Stuck
Part 2

By Stuart Yoder

You can't keep a good adventure gamer stuck!

The responses to my "Stuck" article were overwhelmingly in favor of being stuck--once in a while. Why? For the payoff, of course. After mentally wrestling with a puzzle until you are at the point of surrender, your fingers twitching to punch in that 900 hint line number, you are suddenly struck with a fit of brilliance and you solve that stucker! The rush of victory is well worth the struggle. As K.M. wrote, "Believe me, the feeling I got when I finally solved it was worth being stuck for much more than one week." And T.H. added, "As I read your article Stuck, I was reminded of the many, many feelings of frustration that preceded the eventual exhilaration that occurred when I solved the puzzle."

K.M. got her rush from Curse of Monkey Island. "I was stuck for a week trying to get the gold tooth from the guy in the restaurant. I tried absolutely everything in my inventory on everything in the restaurant. And I tried everything in my inventory with everything else in my inventory! I tried everything I could do with the chewing gum again and again. When the solution finally came to me, I laughed for several minutes."

Mark was stuck for a full month! "In Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, there's a puzzle where you have to put the parts in a robot. The robot's arm is suppose to move to open a door, if you have the parts in the right place. I must have been stuck for a full month on that one puzzle. I tried every combination of parts, except the right one, of course. I swear I could see the impatience on Indy's face. He's an action kinda guy; he doesn't like to stand around all day trying to put parts in holes! After a full month of having Indy ticked at me, I had to look at a hint guide. Yeah, I'm still kicking myself ... mostly."

The longest stuck goes to R.G.: "I remember playing Zork 2 and how I spent weeks trying to figure out the answer to the riddle that the door asks you, 'What is tall as a house, round as a cup, and all the kings horses can't draw it up?' I remember putting down the game altogether, not playing it for a year, and going back to it and still not being able to figure out the answer! When I finally got the answer 'a well,' I was kicking myself for how easy the puzzle seemed afterwards."

Not every stuck is solved without a little help. W.H. wrote, "The worst stuck that I ever encountered was in The Dig. I'd spent hours and hours rambling around, back and forth on the Tube, resolving puzzles and collecting things. Every now and then I tried the glowing plants in the central underground hall to no avail. Then I got the last 'room' where I had to make the generator work and I couldn't. I went up and down the windy passage, went back to the hall and tried the glowing plants--nothing. If I would have had some weed killer, I would have zapped those blasted things! In the end, I gave up and searched for a walkthrough on the web. But, guess what. I'd already cracked the problem without realizing it. All I had to do was press the little button on the panel and hold it down. At that point, up pops a series of light bridges which would have saved me hours of tube traveling. If I'd only known!"

Sometimes it's not a particular puzzle, but a particular type of puzzle. T.H. wrote, "Rather than one particular puzzle in one particular game, for me there is one type of adventure game puzzle that always gives me trouble. Many's the night I have gone to bed and attempted to sleep with musical tones resounding in my head, as I tried to figure out the sequence that the notes were suppose to be played in. I don't think that I am tone deaf, but I always struggle for a long while with this type of puzzle."

How about getting stuck in a game on something that isn't even a puzzle?! N.B. shared this experience: "My favorite stuck is in Gold Rush by Sierra. For some reason, I couldn't find my way out of Sutter's Fort. I kept retracing the path I'd taken and ending up somewhere else. I spent many days trying to figure this out. The thing I wasn't realizing was that whenever Jerrod (the hero) entered a room, he would usually enter on a different side from where he'd left the previous room. For example, in one scene, you exit from the bottom of a room and enter the next room on the left. Can you imagine how stupid I felt when I finally realized that I'd spent days trying to figure out something that wasn't even meant to be a puzzle?!"

Did you ever struggle with a puzzle for hours only to have someone else come along and solve it in minutes? If you have, then you will identify with J.L.: "Remember in The Dig, there are five light bridges at regular intervals throughout the game? Well, whenever you came to one, you were suppose to turn it on. Only I kept fiddling with them and nothing would ever happen. I just kind of kept going because, hey, maybe I just can't see the light bridges. It's made of light, so it could be invisible, right? Well, I got near the end of the game and nothing was happening. I really started to hate those light bridges. It was pretty simple. You could walk up to a light bridge and look at it, and you would get a full screen view of the control panel. There was one big button and some hieroglyphics. I clicked every square inch of those buttons, adjusted the mirrors, tried to interpret the hieroglyphics (I was in denial of the fact that they were just pictures of X-Wings and other Star Wars spacecraft, so desperate was I to get some meaning out of them), everything. Finally, my little brother, who had never played the game, walked by and I said, 'Hey, come here and solve this puzzle for me.' So, he comes over, plops down in the chair, grabs the mouse, clicks once on the big button. Nothing happens. So, he holds down the button, and sure enough, on goes the light bridge. It took him five seconds to figure it out. Too bad I wasn't able to solve it myself, but it's like you said, the worst puzzles are the simple ones."

One reader had this to say about being stuck: "I detest illogical puzzles in adventure games. I hate to cheat because, once I cheat, that sense of accomplishment vanishes, but I insist on cheating after being stuck for a while because very often puzzles have no logic to them. So, if I never cheated, I might be stuck on a puzzle forever."

No one likes being stuck at the time, but if we never got stuck, I don't think we would play adventure games. It's like the old argument of "if we didn't have winter, we wouldn't enjoy the summer so much."

I wanted to end with something profound, but I can't think of anything right now. I'm stuck!

Thanks for the responses, and enjoy the adventure!