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Comment by throwaway7645 | Hacker News Reader

Yea I guess I should have specified that Infocom had them, but they weren't stupid mostly. They aren't as common in modern IF.

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I have plenty of bad memories of being stuck on the Vogon ship with no way that I could figure out to get the Babel Fish. I hadn't realized that I needed the junk mail from the second room in the game.

[SPOILER]

It gets worse -- there are a bunch of tools you go by throughout the game. If you fail to pick up any of them, that one will be the one you need to open one of the final doors.

In theory, I know the solution to every puzzle in the Hitchhiker's game. In practice, I've solved every one of them that you can solve while missing others (there's a gate right at the end of the game you have to have all of the items you can possibly get to get past)... but I have never strung all these solutions together into one winning game, despite several attempts.

It's a nasty little game, really.

I guess if I were doing it again nowadays I'd be going for a tool-assisted... umm... speedrun isn't really right here, so win-at-all-run.

I feel like Hitchhiker's is meant to be an exception to the rule.

If you have all the items with you and put them in place one at a time as you discover they're needed, the Babel Fish dispenser runs out of fish right on the attempt when you've finally got them all in place and are ready to collect it for real. Evil little game.

Typically they made sense in the infocom games. If you needed matches for something but had already struck and burned them all, you were stuck.

Getting rid of dead ends makes some of these games feel like they are on rails. If you try enough combos of everything, eventually you'll progress.

There is a difference between always reaching a winning state or getting stuck without any resolution.

I think its important that there is no state were you just get stuck, you should at least have a game over sequence, so that you know you have done something wrong.

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