Adventure games, their puzzles along with trial and error

[YoshiM]

(subtitled: Did we really have that much time to figure these #*^@&! games out?)

I sometimes wonder what the hell adventure game designers were thinking when they developed various puzzles or activities you had to figure out in games like King's Quest or the Kyrandia games. Some of the puzzles or obstacles you had to figure out were logical, even though it took you a dozen tries to figure it out and had to start over from a old save point to fix. Others just seemed to make you scratch your head and wonder why something worked when you use an unconventional method to get to the next room. It was puzzles like these that made you sit at your computer for hours until you butt was numb or you couldn't take it anymore.

What games did you have to bang your head against the desk until you got a revelation to perform the illogical, like taking the duck you picked up at a fowl talent contest at the mall and turning it into a rudimentary organic lubricant by shoving it into the rusty gears of your space ship's engines to them to start?

[YoshiM]

Police Quest 2: When you first start the game you had to take your firearm and then do some target practice. Your aim WILL be off so you have to adjust the sights until your shot is true. If you don't later on you will be attacked by an escaped convict (the guy your character put away in Police Quest 1) and you won't be able to shoot accurately causing your untimely death. It makes sense but for a guy who ISN'T police trained nor a "gun guy" sighting my pistol was the furthest thing from my mind.

Legend of Kyrandia: you have to navigate a network of caves to get to the other side. Unfortunately it's dark and I'm pretty sure you will die if you try to navigate through the dark rooms. If memory serves you could walk through if you had a fire berry but they die quickly. You can also use the power of a gem to turn into a wisp that both lights up the room and allows you to float but even then the power has a time limit so if you aren't out you turn back to normal. Pain in the ass and caused my then-girlfriend to buy the hint book.

Legend of Kyrandia 2 Hand of Fate: mixing potions. Your character was an alchemist and she didn't know how to make certain potions?! I remember this was a trial and error puzzle as well, mixing certain components in your cauldron and then going to these two stone pillars to get the potion "energized".

I'm sure there are more issues I had with oddball puzzles but those are the ones that really stuck out.

[Gast]

That was one of the many reasons for me to only play Lucasarts Games.

[Flack]

I remember playing a text-based adventure on the TRS-80, Haunted House maybe? Anyway, the game was two sides of a cassette tape. It took about 30 minutes to load the game up. Then you would get to the halfway point and would have to load the other side up. So, you wait another 30 minutes. The first room you came to had a floating knife. You had to type a two word command. Type wrong, and the knife would slit your throat. GO WEST. "You try to GO WEST, but the floating air soars toward you and slits your throat." Then you would have to RELOAD the FIRST side -- another 30 minutes. Maybe it wasn't quite 30 minutes but it was a really, really long time

We did this OVER and OVER and OVER, trying to find the right two words. GO WEST, dead. GO EAST, dead. We had an inventory of about 10 items by that point. USE ROPE, dead. USE CHAIR, dead. DUCK, dead. Seriously, everything we tried killed us. Then to try something else it was going to take us another hour to get back to that point.

After over a month of trying things, someone suggested, GET KNIFE. After that, the game simply said, "You now have the knife."

God damn game.

[DarkSoul]

The Monkey Island series has a huge number of the odd puzzles.. II and III were the most guilty of it, if I recall correctly, but I'm drawing a blank when it comes to specific incidences...

[Ze_ro]

The most memorable for me has to be right in the beginning of Infocom's version of The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, where you have to get the babel fish into your ear... the whole thing ended up turning into some Rube Goldberg device though, and you'd have to constantly reload and do things differently to prevent the fish from falling into a drain (by plugging the drain this time before you do anything else) and whatnot. I remember it was usually fairly obvious what you had to do, but it was only obvious after you had already failed, which really bugged me.

And yeah, I played all the way through Hand of Fate too, and it had a LOT of illogical problems... I needed a FAQ to beat that one.

--Zero

[WiseSalesman]

That was one of the many reasons for me to only play Lucasarts Games.

Because those were so much more logical? LOL

I mean, c'mon, I love the Lucasarts games, but let's not shit ourselves. "To save the world, sometimes you have to push a few old ladies down the stairs."

Washing a carriage to make it rain? Painting a kumquat tree red, so George Washington would think it's a cherry tree and chop it down? It's not like they were logical at ALL.

At least you couldn't die in the Lucasarts games, though....maybe that's what you meant.

[Ze_ro]

I still remember the first time I played Space Quest III, and the first thing I tried to do was to pick up a piece of metal from the scrap heap, right next to where you start off... of course, Roger cuts himself on the metal and bleeds to death. Game over.

Never being able to die in LucasArts games gives me a lot of incentive to keep going. When you know that trying random stuff won't kill you and force you to reload, it's a lot less frustrating.

--Zero

[Buyatari]

double post

[Buyatari]

Almost every Scott Addams game had one puzzle like this. The worst has to be Savage Island II.

You start out in a space ship inside a bubble. Nothing of use in side the bubble so you try to leave.

DEAD

No air.

Good luck with this one. After many many tries I finally bought the hint guide. You have to hyperventilate to travel in the vaccum of space.

Get real. That was terrible. 10 year kids in playgrounds across the US telling each other they could travel along in space so long as they hyperventialed followed for the next 3 years.

What was another game by Scoot Adams? Mystery Fun House? Something like this.

Anyway, you start out with this gum. You need it to get a key by chewing it and putting it on a stick. Now thats a good puzzle but then you need it again later in the game. You are required to blow the place up and it turns out that gum you were chewing this entire time was plastic explosives? Come on. terrible. In order to keep us playing the game longer they had to "cheat". Man was I pissed. LOL

Adam

[mezrabad]

Did we really have that much time to figure these #*^@&! games out?)

Y'know, I think we actually DID have a LOT of time, but more significantly I think we didn't have a lot of other games to choose from. This was in part due to not having money as teens/pre-teens and in another part to there not being too many games available in general.

The one game that, to this day, remains unfinished and a thorn in my side and the side of the three other friends with whom I played: Return to Pirate's Isle on the TI-99/4A. That damn alarm clock that just wouldn't stop ringing drove us nuts. Fortunately, my friend got an Apple ][ not long after we started RtPI. We became Infocom addicts immediately. I still have the Return to Pirate's Isle cart. One of these days I'm going to get a TI and finish the damn thing.

[Daria]

and you'd have to constantly reload and do things differently to prevent the fish from falling into a drain (by plugging the drain this time before you do anything else)


Ironically enough that's the puzzel I was stuck at. o.O

I remember Grim Fandango had really weird illogical puzzels, but the story was so good my boyfriend and I gave up and played it with a printed walkthrough.

:P

Nothing's as hard as a text based point and clicks though... at least with well.... pointing and clicking you have a limited number of combonations but text games were so fucking picky about the wording. Occasionally you'd abandon the right idea because you couldn't word it correctly. The only one I really had the paitence to stick with was Quest for Glory 2 because it was just that damn good. And honestly not all that frustrating.

I remember I'd get stuck in King's Quest 2 (at the begining) and have fun kicking the cat. Call me easily amused.
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LovelyWendie (http://www.lovelywendie99.com/)

[calthaer]

All I have to say is:

NIKSTLITSELPMUR

"You are almost correct but your thinking is a bit off!"

Remember when Roberta Williams practically whined that gamers no longer liked her games because they had no taste? I've been looking all over the web for that interview...it caused a big stink at the time.

[TheRedEye]

All I have to say is:

NIKSTLITSELPMUR

"You are almost correct but your thinking is a bit off!"

Oh jesus CHRIST I hated that. MRPHGORGHVOKNFI! Makes sense, right? Right???

http://www.membrana.ru/images/gallery/1049811661.jpeg

Also, Daria, I think you just made me cry. Please please please don't print out a walkthrough with a masterpiece like Grim Fandango. If you absolutely have to have hints, force yourself to actually quit the game and look it up online. Otherwise you're just following a roadmap, not playing a game.

Also, girl + Grim Fandango = sup baby 8-)

[Daria]

Well I was doing fine on my own despite the lack of logic to some of these puzzel solutions but my boyfriend wanted to speed things up a little. Cheap? Yeah. But we had a lot of fun doing it all the same. I mean to our credit we did at least try the puzzles out before cheating, we just weren't very patient either.

But it was some of the most fun I've had playing a point and click and that's what's important. Having fun playing the game.

I'f I played it again today I would skip the walk through though.
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Hotasiansexy (http://www.girlcamfriend.com/cam/hotasiansexy/)

[Arqueologia_Digital]

That was one of the many reasons for me to only play Lucasarts Games.
C´mon!!...Indy 3 is technically...IMPOSSIBLE!!!!!!

[Funkenstein]

I'm probably one of the few people to have ever bought/played it, but in Space Quest 6, at one point if you want to start a ship up you need to actually have a periodic table of the elements at hand or the puzzle's impossible. I literally spent 8 hours trying to guess my way through before I realized I had a table sitting next to me in my bookbag the whole time.

[Daria]

In "Broken Mirror" there's a puzzle that's nothing more then taking little colored balls and setting up a diagram of the solar system... it's almost embaressing how hard of a time me and my mom had with that one. (It's my mom's game, I bought it for her as a Christmas present but she asked for my help with the puzzle.) We finally broke down and started looking up each planet in the Encyclopedia... then we had to experiment with a couple that looked almost the same. Switching them out until we finally got it right. :P
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