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Comment by leibnitz27 | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that's interesting to me is the resources available at the time - in terms of help.

With a game like this now (Say, the excellent Thimbleweed Park - you played it, right?), if you get truly, epically stuck, there's a walk-through no more than a few clicks away. And you'll probably admit defeat and go there after a few hours.

When I picked DoTT up (a few seconds after release ;) ), no such thing. You were in it alone. Maybe there was a magazine write in for hints, and if you were lucky you knew a guy on a BBS, but other than that, you were on your own. That made the puzzles so much sweeter when you got them.

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> When I picked DoTT up (a few seconds after release ;) ), no such thing. You were in it alone. Maybe there was a magazine write in for hints, and if you were lucky you knew a guy on a BBS, but other than that, you were on your own. That made the puzzles so much sweeter when you got them.

Completely agree. Unlike today, there was really no alternative to really thinking "deep" and trying to figure something out on your own. If push really came to shove, you went to the local bookstore and hopefully they had a magazine or guide available. I miss those times. :)

On one hand, I don't 100% miss those times unless I can have as much spare time as I did aged 14 to spend walking round a game without necessarily progressing.

(It helped that I only got a new commercial game every few months and maybe a couple of mostly short shareware games, so plenty of time to explore each one. Now I have a massive backlog of unplayed Steam games and still keep buying more.)

But not having hints and walkthroughs to fall back on definitely enhanced how much attention I paid to the game. I replayed various Lucasarts games from my teenage years recently and remembered a little bit from each section of each game, until I got halfway through Grim Fandango.

I knew I'd finished it before but the last two or three areas seemed completely unfamiliar, I think because I first bought it in the UHS Hints era, looked a hint up halfway through, and started leaning way too heavily on hints for the rest of the game.

The flipside is of course that some of those games were near impossible without some kind of hint. The old Hitchhiker's Guide game is the one that comes to mind for me. I read all of the books multiple times as a kid but never got more than halfway through the game. It was just plain cruel to the player.

> The flipside is of course that some of those games were near impossible without some kind of hint.

This is true, but it made winning all the more satisfying. :)

Myst comes to mind as another game which was a beast to figure out. Once you did though, you felt like a god.

They did have hint lines you could call (for a fee!).

Day of the Tentacle even includes its own hint line as a part of a puzzle!

(LucasArts had 1-800-STAR-WARS set up as its hint line. It still plays as an obvious Star Wars joke in the game today, but for kids that were familiar with the hint line it was much more on-the-nose joke about bothering your parents to call for a hint.)

One Chanukah I bought my brother Ocarina of Time for N64 and the guide book. I gave him the game on day one and book on day eight, so he had to struggle through eight days without hints. I thought it was both evil and brilliant, although I might be biased.

The web has had game walkthroughs since I started using it (about 1995). I remember the first walkthrough I looked up was for Space Quest 6.

Yeah, walkthroughs whether on the Internet or old dial-ups BBSes, have been around since the invention of the adventure game, or at least the Leisure Suit Larry series.

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