Let's Play... Simon the Sorcerer 3D

[coolsome]

Mountains can't be friends.

[GuruGuru214]

I've been sick all week, and there's been nothing like this thread to make me question whether or not my illness has made me delirious.

Because really, a game this bad has to be a hallucination, right?

[Darth Marsden]

I'd put that down more to you playing Sonic Colours. Now THAT game's bad for your health.

[GuruGuru214]

I actually haven't played Sonic Colors. And I have to skip it and 2006 because I don't own them. They're just sitting in the list where I would play them if I did own them.

[Darth Marsden]

Yeah, I meant HEROES. Oops.

[GuruGuru214]

Meh, it's not so bad until you slowly drive yourself insane trying to get more than two Chaos Emeralds. Certainly, it's not as bad as this Simon game. Of course, that does diminish the entertainment value of watching someone suffer through it.

[Secret Fawful]

Yeah, from what I've seen every version of Colors is GOOD. I liked Heroes when I was a kid, but seeing Guru play it, it's really bland and kind of ugly.

[Darth Marsden]

Let's... let's not talk about it. If we do, we'll have to discuss what comes after Sonic Heroes.

And you don't want that. Oh god. YOU DON'T WANT THAT.

Onwards to Chapter 5!



So we take the CD back to Calypso and he tells us what we need to do next, according to the prophesies of Nostramades.



Here's the prophecy in full:

The King of Fools destroys them,
Lady of Steel, Hero of Light,
King of East and a Prince Brave.
All must journey forth to prevent a great change.

The King of Fools is clearly Simon , but who are the other four?

Well, Calypso whips out his magical scrying ball and shows us where to find them.

(Calypso flat-out says he FORGOT to use it when we were searching for Swampy. GRR.)



The Lady of Steel is clearly Melissa Leg. The REAL one this time.



The Hero of Light is called Coneman the Barabrain (yeah, I know), and he's the guy who we crushed under a cart.



The King of the East is... well, it's the guy we killed by eating the Sacred Peach early.



And finally, the Prince Brave is Prince Charming, whom we got turned into a frog.

So, basically, because Simon's been such a massive asswipe, he's gone and made his own life six times more complicated.

Fan-fucking-tastic.



Great.

So we've got to find the real Melissa Leg, get Coneman out from under the cart (and repair his broken back!), resurrect the Prince of the East and find some way of turning Prince Charming back into a human.



Inadvertently?

INADVERTANTLY?

...

...excuse me while I go and scream at the top of my lungs while standing in the rain.



...ah, that's better.

Now. We need to ask Calypso about changing the Prince back and how to resurrect the King of the East.

We'll ask about the Prince first.



He says that Princess Austin is in town - they're holding a tournament to find her a suitable... well, suitor.

He then explains that he has a friend who can sneak us into the tournament. We'll find him at the side entrance at night.

Right. That's that then. As for the King of the East?



OK. He gives us the soul jar he used in the opening cutscene and explains that in order to capture his soul, something valuable must be placed inside the jar to lure him in.

We'll then need the body, and once we have the two, then Calypso will perform the joining ritual.

OK then! We have ourselves a plan (and the King of the East gets an actual name - Jar Nin).

We'll go grab Jar's body first, since I know where THAT is.



Uh... where'd it go?

No, really. Where'd it go? No-one ever mentions it.

Well, whoever moved him, they've left behind a rather expensive looking necklace. So let's try and grab that.



Nope, stuck. Must be why it got left behind.



What in the seven layers of hell? Is that tree talking to me?



Oh.

It's worth pointing out that this particular woodworm talks like a terrorist. Infidel this and filthy son of a jackal that. It's rather reminiscent of stuff Osama bin Laden would say, and every bit as uncomfortable.

Long story short - if we get them some weapons, they'll eat the tree so we can get at the necklace.

Now, before we go ahead and track down the others, I just want to head back to Calypso quickly. See, I forgot to ask him what we're going to do once we've gotten the four warriors of light together.



*sigh*

Is is worth asking what's still legible?



Oh PLEASE be Simon oh please oh please oh please.

Now, I don't normally feature dialogue scenes taken straight from the game, but when we get conversations like this...

...well, you'll see where I'm going with this.





...this is absolutely HILARIOUS in hindsight.

In case you don't know, this game completely ruined AdventureSoft, and it's really no surprise as to why. Hell, this thread's 8 pages long - take your pick.

But that wasn't the end for Simon, oh no. He had two more games - Chaos Happens and Who'd Even Want Contact?!, both made by Silver Style Entertainment.

A German developer.

...

I'm not even kidding.

The series was fairly popular in Germany, so it's no surprise that a German developer would want to make more games in the series.

From what I can tell, they're actually not that bad either. Certainly better than this piece of crap.

So yeah, that's why that was so hilarious. AdventureSoft actually managed to unintentionally predict that the series would be continued in Germany.



Yes you do Simon. Yes you do.

[Syd]

That bit about Germany is hilarious. It's a bit sad when the funniest part of this game was a completely unintentional but eerily accurate prediction of the series' future.

Edit: Now that I think about it, AdventureSoft might have already been pretty sure that Simon 3D was going to destroy them about partway through development, and they put that line in because that was the likely fate of the series after that.

[corruptbiggins]

Well technically Simon 3D was made by Headfirst Productions (formed by the Woodroffes) as Adventure Soft just became a publisher. It was their (Headfirst) 2nd game that bankrupted them, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.

[Secret Fawful]

Originally Posted by corruptbiggins

Well technically Simon 3D was made by Headfirst Productions (formed by the Woodroffes) as Adventure Soft just became a publisher. It was their (Headfirst) 2nd game that bankrupted them, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.

Good lord. That was such a bloody masterpiece compared to this tripe!

[Darth Marsden]

...boo.

Sorry this took so long to get back to. I got distracted by... Well, let's just say that if I'm working on something big and then I get distracted, it takes me a while to get back to it.

But I'm here now, so let's get on with it!

So... where were we?



Oh, right. Coneman.



Using the jack with the cart should be enough to get him out.



Ah. Yes. Well, that may count against us.



Oh, yeah. That too. Heh.

So we're gonna have to find some way of fixing his back, and then convince him to not rip us limb from limb (heh - you don't know how funny that comment is yet).

Basically, we'll have to leave him for now.



So while running around town, I notice something odd about the church. If you look above the door in the texture that's supposed to represent a hedge, you can see something on the roof of the church.

Let's go see what that is.

But how to get up there?



A rope. Right. So, do we climb it?



Actually, no.

It's a little hard to explain using pictures, but I'll do my best.

Basically, we pull the rope down and when it goes back up, we grab on to it and let it carry us up. As you can imagine, this doesn't get us all the way up on the first try, so when we land we have to let the rope go further down before we grab on to it and let it carry us up again.

We need to repeat this about 4 times before we have enough height to reach the actual roof.

And does the game bother to tell us how to do this?

OF COURSE IT FUCKING DOESN'T.

This took me about 5 minutes of experimentation before I managed to figure out what I was supposed to be doing.

God this game sucks. It sucks so bad.

So anyway. The roof.



Oh hai Goldilocks!

[/Tommy Wiseau Impression]

Another summary. She's basically trying to steal the lead from the Church roof, but she didn't realize it'd be so heavy, so she offers to split the cash she gets for it with Simon if we figure out a way of getting it down from the roof and to the inn.

This is another puzzle we'll have to come back to later, so we'll do just that.

OK. So we can't do anything with Coneman yet, and we can't do anything with Jar Nin yet. Since we don't know where Melissa Leg is, we'll have to focus on Prince Charming (or whatever his name is).

Now since he's a frog, he probably needs to kiss a princess to be changed back. And Calypso mentioned meeting someone to get into a tournament she's at, so let's go see him.



This is back where we got the Varnish for our Conker, if you recall.



Oh, those graphics. I'd forgotten how atrocious they were. This guy in particular - it looks like he's been stretched on a rack for about 3 years.

Anyway. This guy will get us in, but only if we help him with the fireworks display that'll start the tournament. We have to come back at night to do so.



Yes, I remembered to take a picture with the right outfit this time. Go me.

(And I know I keep going on about this, but notice the rim of his hat? It should be white, but it switches to yellow every time a cutscene takes place where Simon actually performs an action. I honestly don't know why, but it's incredibly distracting)



And here we are.

OK. So you know how Guitar Hero works, with the colors scrolling down the screen and you having to press the right button when it reaches the bottom?

This works very much like that. Only it's not scrolling from top to bottom, it's scrolling from left to right.

AND YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THE BUTTONS ARE.



This is all we get. And I know this seems like a perfectly fine explanation, but bear in mind we only get told this once, and when the actual minigame starts...



...this is what we get. So... what do I press for yellow?

Since this is a bunch of screenshots, you can look at the last-but-one image, read that Left is for a Roman Candle and then look back at the other image and see that Candle is Yellow, and so deduce that I have to press Left when the Yellow icon hits the green area.

Now, what's Red? And what's Purple?

Can you deduce all those in about 5 seconds? Can you remember them under pressure? Hell, can you remember what key Use Item was?

Unless you're some sort of genius, you won't remember any of it. And that's why this minigame is so awful.

We're not given any time to practice, which would have been immensely helpful, we're just thrown into this and expected to do well.

Which, naturally, I don't. I completely balls it up, to be perfectly frank.

Thankfully you're given an infinite number of tries to get this right, but here's the thing - you're never retold what the controls are. So as time goes on, you won't even remember that.

Combined with the panic that you'll no doubt be facing each time you try this, you're not going to get better. If anything, you're going to get worse.

Eventually I had to pause the game, minimise it, consult a walkthough to find out which buttons do what, write them down on a bit of paper and then try again, AND I STILL DIDN'T GET IT RIGHT UNTIL THREE TRIES LATER.

This is far from the worst minigame we'll have to go through in this game. In fact it's actually not all that bad. But because it's so poorly explained, it's the one I'll despise the most whenever I think back on this game.

*sigh*

So eventually, after 20 MINUTES OF TRYING (no, I'm not exaggerating, I literally spent 20 minutes on this one stupid minigame), I got it right. Hoo-fucking-ray.



And as a result, the tournament (or, let's call it what it is, the fair) will be open in the morning.

But we'll have to tackle that next time, because I need another break. Ugh.

[WarpSpeed]

"Is that a sign the tournament is starting?"

"Can't be. The fireworks are in the wrong sequence."

"Oh, just someone playing around with expensive pyrotechnics for no reason, then. Never mind."

[Darth Marsden]

I believe I failed that challenge around 15-20 times before I got it right. Decent fireworks are NOT cheap, so think of how expensive my fuck-ups must have been. Well, that's what you get for not explaining shit correctly!

Right. Let's check out that fair then, shall we?



In the morning, obviously.

Now, if we head through what I like the call the 'Magic Square' (since it's got all the magic-related buildings in it), we should find...



A gate. Now up until now, this has been locked, but since the tournament's started, it's been unlocked.

Not that it's particularly easy to tell, since it looks exactly the same and is therefore easily overlooked.

*sigh*

Anyway, we use it and a new map loads. And in this new map...



A FUNFAIR! WEE! I WANT SOME COTTON CANDY!

But before we can go and actually explore the fair, these two show up.



It's a pair of demons who run the fair. They've encountered Simon in a previous game where he screwed them over or something (I'm guessing it was the second game, since Simon wasn't a complete douche in the first one).

They CLAIM that they've given up on revenge and are just here to entertain people. Naturally they almost immediately confirm that that's a complete and utter lie, and all the attractions are rigged in their favour.

...so how's that different from any other funfair?

There's a nice dig at Hollyoaks (a truly terrible British soap aimed at teenagers), but otherwise this conversation serves absolutely no further point.

SO ON WITH THE FAIR! WOO!



The whole fair's basically set up on a circle, with this in the middle. Might as well get this one out of the way first.

It's VERY hard to see due to the poor texture resolution, but the text on the side of the caravan (that's obscured by the Lens Flare in this shot, sorry) reads 'MADAM SPANGLES ACTUPUNCTURE'.

Acupuncture could come in handy for Coneman, so we'll check it out.



If you guessed the joke is that these guys run everything to a very questionable degree, you win a no-prize.

Anyway. They don't make house street calls, but they CAN deal with Coneman's back problem. So we'll have to find a way to make use of that later.

NEXT!



A shooting gallery. SWEET.



Aw. No guns for me.

Either way, I ace this on the first go, because I'm just that awesome. And my prize?



...woo.

It's not a very nice teddy bear either.



Lovely.

Anyway, as soon as I finish this game, I immediately bump into this annoying little brat who's wandering around the place.



Blah blah blah, he wants a gobstopper. A RED gobstopper. Fine, whatever, NEXT!



An arcade machine. I wonder if they'll actually let me play thi-



...huh. OK game, whaddya got?



Space Invaders.

It's a Space Invaders clone.

And it's actually not bad.

...

I honestly do not know what to say.

Anyway. At one point for each ship I destroy, I manages to make it to 112 before dying, which is more than enough to get... something.

To find out what it is, I had to open the inventory screen and see what I'd just picked up.



Sunglasses. Of course.

NEXT!



Ah, the Wonder Wheel.

Unfortunately, the game is currently rigged so that you always lose, so let's leave it for now and move on.

If we head down the path next to the Wonder Wheel, we can see this:



Naturally, this leads to a bit of a tunnel maze. Not a very complicated one mind, but remember that the clipping sucks and... yeah.

Anyway. Said maze leads us to...



...behind the Wonder Wheel.

See that giant magnet? That's what's causing us to lose whenever we play it.



Well, it WAS, anyway.

So let's go and give the Wonder Wheel a go and see what happens now.



Boosh!

And as you might have guessed, our prize is the pea shooter that Simon was admiring earlier. Awesome.

...we'll continue the fun next time. Come back for more fun at the fair!

[Syd]

Nice to see you updating this LP again.

Those two demons first show up near the end of the first game. Simon actually helps them out in the first game, since they want to go back to hell for some reason or another, but due to demon rules or something like that, they can't tell Simon their real names, which is required in the whole sending-them-back-to-hell ritual thingy. After utilizing the old tried and true method of using items on other items, Simon eventually discovers their real names and sends them on their way.

If Simon did something that they now hate him for, it must be from the second game, and that doesn't surprise me since Simon is a complete douche to everyone he encounters in Simon 2.

[Darth Marsden]

Ah. Thanks for that.

[Darth Marsden]

...and we're back.

OK, we're heading back to that open area with the hedge tunnel maze.



See, in this area, there's a snake statue we can use (it's on the right of this image). And when we do...



...this appears. Right smack in the middle of this area.

It's actually done via a cluncky fade-to-black-then-fade-back-to-new-map effect.

Whatever. Let's head inside and see what's what.



Oh, and now they're Voodoo Priests. Yeah. Of course. Makes perfect sense.

In short, they can make a voodoo doll of someone, but they need the doll and some children's teeth.

Children's teeth. Hmm. I sense some child abuse just around the corner.



Actually, THIS is what's just around the corner (d'ya see what I did there? God I'm witty).

On the left, a cotton candy stall GIMME GIMME GIMME!



Yays! OM-NOM-NOM!



...wait, what? Why won't you eat it now? IT'S CANDY FLOSS! Y'know, ON-NOM-NOM?



Oh, it's rock hard.

...

...I'd still eat it.

Anyway. Inside that giant tent:



An actual flea circus! With real fleas for once!

...let's nick 'em.



So now we have a flea-infested teddy bear and a very unhappy demon.



Well, he WOULD be unhappy if he couldn't just turn on the machine that moves the trapeze stuff.

...

NOW it's a real carnival!

Anyway. We're going to take a quick break from the carnival so we can return to the pub.

Remember that pool table we shoved a cat into?



Yep, we're giving the cat fleas. Let's see what that does.



Well, it's not the most evil thing we've done in this game, but still pretty douchey.

But with the cat gone, we can reach inside the table and fetch out two snooker balls - one red, one yellow.

I know what we can do with the red one. Do you?

...

Well, it's gonna have to wait, 'cause we're going to the pub garden first.



That lady right there is a wig trader.



Yes. Yes it is.

I'll skip the not-at-all-funny conversation with her and skip to the chase. We give her the candy floss (NO! I WAS TOTALLY GOING TO EAT THAT!) and she gives us her wig in return.



...let's go get some kid's teeth, shall we? Yeah, that sounds reasonably sane.



Add Child Abuse to the list of crimes this game's made us commit.



Right, so we have our teeth. Our bloody, sticky teeth.



I most certainly hope so, you little cock-bite.

The rest of the fair next time. Hope we don't have to viciously hurt anyone else (though we probably will).

[Darth Marsden]

...and we're back.

Right. Up next is the Test Your Strength game.



Looks like someone's already there.



Ah, the guy who gave us HAMMOR.

Blah blah blah his clan was all wiped out by the dragon, he needs a symbol to restart it, blah blah blah.

Well, the obvious answer is to give back HAMMOR. Symbol found, problem solved.

Oh, but now he wants to win this Test Your Strength game.



...kay.

Naturally though, he's not allowed to HAMMOR on the game.



Like so.

The answer to this actually uses the 3D aspect of the game in an intelligent way.



If you can't tell, what we have to do is stand the other side of the demon and talk to him so that he turns to face us and isn't looking at the game, allowing the dwarf to use HAMMOR on it and win.



Huzzah.



Yeah, the prize was a black T-Shirt, which we promptly take off his hands (well, it wouldn't fit him anyway).

We actually have all we need to go and save the Frog Prince now, but we'll finish going through the fair first.



This one's a ball toss. Could it possibly be rigged?



No idea, but it's turned Simon's sleeve back to red, so that's probably not a good sign.



Well, that should fit...



...oh. Yeah, it's rigged. The ball's too big to actually fit in the hole.



Well, he's got me there.

The solution to this might not come to you immediately, but if you recall, we got two snooker balls. We've used the red one, which leaves us with the yellow one.

Maybe if we swap it with one of the yellow balls the demons give us?



Boosh!

And our prize is...



So now we have what we need to fix Coneman as well.

But the last fairground attraction awaits!



It's a little hard to tell, but this is a water squirting game, or Aqua Derby, as the game calls it.

But before we can actually play it, the demons show up and remind us of everything we've put them through.



This explains SO MUCH.

Ayway. We say we want to play, and since it's a race we need someone to play against.

Fortunately, we've made several evemies over the course of this game, and one such person challenges us.



The Conkers Kid! (The lesser-known relative of the Milky Bar Kid. His outfit may have had something to do with his failure)

After some utterly unfunny banter between him and Simon, the game is on.



...and here it is.

This isn't all that awful, to be honest. We just need to spray whichever of the three holes happens to be open at the time (they open anti-clockwise).

It's not too difficult, and is easily won.



Is... is the Conkers Kid going to the toilet?

Anyway. Our prize for THIS game?



A tub of Toy Soldiers, like what was in the first Toy Story or *shudder* Army Men.

And now we 'technically' have all we need to fix the dead guy as well. Jar Nin, wasn't it? Eh, whatever.

Since we're done with the fair, I need a break to calm down. We'll fix everyone up next time.

Can I get some people posting in this thread please? We're over 100 pictures on this page alone. Thanks.

[ryannumber1gamer]

Maybe for your next picture Let's Play you should do Doctor Who The Eternity Clock

[corruptbiggins]

The fairground bit is one of the better parts of the game. Too bad it's over pretty quickly.