They certainly install a weird way of thinking within the playerbase, before you know it you're trying to combine every single item in your inventory or clicking all over the screen for fifteen minutes straight. Special shout-out goes to adventure games with game breaking bugs that never got patched and where you can screw yourself over hours in. 10/10, would rage again.
The only part of the game I needed a guide for in CMI was the final puzzle but that's because it was my first monkey island and I didn't know that the final puzzle is always a repeat of a puzzle from earlier in the game.
you had to spend a lot of hours trying moronic actions until something worked, so you had to be kind of fascinated by computer graphics that were a new thing a the time, hard to play now when all your dopamine receptors are fried
that, or you could read a guide on a videogame magazine when you got stuck
MI2 really was "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" in terms of puzzles >the hand puzzle >the monkey wrench if you aren't a native english speaker >the spitting competition >the maze where you have to keep checking the notes over and over
Both, I finished all of the LucasArts adventures without hints growing up. Two points though:
- Some of it is experience. If you've played one or two you kind of get a sense of the logic, what type of puzzles they might have put in, what to look for and what to try.
- You were never meant to breeze past them in one sitting like a normal game. You'd play a bit, get stuck, try a bunch of stuff, give up. Go do something else, sleep on it, go to school, then maybe you'd suddenly get a flash of inspiration the next day and couldn't wait to get home and try it. This doesn't really fit with the fast-moving world of today where everything is just a click away at all times.
The Dig is such a wonderful game. Specially the music.
I just learned that there is an early gory version of the game.
How many anons played this game?
I remember the demo being in Indy: Fate of Atlantis CD, that my older brother bought and it just blew my mind. Years later I got to play the full game on ScummVM.
Lucas Arts really made the best graphic adventures. Up until this day they remain my favorites.
My issue with The Dig is twofold. First is the ending because it completely undermines the game's message. But it's not just the ending, the dialog is very....amateurish a lot of the time. Which is wierd because Orson Scott Card can do videogame dialog writing, he wrote all the insult swordfighting lines for MI1. And he can certainly do sci-fi dialog writing because he wrote Ender's Game. But man, the characters in The Dig might as well be spouting movie cliches half the time.
Also, that game is fricking carried HARD by its soundtrack. If it weren't for the orchestration making everything sound grand and sweeping, a lot of the game would be kinda boring. But goddamn that music is one of the best soundtracks ever.
I think it's the variety of options that adds to the difficulty. You have several items and a two dozens of actions - take, pull, lick, etc.
Which one you should pick for a particular item to work?
Extra ass when the game requires you to combine items or use them in certain order, that doubles the amount of possible choices.
It's certainly the test of patience, which is not everyone would be able to pass these days. I'd certainly give up after 30 minutes
point and click games had a lot of charm and your main enjoyment might only come from interactions with characters and choosing diverging plots (if you can). the puzzles can be tedious and annoying, and some are purposely obtuse and insipid. dont sweat the details, use a guide when you need to, they made it so you would be tempted to buy them
They were notoriously hard, with puzzles that make almost no sense and a ton of pixel hunting. Older ones were even crazier, with possible deaths if you so something wrong.
I like how you can lock/have a nice day in Maniac Mansion. It gives some replay value since the game takes 20min to beat if you know what to do. The longer the game, the worst this gets though.
Blowing up the entire mansion along with yourself was fun, surely, but locking sucks.
And the game has time limit of sorts I guess? While you're roaming around, the game keeps interrupting you with the cutscene where doctor is telling your girlfriend in the basement that it almost the time for his plan or something. I never could progress far enough to see what happens.
I don't remember it having a time limit for beating the game, but it has some sort of timing for some cutscenes, like Ed keeps changing places. The ending changes based on the characters that are alive at the end.
Depends who made them. Sierra was generally cruel and any wrong move would kill you. Sometimes you could render a game unwinnable from an action hours ago and not realize (like in Kings Quest 5 were the first action you take can render an endgame area unwinnable).
Others like LucasArts games generally didn't let you fail and you just had to figure out their crazy moon logic.
I know what you meant I just don't know what part of the game you're referring to because you failed to mention any particular puzzle or sequence in the OP or this reply.
No single puzzle in particular, the general logic of the game goes over my head most of the time
A few examples include using the biscuit cutter on a rubber tree to get a cork and using the glove to slap the pirate and initiate a duel (which I'll give a bit more leeway, but I assumed it would be a verbal duel like the previous games and this either needed some form of training or an insult book. plus a slap with a glove isn't the most well known gesture in the world. I'm familiar with it but never considered the idea.)
I'm not usually filtered by difficult games, it's just old adventure titles that require a degree of "logic" that totally stump me.
I think that the biscuit cutter puzzle is only present in Mega Monkey mode, which is supposed to be a little bit more difficult than the regular game. Maybe picking Mega Monkey mode from the start wasn't the best idea.
I disagree, Monkey Monkey is the only way to play because easy mode straight up removes some of the jokes.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I think if you don't like the game, hearing a few jokes you've missed out on isn't going to change that. And conversely, if you truly like a game you will probably play it multiple times, especially if there's an incentive of extra content.
2 years ago
Anonymous
it not only removes jokes, at times it straight up screws over the story. In the second half of the game the barkeeper will talk to you about a room upstairs that makes weird noises at night, he has locked it up and refuses to let anybody in there. It's important dialogue to understand what that room is about, and it introduces hints used for a later puzzle, but in the easy version the door is just straight up unlocked from the start, so the dialogue makes no sense at all anymore.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I never noticed that before. What are some other instances where the dialogue alludes to a puzzle that's only in Mega Monkey mode?
Curse had an "easy" mode that actually took out a lot of those iffy puzzles. Like the Canoe never needs to be plugged in the first place so you never need to do the biscuit cutter bit.
I got most of it as a kid (I needed my cousin's guide to look up how to get past the beach sand), but maybe that because back then I played adventure games thinking "how would a cartoon character solve this problem" instead of real logic
I thought curse was one of the better balanced games in terms of puzzle difficulty, it's never obvious but you don't have moon logic that would take you days of brute forcing to solve.
Lucsarts ones were a little more intuitive and the solutions are rarely moon-logic nonsense.
Sierra's though, holy frick. Absolute bullshit from start to finish. Every single one of them. You could even make them unbeatable by not doing a single puzzle properly.
> Absolute bullshit from start to finish Every single one of them.
Zoomers always parrot this bullshit, but it's not true. Sierra games typically had more logical and straighforward puzzles than Lucasarts (see Conquests of the Longbow), and there are at least a dozen Sierra games without any dead ends (not counting bugs).
The problem is that they lead to game overs constantly, and obviously this is because they were extremely short games, so they had to kill you and make shitty intricate puzzles so you played more hours.
Play Blade Runner. Instead of traditional puzzles and inventory, you collect clues that hint where to go next and who to talk to. There's no way to get stuck unless you're straight up not paying attention.
I know it sounds lame, but it somehow works surprisingly well.
Loved MI1, but I gave up on 2 because the puzzles were getting absurd. At one point I had my inventory filled with items and no clue where to even start using them. I gave the game quite a few tries but always gave up around the same chapter.
Should I skip it and play 3 instead?
Use the Universal Hint System. Find the bit you're stuck on. It gives you gradually clearer hints towards your goal, so you don't spoil yourself with a walkthrough and still have to think.
Am I the only one who played this?
This game fricking ruled. It's seriously a great adventure game, great puzzles and super-entertaining dialogue exchanges, with campy FMV graphics, tons of atmosphere.
You guys have got to play it
This. I don't remember much of it now, but I think there was a truly annoying one with mirrors (crystals?) nearer the ending of the game and something with restoring a fossil as well, but that one didn't take nearly as long to crack. I should probably replay it. Amazing soundtrack by the way.
>use everything with everything
This was the mantra for a lot of these games. Some of them had logic puzzles so convoluted and stupid you just had to brute force the solution. Hell, the cat-mustache puzzle from GK3 was so bad it killed the genre.
I think I read somewhere the designers weren't satisfied with the cat moustache puzzle either. It's unfortunate since apart from that, GK3 has a lot of really fun puzzles, like the Serpent Rogue puzzle. Same thing with GK1, great puzzles apart from that stupid mime.
I've noticed that MI3 really tried its damnest to not do the "each item is used ONCE in the whole game" because the bread knife is used twice, the wooden nickels are used at least twice, magic wand is used twice, the balloons are used twice, the chicken grease and cooking oil can both alternately be used for the same 2 puzzles and either works, etc
There's a part where the obvious solution requires a hammer, but there are multiple hammers depicted and only one is a real item. I didn't expect hunt the pixel, so I just checked the first hammer then assumed the solution was something else.
Most likely both. It's ok though OP, I'll admit to using a guide with both the Discworld games and The Dig.
They have some arbitrary solutions, I wouldn't consider someone stupid for this
They certainly install a weird way of thinking within the playerbase, before you know it you're trying to combine every single item in your inventory or clicking all over the screen for fifteen minutes straight. Special shout-out goes to adventure games with game breaking bugs that never got patched and where you can screw yourself over hours in. 10/10, would rage again.
The only part of the game I needed a guide for in CMI was the final puzzle but that's because it was my first monkey island and I didn't know that the final puzzle is always a repeat of a puzzle from earlier in the game.
Old adventure games are famous for moon logic.. maybe to sell strategy guides
Most old adventure games are pretty damn hard, but you're also dumb anon, since LucasArts games tend to be one of the easier ones
you had to spend a lot of hours trying moronic actions until something worked, so you had to be kind of fascinated by computer graphics that were a new thing a the time, hard to play now when all your dopamine receptors are fried
that, or you could read a guide on a videogame magazine when you got stuck
the puzzle dont rely on intelligence, just grim determination of trying everything with everything else.
Adventure games are easy when you know the solution beforehand.
MI 2 puzzles were straight bullshit half the time
I really hated the spitting competition because there's so much preparation for it and the solution is ultimately about timing.
You mean, the final solution?
MI2 really was "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" in terms of puzzles
>the hand puzzle
>the monkey wrench if you aren't a native english speaker
>the spitting competition
>the maze where you have to keep checking the notes over and over
>the hand puzzle
Which one was this?
The "if this is two, what's this" puzzle. Schafer put it in basically for fun
?t=717
Some of the art is excellent but MI2's puzzles can suck it
Both, I finished all of the LucasArts adventures without hints growing up. Two points though:
- Some of it is experience. If you've played one or two you kind of get a sense of the logic, what type of puzzles they might have put in, what to look for and what to try.
- You were never meant to breeze past them in one sitting like a normal game. You'd play a bit, get stuck, try a bunch of stuff, give up. Go do something else, sleep on it, go to school, then maybe you'd suddenly get a flash of inspiration the next day and couldn't wait to get home and try it. This doesn't really fit with the fast-moving world of today where everything is just a click away at all times.
Damn your pic is gorgeous, what is it from?
not him, don't know, but there's a strong stargate vibe, which I like.
Also not him but I think it's from The Dig.
It's a shot from Dig Dug.
The Dig, the first shot you got upon landing on the planet
trying something
Don't.
The Dig is such a wonderful game. Specially the music.
I just learned that there is an early gory version of the game.
How many anons played this game?
I remember the demo being in Indy: Fate of Atlantis CD, that my older brother bought and it just blew my mind. Years later I got to play the full game on ScummVM.
Lucas Arts really made the best graphic adventures. Up until this day they remain my favorites.
The Dig really is something special, That and Grim Fandango will probably never be topped in my personal faves list.
My issue with The Dig is twofold. First is the ending because it completely undermines the game's message. But it's not just the ending, the dialog is very....amateurish a lot of the time. Which is wierd because Orson Scott Card can do videogame dialog writing, he wrote all the insult swordfighting lines for MI1. And he can certainly do sci-fi dialog writing because he wrote Ender's Game. But man, the characters in The Dig might as well be spouting movie cliches half the time.
Also, that game is fricking carried HARD by its soundtrack. If it weren't for the orchestration making everything sound grand and sweeping, a lot of the game would be kinda boring. But goddamn that music is one of the best soundtracks ever.
Probably Spielberg's influence shitting it up
I think it's the variety of options that adds to the difficulty. You have several items and a two dozens of actions - take, pull, lick, etc.
Which one you should pick for a particular item to work?
Extra ass when the game requires you to combine items or use them in certain order, that doubles the amount of possible choices.
It's certainly the test of patience, which is not everyone would be able to pass these days. I'd certainly give up after 30 minutes
The reason myst stood out from every other puzzle game is the puzzles were actually logical.
Yeah, and no one ever learned the lessons despite how popular and "influential" it apparently was.
point and click games had a lot of charm and your main enjoyment might only come from interactions with characters and choosing diverging plots (if you can). the puzzles can be tedious and annoying, and some are purposely obtuse and insipid. dont sweat the details, use a guide when you need to, they made it so you would be tempted to buy them
They were notoriously hard, with puzzles that make almost no sense and a ton of pixel hunting. Older ones were even crazier, with possible deaths if you so something wrong.
I like how you can lock/have a nice day in Maniac Mansion. It gives some replay value since the game takes 20min to beat if you know what to do. The longer the game, the worst this gets though.
Blowing up the entire mansion along with yourself was fun, surely, but locking sucks.
And the game has time limit of sorts I guess? While you're roaming around, the game keeps interrupting you with the cutscene where doctor is telling your girlfriend in the basement that it almost the time for his plan or something. I never could progress far enough to see what happens.
I don't remember it having a time limit for beating the game, but it has some sort of timing for some cutscenes, like Ed keeps changing places. The ending changes based on the characters that are alive at the end.
Certain ethnic backgrounds are too mentally inhibited to enjoy adventure games.
that's racist anon which ones?
all of them
Depends who made them. Sierra was generally cruel and any wrong move would kill you. Sometimes you could render a game unwinnable from an action hours ago and not realize (like in Kings Quest 5 were the first action you take can render an endgame area unwinnable).
Others like LucasArts games generally didn't let you fail and you just had to figure out their crazy moon logic.
Try Space Quest, that shit is ridiculous.
That depends on what part you think is hard as hell. You are stupid for making a low-quality possibly unironic thread though.
I mean difficult to solve. I'm playing through Curse and I find the solutions are usually things I'd never think of doing of my own volition.
I know what you meant I just don't know what part of the game you're referring to because you failed to mention any particular puzzle or sequence in the OP or this reply.
No single puzzle in particular, the general logic of the game goes over my head most of the time
A few examples include using the biscuit cutter on a rubber tree to get a cork and using the glove to slap the pirate and initiate a duel (which I'll give a bit more leeway, but I assumed it would be a verbal duel like the previous games and this either needed some form of training or an insult book. plus a slap with a glove isn't the most well known gesture in the world. I'm familiar with it but never considered the idea.)
I'm not usually filtered by difficult games, it's just old adventure titles that require a degree of "logic" that totally stump me.
I think that the biscuit cutter puzzle is only present in Mega Monkey mode, which is supposed to be a little bit more difficult than the regular game. Maybe picking Mega Monkey mode from the start wasn't the best idea.
I didn't want to miss anything, and I figured I had a good enough head on my shoulders to manage.
Clearly I was wrong.
I disagree, Monkey Monkey is the only way to play because easy mode straight up removes some of the jokes.
I think if you don't like the game, hearing a few jokes you've missed out on isn't going to change that. And conversely, if you truly like a game you will probably play it multiple times, especially if there's an incentive of extra content.
it not only removes jokes, at times it straight up screws over the story. In the second half of the game the barkeeper will talk to you about a room upstairs that makes weird noises at night, he has locked it up and refuses to let anybody in there. It's important dialogue to understand what that room is about, and it introduces hints used for a later puzzle, but in the easy version the door is just straight up unlocked from the start, so the dialogue makes no sense at all anymore.
I never noticed that before. What are some other instances where the dialogue alludes to a puzzle that's only in Mega Monkey mode?
A slap with a glove is actually the most well-known way to challenge someone to a duel.
zoomers literally don't know anything
rent free, forever and always
Curse had an "easy" mode that actually took out a lot of those iffy puzzles. Like the Canoe never needs to be plugged in the first place so you never need to do the biscuit cutter bit.
I got most of it as a kid (I needed my cousin's guide to look up how to get past the beach sand), but maybe that because back then I played adventure games thinking "how would a cartoon character solve this problem" instead of real logic
Lol I can. That's actually the exact point I said "aight, I'm out" and stopped playing it.
I thought curse was one of the better balanced games in terms of puzzle difficulty, it's never obvious but you don't have moon logic that would take you days of brute forcing to solve.
Lucsarts ones were a little more intuitive and the solutions are rarely moon-logic nonsense.
Sierra's though, holy frick. Absolute bullshit from start to finish. Every single one of them. You could even make them unbeatable by not doing a single puzzle properly.
> Absolute bullshit from start to finish Every single one of them.
Zoomers always parrot this bullshit, but it's not true. Sierra games typically had more logical and straighforward puzzles than Lucasarts (see Conquests of the Longbow), and there are at least a dozen Sierra games without any dead ends (not counting bugs).
motherfricker I'm likely older than you are and I'll say Sierra was moon logic incarnate.
The problem is that they lead to game overs constantly, and obviously this is because they were extremely short games, so they had to kill you and make shitty intricate puzzles so you played more hours.
I don't think anything in the MI games really compares to this puzzle
I love the Longest Journey, but holy shit that puzzle was bad
Play Blade Runner. Instead of traditional puzzles and inventory, you collect clues that hint where to go next and who to talk to. There's no way to get stuck unless you're straight up not paying attention.
I know it sounds lame, but it somehow works surprisingly well.
Loved MI1, but I gave up on 2 because the puzzles were getting absurd. At one point I had my inventory filled with items and no clue where to even start using them. I gave the game quite a few tries but always gave up around the same chapter.
Should I skip it and play 3 instead?
3 isn't a cakewalk but it's definitely more straightforward than 2.
Use the Universal Hint System. Find the bit you're stuck on. It gives you gradually clearer hints towards your goal, so you don't spoil yourself with a walkthrough and still have to think.
I used to replay Monkey Island 2 often and one of the things I tried to do with have as many items as possible in my inventory.
3 is much closer to 1 in difficulty and in my opinion is better overall. Don't miss it.
Am I the only one who played this?
This game fricking ruled. It's seriously a great adventure game, great puzzles and super-entertaining dialogue exchanges, with campy FMV graphics, tons of atmosphere.
You guys have got to play it
The Dig was pretty intuitive, some parts a bit difficult but once you solve the puzzle it makes sense.
You're trolling right? The Dig had the most esoteric, nonsensical puzzles of them all.
This. I don't remember much of it now, but I think there was a truly annoying one with mirrors (crystals?) nearer the ending of the game and something with restoring a fossil as well, but that one didn't take nearly as long to crack. I should probably replay it. Amazing soundtrack by the way.
Yep, the only LucasArts/Film game that tops The Dig in terms of obutuseness is Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders.
>use everything with everything
This was the mantra for a lot of these games. Some of them had logic puzzles so convoluted and stupid you just had to brute force the solution. Hell, the cat-mustache puzzle from GK3 was so bad it killed the genre.
>cat-mustache puzzle from GK3
Quick rundown for someone who's never played Gabriel Knight please?
https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
>https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
Thanks, had a good laugh.
I think I read somewhere the designers weren't satisfied with the cat moustache puzzle either. It's unfortunate since apart from that, GK3 has a lot of really fun puzzles, like the Serpent Rogue puzzle. Same thing with GK1, great puzzles apart from that stupid mime.
I've noticed that MI3 really tried its damnest to not do the "each item is used ONCE in the whole game" because the bread knife is used twice, the wooden nickels are used at least twice, magic wand is used twice, the balloons are used twice, the chicken grease and cooking oil can both alternately be used for the same 2 puzzles and either works, etc
Any old adventure games without moon logic and the solutions seem logical and reasonable but still challenging?
Day of the Tentacle I think is completely solvable and playable without any assistance.
I agree
>people complaining about the dirty carriage puzzle
Sometimes players just don't get obvious clues and say the puzles make not sense
There's a part where the obvious solution requires a hammer, but there are multiple hammers depicted and only one is a real item. I didn't expect hunt the pixel, so I just checked the first hammer then assumed the solution was something else.
Core > Sierra > LucasArts
At least when it comes to PnCs.
probably both.
What are some other games like this?
Adventure games in general or MI3 specifically?
The point and click solving puzzles adventures. I’ve played MI 1-3
If you're talking about the art style then maybe Sam & Max, Grim Fandango or King's Quest
Thanks. King's Quest was on my wishlist.
Idk but Grim Fandango has moronic ass puzzles and story, neat aesthetic but it isn't the peak of the genre like how journos claim
I liked the story and characters in Grim Fandango. Probably wouldn't have completed the game at all if I didn't tbh.