Hacker News Reader

Comment by patchymcnoodles | Hacker News Reader

That was a fantastic read. My best friend back in school had this game and I played it several times during school holiday. As described in the article, it felt like an actual episode of the X-Files. Had an interesting packaging as well because of the 7 CD's it included.

If I remember correctly, it did have a showstopper in, not sure if intentional or not. At the very beginning, when the reporter asked you for information, and you don't give any ... later in the game (in the ship) when you need her help, the game just can't go forward. And you have no idea why, because nobody tells you.

This is so stuck in my head as a very bad design choice, if it was intentional.

View on HN

I feel like 90s PC games were filled with things like this. Stuff that would be probably day one patches in the following decade, but that (of course) wasn't a thing then.

I remember at least two of the Police Quest games having similar breakage, where you just couldn't go forward after putting 20+ hours into the game, because of a choice you made early on.

There's definitely a Space Quest game where if you kiss an alien early on there's a non-escapable death by stomach-bursting right near the end.. bummer if you saved after the kiss (I did).

I think that was fairly common with sierra games, happened a lot less with Lucas ones.

There was even a gag about it in the Curse of Monkey Island (Lucas) where your character (Guybrush) seemingly dies and credits start to roll, but the narrator recognises that it is not a Sierra game, credits start rolling backwards and the game resumes.

While frustrating, obtuse, absurd, and a plethora of other adjectives aside, those (early, at least) Sierra games had the benefit of being pretty short. If you screwed yourself because you walked over the bridge one time extra in King’s Quest 2, a restart only cost you somewhere in the neighborhood of half an hour. (I’m not sure about later games, though. Maybe they were worse?)

Could almost call it a staple of Sierra games.

That seems like a horrible design choice, though. It just randomly and gratuitously punishes the player for something they couldn't even have foreseen.

It was (for modern games), and it wasn't (for games of the time).

Given media storage capacity and computational limits, a lack of internet, and the scheduling dictates of boxed software...

I remember playing games much longer, before the next one was available.

Consequently, design choices that seem sadistic now were part of the replayability.

In the same way that shmups, bullet hell, and insane platformers (and more recently *Souls) all have their own fanbases.

It's not the same. I still remember playing Grim Fandango all the way to one scene before the end, getting hit by a bug that meant I couldn't trigger the final scene, thinking "fuck this" and quitting.

I never did finish the game, even though it was the only game I'd have in a few months. Injustice is injustice, and players resent it.

It's worth distinguishing bugs from intentional design.

The latter at least had a different flavor of "Well, I shouldn't have done that." Even if unknowable at the time of choice.

Itself probably a legacy of sadistic DnD DMing, where players survived despite the odds.

Though I too remember quite a few games having out-and-out bugs that locked their primitive progression state machines.

Did Sierra games explain their reasoning? Was it "well, you didn't give me information when we first met two years ago, so I won't tell you who my boss is now", or was it indistinguishable from a bug?

From memory, and it's been a few years, Sierra games had both bugs and severe plot-related consequences.

Usually of the "This thing happened because you did / didn't do that thing" format.

E.g. the infamous bomb detonating your police car, if you didn't first walk around it to complete an inspection (something no one would have thought of the first time) or the myriad of ways to arbitrarily die in Kings Quest by walking onto the wrong screen

If you played Sierra adventure games... that was just part of the schtick tho.

> Given media storage capacity

I wonder what percentage of that was given to death scenes in Sierra games? In e.g. Space Quest 3, there were a lot of gruesome, unexpected ways to die.

I meant it from the perspective that games had to be made longer (in terms of playthrough) without using more bytes.

And killing the player and making them replay the game adds a LOT of playtime.

Also, and probably more importantly, I feel like gamers' attention spans and tolerance for bullshit was higher. We mostly played games because we were bored. If not {game}, then what?

We didn't have access to the everything, whenever, wherever post-mobile-internet, on-demand world. The web was slow, static, and sucked for ~1980-2005. (Flash was a poor substitute for real games)

That's a fascinating question though... how much disk space did death scenes take up?!

I know in Another World it's non-negligible. :D

It didn't happen at all after the first couple Lucas Arts game. The made it impossible to get stuck as a design principle.

A perfect imitation of real life…

Many of the Sierra contemporary games including the 'interactive fiction' that inspired them had sudden deaths, dead ends or living dead scenarios, mostly to pad play time probably.

You just unlocked a memory for me - I distinctly remember playing this with my friend on his computer and we were just completely stuck at the ship, with no way forward. We must have missed the reporter!

Searching for that bullet in the warehouse was an absolute nightmare during my first playthrough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com