Corwim: The LA adventures may seem more polished now, but to me, that view only came about afterwards,because every adventure game designer in the late 90s took the same approach as LucasArts (no deaths in adventure games, no unwinnable situations), including actually the later Sierra adventure games like KQ7 and Phantasmagoria (still deaths there, but they came with the 'Retry' option), making the early Sierra adventures in hindsights look 'less well' designed to a lot of people. However, for me, having grown up with the Sierra adventures, those design decisions like deaths were part of the challenge of them, and I actually liked them! :-) Plus, a lot of the death scenes were often delivered with great comedy and accompanied by funny comments and cut scenes, and therefore they never really bothered me, quite the opposite actually. :-) Also, every Sierra manual clearly printed this solid advice: 'save early, save often!'. Ignore at your own risk! ;-)
There was obviously a lot of talent present at LucasArts, and from what I've read over the years, they basically could design the games they wanted, without any interference from management or anything. In that respect, to me at least, it is sad that they never turned their talent to more serious games (you know, what eg Gabriel Knight was for Sierra). Sure, they pretty much nailed the wacky, fun adventure game genre, but a bit more variety and I would regard them a lot more. :-)
Anyway, it's fun to meet a like minded person on these boards who holds Sierra's early adventures in similar high regard as I do! :-)
Hm, I always find that the potato mines and squashes reload so so so slowly, so most of the times, I don't seem to manage with them to kill off the early zombies. Will try again though, would love to get some more use out of the more expensive plants! :-)
well, most of the designers had learned - by that point - from the text adventures that had gone before. they'd been playing those and had been seeing exactly the sorts of tedious design decisions replicated over and over again. this was true even with the grandfather of the genre, infocom. useless items? check. terrible maze design? check. sometimes requiring huge, scary run-on sentences to complete an action in "one turn" or die? check. the infocom games are wonderful games - sometimes for their prose and atmosphere, but they're not always good games for the sake of gaming.
so sierra saw that, took it, modernized it a little and put it onto store shelves. i may have the dates incorrect, now, but lucasarts saw the sierra games and then did exactly the same thing.
the /big/ difference between sierra and lucasarts, i think was that lucasarts had a whole movie studio behind it, which basically meant that they had movie experts to learn from. so they learned about things like pipelines and making "professional" games. sierra, on the other hand, had to kind of learn by hand. so stuff like a "players manifesto" would certainly show up in lucasarts' culture, where that may not have been the case at sierra. naturally, the net result is that the sierra games seem "dirtier" with lots more player frustration. they did, eventually fix that, but it took...a while.
the funny thing for me was at the beginning of the vga era for sierra, i began to see a shift - i can't really explain it - but things i didn't like started creeping in. an example was how the police quest storyline just ended up falling by the wayside when daryl f. gates took over. no, those weren't his characters, and yes, i can totally understand how he'd want to distance himself from them, but i felt like there were other, better ways of doing that that didn't involve him re purposing police quest.
so, my memory of later sierra is kind of dim. i liked and played sq4, but i barely remember 5 and i never seriously tried six. the same happened with king's quest. that marked shift from kq6 to kq7 made me shrug and abandon the series completely. to me, sierra just turned into some kind of monster and not the sort of family friendly, happy-go-lucky company it had been with different spins on old tropes.
i tend to use potato mines/squashes as early-game stall. you can actually see a good bit of what i tend to do in the episode i will post today. once the two threepeaters are out, it's just a matter, then, of covering additional rows. at that point, the squashes and so on become exactly what they are: panic buttons. but you /do/ have to be wary of their cooldowns.
as ever, thankyou for watching my videos and i appreciate the conversation we're having, here.
