I grew up playing King's Quest and Space Quest, and none of his complaints really bothered me. When KQ changed from typed commands to mouse-clicking, I felt it lost a lot of the magic. But that's just taste. What's more interesting is how these early games were just like programming. You had to learn the syntax and vocabulary. "Look under the bridge" didn't work, but "Look under bridge" was okay. Standing on the wrong pixel was a little frustrating (reminds me of being Rosella stuck in the ogre house for weeks), but it's a lot like misplacing a semicolon. Those games taught me the blind spots of the computer brain. Some other commenter somewhere was complaining that today's "learn to program" games are too literal, and I completely agree. The Sierra games were great "learn to program" games.
Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
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Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#12This article makes me feel a lot better that I always got stuck on those games...
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#13As a side note: This blog, The Digital Antiquarian, makes an absolutely excellent job to chronicle the home computer history from a gamers point of view.
Have a look at the table of contents to see just how comprehensive Jimmy Mahers ongoing work is: http://www.filfre.net/about-me/sitemap/
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#14He makes some really god points, such as the magic pixel locations, blind alleys to the no win-scenario, and the guess-the-verb syndrome, but other points are simply opinions that are highly arguable. One is the elaborate death messages in the SQ games. Those aren't there to simply make you feel bad, they're part of the humor. One may not LIKE that type of humor, but then one probably wouldn't play too many SQ games…
The elaborate death messages insulting the player: a matter of taste. These messages not including a "go back to last non-fatal point" button: objectively horrible.
Yup, that's what I said. :)
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#15I agree with MANY of these points. In enjoyed this category of games, both in my youth and when there was a post-Curses revival in interactive fiction/text adventures. I was never able to get through Zork because of the inherent illogic (e.g. if I go west, going east should take me back). Hitchhiker's Guide was perhaps the only one of these games that I finished, and that because it had a built in hint system. As I r…
> I was never able to get through Zork because of the inherent illogic (e.g. if I go west, going east should take me back).
Zork is a graph, not a grid. It makes sense, it just isn't rectilinear. For instance, You start by the mailbox, west of the white house. Going north takes you to the north of the house. From there you have to go west back to the west of the house. On a map it looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/g9Wd39x.png
Note the inside of the house makes perfect sense, as I'd argue the areas around the house do to, once you picture them.
The areas that aren't like that are purposeful. The forest is confusing because it's easy to get lost in forests. The maze is also intentionally confusing. Quite a bit of zork takes place in an underground cave, and so it makes sense that leaving one room through a tunnel that curves will make you enter the new room from a different direction than you'd expect. It may be unfair to not mention that in game, though.
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#16Since a lot of this adventure-gaming-retro-examination comes on the heels of the King's Quest revival...I think it's worth noting that the original KQ suffers from quite a few of these "sins"...and yet, from my hazy memory, it was one of the most open-ended adventure games, back then and even today. There are at least a couple of key puzzles that can be solved in several ways...and in different order. The one that co…
Check out the Quest for Glory games. They are open world, the puzzles can be solved in any order, and each puzzle has three possible solutions (roughly corresponding to fighter/wizard/thief methods of problem solving). Also, many of the subquests are optional and you can beat the game after solving only about 50% of the puzzles. There was recently a free spiritual successor called Heroine's Quest which was pretty enjoyable as well.
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#17I agree with this article. Classic adventure games have a lot of terrible, frustrating design. On the other hand... I think there's something to be said for obscurity as a mechanic. Games these days tend to be easy and digestible. They're built on systems that we're all intimately familiar with, and we can usually tell how a game's going to go from the first 15 minutes. So when I played Metro 2033 for the first time,…
> Back then, as a kid, the world past my backyard was a nebulous, murky unknown to me, and games were an extension of that feeling. Now, as an adult, I mostly understand how the world works. That frontier is closed.
I really doubt that that's true. Have you tried, say, moving to Zambia?
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#18That's why I love Monkey Island so much. You can't do anything wrong so that it becomes impossible to finish the game, and you can't (really) die. Although it is possible to "die" and get the "credits" or a "load old save" screen, you come back to live through some miracle (like the rubber tree).
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#19Great article, with rules that can be applied in other UIs, too.
The exclusive use of female pronouns for 1980s adventure game players is quite amusing to me, though.
Re: Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design
#20Wow, Space Quest was the MOST fun game I ever played! Yeah, it frustrated the crap out of me, but my imagination soared. My favourite was Space Quest III.