If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the
FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to
register or
login before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.
| 10 AUG 2009 at 5:23pm |
SuperEdyPrivate Detective
Posts : 772
Joined: 30 MAR 2007
Status : Online | You should have tried those old adventure games with parser, just finding the right word to type was a nightmare sometimes. Some magazines used to publish hints for those games, but, needless to say, I only managed to finish a handful at the time :
[b]Currently Playing[/b]: None of your business
|
| 10 AUG 2009 at 6:22pm |
| Deleted User | I never purchased "Sins of the Fathers" when it was first released, but I imagine that since it was a Sierra game you could have purchased separately the hintbook with the red plastic reader that I ended up buying for a few other Sierra games. :-/
|
| 10 AUG 2009 at 10:21pm |
AubstopperIntergalactic Janitor
Posts : 85
Joined: 19 MAY 2008
Status : Offline | i remember that Sierra used to publish hintbooks ( i have one for the whole king's quest collection)...
they also had a hintline that you could call :-)
"Man's greatest tragedy is that he can perceive of a perfection that he can never attain."
|
| 10 AUG 2009 at 11:05pm |
Lucien21Guild Master
Posts : 4876
Joined: 9 JUL 2003
Location: 0
Status : Offline | Magazines at the time usually had hints in them.
I had a note book and lots of furious note taking, map drawing and lots of experience of text adventures under my belt by the time GK came out.
Drawing out a map and noting clues and puzzles was helpful. Getting a bunch of friends round to try and crack it was also useful.
If in doubt revert to the old try everything with everything else trick.
Dear Diary, My teenage angst bullsh*t now has a bodycount.
|
| 10 AUG 2009 at 11:31pm |
eaglesIntergalactic Janitor
Posts : 62
Joined: 19 MAR 2008
Status : Online | Well, the older games 1990's adventure games the graphics weren't the best .
You could spend hours looking around and they when you finally read a walkthrough you'll see that the 3 blurred blue pixels in the very bottom right hand corner of the screen is a key for the door or a very important item like a sceptre.
Hours and hours of pixel hunting for items that dont really look like anything more that a blurry color scheme
|
| 11 AUG 2009 at 4:44am |
AlienBZJourneyman
Posts : 877
Joined: 14 JAN 2008
Status : Offline | Originally Posted By eagles (10 AUG 2009 11:31pm)
Well, the older games 1990's adventure games the graphics weren't the best .
You could spend hours looking around and they when you finally read a walkthrough you'll see that the 3 blurred blue pixels in the very bottom right hand corner of the screen is a key for the door or a very important item like a sceptre.
Hours and hours of pixel hunting for items that dont really look like anything more that a blurry color scheme
You could say that again, Eagles! I remember very clearly back in 2005 when I was playing StoneKeep (a DOS game by Interplay) on my old Packard-Bell (ran DOS/windows 3.xx) computer seeing the blurry keys on the floor of the tunnels of the game - since I was faithfully following Rick Barba's strategy guide for this game, I knew immediately that this blurry speck on the floor was a key which was confirmed when I clicked on them!
However, before I started getting guides and w/t for the games in my collection (starting in 2001), I'd start a "new game," go clicking aimlessly here, there, and not know what to do next. I'd frequently end up giving up, buying another game, & start this scenario over again repeatedly (starting in 1995-ish).
Doin' Warp 9 to the Great Kingdom of Adventure Games of Outer Space
|
| 11 AUG 2009 at 11:59pm |
FnordSchattenjger
Posts : 2752
Joined: 15 SEP 2008
Location: SE, Stockholm
Status : Offline | I recently game GK a shot... and gave up. While the story was ok, the game itself suffered from some really game breaking (by todays standard) problems (like the horrible pixel hunting, and puzzles that did not make much sense). I'm with you portiafimbriata, it's a good thing that games have changes, that we are not stuck with the kind of games that were popular during "the golden age of adventure games". Not all games from this era are bad, mind you. Myst and The Dig were both really nice games (if you have not played The Dig you really should try to track it down, the story was really good, and the puzzles made sense! There were very little in the way if pixel hunting as well, most of the object that you could interact with were very obvious. How you should interact with them was the tricky part).
Back before I had internet, before hints were easy to come by... I was very young, and thus I did not play a lot of adventure games. Those games that I had played (Shivers 2, Curse of monkey island, Shadowgate and a few others) were games that I had worked long and hard to beat. But really, illogical solutions was the norm back in the days. Anyone remember the 7th and 8th dungeon in Zelda 1? Those were not easy to find, and only a person with a lot of time on his/her hands were able to actually finish that game. Some of us were used to the kind of (non)logic needed to finish games.
|
| 12 AUG 2009 at 2:27pm |
| Deleted User | The one "old" game I had played back then, with the aid of a hint book, had been King's Quest 6.
I will openly admit that I had played most of Myst, but never completely finished it. Guess what I found by pure chance this morning while pottering around the shelves of a 2nd hand bookstore? The Official Myst Strategy Guide!
It's a lovely big illustrated thing - I feel soooooo tempted to install Myst and run through it with the aid of this guide... [smiley=angel_smiley.gif]
It's written as if narrated by the character you are supposed to be playing, himself; - it's very charmingly done, with illustrations and the works.... -it would be a shame to let it go waste.... [smiley=angel.gif]
..don't you think? :
Has anybody else ever done this?
|
| 12 AUG 2009 at 6:56pm |
Jenny100Guild Master
Posts : 3510
Joined: 12 OCT 2002
Status : Offline | I didn't even own a computer back when Sins of the Fathers came out. I probably played it some time in late 1999, possibly early 2000 -- not long after I first started playing adventure games. I'd played Monkey Island 1 & 2 by then, but Sins of the Fathers was the first "serious-themed" 3rd person adventure game that I played. And the story and characters in the game remain among the best I've encountered in a game.
I fully enjoyed all the interactivity with the game environment that you had with Sins of the Fathers, and the variety of comments you could get when you looked at things. I preferred the Scumm interface in the Monkey Island games to the Sierra interface, because Scumm seemed more intuitive. But nearly every adventure game I'd played up to then had had a single use cursor, and I didn't mind a little variety in the interface.
I also enjoyed being able to "glimpse into gaming history" and see how games used to be in a previous gaming era. Most of what was available on store shelves were first person games, both puzzle-based and conversation-based types, but none of which played quite like the old DOS adventures.
I've never had problems looking at walkthroughs when I'm stuck. Using a walkthrough doesn't destroy the game for me, and because of the small size of some of the hotspots, there is no way I would have been able to finish Sins of the Fathers without a walkthrough. Even with the walkthrough, some of the hotspots took a long time to find. Besides the small hotspots, the only other thing about the game that I disliked were the timed events, like the part with the mummies. Perhaps part of the reason I enjoyed Sins of the Fathers so much is that I have no problem with using walkthroughs. I learned early on that games are sometimes bugged (Shivers 2, I'm looking at you) and that game developers don't always think the same way I do.
But there is also the fact that I played Sins of the Fathers fairly early on and 3rd person adventures were still new to me. The graphics looked pixellated, but no blurrier than any other game I played -- lots of little squares that reminded me of needlepoint designs. (Modern antialiasing capability and LCD monitors probably blurs the edges to eliminate the square pixels, but I'm not sure this is an improvement.) The graphics may have been low resolution, but I didn't think they were bad. (If you want to see some truly ugly graphics, take a look at ***Thunderscape***.
Originally Posted By Aubstopper (10 AUG 2009 10:21pm)
i remember that Sierra used to publish hintbooks ( i have one for the whole king's quest collection)...
they also had a hintline that you could call
And I believe they also had these things called Bulletin Boards -- a sort of precursor to Usenet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
This was before my (adventure gaming) time, but I have a friend who used to use the Bulletin Boards when she needed hints for her DOS games.
|
| 12 AUG 2009 at 7:07pm |
Jenny100Guild Master
Posts : 3510
Joined: 12 OCT 2002
Status : Offline | Originally Posted By TheTraveler (12 AUG 2009 2:27pm)
I will openly admit that I had played most of Myst, but never completely finished it. Guess what I found by pure chance this morning while pottering around the shelves of a 2nd hand bookstore? The Official Myst Strategy Guide!
It's a lovely big illustrated thing - I feel soooooo tempted to install Myst and run through it with the aid of this guide...
It's written as if narrated by the character you are supposed to be playing, himself; - it's very charmingly done, with illustrations and the works.... -it would be a shame to let it go waste....
..don't you think?
Has anybody else ever done this?
Not with Myst. I don't think I've seen the Myst Strategy Guide that you're referring to. Does it look like ***this*** <-- ??
But Uru had a strategy guide that was similar to what you describe for the Myst guide. Unfortunately it used a font that was meant to resemble handwriting, and it was a little hard to read.
|
