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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

I understand it as the game can adjust the time behaviour of NPCs to improve the players experience. If you are a spy who needs to meet your contact at the cafe at 1pm then getting delayed by an interesting side quest and arriving at 1:20, in the real world you screwed up and your mission is done. If you do that in a game then it’s boring and you probably won’t realise and wait hours at a cafe. Instead the NPC can simply arrive 20 minutes late. There were games then that had the real world clock approach and would be hard to play - I think for monkey island he actually built a scheduler to avoid this

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> I think for monkey island he actually built a scheduler to avoid this

That wouldn't make any sense, since nothing in Monkey Island moves.

(Exceptions: During Act I, the cook periodically leaves the SCUMM Bar kitchen to visit the tables. Also during Act I, you can trigger the shopkeeper to walk to the Sword Master's house; he will return when triggered by your actions in the shop. Movement can happen between Acts. On Monkey Island, you have to lead a monkey from its location to somewhere else. Herman Toothrot will show up in the cannibal village at some point after you're already required to have picked up the banana picker; his being there is not relevant to anything. Otherwise, nothing ever moves.)

I've played both monkey islands multiple times and I don't remember any time limit. Everything went at the speed of plot.

As opposed to Maniac Mansion, where you could die if you drained the pool and waited too long to refill it.

(Among many other ways, which you can find here: https://www.maniacmansionfan.50webs.com/waystolose.html)

... and then Gilbert saw the light, wrote this article and the rest is history.

The server you linked seems to be down, here's an archived version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240529033339/https://www.mania...

I recall you need to do the mug'o'grog-puzzle fast.

I think the criticism is of less self-contained time limits that involve multiple puzzles/locations. You can retry the mug'o'grog puzzle if you're not quick enough, I think.

You sort of do, but you can always get a new mug if i remember well.

Yes, the SCUMM Bar restocks with mugs if you destroy yours.

It's still a bizarrely high-pressure moment built into a game that otherwise has no such mechanics. I always hated coming to it.

It would have been at least as easy to tie the disintegration of the mugs to scene transitions, which would have eliminated the time pressure at no cost to the game.

If you stay under water for ten minutes you'll drown in MI 1. It's one of the few ways you can die.

Even then it’s a faux death isn’t it? Doesn’t Elaine tell you that you could not have died there since the story is told in flashback, so you don’t lose any progress?

MI 1 isn’t flashbacks, that would be MI2

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