Things I Learned from Adventure Games | Hacker News Reader

Things I Learned from Adventure Games

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That's funny, I've learned something more like:

1. If you see something you can put in your pocket, do so.

2. Whenever you're in a new place, look at everything and try to use it. Even better, put it in your pocket.

3. When you're done with that, use everything you've put in your pockets with everything else in the room.

I admit my lessons are less practical for real life, but they have helped me finish a lot of adventure games.

I agree with most of this. I think the post demonstrates what a chore some adventure games can be when you get stuck on a puzzle: waste hours trying to get past it (before wasting hours on the next puzzle) or cheat and lose the satisfaction of having figured it out yourself.

Or maybe you tire of the "find the non-abvious joke reference thing to apply to gadget" routine and just want to get the story of the game, in which case hint books (web pages, these days) are the perfect solution.

Not bad, but I'd re-write the first point as: You can solve the problem in front of you with the tools you have more often than you think.

I agree. I did the original colossal cave on 8.5 floppies on ISIS In Circuit Emulators at AES back in 77 or so, when I was first exposed to UNIX, I had to examine the sectors to see the solution - the program was written in FORTRAN, by the way...

point 1 is completely not true. most adventure games I've played require things from many screens to be solved before moving on to the next puzzle. monkey island springs to mind as the most obvious example of this.

Thanks for your comment. I agree with you (and roundsquare) that the first point has problems. To give you some idea of what I was getting at:

The way I, and I suspect most gamers, play adventure games is to:

a.) Run through the room graph as far as possible, do everything obvious, and take everything that isn't nailed down b.) Look at the list of "roadblocks" encountered, and figure out how to get past them c.) On passing a "roadblock", go to (a.)

To my way of thinking, anything you can grab without solving a puzzle is as good as in your inventory, even if it's in a different part of the room graph.

The post was inspired by Saturday's playthrough of "Leather Goddesses of Phobos" - one of the few Infocom games I hadn't spoiled for myself in my youth, due to Activision's decision to omit it from the "Lost Treasures" collections. Anyway, at one point I was faced with this set of puzzles:

1.) How to get past Thorbast in space 2.) How to get past the ion beam 3.) How to get into the orphanage 4.) How to turn the enchanted frog into a princess 5.) How to capture the mouse 6.) How to get the headlight in Cleveland

I was stuck - it seemed that I needed something "extra" to solve any one of these puzzles. In fact 20-YEAR-OLD-SPOILER-ALERT every puzzle on that list can be solved as soon as you encounter it (assuming that you've previously grabbed everything that was lying around in plain sight) with the very possible and partial exception of (4.).

(BTW, how could that list of puzzles not make anyone want to play that game?)

Anyway, thanks again.

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