OOTS #1179 - The Discussion Thread

[Peelee]

This is the first I've heard of it being anything except the other thing.

Didn't have enough fun in college, I take it?

[Rogar Demonblud]

Anyway, for me, text adventures were like six years after what I'd call early games. Those was more along the lines of Archon, M.U.L.E., Millipede, Mail Order Monsters, Gorf, Joust, Dig Dug, Boulder Dash.

Darnit, now you're reminding me how many quarters I spent at Arcade Away in my single digit years. Dig Dug, Space Invaders, Q*Bert, Frogger, later Galaga and Spy Hunter...

Good times.

[dmc91356]

If we're delving into really old games for the Apple, I remember when I got Taipan! back in the very early '80's - anyone play that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taipan!

[factotum]

If we're delving into really old games for the Apple, I remember when I got Taipan! back in the very early '80's - anyone play that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taipan!

You put the ! outside the URL so you've just linked to a snake, not the game.

[The Pilgrim]

I was always more a Space Quest guy myself-- Space Quest III and King's Quest IV were the first two graphic adventures I played, and I had a lot more fun with the former.

Well, as I said earlier, KQIV was a weird departure from the genre. It was Roberta's first shot at a game with a female protagonist and, according to her own words, she attempted to make it appealing for female audiences.

Apparently, that involved no killing ("you are not a violent person, Rosella"), no stealing ("a proper lady doesn't steals"), treating the NPCs as if they were people with feelings, and cleaning up the houses of random strangers from dirt instead of from valuables.

I liked it because forcing you to behave like a civil person was a very weird departure from the genre. But you have a point in that as a first game it would feel too bland.

As for humor, Sierra's best IMHO was the first Leisure Suit Larry, perhaps the only game from Sierra that could compete and even outclass LucasArt's classics in terms of humor. For example, after 30 years I still use the "was 'Tuesday' a good year?" line every time I posture as a wine connoisseur. It never gets old. Another thing I leart from that game is to never, ever, get a Taxi if you are carrying a bottle of booze. Safety first. And I still believe Sergeant Pepper was hung for treason.

[Riftwolf]

I remember seeing something like that on the Apple II at the library in middle school...Montezuma's Revenge, maybe?

No, looking at the graphics for Apple II I'm remembering the wrong computer. We had a Apple II with text adventures (in one either I got killed by an eye stalk, or the game crashed, either was possible), it was the other better computer with the gem collecting game. The graphics would've been closer to Amiga era stuff?

The forums have finally diverted to a topic useful to me, I'm not passing the opportunity!

[NNescio]

Er, actually, it's Wisdom for DC and Charisma for casting and bonus slots.

...Yes? That's why I said it's MAD.

Also, since by default Favored Souls get proficiency as well as Weapon Focus and Weapon Specialization in their deity's favored weapon for free, plus they get more spells known than Sorcerers and the Cleric list has a lot of good buffs, they make quite good "gishes", the common term for characters who both cast spells and beat face.

Sorcs can get by with fewer spells known because arcane spells are more flexible and they don't have to pay "spell taxes" on the countless Remove [Very Specific Status Condition] spells (which a Cleric can just prep no problem when needed) that a party expects from a primary divine caster.

Cleric can gish better, even without DMM. There's a reason why Clericzilla is a thing.

Though yeah, the FS is still a T2 class, making it better than a significant majority of classes. Only problem is Cleric envy, and unlike the (splatbook-powered) Sorc the FS doesn't get any notable* exclusives to make up for it.

(*Strong and/or thematically outstanding.)

[Reboot]

Oh very, but this is written form so you can't weasel your way out with the fact it sounds identical (unless every use of it until mine is replaced by an audio file of someone saying Montezuma).

Take it up with the Windy Canyon :p

[Schroeswald]

Take it up with the Windy Canyon :p

That’s in a comedy strip, we are discussing this in a dramatic forum, the rules are different.

[Jasdoif]

If we're delving into really old games for the Apple, I remember when I got Taipan! back in the very early '80's - anyone play that?

No, but the description sounds a heck of a lot like the original Tradewinds...and now I see that Tradewinds' self-describing paragraph mentions "Tai-Pan" as the highest title, so it's probably not a coincidence. (The Tradewinds series wouldn't really find and take off in its niche until Tradewinds Legends found its persistent comedic undertones...but I digress)

Seeing as we're talking old games...
There was a platform game we had on the computer (Apple II maybe) in primary school (late 80s-early 90s) where you had to collect gems from round a tomb. If you showed me a screenshot I'd recognise it straight away, but I never learnt the name of it; it was deleted when the teachers discovered when you quit the game it swore at you. I remember it having far better graphics than any other game of the time. Any ideas what it could've been?

I remember seeing something like that on the Apple II at the library in middle school...Montezuma's Revenge, maybe?

No, looking at the graphics for Apple II I'm remembering the wrong computer. We had a Apple II with text adventures (in one either I got killed by an eye stalk, or the game crashed, either was possible), it was the other better computer with the gem collecting game. The graphics would've been closer to Amiga era stuff?

Hmm. As I'm sure you can imagine, "finding gems in a tomb" isn't an uncommon concept, and platformers were pretty common at the time.

Given that most Atari ST games I know about were also ported to/from the Amiga....The closest I can think of are the mine level in Impossamole (which wasn't a tomb), Count Duckula (which didn't involve gems), and the Egyptian-themed levels in Time Bandit (one of my favorites, but which wasn't a platformer).

[Ruck]

Didn't have enough fun in college, I take it?

We, ah, we had moved past tequila shots to other types of "fun."

[Peelee]

We, ah, we had moved past tequila shots to other types of "fun."

So what you're saying is I didn't have enough fun in college!

[Arathorne]

So what you're saying is I didn't have enough fun in college!

Peelee, based on where you live currently and where you may have gone to college, if in that state, and the years you attended college, you may not have had as much fun

[Riftwolf]

No, but the description sounds a heck of a lot like the original Tradewinds...and now I see that Tradewinds' self-describing paragraph mentions "Tai-Pan" as the highest title, so it's probably not a coincidence. (The Tradewinds series wouldn't really find and take off in its niche until Tradewinds Legends found its persistent comedic undertones...but I digress)

Hmm. As I'm sure you can imagine, "finding gems in a tomb" isn't an uncommon concept, and platformers were pretty common at the time.

You were a kid archaeologist and I think you had to collect gems to open portals back home? I'm trying to remember if I ever actually played it or if the older years stopped me because they wanted to play it and so I just watched.
I should probably resign myself to the fact I'll probably never find out what that game was and take counsel from Wyclef and the Rock on how much this should concern me.

[Gnoman]

You are right in that most text-based adventure games were quite obnioux. But Sierra made a good work with their AGI, allowing you a good amount of command variants to perform the actions and you didn't felt frustrated by the parser itself. I think it's a pity they discontinued it after King's Quest IV in favor of a graphical interface. I understand they had to do it to keep up with the times as they needed to keep their games marketeable (and make them translatable to other languages), but still King's Quest V didn't feel the same to me.

Reminder: King's Quest 2 features a puzzle solution so unintuitive that the official novelization had to pass it off as an accident, while Leisure Suit Larry 2 (which is technically SCI rather than AGI, but still parser driven) is nearly impossible to complete due to a game-breaking parser bug. Sierra was a landscape of bad design (although the games by Al Lowe, the Coles, and others weren't nearly as bad as what Williams came up with - she never seemed to grasp that "what makes sense to Roberta Williams" and "what makes sense to anybody else" were not equivalent statements, and wasn't good at viewing things from the player's perspective because she didn't play computer games). By the time Kings Quest came along, Sierra was raking in cash - Mystery House was bringing in five figures a month shortly after publication, and The Wizard And The Princess was an even bigger hit. They could have fixed the problems with their design process - they just didn't. It wasn't until 1988 that they even had any dedicated bugtesters.

[Ruck]

Well, as I said earlier, KQIV was a weird departure from the genre. It was Roberta's first shot at a game with a female protagonist and, according to her own words, she attempted to make it appealing for female audiences.

Apparently, that involved no killing ("you are not a violent person, Rosella"), no stealing ("a proper lady doesn't steals"), treating the NPCs as if they were people with feelings, and cleaning up the houses of random strangers from dirt instead of from valuables.

I liked it because forcing you to behave like a civil person was a very weird departure from the genre. But you have a point in that as a first game it would feel too bland.

As for humor, Sierra's best IMHO was the first Leisure Suit Larry, perhaps the only game from Sierra that could compete and even outclass LucasArt's classics in terms of humor. For example, after 30 years I still use the "was 'Tuesday' a good year?" line every time I posture as a wine connoisseur. It never gets old. Another thing I leart from that game is to never, ever, get a Taxi if you are carrying a bottle of booze. Safety first. And I still believe Sergeant Pepper was hung for treason.

I did enjoy the Leisure Suit Larry games eventually, but I was too young when they first came out. Space Quest was just right for the goofy sense of humor that I appreciated as a kid (and still have; my comedy palette is just broader now).

So what you're saying is I didn't have enough fun in college!

Well... maybe, but again, keep in mind that "fun" is definitely relative. A lot of it was not fun.

Peelee, based on where you live currently and where you may have gone to college, if in that state, and the years you attended college, you may not have had as much fun

I dunno, I've heard some of the colleges in the area have a lot of fun.

(Funny enough, I remember reading in one recent list-- maybe US News & World Report-- ranking quality of life in cities, Birmingham scored very high. I assume because of relatively low cost of living + good NASA jobs.)

[Rogar Demonblud]

All of this talk about old games makes me wish I still had my old NES. Then again, I can't remember the last time I saw a coaxial cable, so I probably couldn't hook it up anyway.

[Ruck]

All of this talk about old games makes me wish I still had my old NES. Then again, I can't remember the last time I saw a coaxial cable, so I probably couldn't hook it up anyway.

You could get one of these.

(I actually replaced my old NES with the NES-101 model in 1993. It lasted quite a while. I really dug the design and the new controllers, even if it was too late in the NES' life cycle for it to have much impact.)

[The Pilgrim]

Reminder: King's Quest 2 features a puzzle solution so unintuitive that the official novelization had to pass it off as an accident(...)

Wait, what? Now you have picked my curiosity, because that was the first text game I ever played, and I do not remember having any problem to solve it, as a 10 years old child, beyond some language barriers that my handy pocket dictionary used to solve. All the puzzles made sense to me.

[Gnoman]

All of this talk about old games makes me wish I still had my old NES. Then again, I can't remember the last time I saw a coaxial cable, so I probably couldn't hook it up anyway.

The original model of NES (not the toploader, which is thus inferior) supported composite video via a RCA port on the side of the unit, which most TVs still support. Unfortunately, modern TVs are really, really bad at analog-to-digital conversion, and upscaling takes time as well. Unless you have a really nice TV, using an older console with a flatscreen induces significant lag. This means that retro collecting either requires you to buy an expensive upscaling unit, or else find a CRT.


That said, the old hardware isn't that expensive, although a fair number of the games are getting up there.

Wait, what? Now you have picked my curiosity, because that was the first text game I ever played, and I do not remember having any problem to solve it, as a 10 years old child, beyond some language barriers that my handy pocket dictionary used to solve.

At one point in the game, you encounter a snake. You have a sword in your inventory, the description of which even includes a snake. Obviously, you kill the snake with the sword, right?



You can kill the snake to get past it, but that hurts you later. Instead, you get a bridle from a genie, then throw the bridle at the snake. The snake turns into a winged horse, which gives you a magic sugar cube. The magic sugar cube nullifies poison, allowing you to survive a scratch from the poisonous thorns guarding Dracula's castle.

[Peelee]

(Funny enough, I remember reading in one recent list-- maybe US News & World Report-- ranking quality of life in cities, Birmingham scored very high. I assume because of relatively low cost of living + good NASA jobs.)

Huntsville's got NASA, that's a good two hours away. Birmingham is the one with world-class medical facilities and research. UAB is the States second largest employer, only behind the military (which, really, will be #1 in about every state) with almost 20,000 employees. Spoiler alert, most of them are in the med school and hospital system.

The city is a bastion of civilization in an otherwise hellish landscape of heat and poverty and more heat. With, yes, crazy low cost of loving comparatively. My house came with a free house. And it's a fairly nice house already.

[The Pilgrim]

At one point in the game, you encounter a snake. You have a sword in your inventory, the description of which even includes a snake. Obviously, you kill the snake with the sword, right?

Yes. You can bet I did it. Took me like two seconds to figure it out, back then. You can also use the sword to kill the Lion warding Valanice's prison room, but it's more elegant and yields more points to feed him the ham you got at Dracula's Castle.

You can kill the snake to get past it, but that hurts you later. Instead, you get a bridle from a genie, then throw the bridle at the snake. The snake turns into a winged horse, which gives you a magic sugar cube. The magic sugar cube nullifies poison, allowing you to survive a scratch from the poisonous thorns guarding Dracula's castle.

You can survive the poisonous thorns by just crossing the path carefully, at the slowest speed. The people at Sierra loved those kind of "one step out of the path and you are dead" things. There was one almost the same at the beggining of Space Quest II, to get past an alien plant that would eat you if you stepped on it's roots.

That bridle and snake thing was counter-intuitive, but it was not required to complete the game, and had a straight, logical alternative solution. Just like the Ifnkovhgroghprm I mentioned earlier, in the original KQ. If you didn't guess it, instead of the magic beans the gnome would give you a key to open a door to a stairway to the Land of the Clouds. So, yes, the riddle was infamous, but you didn't need to solve it in order to complete the game. It was just a bonus.

[Squire Doodad]

You guys are all fussing about games from decades upon decades ago in the olden days and I'm just dumbstruck by the fact that FF4 is a lot of fun yet came out before I was born (I mean, 1991 was a long time ago by now).

[dmc91356]

The city is a bastion of civilization in an otherwise hellish landscape of heat and poverty and more heat. With, yes, crazy low cost of loving comparatively. My house came with a free house. And it's a fairly nice house already.

I am intrigued as to how one measures the cost of loving, let along being able to compare it to others. Is it some sort of inverse of a divorce lawyer's hourly rate?

[The Pilgrim]

You guys are all fussing about games from decades upon decades ago in the olden days and I'm just dumbstruck by the fact that FF4 is a lot of fun yet came out before I was born (I mean, 1991 was a long time ago by now).

Luckly for you, we are not elves, or we would be talking about games from centuries ago.

[The MunchKING]

Luckly for you, we are not elves, or we would be talking about games from centuries ago.

Checkers is SUCH a broken game, Amiright?

[Jasdoif]

Checkers is SUCH a broken game, Amiright?

It's pretty good in its niche. Now Tic-Tac-Toe, that's a broken, repetitive, overly simplistic game; wholly dependent on system mastery while pretending it's based on actual skill. Can you believe they flat-out copied noughts and crosses and still failed to improve anything about it?

[Peelee]

I am intrigued as to how one measures the cost of loving, let along being able to compare it to others. Is it some sort of inverse of a divorce lawyer's hourly rate?

It's at a fixed 1:1 ratio to the cost of living.

[CriticalFailure]

Luckly for you, we are not elves, or we would be talking about games from centuries ago.

chess is fun but I suck major *ss at it

[The Pilgrim]

chess is fun but I suck major *ss at it

I stopped playing chess after they changed how the Queen moved.