3 ms·
Aha, but there's an added dimension to this Sierra-branded cruelty: A young 8-year-old me, playing Police Quest for the first time. Sits through the briefing.
by disillusioned 2mo ago
Aha, but there's an added dimension to this Sierra-branded cruelty:
A young 8-year-old me, playing Police Quest for the first time. Sits through the briefing. Gets the gun, the ammo, the briefcase, from the locker room. Grabs the car key. Heads out to the parking lot, gets in the car, starts driving... and immediately dies: "you failed to perform the prescribed vehicle walkaround."
A bit of a "gotcha" for sharewareing the game, because said prescription was in a manual I definitely did not own (remember the games that would ask you for, say, the third word of the tenth page of the manual, as a form of DRM? brilliant.)
NO PROBLEM: ASSIGNMENT RECEIVED: I WILL SAVE THE GAME EARLY AND OFTEN!
Begin another playthrough. Lather, rinse, repeat. Play for several hours, carefully save scumming my way to glory: I have built a complex ladder of 10 save slots that I am slowly rotating through. Then the action gets heavier and heavier, and the saves come faster and faster, until the climax of the game, where you have the Death Angel cornered. "Radio for help."
And there it says: "With what radio?"
The one I had left back at the station, I don't know, 10 hours ago? But that's okay, because I can head back to the station and grab it from one of my convenient saves!
No, no I cannot. I have over-indexed and let fear win the day and save scummed myself into oblivion. The earliest save is in a walking-dead state as well. I am toast.
I died a bit that day. A painful lesson for an 8-year-old to learn. As Bennett Foddy says in his Getting Over It soliloquy, "When games were new, they wanted a lot from you; daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone’s turned off by that."
- 13hours 2mo ago"use nightstick" - took me ages. I didn't know what a nightstick was, it's not a term known in my country
- addandsubtract 2mo agoPressing random buttons before you know the language of the game your playing is peak gaming childhood for me.
- hungryhobbit 2mo agoSierra games didn't use random buttons, you had to type phrases :(
- a96 1mo agoMy memory says there's some of them that didn't. Mixed Up Mother Goose, Black Cauldron, and both Manhunter games come to mind. I can be wrong, though. Sierra probably also has a ton of games I don't remember at all. They did a lot of games. A lot.
- wkfauna 2mo agoI legit started learning English from King's Quest 4. One of my first words was "Zounds!".
- Asooka 2mo agoYou could have also learned how to edit the saves to give yourself the radio :) . A tall ask of an 8-year-old of course, but not beyond the realm of possibility. Funny you mention Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It, because that's kind of how I "beat" it. After about 6 years of on and off attempts that always died around the church, I got fed up and edited the physics constants to make the game significantly easier. Since I used my own skill to hack the game and not an outside patch, I consider that "beating" the game in a sense. I am now thinking if you can pull off an adventure game where some puzzles require editing the save file. It would be pretty tricky to make it understandable to most people. Now that I think about it, I wouldn't put it past Deltarune to eventually have an easter egg that can only be reached from a save state, which is impossible to achieve through normal gameplay. I know it doesn't have one right now, because all the scripts have been examined in depth and nothing like that was found.
- dionian 2mo agoi remember using a hex editor to edit save games to give me more in game money. felt like a hacker in a movie :)
- failrate 2mo agoFor me, cracking open the data for some castle adventure ascii character game was one of the first steps to being a real programmer.
- syntheticnature 2mo agoI think I spent more time figuring out how the character save files worked in the original Bard's Tale CRPG than actually playing the game; I certainly made more progress with doing so!
- hungryhobbit 2mo agoWas this on DOS? "ASCII castle adventure game" brings back memories!
- 1mo ago
- jonathanlydall 2mo agoWhile I have genuine sympathy for 8-year-old you, this has made for a thoroughly entertaining story which current you can tell, I and several of my friends I shared it with have laughed thoroughly, one of them remarked: That sounds like me…. Legit, the pre-car inspection and the radio killed me Remember it like it was yesterday Kind of interesting for humans that things like this which at the time are so painful can be amazing to reminisce about years later.
- disillusioned 1mo agoHa! I love this! This is absolutely an "iykyk" situation. I brought this thread up with my brother and he remembered every bit of it as well. Here's a friendly reminder you can play Police Quest in your browser, right now: http://sarien.net/policequest#hq http://sarien.net/policequest#hq
- jghn 2mo agoPerhaps I was always a weirdo but while it did frustrate me when I ran into these I always found it to be an amusing part of the game. So much more so than games requiring specific twitch reflexes or hand eye coordination that I might not be able to pull together. But it probably says something that many of my favorite games back then are described as "punishing" today. Of course these days I wouldn't last 5 minutes if parachuted into one, but I've become soft! The one exception to the above was the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, which can fuck right off.
- smrtinsert 2mo agoEverytime I see a bad guy get cuffed in a movie in the front, I say "nope! the cop can get choked out now!". Thanks Police Quest, you taught us all a little safety that day.
- close04 2mo ago> "When games were new, they wanted a lot from you; daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone’s turned off by that." Most old games had a very short gameplay, single digit hours. They had to be challenging by any means so the player gets their money's worth.
- xnorswap 2mo agoIt blows my mind to go back and look up how long some games such as Sonic 2 actually took, compared to the amount of time I spent failing to complete it in my youth.
- close04 2mo agoI remember taking forever to finish the 1993 version of The Punisher on an arcade machine, and never managed at all for the 1991 NES version, only to finish them in probably 1h in an emulator with about a bazillion coins/retries :).
- expedition32 1mo agoYeah I played Grim Fandango with a guide and clocked something like 8 hours. There was also the conspiracy that publishers made a lot of money with selling strategy guides back in the days.
- boredhedgehog 2mo agoThe final scene in PQ1, where you're incognito? I'm pretty sure you don't need a radio there, or are even allowed to have one. You get searched before they let you into the poker room. Instead you get a hidden pen transmitter from the cops in your hotel room.
- disillusioned 1mo agoNot the poker room... the... park? In the bushes? You're asking a lot of eight-year-old me's memory here, man.
- boredhedgehog 1mo agoJust trying to sort out the details. I think any story, even a funny one, improves when the facts are correct. The scene in the park indeed requires the radio. It's not very climactic though; you're just arresting some drug dealer, not confronting Death Angel.
- im3w1l 2mo agoThis is why you dont use linear save frequency. 5 min, 10 min, half an hour, one hour, two hours etc
- a96 1mo agoI still do this. Save in a new slot when I start something new and cycle between a few slots as I go along. I'm sure I wouldn't need that with most newer games and I rarely if ever jump back to undo something, but somehow I feel like any of those saves could become corrupted at any time or I could be soft-locked somewhere.
- expedition32 1mo agoIf anyone wonders why adventure games died...
- frandroid 1mo agoLucasArts kept them alive for a few more years :) But also, you die aplenty in a FPS game.