with people's names and a check mark if I'd bothered to search for them on the web and in each of the periodicals, because 90% of the time we were stuck it was because I hadn't searched enough people in enough periodicals.
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Dec 14, 2023 05:36
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