The puzzel lvl of the new game

ba-dum *chinnge*

Yeah I love being stuck on a puzzle..having to walk away..take a break from the game..and then while you are doin somethin else..an idea hits you..so you rush back and see if it works.. I don't think I've had to do that while playing a game since grim fandango..

Yeah i did that once. I was in the shower and it hit me! So i ran over to the computer *in a towel* and put in the game and I tried it. And it worked. Yay!

*sigh*

I'm never going to live this down.

Don't dispair!
Those games still exist, are more than playable, and offer a very rewarding sense of gratification once completed.

If you get the chance, they're well worth looking into (as I'm sure other people have already told you)

Oh yeah and Discworld 1/2 are perfect examples of fiendishly hard puzzle solving. I want a game not a point and click talking picture book.

There -is- quite a big grey area between 'fiendishly hard puzzles' and 'talking picture book', you know.

Do it; get them off eBay or something.

I think SCUMVMM or whatever it's called allows you to play the older Lucasarts adventure games on Windows XP

Wow, what are you doing here then? If you've got those three games to play and more, you won't need anything else for a while. Discworld and Full Throttle aren't really that long, but DoTT'll have you playing for ages. If I recall correct.

I'm here because I am a huge fan of adventure games, and want the genre to start living again.


But can't you just put a "spoilers inside" on threads like these? I hate the arrogance of people who think it's their right to spoil things for other people.

But can't you just put a "spoilers inside" on threads like these? I hate the arrogance of people who think it's their right to spoil things for other people.

Fair enough. Oh, and at the end of the game giant martians come down from outer space and zap everyone with their ray-guns, then the whole world blows up.

(I make a joke)

[Emily]

I have the games. I'm playing Sam & Max with ScummVM right now.

Just don't have enough hours in the day...

[jp-30]

Do it at work and call it 'research'.

My thoughts exactly.

Yeah I love being stuck on a puzzle..having to walk away..take a break from the game..and then while you are doin somethin else..an idea hits you..so you rush back and see if it works.. I don't think I've had to do that while playing a game since grim fandango..

Yeah thats why that game was pure unadulterated fried gold.
"Just a drop'll do ya!"

I don't think I've ever finished an adventure game without referring to the walkthrough at least half the game.

[Pvt._Public]

I tend to have a walkthrough nearby just in case of any puzzles which leave me stuck for more than an hour. Most of the time I simply rant and rave for 15 minutes while swearing at the filthy impossible cheating game before leaving it for another 15 minutes then rushing back after getting an idea while making a sandwich or something. But sometimes you get games where you miss an item because it is carefully hidden in amongst a huge pile of similar objects and is about 3 pixels high. *Cough* Runaway */Cough*.

That said, I managed to get through all of the old SCUMM games without consulting a walkthrough 'cept for The Dig and Day of the Tentacle. Just took me a while. But that's cool. Harder puzzles means more time spent clicking on everything and really exploring the game. Instead of clicking three places in one room and missing out on a whole lot of cool stuff. And this is Sam and Max. There's bound to be a whole lot of laughs to be had simply by listening to whatever Sam has to say about a semingly innocent sock stuck on a pole (or something similar. I'm guessing what'll be in the game. Or am I?).

No using a monkey to turn a spigot to shut off a waterfall.

*twitch*

Of all the puzzles in all the games over all the years... Thats the one thats still burned in my mind with unfettered rage.

Curse you monkey, curse you.

Weird. I didn't know at the time what the English word for that particular tool was. When I learned that it was a 'monkey wrench', I knew what to do instantly.

No, I think the most baffling puzzle that had me stumped for weeks was "If this is 2... and this is 5... then what's this?"

[Alucard]

I enjoy hard puzzles like that. Sure there are times when you get annoyed but there is so much more satisfaction when you figure it out. I can remember being stuck in monkey island II a few times but the game is probably in my top 3 adventure games of all time.

Yeah, puzzles in Monkey 2, like the fingers, or the spitting contest. The first time I played through the game I got through them, eventually, just by keeping trying at them until I did it. It was only later that I realised there was a method in the madness.

Some time later, after finding out from a walkthrough how to win the spitting contest properly, I was at Elaine's party, and realised two of the people there give away a massive clue how to do it.

For some reason I look back at puzzles like that fondly, and remember how clever they were, rather than curse how difficult they were to solve.

Someties you can admire a puzzle for how clever it was, and how much sense it made when you understood it. Even if you couldn't solve it yourself.

Yeah, overall MI2 was a really clever game.

See I don't think of it as 'clever' as contextually clever. I see those as 'Look at how clever I am as a designer'.

Sort of the designers way of showing you the player how smart they are.

It's a trap designers fall in and one you have to try really hard to avoid. When you're putting some sort of puzzle into a game you really need to stop and think about your audience.

Now that has absolutely nothing to do with difficulty. It has to do with being obscure. Sort of like conversing with someone that insists on making obscure literary quotes from books that they know no one has read. They do it because if no one gets it they feel like it makes them smarter.

You can make a puzzle 'clever' and difficult and not make it obscure. Trail it with enough clues so that someone who doesn't get it will eventually figure it out, and someone thats thinking more along your lines will recognize sooner.

Yup. Like the RASP in Sam & Max: Hit the Road. I had never heard of a RASP before. RASP? What is that?!

Anyway, I like a puzzle that if I DON'T figure it out immediately, the game provides enough pointers to get me there. Like if I'm really TRYING to figure it out, there should be something somewhere to point me in the right direction.

It's when the puzzle completely loses track with what I'm thinking that I get despondent and stop playing. I sometimes just don't get the bigger picture. When I see the solution, sometimes I think 'Okay, now how the hell was I supposed to think of that?' If, by some fluke, I DO use MAX with the dimly-lit 'TUNNEL OF LOVE'S' electrical box, I feel like a real genius...but these moments are few and far between. I only go forward to reveal more cool animations of speeches of backgrounds or clickable things or maybe even story. For HIT THE ROAD I just really wanted to see the MAX put his hand inside the cat and pull out a note, I wanted to see THE WHEEL OF TRAGEDY IN ACTION, I wanted to see MAX bounce on TRIXIE'S bed, and I wanted to see THE WORLD'S LARGEST BALL OF TWINE, and I wanted to see the one shot where SAM is holding MAX over the edge of the BALL OF TWINE restaurant. I bought the game for that. I'm sure the marketers didn;t expect those to be big selling points, but hey. Oh, and the screenshot of GATOR GOLD on the box...I loved that. And the BOX ART.