4 ms·

The only good AGI. Impressive fitting into the machine. I wonder if SCI would be possible?

bzzzt 2mo ago
Only with some serious downgrading of the assets. I remember playing SCI games on an 8MHz XT class PC and everything ran dog slow. Some SCI games had optional animations that didn't play on a slow machine.
stuaxo 2mo ago
Now this is an AGI I can get behind.
aidenn0 2mo ago
AGI was an impressive game engine. It's just a shame it was wasted on so many bad games.
- JoshTriplett 2mo ago
  Some of them weren't wildly worse than the era. I think many old games substituted punishing difficulty for depth, so that they'd have more staying power. That was true of some of the early NES games as well.
  - aidenn0 2mo ago
    I agree that they weren't terrible for the era, but they weren't great either. I'll pick on SQ1, since that's the highlight of TFA. Obtaining the Jetpack is not just punishingly difficult, even once you get to the point where you know you need a jetpack there are zero hints where you might obtain one; the only solution is to replay the game and try random things differently than the first time you played through.
    - JoshTriplett 2mo ago
      Yeah, agreed. Many games did the same, but that didn't make it good. On the "cruelty scale", that'd be a "Cruel", since it has a "walking dead" state of "you did it wrong a while back and have to start over": https://eblong.com/zarf/essays/cruelty.html https://eblong.com/zarf/essays/cruelty.html (and https://eblong.com/zarf/essays/cruelty-revisited.html https://eblong.com/zarf/essays/cruelty-revisited.html ) Early King's Quest games were in that same category of "Cruel", where an incorrect choice is not immediately obvious as a mistake. I think King's Quest V was closer to "Nasty" (because it can catch you off guard with things you fail, but it'll be obvious that you did something wrong). But there are a couple of exceptions that keep it in "Cruel", though: you can eat the wrong item when you're starving, and in some cases if you miss picking up an item you can't go back for it, so if you didn't see it at all then you have to go back to an earlier save. That one definitely required keeping a full array of save files. (Very satisfying to complete, though.) Even King's Quest VI, which is much more forgiving, has some cases of "you need the right item before proceeding into this section you won't be able to leave (for a while)". But it goes out of its way to advertise those "points of no return", so I'd rate it firmly at "Nasty" rather than "Cruel", with the asterisk that there are ~3 notable points where you might have to go back by more than just your most recent action, but it'll be obvious you want save points at those points to go back to if you find you can't progress inside. (Before the catacombs, before the land of the dead, before entering the castle.) The entry to the catacombs even offers you the chance to go prepare further, if and only if you don't have everything you need.
      - vunderba 2mo ago
        KQ4 suffers many of the same issues. 1. Reach location A. 2. You need to "get equipped with Item X" here, though it's for a future puzzle you haven't even encountered yet, so you don't even realize you need said item. 3. Reach location B with the puzzle. 4. Realize you don't have the item required. 5. Location A is permanently inaccessible, so you can't even go back and look for it.
      - aidenn0 2mo ago
        The cruelty scale is somewhat orthogonal to difficulty, and misses another axis; you can have punishingly difficult puzzles seem to have logic, and punishingly difficult puzzles that do not. Ending up in "walking dead" with no hints that you are in that state means "Cruel" but it's different depending on where things go next. If the guy buying your skimmer in SQ1 had a visible jetpack, then once you know you need a jetpack later in the game, you have a hint as to where to go back to. This would make it just a slightly more cruel form of "trial by death" (which was kind of expected in a lot of early adventure games). w.r.t KQ5, not saving the mouse from the cat is something that will get you if you haven't played enough Sierra games to know that missing a single random event with a short timer is likely enough to render the game unwinnable; when I played it I just said "damn, I think I need to reload" when the mouse died. IIRC there are no hints in the cellar that saving the mouse would have helped you, but I could be wrong.

bzzzt 2mo ago

Only with some serious downgrading of the assets. I remember playing SCI games on an 8MHz XT class PC and everything ran dog slow. Some SCI games had optional animations that didn't play on a slow machine.

stuaxo 2mo ago

Now this is an AGI I can get behind.

aidenn0 2mo ago

AGI was an impressive game engine. It's just a shame it was wasted on so many bad games.

JoshTriplett 2mo ago
Some of them weren't wildly worse than the era. I think many old games substituted punishing difficulty for depth, so that they'd have more staying power. That was true of some of the early NES games as well.
- aidenn0 2mo ago
  I agree that they weren't terrible for the era, but they weren't great either. I'll pick on SQ1, since that's the highlight of TFA. Obtaining the Jetpack is not just punishingly difficult, even once you get to the point where you know you need a jetpack there are zero hints where you might obtain one; the only solution is to replay the game and try random things differently than the first time you played through.
  - JoshTriplett 2mo ago
    Yeah, agreed. Many games did the same, but that didn't make it good. On the "cruelty scale", that'd be a "Cruel", since it has a "walking dead" state of "you did it wrong a while back and have to start over": https://eblong.com/zarf/essays/cruelty.html https://eblong.com/zarf/essays/cruelty.html (and https://eblong.com/zarf/essays/cruelty-revisited.html https://eblong.com/zarf/essays/cruelty-revisited.html ) Early King's Quest games were in that same category of "Cruel", where an incorrect choice is not immediately obvious as a mistake. I think King's Quest V was closer to "Nasty" (because it can catch you off guard with things you fail, but it'll be obvious that you did something wrong). But there are a couple of exceptions that keep it in "Cruel", though: you can eat the wrong item when you're starving, and in some cases if you miss picking up an item you can't go back for it, so if you didn't see it at all then you have to go back to an earlier save. That one definitely required keeping a full array of save files. (Very satisfying to complete, though.) Even King's Quest VI, which is much more forgiving, has some cases of "you need the right item before proceeding into this section you won't be able to leave (for a while)". But it goes out of its way to advertise those "points of no return", so I'd rate it firmly at "Nasty" rather than "Cruel", with the asterisk that there are ~3 notable points where you might have to go back by more than just your most recent action, but it'll be obvious you want save points at those points to go back to if you find you can't progress inside. (Before the catacombs, before the land of the dead, before entering the castle.) The entry to the catacombs even offers you the chance to go prepare further, if and only if you don't have everything you need.
    - vunderba 2mo ago
      KQ4 suffers many of the same issues. 1. Reach location A. 2. You need to "get equipped with Item X" here, though it's for a future puzzle you haven't even encountered yet, so you don't even realize you need said item. 3. Reach location B with the puzzle. 4. Realize you don't have the item required. 5. Location A is permanently inaccessible, so you can't even go back and look for it.
    - aidenn0 2mo ago
      The cruelty scale is somewhat orthogonal to difficulty, and misses another axis; you can have punishingly difficult puzzles seem to have logic, and punishingly difficult puzzles that do not. Ending up in "walking dead" with no hints that you are in that state means "Cruel" but it's different depending on where things go next. If the guy buying your skimmer in SQ1 had a visible jetpack, then once you know you need a jetpack later in the game, you have a hint as to where to go back to. This would make it just a slightly more cruel form of "trial by death" (which was kind of expected in a lot of early adventure games). w.r.t KQ5, not saving the mouse from the cat is something that will get you if you haven't played enough Sierra games to know that missing a single random event with a short timer is likely enough to render the game unwinnable; when I played it I just said "damn, I think I need to reload" when the mouse died. IIRC there are no hints in the cellar that saving the mouse would have helped you, but I could be wrong.