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Sounds like Douglas Adams’ copy protection did it’s job so! He typically published literature along with his games that if you didn’t have made the games frust
by rusk 6y ago
Sounds like Douglas Adams’ copy protection did it’s job so!
He typically published literature along with his games that if you didn’t have made the games frustratingly difficult or even impossible (see bureaucracy).
From the description of the disk you gave id say it’s highly likely you didn’t have access to that.
- duskwuff 6y agoNope. The game just has some really, really obtuse puzzles. Don't pick up the junk mail in the second room? That'll make the Babel Fish puzzle (the one on the Vogon ship) unwinnable. Ate the sandwich in the pub instead of feeding it to the dog? That'll kill you much later in the game. And so on. None of this was hinted at in the "feelies" shipped with the game or in the books; players were expected to figure it out through trial and error. Games in this era were written with the expectation that you'd have to play through them many times to get everything right. It made them last longer (in terms of play time), but also made them incredibly frustrating to play.
- ghaff 6y agoOne of the philosophical issues I have with a lot of IF--which I've actually discussed with the author of this game--is that I feel you should, at least in principle, be able to complete a run through in a game in one try rather than having to make essentially random trial and error choices. Unsurprisingly, he didn't really agree. (Which there are a lot of in Hitchhiker's. Although I didn't really complete that many Infocom games in general.)
- stinkytaco 6y agoDid he give a logic for this? I speculate in the case of this game, the developers and Adams wanted you to experience as much of the story (and humor) as possible. Failing was part of the fun. Is that the case or was it the case for other games?
- ghaff 6y agoNot really. >Failing was part of the fun. I think this is part of it. And I think it's hard to have puzzles of sufficient difficulty that good game players would feel they got their "money's worth" out of a game without less advanced players feeling that puzzles were almost insolvable. (Doesn't mean you should really have puzzles that require trial and error though.) In all fairness to the author, his other games are generally easier and one of them, A Mind Forever Voyaging, really is interactive fiction more than a puzzler.
- EricE 6y agoRE: Failing as part of the fun Same arguments in AARPGs around picking up gold :)
- klodolph 6y agoI don’t think that applied to HHGTTG—it follows the rules of ordinary interactive fiction, and doesn’t need additional explanation. And I wouldn’t call the game difficult. Difficulty implies that there is skill involved. Instead, it’s just a grind getting through the game figuring out a couple things each time you run through it.
- lproven 6y agoThis is not true. Adams only co-wrote 2 adventure games (THHGTTG and Bureaucracy), and arguably a graphical adventure (Starship Titanic) much later. It is not really possible to generalise about "his games," there are so few of them. He was primarily a scriptwriter and reluctant novelist. I own an original boxed copy of this game, and it is the first program I ever ran on an IBM PC back in 1985. There are no significantly helpful clues in the packaging. Source: I am the former president of his appreciation society.