Sierra Sudden Death Syndrome

It is unacceptable by today's standard, but in early days this game design is quite common.

Well, I get what you mean, but I wasn't talking about completely removing all gameplay elements or obstacles, just about people who want *more* and *tougher* obstacles in their way. My personal opinion is that something doesn't have to be challenging to be called a game, as long as it's interactive, has goals and rules to follow, or allows you to experiment. Many other games have obstacles that are so easily overcome that you hardly even notice they were trying to slow your progress. And difficulty in adventure games is different from difficulty in action games, because it's not related to skills but to guessing pre-defined solutions (which I don't mind as long as they are logical or hints are provided, but it can go easily out of hand, and I'm not sure if it's accurate to call a puzzle "difficult" or "hard" in a positive sense, just because noone in their right mind would have thought of solving it the way it was designed to be solved).

I finally figured out how to get the key ! Just 11 hours later ! It wasn't even complicated, I feel so stupid now. It's just that those expandable hands were mentioned so many times, you would figure that must be it. Like zeogold said, a big problem is when you could do something in many different ways, but you need to guess what the developer wanted.

It really is best to take a break and let the brain work on it in the background. I'm so glad I didn't have to look up a walkthrough.

Speaking of Lure Of The Temptress, that is a rare game I finished alone. Other ones were Flight Of The Amazon Queen and Blair Witch 1 Rustin Parr. I usually get stuck like this and give up. And to confirm what others have already said, Dragonsphere is the hardest adventure game I personally played, it really broke my adventure spirit. The story is great though. Also the deaths in that games were pretty violent and shocking.

I was remembering the same thing, though I thought it might have been Tim Schafer. Can't find the video on GOG that I vaguely recall, must have been linked elsewhere. But now you got me imagining it as Ron Gilbert. Memory is so malleable...

Nah, that wasn't so bad. You would simply reload a save game and try something else.

What was very bad in some old Sierra adventures was that not doing something (or picking some item) earlier in the game could make you face a dead-end later in the game, meaning you basically have to replay the whole game from the very start (and hopefully figure out then what is that something you need to do so that you don't face the same dead-end later).

The first Space Quest, even its VGA remake I think, had something like that. I'm pretty sure Space Quest IV as well.

Oh yes, right. Probably Tim Schafer, in the Full Throttle re-release let's play.

I keep re-starting this forum thread over and over, and yet somehow I keep missing in one of the dialogs the name of the game you are playing. Argh! This is why I should keep notes. Maybe it's a different answer in one of the earlier conversations.

     A. I know what you mean! No, I don't even want to know the name of that game.
     B. Oh, but I love adventure games! No, don't tell me which one, let me guess!
     C. Would you be interested in borrowing a set of mechanical hands to grab a key?

Hmm, I still don't think "C" is going to get me anywhere with finding out the name of the game. But what if...what if... No, not worth trying. Must be a different dialog. Maybe I'll start over again. And make notes.

tend to agree but I still love them. In trying to explain how to play some of these oldies to my husband (who always quits after half an hour) its not so much working the puzzle as it plays out but in how to work the code, such as in forcing scripted events to unlock, positioning of your char in order to unlock hotspots, gaming puzzles that can easily break if you do it wrong and for some games lots of peeks into online guides to avoid coding failures or insanely tiny hotspots. lololol

Yeah, IIRC, in Space Quest if you sell your speeder right after arriving in town, you don't realize that if you refuse the guy at first, he'll come back and throw in a jetpack with his offer, which you need to infiltrate the bad guy's ship at the very end. Back in the day I somehow did figure this out on my own, along with finding the shard of glass you need from the wreckage, which is another killer "puzzle" in that game. When you had almost nothing else to play, and the game really wasn't that long so it didn't long to retrace your steps, you could muddle through a lot of really obtuse puzzles. I guess it's like Sherlock Holmes - you eliminate as many possibilities as you can and the solution is whatever remains however ridiculous.

What always drove me crazy about adventure games is when you knew what to do but the parser was simply not big enough to recognize alternative commands. This just happened to me when I was playing the Stories Untold demo - there's a puzzle in which an alarm clock starts blaring at you and you have to turn it off. Somehow I kept typing variations of "turn off alarm" and the game just wouldn't recognize any of it. Finally I looked it up and it turned out the game wanted a VERY SPECIFIC phrasing which I wasn't using but was essentially the same thing. Seems like we could have new text-parser games now that would have far broader vocabularies thanks to better technology...

Didn't you also need to take some gadget from the exploding ship in the beginning before you escape? Naturally you can't get it later because the ship is destroyed...

No. Adventure games are not most flawed games. But flaws in them ARE most annoying and frustrating.

Heck, in Quest for Glory II (adventure-RPG hybrid) I had problem with defeating air elemental even with walkthrough.
So, do you really think that creating a text parser is easy?

Depends how simple parser one is creating. :) The early ones seemed quite simple, mainly just understanding "verb + item", two or at best three words at a time, and quite often saying they don't understand what you are trying to say unless you said specifically what they expected you to say.

And when adventure games moved on from text parsers to point & click interfaces, this became irrelevant...

Maybe one way to demonstrate the relative simplicity of puzzle adventure games would be that you'd set up such "game" without computers. You know, like pen&paper RPG or strategy gaming sessions.

So if the genre was, say, a first-person shooter, I guess you would give everyone nerf guns or laser tag guns and you'd run in some environment shooting at each other, maybe in teams. Someone would maybe need to count the points and decide the terms for victory.

If it was a RPG, I guess the existing pen&paper RPGs give some idea, so apart from you telling the team of merry adventurers what is happening at each place, there'd be the stats and dice rolls and such.

If it was a strategy game, I guess you'd need some kind of table and pieces, along with the rules how things work in the game. Like in chess, how you can move each piece.

If it was a racing game, I guess you'd all go to race on some go-kart track.

If it was an adventure game... basically all it would need was you to describe each location to the player (what is in the room, what is puzzle to be solved etc.), and deciding if the solution the player is offering for the puzzle is valid or not, and what will be the consequences. Like my earlier example of an evil wizard blocking your way, you'd just say the wizard kills the player unless they say they will use a spray deodorant and a match together in order to fry the wizard.


Of all those different examples, the adventure game would be the easiest to set up and run.

I kept it a secret, because I didn't want people start talking about the series and spoil the games for me. Speaking of which, does anyone know how root beer tastes ? I never tried it and just heard it is great with vanilla ice-cream.

A level of logic where you have to be inside the head of whoever wrote it to understand it.

Some of the more 'difficult puzzles' sometimes relies on puns, or hitting a specific pixel that isn't well enough explained.

This is one reason i don't like Point&Click adventures much, because at some point you end up with 'click everything with everything else'. Or relying on a tutorial/walkthrough and it feels like crap when i can't figure it out myself...

Dragonsphere for one is very, very logical. (It's also very cruel, which is something I hate in adventure games - but not unfairly so. FWIW, the lights puzzle referenced above is completely standalone -- it doesn't require any info or items, not to mention permanently missable ones.)