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

[Phil_A]

I had a bit of fun playing through Kings Quest I/II and Space Quest I/II a few year back. Having access to the old hint sheets online made all the difference, though. Plus I'd played some of them before years ago so probably had a vague subconscious memory of how to solve some of the puzzles.

I did become aware though that there were a few puzzles that were entirely unsolvable without having outside knowledge, as the game doesn't give you enough information to know that you have to do a specific thing in a specific place. Which seems like it was a bit of a cunty way of forcing people to ring the hintline in order to progress.

KQIII is an absolute fucker of a game though.

[Zetetic]

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.

I suppose there's something interesting that - so long as you have a rapid save/reload system - the Sierra games can be played out as just exploring the landscape of choices you can make.

But it does sound like you have to be aware that there's no way of playing them as a game where you try to do the right thing with the information that you have available to you. The writer isn't co-operating with you in the way that you'd expect in most interactive fiction, where you might still be misled but you can still expect certain rules about the misleading (if only that being misled means something, even if you couldn't have not been mislead).

I don't think my account is quite right. You still sort-of have to engage with the idea of navigating through the maze of choices, but maybe what you can't do is take it very seriously.

[popcorn]

There is a certain kind of trial-and-error gameplay that's quite satisfying. I think this is how people actually play Deus Ex most of the time - concocting plans, seeing if they work and then quickloading when they go wrong. It feels like sort of a hack and I don't really think it's entirely how the game is "supposed" to be played, but it's fun.

[Zetetic]

The Deus Ex comparison is interesting. I don't know about "supposed" to be played - we've made quick save and load a lot quicker and more accessible (and adopted consistent keys for them) in recent years.

I was considering making a thread about Ironman-ing games that probably aren't really suited to it a few weeks ago, having started an ironman-run of Death of the Outsider (which actually has it as an option amongst its large number of difficulty tweaks). Partly driven by wanting to explore and engage with more of the game's systems better, rather than just playing it in the most comfortable way (and reloading when I was forced out of that).

I then died having done about a third of the second level, entirely due to stupid decisions on my own part, and was too annoyed with myself to start again (so far).

[St_Eddie]

KQIII is an absolute fucker of a game though.

As I previously mentioned, give the brilliant free AGD remake a go.  There's an option at the start of the game to remove all of the game breaking deadends and the time limit.  The original King's Quest III was an exercise in frustration.  Whereas the remake is equal with King's Quest VI as the best in the series within my eyes.

[madhair60]

But it does sound like you have to be aware that there's no way of playing them as a game where you try to do the right thing with the information that you have available to you. The writer isn't co-operating with you in the way that you'd expect in most interactive fiction, where you might still be misled but you can still expect certain rules about the misleading (if only that being misled means something, even if you couldn't have not been mislead).

The way I see them, they're games, with complex rules, and they're designed to be save-scummed. Dying in really mean, unpredictable ways is a lot of the fun. There was some talk earlier of me playing them out of their original context, which is unavoidably kind of true, but I'm not using anything that wasn't available in the original versions, shy of disk-swapping.

[Zetetic]

Should Sierra have been better at communicating the "designed to be save-scummed"?

Although the more explicit you are about it, perhaps the less well it works.

[madhair60]

"Save early, save often and don't overwrite saves" was like their mantra. I think it was pretty well known to be the case?

[popcorn]

I think sometimes groping in the dark can be really fun (so to speak). I really like how Limbo kills you with zero notice every 30 seconds - it's funny, the deaths are so elaborate and gruesome they're sort of a reward unto themselves, and importantly the cost is basically zero - you respawn immediately with no loss in progress, so the feedback loop is fast.

By comparison, I hate how RE1 has that early puzzle that kills you, and there's no way to solve it until much later in the game. I would be fine with that if experimenting it weren't such a chore - it takes ages to kill you, and you have to reload a save several rooms back each time. So it takes ages to get the point where you're like "right, I don't think I can do anything else here". The feedback loop is painfully long.

[Hand Solo]

The way I see them, they're games, with complex rules, and they're designed to be save-scummed. Dying in really mean, unpredictable ways is a lot of the fun. There was some talk earlier of me playing them out of their original context, which is unavoidably kind of true, but I'm not using anything that wasn't available in the original versions, shy of disk-swapping.

You don't use the internet at all for solutions? I can't imagine anyone enjoying these games without that as a basic fail-safe, also you're playing through an emulator without all the loading and disk swapping as an adult who has searched these games out because you're a glutton for punishment. The emulation also helps with the constant save state problem and enables you easily dip in and out of the games at a whim and laugh at the stupid deaths. People who originally played these games just had the game and that was it, you couldn't alt-tab to a browser or play something else, you generally tackled one game at a time, so the fact they were grossly unfair was a more heart-wrenching problem because you were much more invested, each game was your world for a certain amount of time. Having that world be terribly unfair with contrived dead-ends and sudden deaths designed to make you ring up an extortionate hint-line was a cunt's trick.

The other strange thing is I don't remember anybody actually ever buying Sierra games, they just sort of turned up, whether as hand-me-downs from someone else in the family or came in a box of other stuff whether pirated or whatever, that sort of adds to the horror of them - they are the found-footage of gaming.

I should add maybe I'm slightly unfair on Sierra in that they weren't exactly marketed at kids, obviously, but a lot of kids ended up playing them hence the general negative outlook. Lucasarts maybe had some annoying puzzles but at least when you were stuck you knew you were stuck and just had to bumble around trying things until something worked. Just trying things in Sierra was never a great idea.

[Phil_A]

You don't use the internet at all for solutions? I can't imagine anyone enjoying these games without that as a basic fail-safe, also you're playing through an emulator without all the loading and disk swapping as an adult who has searched these games out because you're a glutton for punishment. The emulation also helps with the constant save state problem and enables you easily dip in and out of the games at a whim and laugh at the stupid deaths. People who originally played these games just had the game and that was it, you couldn't alt-tab to a browser or play something else, you generally tackled one game at a time, so the fact they were grossly unfair was a more heart-wrenching problem because you were much more invested, each game was your world for a certain amount of time. Having that world be terribly unfair with contrived dead-ends and sudden deaths designed to make you ring up an extortionate hint-line was a cunt's trick.

The other strange thing is I don't remember anybody actually ever buying Sierra games, they just sort of turned up, whether as hand-me-downs from someone else in the family or came in a box of other stuff whether pirated or whatever, that sort of adds to the horror of them - they are the found-footage of gaming.

I should add maybe I'm slightly unfair on Sierra in that they weren't exactly marketed at kids, obviously, but a lot of kids ended up playing them hence the general negative outlook. Lucasarts maybe had some annoying puzzles but at least when you were stuck you knew you were stuck and just had to bumble around trying things until something worked. Just trying things in Sierra was never a great idea.

I think the majority of Sierra games were pirated extensively, hence the phone lines were a way of getting some revenue back.

[Sexton Brackets Drugbust]

Deaths aren't especially the issue - dead ends are.

If I can't yet solve a puzzle, I want to at least be aware that I always have the capacity to do so, I just haven't struck upon the correct line of thinking.

With older games if you reach an impasse, you could never be 100% certain the game was now unwinnable because you hadn't picked up the crowbar in screen three of Act I.

[popcorn]

Yeah - you don't want to waste the player's time basically. You never want to be in a situation, as a player, where you realise that the last hour or 10 hours or whatever were all pointless.

[madhair60]

You don't use the internet at all for solutions? I can't imagine anyone enjoying these games without that as a basic fail-safe, also you're playing through an emulator without all the loading and disk swapping as an adult who has searched these games out because you're a glutton for punishment. The emulation also helps with the constant save state problem and enables you easily dip in and out of the games at a whim and laugh at the stupid deaths. People who originally played these games just had the game and that was it, you couldn't alt-tab to a browser or play something else, you generally tackled one game at a time, so the fact they were grossly unfair was a more heart-wrenching problem because you were much more invested, each game was your world for a certain amount of time. Having that world be terribly unfair with contrived dead-ends and sudden deaths designed to make you ring up an extortionate hint-line was a cunt's trick.

I have these games on GoG. Outside of DosBOX as far as I know the experience is not that different outside of disk loading/swapping, which I think I mentioned already?

I think the difference with Sierra, for me, is you treat them as experiments, everything is an experiment. Losing ten hours to realising something has dead-ended sucks, but none of the games are that long and if you're saving the way you're expected to (the way the old adage tells you to) you can hope back to almost any point in the game. Is it archaic? Yes! But the games are old as fuck. So I'm prepared for that kind of stuff.

[St_Eddie]

Is it archaic? Yes! But the games are old as fuck. So I'm prepared for that kind of stuff.

The thing is that Sierra were still using that archaic design in their adventure games at the same time that LucasArts eliminated them from their adventure games, from The Secret of Monkey Island and beyond.  Lead designer for said game, Ron Gilbert has a good article on his design philosophy in an article titled Why Adventure Games Suck.

[Hand Solo]

I have these games on GoG. Outside of DosBOX as far as I know the experience is not that different outside of disk loading/swapping, which I think I mentioned already?

Apart from the using the internet constantly to help?

I think the majority of Sierra games were pirated extensively, hence the phone lines were a way of getting some revenue back.

[St_Eddie]

Ron Gilbert and many other LucasArts alumni have discredited the notion that Sierra's business model suffered from piracy...

"With Maniac Mansion, we didn't really know what we were doing. Monkey Island refined our ideas." I've never been sure if the fake death scene in the first Monkey Island game, in which Guybrush falls to his apparent death, terrifying any players who haven't saved recently before delivering a punchline that allows them to continue, was a jab at Maniac Mansion's punishing design or a jab at rival developers Sierra, whose Quest games required a great deal of trial and error.

"It was mainly aimed at Sierra," Gilbert says without hesitating. "That whole situation was so annoying because we made these games that encouraged players to explore and experiment and rewarded them, and we got better reviews, but Sierra would outsell us. They sold ten times as many games as we did sometimes."

I've heard this same recollection of how Sierra's adventure games vastly outsold LucasArts titles from many ex-developers.  Your argument also fails to acknowledge that plenty of LucasArts' adventure games didn't have any form of copy protection and that plenty of Sierra's adventure games did feature copy protection.

Furthermore; let's dispel this commonly held notion that the poor design decisions were down to a desire to encourage players to phone the Sierra hint line.  Plenty of the ex-Sierra developers (including Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy of Space Quest fame) have gone on record in the decades since as saying that there was never a mandate passed down from the higher ups at Sierra for them to make their games more difficult to encourage hint line usage.  They've straight up said that management never got involved on the design side of things during the heyday of Sierra and have copped to their often questionable game design and said that it was entirely down to their own stupidity and inexperience at a young age.

Management never needed to tell their developers to make the games more unfair or harder because the developers were already doing that off their own back.

[popcorn]

I've heard it said before, and I assume it's true, but I find it incredible that Sierra outsold LucasArts so drastically because I don't think I managed to touch a single Sierra game in the 90s and I don't think I knew anyone who was playing Sierra stuff either. Everyone was all on Monkey Island, DOTT and Full Throttle. I think it might have been an American thing.

[bgmnts]

After all this talk of Sierra I am intrigued as to what happens in Softporn Adventure.

[madhair60]

Apart from the using the internet constantly to help?

I don't use the internet constantly to help? I can't think of a Sierra game I've used the internet for at all. Bear in mind that's not me saying I've beaten them all, because I haven't. But I give up on them less readily than the LA games I've played.

[madhair60]

I've heard it said before, and I assume it's true, but I find it incredible that Sierra outsold LucasArts so drastically because I don't think I managed to touch a single Sierra game in the 90s and I don't think I knew anyone who was playing Sierra stuff either. Everyone was all on Monkey Island, DOTT and Full Throttle. I think it might have been an American thing.

My friends back then were on King's Quest, mostly. Which might explain my affinity for these games better than any back and forth.

[The Culture Bunker]

I've heard it said before, and I assume it's true, but I find it incredible that Sierra outsold LucasArts so drastically because I don't think I managed to touch a single Sierra game in the 90s and I don't think I knew anyone who was playing Sierra stuff either. Everyone was all on Monkey Island, DOTT and Full Throttle. I think it might have been an American thing.

While I played a lot of LucasArts games, I did also manage to play Manhunter, Police Quest 1+2 and Gabriel Knight, so presumably the Sierra games were widely distributed if even some lad in the back end of Cumbria was able to get hold of them.

[St_Eddie]

After all this talk of Sierra I am intrigued as to what happens in Softporn Adventure.

It's essentially just a slightly more raunchy text adventure prototype for Leisure Suit Larry.  These days it's perhaps most notable for its cover art, featuring a topless Roberta Williams (of King's Quest fame) sat in the hot tub and to the farthest right of the shot.

[Zetetic]

Point taken, madhair, about Sierra's own emphasis on saves.

Wonder what Sierra and LucasArts sales figures actually were. 10ks?

[popcorn]

While I played a lot of LucasArts games, I did also manage to play Manhunter, Police Quest 1+2 and Gabriel Knight, so presumably the Sierra games were widely distributed if even some lad in the back end of Cumbria was able to get hold of them.

Just for clarity, I meant I wondered if they were just less popular in the UK than the US, not "did they even come out in the UK".

[Mister Six]

The way I see them, they're games, with complex rules, and they're designed to be save-scummed. Dying in really mean, unpredictable ways is a lot of the fun. There was some talk earlier of me playing them out of their original context, which is unavoidably kind of true, but I'm not using anything that wasn't available in the original versions, shy of disk-swapping.

Dying in unpredictable ways is one thing. It annoys the shit out of me, but I can see why getting a special death image and a sarcastic comment in Space Quest V or something adds to the appeal.

But deliberately being led to do something that follows the established conventions of the medium (or even the series), complete with "hints" and special animations upon doing so, then being punished several hours later (so even if you're savescumming you have to replay hours of puzzles you already did) is just a cunt's trick.

Even worse back in the day, when saving and loading meant swapping in your special save/load disk and waiting 30 seconds for the information to be written down.

You're mental if you think that's a good thing, basically.

[Mister Six]

Just for clarity, I meant I wondered if they were just less popular in the UK than the US, not "did they even come out in the UK".

Yeah, I think that's probably it. LucasFilm/Arts stuff, with the offbeat subject matter and generally more complex/mature sense of humour, likely appealed more to Brits than Sierra's juvenile gags and bright colours, which appealed more to those Americans capable of operating a computer without electrocuting themselves.

I say, almost joking.

[The Culture Bunker]

Just for clarity, I meant I wondered if they were just less popular in the UK than the US, not "did they even come out in the UK".

It was more a thought about how widespread Sierrea's UK distribution was if their games even made it to outposts such as my old neck of the woods. In my own (admittedly small) sample group, the first Gabriel Knight was easily as popular as Monkey Island and while Kings Quest was never my bag, but a fair few of my friends had it.

[Consignia]

I think LucasArts were much better marketed in the UK. I remember PC Magazines with big colourful spreads for things like Day of The Tentacle. Having Indy as one of your prominent games helped push the line as well, I reckon.

[Hand Solo]

I noticed the latest How Did This Get Played? podcast covers Day Of The Tentacle

Hayes Davenport joins Nick and Heather to talk about Day of the Tentacle! They talk about Hayes' love of adventure games, how faithful the remaster is, the obtuse puzzles and more!

Skip past the first 5 mins, there's some awful trying to do an adventure based comedy sketch thing at the beginning that made me want to kill. The constant laughing.. God, why do American podcasters find themselves all so inherently amusing?