I'm rereading all my old Computer Gaming Worlds dating back to January of '93, and when I stumbled upon the review and ads for Gobliins (2), it looked like a lot of fun, and I had missed it the first time around since I was just getting into gaming in '93.

I was happy to find the three pack on GOG and went straight to work on Goblins 2.

After about a week at it, I had to give up on the game today.

I made it inside the castle but was completely stuck, and after retreating to the hint book for three puzzles in a row, and being pissed off at the obscurity of the solutions, I realized I wasn't having any fun.

Are the first and third game any better in this regard? I've been playing games my entire adult life and found Goblins II to be mind-numbing in its difficulty. While I understand the illogical nature of the game is part of its charm, it severely detracts from the game play when there is NO explanation for why a certain action would solve a puzzle. Ugh!

Goblins 3 is much more like traditional adventures. There are still some wacky things, specially towards the end, but they are not impossible to figure out.

On the other hand, the first and second games were not so frustrating to me. The only parts I found difficult were mainly the two-character three-way-action puzzles of the second game (push this with one char, pull that with the second, while the first runs to do something else... aargh).

Heh. I remember the first time I played this series (as a kid, with my mom). We completed the first game just fine: it's completely linear, so there's not much room for experiments - although of course the death count was very high ^_^;, some people find it annoying when the game punishes them for doing wrong things.

But then we got stuck partway through the second game. Apparently, we were confused by the fact that a particular item can be picked up under certain circumstances, even though there were no signs that it could be interacted with... Didn't finish it until much later.

Goblins 3 felt different somehow, I rarely had to resort to the "use every inventory item on everything" strategy. I guess they named it "Goblins Quest 3" for a reason. There are still some parts that resemble the kind of puzzles the second game uses, but for the most part this game is more "sane" than its predecessors. (Though I would also guess that there were people who didn't like this change. ^_^;)

Gobliins 2 seems like a kind of a "transitional" case: it keeps the wacky logic of the first game, only it is no longer confined to a single-screen area and a single-item inventory, so the game can get very confusing at times.