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Comment by sys32768 | Hacker News Reader

Old Man Murray wrote a great peace in 2000 about who killed adventure games, the answer to which I won't spoil since it's an easy read:

https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

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Important context that's come to light since then

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle

Crazy to think that the same game contains both the worst puzzle ever conceived (cat hair) and arguably one of the finest, "Le Serpent Rouge".

Highlights:

> It was created by the game's producer, Steven Hill, after a puzzle designed by the game's lead designer, Jane Jensen, was cut due to budgetary reasons.

> It came as a result of a puzzle created by the game's designer, Jane Jensen, needing to be removed due to budget concerns.

What an incredibly classic, braindead tragedy.

I mean its a bad example, but not the only example of obtuse puzzles in games preventing forward progress in game. Dead ends and not being able to finish if messed up a previous steps were real problems. This was a bigger issue when the internet wasn't available to help out. I like adventure games, but even still they can be difficult and frustrating (although maybe I'm not great at them)

Puzzle Dependency charts in game design help this (from Ron Gilbert/ Monkey Island etc...).

https://grumpygamer.com/puzzle_dependency_charts/

It used to be pretty common to buy strategy books for the really tough games!

I remember playing Space Quest IV and we got to a part where we were completely blocked. We got parents permission to call Sierra's 1-900 hint line (who knows how much that cost) to find out that the game won't process until you stand on a certain pixel in the back of the arcade. There was no reason to go there, so while we had walked around the arcade many times apparently we never stepped on that precise pixel.

Back then as a kid, I made dozens of attempts at SQ5, the best I managed before giving up was dying in some ventilation shaft towards finale. This was my first point and click adventure, but hostile game design decisions really put me off other Sierra games, the only one I finished was SQ1 VGA. Arbitrary actions you have to take with consequences hours later are such BS.

I was stuck on that puzzle for years, let a friend borrow it, and he confidently announces the solution a couple days later. He swore he had uncovered it through trial and error, but I didn’t believe him. Still don’t. You weren’t running a BBS in the 90s, were you?

Nope, didn't even own a computer back then (parents too poor), it was my friend's computer. Was a while after that before I got online.

Sierra's early catalog was basically a large collection of dead-man-walking situations. A key item for the endgame of Space Quest 1 stops being available 5 minutes into the game. Kings Quest II has a bridge that can breaks down every time you cross it, and you must do the right thing on every single crossing, as one superfluous crossing alone will end the game. Even as far as 1991 they were still making games where you could put yourself in an unwinnable scenario by missing an item hours before, sometimes in what you thought was a non-interactive cutscene!

Very few modern adventure games bring any of that back.

There's a system for describing that - the "Game Cruelty Scale": https://www.ifwiki.org/Cruelty_scale

A lot of early adventure games were Cruel - requiring the user to replay the game over and over because they got something wrong was a cheap way to extend play time without having to add more content. Thankfully, most modern developers have realized that players hate having to do that.

Similar topic explored in videos from a friend of mine I call the "Adventure Game sommelier," because he's played so many of them and can recommend you one for precisely your needs. The first

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOPiSYUSrQ0

and the second, which is one of my favorite videos of all time (if you only watch one, I'd pick this one)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMVl5U3SlS0

I think he mentions Old Man Murray's piece in the second!

Sierra's Thexder haunted me for years, because I couldn't understand the tinny Japanese at the start of it at all or even tell what language that was, but I remembered the sound from playing it on an Apple ][ GS as a kid despite that.

Just watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si_iveNrUPo

And tell me if you can hear "Siera ga ookuri suru Thexder" (Thexder presented by Sierra) there. Even now, at most I can make out Sierra and a distorted bit of Thexder, even knowing how Thexder is rendered into katakana.

I miss this style of internet humor. It used to be dominant whenever there were gaming forums and it was dominant also on Reddit even up through 2015 but I feel like it has mostly disappeared since then.

The whole "bright guy writes like he's an idiot" schtick attracted an element that wasn't going to parse sarcasm. Seanbaby's entire oeuvre assumes you went to high school with a bunch of racist assholes and hated them. It was safe for him to do that at the time because the internet was still mostly cool people.

>Did you read all of that? If not, good for you! Dumb as your television enjoying ass probably is, you're smarter than the genius adventure gamers who, in a truly inappropriate display of autism-level concentration, willingly played the birdbrained events described in that passage.

I laughed a bit too hard at this. Pure "follow my train of thought" puzzles aren't the most fun, and I think they fit best in the larger context of something like Uncharted. Just give me a skip button.

The real reason why adventure games had moon logic puzzles is because if they did not the games could be completed under 10 hours. And adventure games did not have replay value- unlike C&C, Quake or Tomb Raider.

God that is great

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