10 ms·

Did anyone actually beat games of this class 100% without cheating? The whole era of Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Indiana Jones, etc had so many random little

Did anyone actually beat games of this class 100% without cheating? The whole era of Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Indiana Jones, etc had so many random little "make this thing interact with that thing" I know as a kid I had to occasionally look up the answer. I did beat Myst without cheating, which felt like it was a different type of product because there was always a logical answer once the puzzle clicked, whereas the old Lucas Film games had so much randomness. I hope/wonder if they will tweak the mechanics on this new release.

noufalibrahim 5y ago
Games back then without access to walkthroughs on the net were genuine puzzles that one spent weeks over. Ideas popped into ones head after a night of trying out various things and it was genuinely satisfying. I hated making genuine progress and then being blocked because of lack of some copyright protection codes from a manual (mostly Sierra games). It was a more complex albeit a simpler time.
- psyc 5y ago
  Or you racked up a $300 phone bill dialing 1-900-4SIERRA and got grounded for 2 months.
DrBoring 5y ago
I beat all the Lucasfilm classics them without looking anything up. I think Loom was the hardest for me.
- chestervonwinch 5y ago
  dear lord, I couldn't do loom. I got stuck too long and too often.
kristiandupont 5y ago
As a non-native English speaking teenager, I can attest that I spent at least a month on "figuring out" (i.e. basically trying everything on everything) the monkey wrench puzzle. It wasn't until years later that I learned that it actually made any sense!
syntheweave 5y ago
With adventure games, some people are just very persistent and can guess what the designer was thinking. While the apparent search space can seem huge, trial and error(use all verbs including the look-at; use all item combos), reordering actions, and pixel hunts eventually defeat everything except the puzzles where search space has been deliberately inflated(secret code puzzles, infinite mazes etc). The Lucasarts games were not the hardest in the genre by any means. By the time they came along there was a huge legacy from both Infocom and Sierra and those also had parser issues(you wouldn't be able to trial-and-error verbs or nouns without sitting down with a dictionary) and softlocking events(don't eat that custard pie, King Graham, you might need it later). It's interesting to compare with Japanese adventures, which gravitated towards a straightforward menu of choice actions by the late 80's but mostly stayed in first person instead of using an onscreen avatar, and from there, visual novels became a standard gameplay style. (It takes a lot less animation to show first person scenes, and many of the titles were targeting the higher-res display tech of PC-88/PC-98, which might have something to do with it) The Ace Attorney games are good examples of this style of game, and they have a particular strategy of focusing on one style of interaction at a time(separate scenes for investigation and trial).

noufalibrahim 5y ago

Games back then without access to walkthroughs on the net were genuine puzzles that one spent weeks over. Ideas popped into ones head after a night of trying out various things and it was genuinely satisfying. I hated making genuine progress and then being blocked because of lack of some copyright protection codes from a manual (mostly Sierra games). It was a more complex albeit a simpler time.

psyc 5y ago
Or you racked up a $300 phone bill dialing 1-900-4SIERRA and got grounded for 2 months.

DrBoring 5y ago

I beat all the Lucasfilm classics them without looking anything up. I think Loom was the hardest for me.

chestervonwinch 5y ago
dear lord, I couldn't do loom. I got stuck too long and too often.

kristiandupont 5y ago

As a non-native English speaking teenager, I can attest that I spent at least a month on "figuring out" (i.e. basically trying everything on everything) the monkey wrench puzzle. It wasn't until years later that I learned that it actually made any sense!

syntheweave 5y ago

With adventure games, some people are just very persistent and can guess what the designer was thinking. While the apparent search space can seem huge, trial and error(use all verbs including the look-at; use all item combos), reordering actions, and pixel hunts eventually defeat everything except the puzzles where search space has been deliberately inflated(secret code puzzles, infinite mazes etc). The Lucasarts games were not the hardest in the genre by any means. By the time they came along there was a huge legacy from both Infocom and Sierra and those also had parser issues(you wouldn't be able to trial-and-error verbs or nouns without sitting down with a dictionary) and softlocking events(don't eat that custard pie, King Graham, you might need it later). It's interesting to compare with Japanese adventures, which gravitated towards a straightforward menu of choice actions by the late 80's but mostly stayed in first person instead of using an onscreen avatar, and from there, visual novels became a standard gameplay style. (It takes a lot less animation to show first person scenes, and many of the titles were targeting the higher-res display tech of PC-88/PC-98, which might have something to do with it) The Ace Attorney games are good examples of this style of game, and they have a particular strategy of focusing on one style of interaction at a time(separate scenes for investigation and trial).