But probably pixel hunting. Made me drop Riven. After hearing so much about how awesome the puzzles are, the only times I got stuck is because I overlooked some tiny nonsense fantasy thing I had to click without being able to know it does something
>What's that?
Adventure game logic that would have required you to be in the same room as the developers to even begin to guess how to solve it. Think the gabrial knight cat hair puzzle
When you have to combine THIS with EXACTLY THAT and use it like THIS to solve an obstacle that could be solved in so many other ways but the game simply refuses to acknowledge other solutions.
Like you have a door but it's missing a handle - so obviously you have to get a banana from the market on the other side of town and a candle and matches, light the candle and use the wax to glue the babana on the door - and NOT use for example a nail with the hammer you have in your inventory and then pull on it, or use knife on side of door or.... The game simply refuses any other than the one absurd solution the developers thought of - THAT'S mood logic.
It's funny how people complaining about moon logic always have to invent absurd fictional examples to prove their point, almost as though any real examples they have would make them look like the morons they are.
>literally begging and scraping any reason you can find to shit on made up enemies >"no puzzle has ever had an obscure solution you bunch of morons lol"
there are already several examples in the thread but you just had to try and posture infront of literally nobody
Pixel hunting. While you are likely to resort to trying everything possible when stuck, you won't always stumble across the pixels you were supposed to find. Best example I can think of is Maniac Mansion.
You NEED stamps to beat the game unless you have Bernard in your team. Only stamps in the game appear for a limited time on the package that arrives out front for Weird Ed. If you don't even know you can remove the stamps(or even think they might have not been canceled already due to going through the post office), you aren't likely to put the cursor over the 2-3 pixels of the stamps and notice the command line change from Go To Package to Go To Stamps. Once you or Ed gets the package, you can't get the stamps anymore. Notice those few pixels or that save is soft-locked.
Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade has a nasty one towards the end. The first death trap at the Temple of the Grail involves trying to find the tiny spot you need to stand to trigger Indy to get through unharmed. It's not 1:1 with the drawing in feelie Grail Diary that came with the game, I can tell you that.
>timed actions
Those are awesome if tied to optional things or alterations. It's the only thing that really makes point and click adventures feel immersive
True, however I was referring to mixing the two. Softlocking your run because you didn't click on that one pixel during the specific time window is bad design.
Moon logic would probably be worse but it very rarely actually happens, what most people call "moon logic" usually ends up being "the player is a moron and doesn't play attention to clues earlier in the game".
So pixel hunting is worse.
I'd say the worst is the genre's potential to fire up the modern consumer mindset's infinite ability for proxifying the implications of its own limited scope.
The worst is when it's some object and you click on it and it doesn't work, then you you find out it was "that object" but you clicked a few pixels too right/left/up/down and didn't trigger the activation.
When I got to this part as a kid I thought that since the monkey was smart enough to play the piano, it was smart enough to fix the pump too.
And then Guybrush... did his stuff and the joke didn't land until years later, but at least I didn't get stuck at THAT part.
Man, I was going to link that funny rant about finding the insane logic to the puzzles made by Roberta Williams and I can't find it on my pc (I think it was about Phantasmagoria). Then tried google and the search is so unbelievably shit nowadays, can't find anything.
If anyone remembers it, please link it.
At any case I think prefer the wacky logic, because all the clicking on every pixel back then gave me carpal tunnel.
>A few weeks ago, Gamecenter ran an article in which they declared that adventure gaming was "dead and buried". The Gamecenter employees who write the titles for articles apparently don't coordinate their efforts with the people who write the subtitles for articles because even before the banner graphic was completely over, someone in the subtitle department had upgraded the condition of adventure games to merely "vanishing". Still, no matter which part of the logo you choose to look at, adventure games are in trouble.
>Gamecenter blames Myst for killing adventure games. Or at least the Gamecenter employees who write the first paragraph of Gamecenter articles do. Again, this department may not be in direct contact with the team responsible for paragraph four, in which it is clearly stated that: >"Now it seems people want more action than adventure. They would rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories"
>As far as I can tell, the Gamecenter "death of adventure" timeline goes something like this: >The action-packed Myst introduces casual gamers to the pleasures of Tomb Raider. >Genius adventure gamers come to the painful realization that the same equipment they use to explore the complex fantasy world of Leisure Suit Larry can also be utilized by stupid people to run Quake. Thanks to their television-atrophied attention spans, these casual gamers are mentally incapable of spending six hours trying to randomly guess at the absurd dream logic Roberta Williams has applied to the problem of getting the dungeon key out of the bluebird's nest. >Horrified by the knowledge that somewhere someone is playing a game that is not an adventure, genius adventure gamers abandon the hobby in droves and resort to their backup source of entertainment: various combinations of Babylon 5 novels and jerking off.
Holy shit man thank you so much. It was Gabriel Knight 3 and it was about Jane Jensen, but he did mention Roberta Williams. In my defense I tried searching for rants about point and click/adventure games.
I really can't believe how shit Google search is nowadays, it keeps spamming SEO garbage at the top and then next pages are things that aren't related at all. Maybe I'm just getting old.
Google really is dogshit as a search engine now, it peaked around 2009 or so, and has become magnitudes worse with each year since.
Google is an advertiser megacorp, and advertising is what they specialize in above everything else in the world.
Ah yes, Old Man Murray, the original meme reviewer, who had such choice opinions as pic related.
His aggressive style of "irreverent humor" comes off as a dork trying to seem edgy, and his short-sighted criticism of Adventure games has proven to be more of a joke in itself than the persona he put on when trying to rationlize his stupidity towards them in the first place. Truly a reviewer of time.
It may very well have been an obnoxious tryhard review format, but on adventure games, the observation stands, and firmly. Convoluted moon logic bullshit isn't smart or engaging, it's just shitty and lazy design, and people making excuses for it are suffering Stockholm Syndrome.
If there isn't an actual logic to pay attention to and figure out, then that means the designer didn't actually think very hard about it, and he's either hoping for me to give up and try the trial and error approach, or he's hoping that I'm gonna pay up for a guide book or a hotline service.
It's not engaging, it's not stimulating, and it's not fun, this shit is just blueballs for my brain, I wanted to be forced to think and analyze.
On pixel hunting, that's the kind of shit which can ruin what would otherwise be a perfectly acceptable puzzle, maybe even a pretty good puzzle, but the devs halfassed the design or implementation.
> the observation stands
No, it doesn't. That's like me calling every FPS call of duty. Much like you calling moon logic puzzles lazy and moronic, so too is summing up Adventure games as all being the brainchild of Roberta Williams, especially when he had to go out of his way to avoid name-dropping Secret of Monkey Island, or Sam and Max Hit the Road, both of which have been cited as being some of the best all-around video games of all time.
>how DARES he saying that my favorite game sucks AND explaining why he thinks so!
Sorry kid, at the time nobody knew that Thief 2 is le retro gaming cult classic, so it was actually allowed to criticize it.
Pixel hunting. At least with moon logic the players who do solve the puzzles (not just by clicking everything) get to feel like gods. Pixel hunting doesn't make anyone feel good, it just punishes those less meticulous. Guess-the-verb problems in text adventures and early graphical adventure games could be really frustrating too, but I unironically almost prefer that to pixel hunting.
Definitely, but that's part of why I prefer moon logic. Pixel hunting is the devs failing at game design. With moon logic the devs often know what they're doing and don't give a frick.
To preface this I'm a complete beginner to adventure games and I just started playing Sanitarium and I had no real issues until this part. How was the hell was I supposed to know to pick up this specific tiny rock off to the side to throw at the bell to ring it? I already suspected that I had to ring the bell by throwing something at it but I couldn't find anything in the area to pick up and I was clicking everything that looked interesting and it's just some random rock on the ground that was the ONLY possible that could possibly be thrown? This was bullshit. Were all old adventure games like this? Also are there other puzzles like this in the game?
Their intention was probably that it is the only one out of order.
But in reality you would think differently, my first instinct would be to try one THE CLOSEST to him. It is also simply couterintuitive that you cannot simply pick any old rock.
Ironically, this is an issue that graphical adventure games invented. A lot of the great text adventure games had multiple ways to solve puzzles (especially the Magnetic Scrolls ones, and the Level 9 ones as well I think).
I mean....Is it any less or more bullshit than playing Ninja Gaiden on the NES, and having bats deliberately spawn a few pixels in front of you after you make a jump? There's bullshit in a lot of different genres, and unfortunately Adventure games suffer from their own faults just as any other. In your example, I think they were expecting you to note that the one rock was eschew, causing you to motion your mouse over it to see if it was interactable.
There's 2 laws of Adventure games: >Pick up everything immediately unless told other-wise >If something looks unique or out-of-place, check it to see if it can be interacted with
I would be lying if there aren't some genuinely frustrating adventure games, and I would also be lying if I said that those issues don't become grating. But in spite of everything, they manage to be a lot more memorable and interesting than most of the other games I've played.
I highly recommend playing Gabriel Knight 1 to reaffirm your interest in the genre. Its peaks are undoubtedly among some of the best gaming has to offer.
>Dialog puzzle in which you have to nag the NPC with the same dialog choice multiple times before they give in.
That's fine as long as their response is different the second time you click it, to signal that trying it even more might do something.
>Which is worse in adventure games
Reselling the same game with a shittier art style, and then some zoomer homosexual uses a screenshot from it when they make a thread on a retro games imageboard
Old adventure games have nasty difficulty problems like moon logic and pixel hunting because it would stretch out the time you needed to play the game and justify spending money on it. It wasn't like today where you expect to pick up a game and blitz through it and then get something else. It was normal to spend a good while trying to solve a game, like weeks, just tinkering around with it to try what works. Also some companies had a phone number you could call to pay for hints. To play them today you have to get into a different mindset and chill out. If you can't figure something out just put it down and come back to it in a few hours or the next day to play around with it some more. It's okay if you can't advance immediately.
That shit is the equivalent to home console games trying to wring imaginary quarters from you like it's an arcade game, a shit one.
Frick off with that homosexualry.
games were better like that. the generation after are only concerned with clearing games as an experience "i love content" and not something to actually relish and conquer. those sierra games were great because i actually had to learn through failure and figure out the intricacies of the sandbox.
Doing nothing and being stuck in one limited location hoping to figure out how the designers failed at their job isn't content, that's not even filler, it's a waste of my fricking time.
Which of these are good design? >A puzzle which is difficult or complex, but has a sound logic which makes sense, making you actually have to pay attention and think about how to solve it (maybe it has multiple solutions even). >A puzzle which doesn't have any grounded logic, and the only actualy viable approach is to throw random actions and items together, praying that you'll stumble upon the secret bullshit. >A puzzle which actually isn't difficult to figure out, maybe even easy, but there's exactly zero leeway in which range of pixels on a given feature which the game recognizes, or only very exact wording.
Zoomers and later millennials just don't enjoy games for the same reasons as earlier generations. They want to finish the game in a weekend and move on to the next one. They'll never get it.
I don't mind taking a break from a game and coming back later, but it should be because the devs are clever, not because they're jerking my wiener around or didn't give a frick.
They clearly didn't give the right fricks, because their school of thought was already dying out in the market in the 1990s, and thank frick for that.
With how technology flourished at the time, adventure games could do complex puzzles and interesting dialogue trees instead of exercises in wasting time. Or you could do better genres, like real time strategy, full fledged role playing games, action packed shooters, simulator and tycoon games, or 3D racing games and flight sims which weren't slow.
Classic text parsers and point & click adventure games are a fun time until you get away from the biggest devs and publishers, and even those delved into their share of bullshit at times.
>Its puzzles were largely dogshit.
You're saying that because you never realised you were solving puzzles, which is the point. For example, the water pipes.
> because almost never does an adventure game require you to click on a random part of the screen
Of course it doesn't REQUIRE you to do that, but the prevalence of "try everything on everything" as a method of brute forcing shows that people do resort to that kind of gameplay.
[...]
[...]
And I suppose you think grinding is a good thing in RPGs? It's nonsense to act like this is some mythical lost age.
Ask yourself this: have you ever played an adventure game when the majority of the puzzles were solved after contemplation an not just, as I said, trying everything on everything?
It's the video game equivalent of opening a combi-lock by going 001,002,003,004...
>as a method of brute forcing shows that people do resort to that kind of gameplay.
It's only bullshit when it's the only option, if someone wants to brute force when there's an actual logic to deduce, that's on them and their intellect, and that kind of brute forcing may even take longer than actually figuring out the solution.
>And I suppose you think grinding is a good thing in RPGs? It's nonsense to act like this is some mythical lost age.
When the alternative is having everything level with you so you can always go everywhere and never be challenged, yes, I do. But what am I saying, you're a zoomer who's grown up in an age where being told "no" is bigotry.
>Ask yourself this: have you ever played an adventure game when the majority of the puzzles were solved after contemplation an not just, as I said, trying everything on everything?
This argument has been used in the past on /vr/, and to just about the same level of success, IE, not very. Using it as some sort of a "gotchya" shows a lack of actual familiarity with the genre, since for starters, adventure games typically have specific triggers, preventing brute forcing, punish brute forcing, or misleading players for trying to brute-force. Death and dead-man-walking scenarios is also a preventative measure inserted into them to prevent brute-forcing.
>It's the video game equivalent of opening a combi-lock by going 001,002,003,004
Feasibly, no, since that combi lock has 996 billion possible combinations, effectively making it immune to brute-forcing, since the player will be long dead by the time they solve it.
>When the alternative is having everything level with you so you can always go everywhere and never be challenged, yes, I do.
That would not have to be the only option, in games like Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, and Morrowind, you may easily run into high level adversaries which will rape you if you go somewhere you ought not.
In Baldur's Gate 2, you can go and find a lich basically an hour into the game, and he's not happy to see you, he's very likely to wipe your party. What can you do to take him, go grind? Not really, there's not this wide abundance of random encounters sprinkled out around the city of Athkatla, there's some, but you'd be grinding for SUCH a long time, and with preciously little material rewards in gold and equipment. Instead, you'd go and find a quest to do, like liberating a keep invaded by an army of trolls. It'll be tough at a low level, but fairly doable as a lot of the needed supplies will be in there, and there are smart ways to approach some of the fights.
With a bit of leveling from that, and accruing some capital to upgrade some gear and buy supplies, you're better set, and if you weren't a mage yourself you'd be able to get a capable one from doing the troll keep. Now, you could go and have a chance against that hidden lich, you may very well win without any dead party members, and what's this? He's got a pretty cool sword which can make one of the other quests a LOT easier to do (though not making it trivial).
BG2 will demand higher levels in many places, but the only real way to actually level is to go and do dungeons and sidequests.
This particular way of achieving longevity was never normal and no one ever liked it. Like mirror balance in RTS, faceless sewer levels, red barrels and platforming in FPS, or being tremendously underpowered at the beginning of RPGs, it is one of the things that devs stupidly clinged to out of some weird devotion to genre canon. But it wasn't a genre canon, it was something that people merely tolerated because of hardware limitations. And that is if we assume that all its instances were intentional, because if it is not, then it is just designer sucking at his job, like an FPS dev forgetting to put feedback from the enemies receiving hits.
Pixel hunting. All the people that moan about the monkey wrench puzzle should redirect their complains to the Ash2Life puzzle which is twice as hard to figure out.
The worst thing in adventure games is complete lack of clues as to why what you're trying to do wouldn't work and instead getting the same three generic "I don't want to do that" lines when you're attempting to do something that seems like a completely sensible solution but isn't what the game is looking for.
Depends on your definition of each. As much as tards in these topics like to complain about the mean moon logic they can never figure out, games with completely straightforward logic and boring and forgettable. Even the beloved Lucasarts games have a goofy logic to them. Myst and Myst-likes all have an internal logic to them that you have to figure them out, and usually have some requirement of pixel hunting. Except Myst V, but that's the weakest entry in the series. Any game with something that shows what it is your mouse is over shouldn't be too guilty of the later. I liked In the Dead of Night.
there's nothing worse than trying all of your objects on something to get anything to work and realizing that you are missing something and not having any idea where OR what that fricking item is.
now if the games used much more reasonable and simple logic then it might not be that bad. like if you need a sword and you go to a sword shop and there are four sword sprites on the wall It's pretty easy to figure out what to do.
But when you need a book because it has a key inside of it to unlock a fricking door and you have to go to a library that has literally 237 book sprites, frick that shit.
This is made even worse when you have a game that allows you to interact with almost everything in a background. because you don't want to hear the same annoying line of dialogue 1400 times as you try to figure out which specific book that you're trying to pull out.
Also, If you use strategy guides then at least with moonlogic, its easier to find the solution than with pixel hunting. whereas when you're trying to find the item you have to go back to find where you get the item in the strategy guide. which isn't always as clearly marked because you were supposed to get it when you were in the bookstore. And since you don't know you need a key you don't know which section of the strategy guide that is so you have to go and read a huge portion of it just to find where the fricking item is.
whereas compared to the soup cans puzzle in 7th guest. literally just a bunch of words. Goofy logic, but at least finding the solution is easy.
TLDR; make your goddamned items obvious you fricking morons
>Puzzle logic is a bit odd and better solutions exist, but are not applicable >You have to interact with an innocuous graphic that's not signposted OR clearly a distinct interactable >You have to do things in a very specific order even if that's unimportant >You have to do something perfectly the first time and the game does not tell you you fricked up >You have to click on one of over a dozen versions of an object randomly >You have to click one of a couple pixels in a low res game >You have to click one of a couple pixels in a high res game >You have to click on a SPECIFIC pixel
Really? People are still b***hing about a puzzle in an American game that was made in the US for an American audience that relied on the American term for an item to solve it when Gabriel Knight's Cat hair mustache puzzle was such a massive level of moon logic that it has a Wikipedia page dedicated to it's insanity.
Well for starters, people actually played Monkey Island 2. I'm surprised no one has mentioned the goat puzzle from Broken Sword yet. It didn't involve moon logic or pixel hunting but it was still bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goat_Puzzle
>The "Monkey Wrench" puzzle
Also known as /vr/'s most trusted third worlder detector. If you don't know the phrase "monkey wrench", you won't understand what was the pun that puzzle was about even if you stumbled upon the solution just trying to use everything on everything. And even good english won't help you there since that isn't something you can learn in the class.
>people say moon logic doesn't exist
I dunno who the frick you're trying to fool, but I can think of three clear examples. >King's Quest 5 and the mouse.
How in the hell would you ever know that you needed to rescue a fricking MOUSE in order to escape from the Inn's basement? There is no hint, no clue, and a very good chance you didn't even grab the boot before you go to town. Even if you do, how would you know you need to throw the boot at the cat chasing the mouse instead of not committing an act of animal abuse? Does Graham usually throw objects at Cedric when he eats? Good luck explaining the logic behind this puzzle. >Maniac Mansion and the security door code.
You need a code to open the security door leading to the lab where the meteor is. This code isn't written down anywhere for you to find. It just so happens to be the high score on the non-functional arcade machine on the 2nd floor. Which is a long and complicated process of getting tools and light to repair the wiring in the attic to get the power back on to the arcade machines. The one and only hint you get that the arcade machine is of any importance is occasionally the Doctor will visit the arcade games and try to play in a cutscene, only to complain they aren't working. Keep in mind, every single other cutscene is strictly for entertainment and contain no clues about anything. As for the logic as to why the code would just so happen to be the current high score in a specific arcade game, good luck explaining that.
Cont. in next post.
Mansion and the security door code.
IIRC the code also changes if he plays the game again, so if you get the cutscene again before you open the door your code will be wrong
Correct. Even if you are standing in front of the security door when the cutscene plays, and there was no way for the Doctor to change the code without encountering the kid in front of the door, the code will still change and the Doctor will be magically back in the lab.
>Maniac Mansion and the safe in Edna's attic
You need an envelope to complete the game without Bernard or Michael. The only envelope in the game is stored in a safe in Edna's attic. The combo to the safe is written below the safe in microscopic font. The solution isn't to find a magnifying glass or microscope to make the font readable. No no. The solution is to change the aim of the telescope for looking into deep space, across the mansion at the text. Even as a kid I knew that violated the rules of physics, and you would just get a giant blur in reality. Good luck explaining why the player should try something that logic says wouldn't work at all. The only way the player could possibly think to use the fricking telescope is if they had(like the devs) never touched a telescope in their entire life.
It's a bit like playing a game with a locked door using a card reader slot where the game expects you to stick a key in the slot and not a card.
>Maniac Mansion and the safe in Edna's attic
You need an envelope to complete the game without Bernard or Michael. The only envelope in the game is stored in a safe in Edna's attic. The combo to the safe is written below the safe in microscopic font. The solution isn't to find a magnifying glass or microscope to make the font readable. No no. The solution is to change the aim of the telescope for looking into deep space, across the mansion at the text. Even as a kid I knew that violated the rules of physics, and you would just get a giant blur in reality. Good luck explaining why the player should try something that logic says wouldn't work at all. The only way the player could possibly think to use the fricking telescope is if they had(like the devs) never touched a telescope in their entire life.
It's a bit like playing a game with a locked door using a card reader slot where the game expects you to stick a key in the slot and not a card.
For the first two, the rule of, if the game shows you something is happening, maybe you should actually pay attention to it. Understandable how some people would miss it though. The second MM is just whining that a game that runs on cartoon logic is running on cartoon logic.
If you aren't prevented from returning and getting it, ergo you aren't softlocked, then I see no problem with game over traps like those.
I'm more thinking Roberta Williams having me continue playing for hours after having unknowingly fricked myself.
[...] >Most of the time it is telegraphed in some way. For instance, if you have sex with the prostitute without a condom in Leisure Suit Larry 1, you die automatically 1 minute later.
That one's just a funny joke and it goes over quickly, when Dark Seed did Dead Man Walking, you had no real way of knowing.
Didn't do the specific steps on the specific days and in specific order, even though there's basically no clues? Too bad! GET BRAINFRICKED GET BRAINFRICKED GET BRAINFRICKED!!
Some Japs who watched Aliens can rip off Giger's art for action arcade games and strike gold, but a western studio actually licensing his art and adapting it directly, trying to build a narrative around the designs, completely frick it up. What a world!
With something like Dark Seed where the game is timed/real-tmie, you're basically going into a game that will absolutely frick you over at that point. It's like complaining that a really hard game is hard.
Day of the Tentacle runs on cartoon logic, not Maniac Mansion. If you refill the pool while someone is inside, they don't make a cartoony OH NOES! and go flying out of the pool, they just die. The majority of puzzle solutions have logical and mundane solutions, like using the ear-piercing record to break the glass. Just about anything unusual is tied to the aliens.
I can deal with pixel hunting, even moon logic on occassion, but the worst is incorrectly solving a puzzle, missing the solution, or failing the time-specific nature of something, and then going on for an hour, possibly more, and realizing you can't continue. Even worse still is when it isn't obvious WHY that happened to you in the first place.
Thankfully, this is mostly contained to a few specific titles in King's Quest, and Dark Seed 1 and 2. Most of the time it is telegraphed in some way. For instance, if you have sex with the prostitute without a condom in Leisure Suit Larry 1, you die automatically 1 minute later.
>character walks into a trap >limited actions to save yourself >but you can't actually get out because you didn't explore THAT OTHER ROOM before and pick up the necessary item first
If you aren't prevented from returning and getting it, ergo you aren't softlocked, then I see no problem with game over traps like those.
I'm more thinking Roberta Williams having me continue playing for hours after having unknowingly fricked myself.
Option 3: Dead-man walking scenarios.
I can deal with pixel hunting, even moon logic on occassion, but the worst is incorrectly solving a puzzle, missing the solution, or failing the time-specific nature of something, and then going on for an hour, possibly more, and realizing you can't continue. Even worse still is when it isn't obvious WHY that happened to you in the first place.
Thankfully, this is mostly contained to a few specific titles in King's Quest, and Dark Seed 1 and 2. Most of the time it is telegraphed in some way. For instance, if you have sex with the prostitute without a condom in Leisure Suit Larry 1, you die automatically 1 minute later.
>Most of the time it is telegraphed in some way. For instance, if you have sex with the prostitute without a condom in Leisure Suit Larry 1, you die automatically 1 minute later.
That one's just a funny joke and it goes over quickly, when Dark Seed did Dead Man Walking, you had no real way of knowing.
Didn't do the specific steps on the specific days and in specific order, even though there's basically no clues? Too bad! GET BRAINFRICKED GET BRAINFRICKED GET BRAINFRICKED!!
Some Japs who watched Aliens can rip off Giger's art for action arcade games and strike gold, but a western studio actually licensing his art and adapting it directly, trying to build a narrative around the designs, completely frick it up. What a world!
This is a bit unrelated but how did 90s adventure game fans feel about how some adventure games would softlock if you didn't do a certain thing yet you can still progress the game for hours without you realizing it's impossible to beat the game because you didn't that one easily missable thing?
It was frustrating, especially when you got no hints that you'd failed. But it was also just part of the game. It forced you to not dismiss anything that had happened up to that point in the game and be ready to restore a save when you didn't know what else to do.
Keeping track of saves has always been annoying though. I wish more games had started doing something similar to what The Last Express did, where you could just rewind to any point in the past of your playthrough. And the only saving you needed to do was so you'd be able to return to the present timeline, after rewinding and changing the past so to speak.
>And the only saving you needed to do was so you'd be able to return to the present timeline, after rewinding and changing the past
*return to the present timeline with the past unchanged, I meant.
Though returning to the future after changing just some small detail in the past and not needing to replay anything else might have made for an interesting mechanic.
Moon logic is infinitely more annoying in the long term, at least for me. What's worse is when it's meant to be funny. You could imagine the devs laughing about how hilarious it'd be if you had to throw a rubber chicken at an electric guitar to make the cow attack the flying saucer, but by the time you do that you're too pissed off to see the humor.
What's annoying is that Myst solved adventure game puzzles right at the start (make the environment something that you solve), but no one learned that lesson because they were too big brained to keep it simple.
Loom is a good example of applying Myst's lessons to a point and click.
My issue with that is that it makes everything too much like a checklist. Like scanning the mouse back and forth down each new screen. I know you can say "don't do that then" but that'd be intentionally disadvantaging yourself.
I think that the "style" of adventure games was kind of flawed from the start for this reason, as much as I loved it in the past and with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.
It goes back to what I said about no one learning from Myst.
>I know you can say "don't do that then" but that'd be intentionally disadvantaging yourself.
You wouldn't be, because almost never does an adventure game require you to click on a random part of the screen. In fact, there are some that are text parsers, so using the mouse isn't even an option.
>I think that the "style" of adventure games was kind of flawed from the start for this reason, as much as I loved it in the past and with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.
What do you mean the style of adventure games? You mean the style of adventure games as a whole? Because that's moronic. Not all adventure games are point and clicks. If you mean point and click adventure games, it's only a flaw if that specific game uses pixel-hunting.
Of course, I also have to question the eye-sight of the anons commenting on here, because I have played over a dozen adventure games and I do not recall ever "needing" to pixel hunt in a single one of them.
There's also the fact that a number of point and clicks don't even have the pointer change when it mouses over a context-sensitive item.
>It goes back to what I said about no one learning from Myst.
Myst was only popular because of its 3D graphics. Its puzzles were largely dogshit. I would prefer if more games took cues from Space Quest and less from the glorified tech demo that was Myst.
>Its puzzles were largely dogshit.
You're saying that because you never realised you were solving puzzles, which is the point. For example, the water pipes.
> because almost never does an adventure game require you to click on a random part of the screen
Of course it doesn't REQUIRE you to do that, but the prevalence of "try everything on everything" as a method of brute forcing shows that people do resort to that kind of gameplay.
Zoomers and later millennials just don't enjoy games for the same reasons as earlier generations. They want to finish the game in a weekend and move on to the next one. They'll never get it.
based
And I suppose you think grinding is a good thing in RPGs? It's nonsense to act like this is some mythical lost age.
Ask yourself this: have you ever played an adventure game when the majority of the puzzles were solved after contemplation an not just, as I said, trying everything on everything?
It's the video game equivalent of opening a combi-lock by going 001,002,003,004...
>And I suppose you think grinding is a good thing in RPGs? It's nonsense to act like this is some mythical lost age.
When the alternative is having everything level with you so you can always go everywhere and never be challenged, yes, I do. But what am I saying, you're a zoomer who's grown up in an age where being told "no" is bigotry.
>Ask yourself this: have you ever played an adventure game when the majority of the puzzles were solved after contemplation an not just, as I said, trying everything on everything?
This argument has been used in the past on /vr/, and to just about the same level of success, IE, not very. Using it as some sort of a "gotchya" shows a lack of actual familiarity with the genre, since for starters, adventure games typically have specific triggers, preventing brute forcing, punish brute forcing, or misleading players for trying to brute-force. Death and dead-man-walking scenarios is also a preventative measure inserted into them to prevent brute-forcing.
>It's the video game equivalent of opening a combi-lock by going 001,002,003,004
Feasibly, no, since that combi lock has 996 billion possible combinations, effectively making it immune to brute-forcing, since the player will be long dead by the time they solve it.
>Feasibly, no, since that combi lock has 996 billion possible combinations, effectively making it immune to brute-forcing
For some adventure game theorycrafting, you could go and find the code, but perhaps there's an intended way to for the player to be able to bypass the lock, maybe the character knows that most mechanical combination locks can be easily decoded.
You could maybe have multiple characters, where one guy doesn't know that, but he is strong enough that he can just plain break the lock with the right tool (but which then clues in the owner that he's been robbed, and maybe you then have to fist fight him at a later point as a consequence).
>You're saying that because you never realised you were solving puzzles, which is the point. For example, the water pipes. >never realised you were solving puzzles
Moon logic. Pixel hunting is half assing a relatively small thing but trve moon logic puzzles kill the will to play regardless of whether they have pixel hunting on top of them.
>moon logic?
What's that?
But probably pixel hunting. Made me drop Riven. After hearing so much about how awesome the puzzles are, the only times I got stuck is because I overlooked some tiny nonsense fantasy thing I had to click without being able to know it does something
>What's that?
Adventure game logic that would have required you to be in the same room as the developers to even begin to guess how to solve it. Think the gabrial knight cat hair puzzle
>dropped
>only time i got stuck
you didnt play the game.
When you have to combine THIS with EXACTLY THAT and use it like THIS to solve an obstacle that could be solved in so many other ways but the game simply refuses to acknowledge other solutions.
Like you have a door but it's missing a handle - so obviously you have to get a banana from the market on the other side of town and a candle and matches, light the candle and use the wax to glue the babana on the door - and NOT use for example a nail with the hammer you have in your inventory and then pull on it, or use knife on side of door or.... The game simply refuses any other than the one absurd solution the developers thought of - THAT'S mood logic.
It's funny how people complaining about moon logic always have to invent absurd fictional examples to prove their point, almost as though any real examples they have would make them look like the morons they are.
>literally begging and scraping any reason you can find to shit on made up enemies
>"no puzzle has ever had an obscure solution you bunch of morons lol"
there are already several examples in the thread but you just had to try and posture infront of literally nobody
You could play Kyrandia 3 Malcolm's Revenge where you get moon logic puzzles that require pixel hunting
Pixel hunting. While you are likely to resort to trying everything possible when stuck, you won't always stumble across the pixels you were supposed to find. Best example I can think of is Maniac Mansion.
You NEED stamps to beat the game unless you have Bernard in your team. Only stamps in the game appear for a limited time on the package that arrives out front for Weird Ed. If you don't even know you can remove the stamps(or even think they might have not been canceled already due to going through the post office), you aren't likely to put the cursor over the 2-3 pixels of the stamps and notice the command line change from Go To Package to Go To Stamps. Once you or Ed gets the package, you can't get the stamps anymore. Notice those few pixels or that save is soft-locked.
Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade has a nasty one towards the end. The first death trap at the Temple of the Grail involves trying to find the tiny spot you need to stand to trigger Indy to get through unharmed. It's not 1:1 with the drawing in feelie Grail Diary that came with the game, I can tell you that.
Pixel hunting and timed actions are a fricking plague.
>timed actions
Those are awesome if tied to optional things or alterations. It's the only thing that really makes point and click adventures feel immersive
True, however I was referring to mixing the two. Softlocking your run because you didn't click on that one pixel during the specific time window is bad design.
Timers are fine if they're within reason for the game. I always liked that King's Quest III had the wizard on a timer.
Moon logic would probably be worse but it very rarely actually happens, what most people call "moon logic" usually ends up being "the player is a moron and doesn't play attention to clues earlier in the game".
So pixel hunting is worse.
I'd say the worst is the genre's potential to fire up the modern consumer mindset's infinite ability for proxifying the implications of its own limited scope.
you could have just said "making the player ask why he can't use XYZ to solve the puzzle", anon
>proxifying the implications of its own limited scope
The worst is when it's some object and you click on it and it doesn't work, then you you find out it was "that object" but you clicked a few pixels too right/left/up/down and didn't trigger the activation.
When I got to this part as a kid I thought that since the monkey was smart enough to play the piano, it was smart enough to fix the pump too.
And then Guybrush... did his stuff and the joke didn't land until years later, but at least I didn't get stuck at THAT part.
Always wanted to get into these games but they make me feel stupid.
Man, I was going to link that funny rant about finding the insane logic to the puzzles made by Roberta Williams and I can't find it on my pc (I think it was about Phantasmagoria). Then tried google and the search is so unbelievably shit nowadays, can't find anything.
If anyone remembers it, please link it.
At any case I think prefer the wacky logic, because all the clicking on every pixel back then gave me carpal tunnel.
This?
https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
>A few weeks ago, Gamecenter ran an article in which they declared that adventure gaming was "dead and buried". The Gamecenter employees who write the titles for articles apparently don't coordinate their efforts with the people who write the subtitles for articles because even before the banner graphic was completely over, someone in the subtitle department had upgraded the condition of adventure games to merely "vanishing". Still, no matter which part of the logo you choose to look at, adventure games are in trouble.
>Gamecenter blames Myst for killing adventure games. Or at least the Gamecenter employees who write the first paragraph of Gamecenter articles do. Again, this department may not be in direct contact with the team responsible for paragraph four, in which it is clearly stated that:
>"Now it seems people want more action than adventure. They would rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories"
>As far as I can tell, the Gamecenter "death of adventure" timeline goes something like this:
>The action-packed Myst introduces casual gamers to the pleasures of Tomb Raider.
>Genius adventure gamers come to the painful realization that the same equipment they use to explore the complex fantasy world of Leisure Suit Larry can also be utilized by stupid people to run Quake. Thanks to their television-atrophied attention spans, these casual gamers are mentally incapable of spending six hours trying to randomly guess at the absurd dream logic Roberta Williams has applied to the problem of getting the dungeon key out of the bluebird's nest.
>Horrified by the knowledge that somewhere someone is playing a game that is not an adventure, genius adventure gamers abandon the hobby in droves and resort to their backup source of entertainment: various combinations of Babylon 5 novels and jerking off.
Classic.
There's two more pages (links at the bottom) in case you missed it
Holy shit man thank you so much. It was Gabriel Knight 3 and it was about Jane Jensen, but he did mention Roberta Williams. In my defense I tried searching for rants about point and click/adventure games.
I really can't believe how shit Google search is nowadays, it keeps spamming SEO garbage at the top and then next pages are things that aren't related at all. Maybe I'm just getting old.
Google really is dogshit as a search engine now, it peaked around 2009 or so, and has become magnitudes worse with each year since.
Google is an advertiser megacorp, and advertising is what they specialize in above everything else in the world.
Ah yes, Old Man Murray, the original meme reviewer, who had such choice opinions as pic related.
His aggressive style of "irreverent humor" comes off as a dork trying to seem edgy, and his short-sighted criticism of Adventure games has proven to be more of a joke in itself than the persona he put on when trying to rationlize his stupidity towards them in the first place. Truly a reviewer of time.
It may very well have been an obnoxious tryhard review format, but on adventure games, the observation stands, and firmly. Convoluted moon logic bullshit isn't smart or engaging, it's just shitty and lazy design, and people making excuses for it are suffering Stockholm Syndrome.
If there isn't an actual logic to pay attention to and figure out, then that means the designer didn't actually think very hard about it, and he's either hoping for me to give up and try the trial and error approach, or he's hoping that I'm gonna pay up for a guide book or a hotline service.
It's not engaging, it's not stimulating, and it's not fun, this shit is just blueballs for my brain, I wanted to be forced to think and analyze.
On pixel hunting, that's the kind of shit which can ruin what would otherwise be a perfectly acceptable puzzle, maybe even a pretty good puzzle, but the devs halfassed the design or implementation.
> the observation stands
No, it doesn't. That's like me calling every FPS call of duty. Much like you calling moon logic puzzles lazy and moronic, so too is summing up Adventure games as all being the brainchild of Roberta Williams, especially when he had to go out of his way to avoid name-dropping Secret of Monkey Island, or Sam and Max Hit the Road, both of which have been cited as being some of the best all-around video games of all time.
>how DARES he saying that my favorite game sucks AND explaining why he thinks so!
Sorry kid, at the time nobody knew that Thief 2 is le retro gaming cult classic, so it was actually allowed to criticize it.
Eric Wolpaw is a funny guy, he wrote for Psychonauts too.
Pixel hunting. At least with moon logic the players who do solve the puzzles (not just by clicking everything) get to feel like gods. Pixel hunting doesn't make anyone feel good, it just punishes those less meticulous. Guess-the-verb problems in text adventures and early graphical adventure games could be really frustrating too, but I unironically almost prefer that to pixel hunting.
I dunno. I feel like a lot of the time pixel hunting might be unintentional. Moon logic is always intentional though.
Definitely, but that's part of why I prefer moon logic. Pixel hunting is the devs failing at game design. With moon logic the devs often know what they're doing and don't give a frick.
To preface this I'm a complete beginner to adventure games and I just started playing Sanitarium and I had no real issues until this part. How was the hell was I supposed to know to pick up this specific tiny rock off to the side to throw at the bell to ring it? I already suspected that I had to ring the bell by throwing something at it but I couldn't find anything in the area to pick up and I was clicking everything that looked interesting and it's just some random rock on the ground that was the ONLY possible that could possibly be thrown? This was bullshit. Were all old adventure games like this? Also are there other puzzles like this in the game?
Welcome to adventure games. Be glad the rock wasn't on the ground in a previous area that you can't get to anymore, thus soft-locking your save.
I don't know why you wouldn't try to look at all of the rocks by the bell you know you need to ring.
Their intention was probably that it is the only one out of order.
But in reality you would think differently, my first instinct would be to try one THE CLOSEST to him. It is also simply couterintuitive that you cannot simply pick any old rock.
Ironically, this is an issue that graphical adventure games invented. A lot of the great text adventure games had multiple ways to solve puzzles (especially the Magnetic Scrolls ones, and the Level 9 ones as well I think).
I mean....Is it any less or more bullshit than playing Ninja Gaiden on the NES, and having bats deliberately spawn a few pixels in front of you after you make a jump? There's bullshit in a lot of different genres, and unfortunately Adventure games suffer from their own faults just as any other. In your example, I think they were expecting you to note that the one rock was eschew, causing you to motion your mouse over it to see if it was interactable.
There's 2 laws of Adventure games:
>Pick up everything immediately unless told other-wise
>If something looks unique or out-of-place, check it to see if it can be interacted with
I would be lying if there aren't some genuinely frustrating adventure games, and I would also be lying if I said that those issues don't become grating. But in spite of everything, they manage to be a lot more memorable and interesting than most of the other games I've played.
I highly recommend playing Gabriel Knight 1 to reaffirm your interest in the genre. Its peaks are undoubtedly among some of the best gaming has to offer.
Monkey wrench made perfect sense. Why is this always used as an example of moon logic?
I'll tell you MY main gripe. Dialog puzzle in which you have to nag the NPC with the same dialog choice multiple times before they give in.
>Dialog puzzle in which you have to nag the NPC with the same dialog choice multiple times before they give in.
That's fine as long as their response is different the second time you click it, to signal that trying it even more might do something.
>Which is worse in adventure games
Reselling the same game with a shittier art style, and then some zoomer homosexual uses a screenshot from it when they make a thread on a retro games imageboard
Old adventure games have nasty difficulty problems like moon logic and pixel hunting because it would stretch out the time you needed to play the game and justify spending money on it. It wasn't like today where you expect to pick up a game and blitz through it and then get something else. It was normal to spend a good while trying to solve a game, like weeks, just tinkering around with it to try what works. Also some companies had a phone number you could call to pay for hints. To play them today you have to get into a different mindset and chill out. If you can't figure something out just put it down and come back to it in a few hours or the next day to play around with it some more. It's okay if you can't advance immediately.
That shit is the equivalent to home console games trying to wring imaginary quarters from you like it's an arcade game, a shit one.
Frick off with that homosexualry.
Then don't play them.
Or I'll just play the ones which aren't filled to the brim with horrible and cheap bullshit.
>t. massive gay
games were better like that. the generation after are only concerned with clearing games as an experience "i love content" and not something to actually relish and conquer. those sierra games were great because i actually had to learn through failure and figure out the intricacies of the sandbox.
Doing nothing and being stuck in one limited location hoping to figure out how the designers failed at their job isn't content, that's not even filler, it's a waste of my fricking time.
you dont understand game design so this conversation is not worth pursuing. return when you can offer us more than sparse buzzwords.
Which of these are good design?
>A puzzle which is difficult or complex, but has a sound logic which makes sense, making you actually have to pay attention and think about how to solve it (maybe it has multiple solutions even).
>A puzzle which doesn't have any grounded logic, and the only actualy viable approach is to throw random actions and items together, praying that you'll stumble upon the secret bullshit.
>A puzzle which actually isn't difficult to figure out, maybe even easy, but there's exactly zero leeway in which range of pixels on a given feature which the game recognizes, or only very exact wording.
which of these would the monkey wrench puzzle belong to?
None of them, it's just a basic pun, there's nothing great about it, but nothing bad about it either.
I found it much more difficult figuring out how to get the monkey to the pump than the word play itself tbh
>which of these are good design
>My clearly worded correct answer
>or these other clearly worded wrong answers
Gee, I don't know Mr Wizard...the wrong one?
t. Roberta Williams
Zoomers and later millennials just don't enjoy games for the same reasons as earlier generations. They want to finish the game in a weekend and move on to the next one. They'll never get it.
based
I don't mind taking a break from a game and coming back later, but it should be because the devs are clever, not because they're jerking my wiener around or didn't give a frick.
They gave a frick, but they gave a frick about different things than modern developers.
They clearly didn't give the right fricks, because their school of thought was already dying out in the market in the 1990s, and thank frick for that.
With how technology flourished at the time, adventure games could do complex puzzles and interesting dialogue trees instead of exercises in wasting time. Or you could do better genres, like real time strategy, full fledged role playing games, action packed shooters, simulator and tycoon games, or 3D racing games and flight sims which weren't slow.
Classic text parsers and point & click adventure games are a fun time until you get away from the biggest devs and publishers, and even those delved into their share of bullshit at times.
>Also some companies had a phone number you could call to pay for hints.
Nintendo did this by the way.
I now await the inevitable horde of nin-tendies that will complain @ me how "it was different".
Nintendo did this and it was bullshit.
>as a method of brute forcing shows that people do resort to that kind of gameplay.
It's only bullshit when it's the only option, if someone wants to brute force when there's an actual logic to deduce, that's on them and their intellect, and that kind of brute forcing may even take longer than actually figuring out the solution.
>When the alternative is having everything level with you so you can always go everywhere and never be challenged, yes, I do.
That would not have to be the only option, in games like Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, and Morrowind, you may easily run into high level adversaries which will rape you if you go somewhere you ought not.
In Baldur's Gate 2, you can go and find a lich basically an hour into the game, and he's not happy to see you, he's very likely to wipe your party. What can you do to take him, go grind? Not really, there's not this wide abundance of random encounters sprinkled out around the city of Athkatla, there's some, but you'd be grinding for SUCH a long time, and with preciously little material rewards in gold and equipment. Instead, you'd go and find a quest to do, like liberating a keep invaded by an army of trolls. It'll be tough at a low level, but fairly doable as a lot of the needed supplies will be in there, and there are smart ways to approach some of the fights.
With a bit of leveling from that, and accruing some capital to upgrade some gear and buy supplies, you're better set, and if you weren't a mage yourself you'd be able to get a capable one from doing the troll keep. Now, you could go and have a chance against that hidden lich, you may very well win without any dead party members, and what's this? He's got a pretty cool sword which can make one of the other quests a LOT easier to do (though not making it trivial).
BG2 will demand higher levels in many places, but the only real way to actually level is to go and do dungeons and sidequests.
This particular way of achieving longevity was never normal and no one ever liked it. Like mirror balance in RTS, faceless sewer levels, red barrels and platforming in FPS, or being tremendously underpowered at the beginning of RPGs, it is one of the things that devs stupidly clinged to out of some weird devotion to genre canon. But it wasn't a genre canon, it was something that people merely tolerated because of hardware limitations. And that is if we assume that all its instances were intentional, because if it is not, then it is just designer sucking at his job, like an FPS dev forgetting to put feedback from the enemies receiving hits.
>red barrels and platforming in FPS,
Literally nothing bad about these.
Pixel hunting. All the people that moan about the monkey wrench puzzle should redirect their complains to the Ash2Life puzzle which is twice as hard to figure out.
The worst thing in adventure games is complete lack of clues as to why what you're trying to do wouldn't work and instead getting the same three generic "I don't want to do that" lines when you're attempting to do something that seems like a completely sensible solution but isn't what the game is looking for.
>Rincewind: That doesn't work.
>Rincewind: That doesn't work.
>Rincewind: That doesn't work.
Real adventure game chads play text adventures.
What are the best adventure games not guilty of these?
Depends on your definition of each. As much as tards in these topics like to complain about the mean moon logic they can never figure out, games with completely straightforward logic and boring and forgettable. Even the beloved Lucasarts games have a goofy logic to them. Myst and Myst-likes all have an internal logic to them that you have to figure them out, and usually have some requirement of pixel hunting. Except Myst V, but that's the weakest entry in the series. Any game with something that shows what it is your mouse is over shouldn't be too guilty of the later. I liked In the Dead of Night.
I think it’s funny that the Monkey Wrench puzzle filters ESLs.
Pixel hunting for sure.
there's nothing worse than trying all of your objects on something to get anything to work and realizing that you are missing something and not having any idea where OR what that fricking item is.
now if the games used much more reasonable and simple logic then it might not be that bad. like if you need a sword and you go to a sword shop and there are four sword sprites on the wall It's pretty easy to figure out what to do.
But when you need a book because it has a key inside of it to unlock a fricking door and you have to go to a library that has literally 237 book sprites, frick that shit.
This is made even worse when you have a game that allows you to interact with almost everything in a background. because you don't want to hear the same annoying line of dialogue 1400 times as you try to figure out which specific book that you're trying to pull out.
Also, If you use strategy guides then at least with moonlogic, its easier to find the solution than with pixel hunting. whereas when you're trying to find the item you have to go back to find where you get the item in the strategy guide. which isn't always as clearly marked because you were supposed to get it when you were in the bookstore. And since you don't know you need a key you don't know which section of the strategy guide that is so you have to go and read a huge portion of it just to find where the fricking item is.
whereas compared to the soup cans puzzle in 7th guest. literally just a bunch of words. Goofy logic, but at least finding the solution is easy.
TLDR; make your goddamned items obvious you fricking morons
They are all pretty easy if you aren't dumb and take some time to think.
>16 rocks on the floor
>can only pick one up
>it's barely made to look different
In order of most to least acceptable
>Puzzle logic is a bit odd and better solutions exist, but are not applicable
>You have to interact with an innocuous graphic that's not signposted OR clearly a distinct interactable
>You have to do things in a very specific order even if that's unimportant
>You have to do something perfectly the first time and the game does not tell you you fricked up
>You have to click on one of over a dozen versions of an object randomly
>You have to click one of a couple pixels in a low res game
>You have to click one of a couple pixels in a high res game
>You have to click on a SPECIFIC pixel
Pixel Hunting, by a mile. It's not even close.
Also
>The "Monkey Wrench" puzzle
Really? People are still b***hing about a puzzle in an American game that was made in the US for an American audience that relied on the American term for an item to solve it when Gabriel Knight's Cat hair mustache puzzle was such a massive level of moon logic that it has a Wikipedia page dedicated to it's insanity.
Well for starters, people actually played Monkey Island 2. I'm surprised no one has mentioned the goat puzzle from Broken Sword yet. It didn't involve moon logic or pixel hunting but it was still bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goat_Puzzle
>The "Monkey Wrench" puzzle
Also known as /vr/'s most trusted third worlder detector. If you don't know the phrase "monkey wrench", you won't understand what was the pun that puzzle was about even if you stumbled upon the solution just trying to use everything on everything. And even good english won't help you there since that isn't something you can learn in the class.
>people say moon logic doesn't exist
I dunno who the frick you're trying to fool, but I can think of three clear examples.
>King's Quest 5 and the mouse.
How in the hell would you ever know that you needed to rescue a fricking MOUSE in order to escape from the Inn's basement? There is no hint, no clue, and a very good chance you didn't even grab the boot before you go to town. Even if you do, how would you know you need to throw the boot at the cat chasing the mouse instead of not committing an act of animal abuse? Does Graham usually throw objects at Cedric when he eats? Good luck explaining the logic behind this puzzle.
>Maniac Mansion and the security door code.
You need a code to open the security door leading to the lab where the meteor is. This code isn't written down anywhere for you to find. It just so happens to be the high score on the non-functional arcade machine on the 2nd floor. Which is a long and complicated process of getting tools and light to repair the wiring in the attic to get the power back on to the arcade machines. The one and only hint you get that the arcade machine is of any importance is occasionally the Doctor will visit the arcade games and try to play in a cutscene, only to complain they aren't working. Keep in mind, every single other cutscene is strictly for entertainment and contain no clues about anything. As for the logic as to why the code would just so happen to be the current high score in a specific arcade game, good luck explaining that.
Cont. in next post.
Mansion and the security door code.
IIRC the code also changes if he plays the game again, so if you get the cutscene again before you open the door your code will be wrong
Correct. Even if you are standing in front of the security door when the cutscene plays, and there was no way for the Doctor to change the code without encountering the kid in front of the door, the code will still change and the Doctor will be magically back in the lab.
>Maniac Mansion and the safe in Edna's attic
You need an envelope to complete the game without Bernard or Michael. The only envelope in the game is stored in a safe in Edna's attic. The combo to the safe is written below the safe in microscopic font. The solution isn't to find a magnifying glass or microscope to make the font readable. No no. The solution is to change the aim of the telescope for looking into deep space, across the mansion at the text. Even as a kid I knew that violated the rules of physics, and you would just get a giant blur in reality. Good luck explaining why the player should try something that logic says wouldn't work at all. The only way the player could possibly think to use the fricking telescope is if they had(like the devs) never touched a telescope in their entire life.
It's a bit like playing a game with a locked door using a card reader slot where the game expects you to stick a key in the slot and not a card.
For the first two, the rule of, if the game shows you something is happening, maybe you should actually pay attention to it. Understandable how some people would miss it though. The second MM is just whining that a game that runs on cartoon logic is running on cartoon logic.
With something like Dark Seed where the game is timed/real-tmie, you're basically going into a game that will absolutely frick you over at that point. It's like complaining that a really hard game is hard.
Day of the Tentacle runs on cartoon logic, not Maniac Mansion. If you refill the pool while someone is inside, they don't make a cartoony OH NOES! and go flying out of the pool, they just die. The majority of puzzle solutions have logical and mundane solutions, like using the ear-piercing record to break the glass. Just about anything unusual is tied to the aliens.
Moon logic you could probably eventually figure out
Pixel hunting is just plain evil
Lack of soul.
I don't care if the game has bad parts like pixel hunts or weird logic if the overall whole is good.
Option 3: Dead-man walking scenarios.
I can deal with pixel hunting, even moon logic on occassion, but the worst is incorrectly solving a puzzle, missing the solution, or failing the time-specific nature of something, and then going on for an hour, possibly more, and realizing you can't continue. Even worse still is when it isn't obvious WHY that happened to you in the first place.
Thankfully, this is mostly contained to a few specific titles in King's Quest, and Dark Seed 1 and 2. Most of the time it is telegraphed in some way. For instance, if you have sex with the prostitute without a condom in Leisure Suit Larry 1, you die automatically 1 minute later.
>character walks into a trap
>limited actions to save yourself
>but you can't actually get out because you didn't explore THAT OTHER ROOM before and pick up the necessary item first
If you aren't prevented from returning and getting it, ergo you aren't softlocked, then I see no problem with game over traps like those.
I'm more thinking Roberta Williams having me continue playing for hours after having unknowingly fricked myself.
>Most of the time it is telegraphed in some way. For instance, if you have sex with the prostitute without a condom in Leisure Suit Larry 1, you die automatically 1 minute later.
That one's just a funny joke and it goes over quickly, when Dark Seed did Dead Man Walking, you had no real way of knowing.
Didn't do the specific steps on the specific days and in specific order, even though there's basically no clues? Too bad! GET BRAINFRICKED GET BRAINFRICKED GET BRAINFRICKED!!
Some Japs who watched Aliens can rip off Giger's art for action arcade games and strike gold, but a western studio actually licensing his art and adapting it directly, trying to build a narrative around the designs, completely frick it up. What a world!
>Some Japs who watched Aliens can rip off Giger's art for action arcade games and strike gold
Not that hard to do, see; Xenophobe.
This is a bit unrelated but how did 90s adventure game fans feel about how some adventure games would softlock if you didn't do a certain thing yet you can still progress the game for hours without you realizing it's impossible to beat the game because you didn't that one easily missable thing?
It was frustrating, especially when you got no hints that you'd failed. But it was also just part of the game. It forced you to not dismiss anything that had happened up to that point in the game and be ready to restore a save when you didn't know what else to do.
Keeping track of saves has always been annoying though. I wish more games had started doing something similar to what The Last Express did, where you could just rewind to any point in the past of your playthrough. And the only saving you needed to do was so you'd be able to return to the present timeline, after rewinding and changing the past so to speak.
>And the only saving you needed to do was so you'd be able to return to the present timeline, after rewinding and changing the past
*return to the present timeline with the past unchanged, I meant.
Though returning to the future after changing just some small detail in the past and not needing to replay anything else might have made for an interesting mechanic.
Moon logic is infinitely more annoying in the long term, at least for me. What's worse is when it's meant to be funny. You could imagine the devs laughing about how hilarious it'd be if you had to throw a rubber chicken at an electric guitar to make the cow attack the flying saucer, but by the time you do that you're too pissed off to see the humor.
What's annoying is that Myst solved adventure game puzzles right at the start (make the environment something that you solve), but no one learned that lesson because they were too big brained to keep it simple.
Loom is a good example of applying Myst's lessons to a point and click.
My issue with that is that it makes everything too much like a checklist. Like scanning the mouse back and forth down each new screen. I know you can say "don't do that then" but that'd be intentionally disadvantaging yourself.
I think that the "style" of adventure games was kind of flawed from the start for this reason, as much as I loved it in the past and with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.
It goes back to what I said about no one learning from Myst.
>I know you can say "don't do that then" but that'd be intentionally disadvantaging yourself.
You wouldn't be, because almost never does an adventure game require you to click on a random part of the screen. In fact, there are some that are text parsers, so using the mouse isn't even an option.
>I think that the "style" of adventure games was kind of flawed from the start for this reason, as much as I loved it in the past and with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.
What do you mean the style of adventure games? You mean the style of adventure games as a whole? Because that's moronic. Not all adventure games are point and clicks. If you mean point and click adventure games, it's only a flaw if that specific game uses pixel-hunting.
Of course, I also have to question the eye-sight of the anons commenting on here, because I have played over a dozen adventure games and I do not recall ever "needing" to pixel hunt in a single one of them.
There's also the fact that a number of point and clicks don't even have the pointer change when it mouses over a context-sensitive item.
>It goes back to what I said about no one learning from Myst.
Myst was only popular because of its 3D graphics. Its puzzles were largely dogshit. I would prefer if more games took cues from Space Quest and less from the glorified tech demo that was Myst.
>Its puzzles were largely dogshit.
You're saying that because you never realised you were solving puzzles, which is the point. For example, the water pipes.
> because almost never does an adventure game require you to click on a random part of the screen
Of course it doesn't REQUIRE you to do that, but the prevalence of "try everything on everything" as a method of brute forcing shows that people do resort to that kind of gameplay.
And I suppose you think grinding is a good thing in RPGs? It's nonsense to act like this is some mythical lost age.
Ask yourself this: have you ever played an adventure game when the majority of the puzzles were solved after contemplation an not just, as I said, trying everything on everything?
It's the video game equivalent of opening a combi-lock by going 001,002,003,004...
>And I suppose you think grinding is a good thing in RPGs? It's nonsense to act like this is some mythical lost age.
When the alternative is having everything level with you so you can always go everywhere and never be challenged, yes, I do. But what am I saying, you're a zoomer who's grown up in an age where being told "no" is bigotry.
>Ask yourself this: have you ever played an adventure game when the majority of the puzzles were solved after contemplation an not just, as I said, trying everything on everything?
This argument has been used in the past on /vr/, and to just about the same level of success, IE, not very. Using it as some sort of a "gotchya" shows a lack of actual familiarity with the genre, since for starters, adventure games typically have specific triggers, preventing brute forcing, punish brute forcing, or misleading players for trying to brute-force. Death and dead-man-walking scenarios is also a preventative measure inserted into them to prevent brute-forcing.
>It's the video game equivalent of opening a combi-lock by going 001,002,003,004
Feasibly, no, since that combi lock has 996 billion possible combinations, effectively making it immune to brute-forcing, since the player will be long dead by the time they solve it.
>Feasibly, no, since that combi lock has 996 billion possible combinations, effectively making it immune to brute-forcing
For some adventure game theorycrafting, you could go and find the code, but perhaps there's an intended way to for the player to be able to bypass the lock, maybe the character knows that most mechanical combination locks can be easily decoded.
You could maybe have multiple characters, where one guy doesn't know that, but he is strong enough that he can just plain break the lock with the right tool (but which then clues in the owner that he's been robbed, and maybe you then have to fist fight him at a later point as a consequence).
>You're saying that because you never realised you were solving puzzles, which is the point. For example, the water pipes.
>never realised you were solving puzzles
Bro, are you fricking moronic?
Moon logic. Pixel hunting is half assing a relatively small thing but trve moon logic puzzles kill the will to play regardless of whether they have pixel hunting on top of them.