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Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle remastered versions ing cheap on PS4 store

Started by Mister Six, February 08, 2021, 06:34:17 PM

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Timothy

QuoteI'm just surprised you can get stuck on something like DOTT when ANY Sierra title is infinitely more taxing.

Being able to finish a Sierra game doesn't mean that you can't get stuck on a LucasArts game. I've started playing DOTT yesterday (years since I last played it) and I'm finding it quite difficult as well. It's a brilliant (and hilarious) game but some of solutions to puzzles make no sense or at least are quite hard to find out.

Yet again I want to thank everybody for the recommendations here. I haven't played much point 'n click adventures over the years but this thread got me back into the genre. Really enjoying playing Full Throttle and DOTT again. Can't wait to start Toonstruck after I finished FT and DOTT. Great memories of that game.

Timothy

Has anyone here played the Runaway Games? Thinking about buying them. They always seemed great (great artstyle as well) but the reviews are all over the place.

St_Eddie

Quote from: Hand Solo on February 13, 2021, 08:07:52 PMI got stuck at one point and it came with a piece of red plastic, you'd have to hold the plastic over the page to read the hint, and I think it was done in three stages.. the first would tell you what the broad objective was, the next hint down was actually hinting at how to do it, the third would just tell you what to do.

There's an online equivalent.  It's called the Universal Hint System.  It's particularly a god sent for adventure games because the tier system means that you can view just enough hints to send your mind in the right direction, instead of outright spoiling the puzzle solution.

St_Eddie

Quote from: Timothy on February 14, 2021, 12:05:08 PM
Has anyone here played the Runaway Games? Thinking about buying them. They always seemed great (great artstyle as well) but the reviews are all over the place.

How bizarre!  You asked this question earlier within the thread and I typed up a response but for some strange reason, my reply is nowhere to be found when I went back to find it.  Spooky.  Anyway, my vanished post had originally said...

Don't bother with the Runaway games.  I have played and completed the first entry in the series and it's dreadful; chock full of pixel hunting in place of actual well designed puzzles (the sheer number of times I found myself stuck for hours, only to look at a walkthrough and realise that I'd failed to click on a 1x1 pixel hotspot were numerous) and the characters are a festival of loathsome twats, all of which is rounded out by a humdrum forgettable plot.  The pretty backgrounds are the sole positive.  Here's a quote they can stick on the back of the box; "Runaway... from this game!".

Mister Six

The Sierra games were objectively awfully designed - not just the random deaths and ridiculous puzzles, but especially the way you could get trapped in a fail state because of something you did hours before, but not know about it until you checked a walkthrough.

There's a bit (IIRC) in King's Quest V where you can give meat to an eagle or a vulture or something that is specifically described as looking hungry. The bird is animated eating the meat and flying away. Following adventure game logic, you would expect it to come back later and help you out. But no: (much) later on you encounter a hungry wolf, and if you don't have the meat to hand, you're fucked.

They deliberately wrote in a trap to trick you into wasting the meat and animated it to look like the correct route! Cunts!

Still, there was something that intrigued about Sierra. There's something so on the nose about titles like "King's Quest" and "Space Quest", and I loved how they mined popular genres - horror with Gabriel Knight, mystery with Laura Bow, even sex comedies with Leisure Suit Larry. And the rate at which they shovelled them out! LucasArts was obviously the premium auteur company, but I would have loved to wade around Sierra's wares if their design philosophy wasn't so repugnant.

I was especially fascinated by the Police Quests. I love police procedurals - I just didn't expect them to be quite THAT procedural. Getting fucked over because you didn't check all your tyres before driving out of the station, FFS.

madhair60

Quote from: Mister Six on February 14, 2021, 04:09:45 PM
The Sierra games were objectively awfully designed - not just the random deaths and ridiculous puzzles, but especially the way you could get trapped in a fail state because of something you did hours before, but not know about it until you checked a walkthrough.

There's a bit (IIRC) in King's Quest V where you can give meat to an eagle or a vulture or something that is specifically described as looking hungry. The bird is animated eating the meat and flying away. Following adventure game logic, you would expect it to come back later and help you out. But no: (much) later on you encounter a hungry wolf, and if you don't have the meat to hand, you're fucked.

They deliberately wrote in a trap to trick you into wasting the meat and animated it to look like the correct route! Cunts!

See, I love that. I don't think that's awful design at all. It's a trap, yes, and you fell into it. Is it mean as fuck? It certainly is. But it's memorable and funny.

There's the fundamental disagreement, I suppose. I don't think games have to be fair all the time. I think it's more interesting when they're not.

St_Eddie

I think that the cornerstone of good game design is ensuring that whenever the player dies in the game, they should always feel that it was their own fault.  The player ought not to ever feel that it was an unfair fail state in which they had no way of knowing to avoid in the first place.  The Sierra adventure games frequently flew in the face of this, which is why despite personally enjoying the games, I acknowledge that they are objectively badly designed games.

madhair60

But it is your fault for giving away the meat, right? Like it's your fault for eating the cream pie in the desert.

I don't actually think either of you are wrong, but it's a different type of design and one I think is valid

popcorn

It's nonsense to make claims about things being "objectively bad" when it comes to entertainment. (See also me being told "Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's bad!" in another thread, sigh) No one is ever going to prove any of this with science. The Sierra model fucking blows but if you like it then own it, tell the world why it rules. It definitely, as Madhair points out, has certain pluses in its favour, like the fact that it is definitely quite funny.

popcorn

Quote from: madhair60 on February 14, 2021, 06:12:35 PM
But it is your fault for giving away the meat, right?

No, because games aren't real life and blame can't be attributed in the same way. You can make estimations about what actions in real life might result in, but in Sierra games for all anyone knows you're supposed to give the meat away.

St_Eddie

Quote from: popcorn on February 14, 2021, 06:15:33 PM
It's nonsense to make claims about things being "objectively bad" when it comes to entertainment.

This is an example of a game with very clear objective flaws.  Regardless of whether one subjectively enjoys the game or not, the inherent objective flaws still remain.

bgmnts


St_Eddie

Quote from: bgmnts on February 14, 2021, 06:30:46 PM
Flaws and being bad arent the same thing, i.e Deadly Premonition.

No, what you're talking about is subjective response.  Again; flaws are objective.  Your subjective response does not dictate reality and magically stop the flaws from existing.  If one is not bothered by the flaws or even feels that the flaws enhance their experience with the game, then that is a subjective response to objective flaws.


St_Eddie


St_Eddie

Good news, CD Projekt Red!  Turns out there's no need to spend any further money patching Cyberpunk 2077, as it turns out that it's all subjective and the game as released on launch day didn't need any kind of post-release fixing.  If any customers complain, just tell them that their complaint is subjective and the game is fine as is.

popcorn

What if I'm madhair and I think all those terrible things are really funny and great?

I just think it's a daft way of looking at things. People interpret things in different ways, that's a given, it's something everyone knows and yet it's really difficult to get through almost any discussion of the pros and cons of anything without someone going "but just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's objectively bad!" or "I know this film is objectively bad but I still love it". I think it's a big red herring.

popcorn

Quote from: St_Eddie on February 14, 2021, 06:38:26 PM
Good news, CD Projekt Red!  Turns out there's no need to spend any further money patching Cyberpunk 2077, as it turns out that it's all subjective and the game as released on launch day didn't need any kind of post-release fixing.  If anyone complains, just tell them that their complaint is subjective and the game is fine as is.

what the fuck?

bgmnts

Yeah but if all the flaws create something great arent the flaws technically good? Brain hurts.

popcorn

Quote from: bgmnts on February 14, 2021, 06:41:02 PM
Yeah but if all the flaws create something great arent the flaws technically good? Brain hurts.

Prezacto. Should be a basic starting position.

St_Eddie

Quote from: popcorn on February 14, 2021, 06:38:27 PM
What if I'm madhair and I think all those terrible things are really funny and great?

Then that's a valid subjective opinion.  It doesn't change the fact that there are flaws within the game design.  It just means that subjectively, those flaws don't bother you.  It's egocentric to say "yeah, but if the flaws don't bother me personally, that means they don't exist".

popcorn

Quote from: St_Eddie on February 14, 2021, 06:42:18 PM
Then that's a valid subjective opinion.  It doesn't change the fact that there are flaws within the game design.  It just means that subjectively, those flaws don't bother you.  It's egocentric to say "yeah, but if the flaws don't bother me personally, that means they don't exist".

How do you prove that something is a flaw?

St_Eddie

Quote from: bgmnts on February 14, 2021, 06:41:02 PM
Yeah but if all the flaws create something great arent the flaws technically good? Brain hurts.

But in that case, you'd still recognise that the flaws exist in the first place, for you to be able to deem that the flaws make the entertainment more interesting.  So if you recognise that the flaws exist and that the flaws make the game better, then you still are acknowledging that the flaws exist, hence they are objectively present.  How one responds to those flaws and how one feels that they affect the game experience, be it for the better or for the worse, is subjective.

St_Eddie



popcorn

When you say that something is objectively X, you are implicitly claiming that this is measurable in some objective way. For example, I can prove the length of my penis any time you like as long as you provide a sufficiently big measuring stick!!!!

So if you're going to go around saying that X is objectively a flaw in a game/whatever, I want to know how you're measuring that. To a degree I think it's reasonable to agree on certain assumptions, at least to allow discussion to proceed at all, but you don't have examine it hard before it falls down.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth


madhair60

I suppose if I was interested in arguing about this (not that I mean to dismissive; I just think it's a fundamental disagreement, not that you haven't been reasonable) I think I would be saying that, for me, having a failure/loss state is a more definitive thing that - for me - makes a game a game. More so than being fair to the player, though I respect that view as well. And agree with it, in 99% of cases. I'd say that a loss in a game because a mechanic has failed, or the controls don't respond, or the camera shits itself, that's an unfair loss. A loss because you gave away a crucial item because you were tricked into doing so seems fair to me. Sickening, yes. Time-wasting, sure. But not unfair.

I don't want to argue the toss though, I know I come at this stuff from a minority position.

popcorn

Quote from: madhair60 on February 14, 2021, 07:04:07 PM
A loss because you gave away a crucial item because you were tricked into doing so seems fair to me. Sickening, yes. Time-wasting, sure. But not unfair.

I'm interested in why you think being tricked into something is fair. Like if I con you out of a grand, is that fair?

madhair60

Quote from: popcorn on February 14, 2021, 07:08:16 PM
I'm interested in why you think being tricked into something is fair. Like if I con you out of a grand, is that fair?

I dunno, it just doesn't register on my "that's not fair"-o-meter. When I played Day of the Tentacle yesterday I got wound up by a few puzzle solutions that I don't see any way I could reasonably have figured out using available clues or logic. If I use that meat or whatever, and I don't have it when I need it, I'm only going to fall for that once, most likely. I die, I reload an earlier save ("save early, save often") and I do something else. With Lucasarts stuff it's just head against the wall time until I look up the answer, then get annoyed at how I could be expected to realise it.