"Feldhamer, Stuart" wrote: > > First of all, there was the novelty. At first it was pretty cool to be able > to see your character on the screen.
That is 90% of it right there. I can't see any other reason. > Second, the animations. Even in their first game, KQ1, Sierra animated stuff > like swimming. In later games, when you try to perform an action, you can > actually see yourself doing it. Contrast this with seeing a picture of a > snake in front of you and typing "kill snake with rock" and then the game > responds with "The snake is dead", and it just disappears from the screen. > >From a puzzle perspective this is fine, but from an entertainment > perspective, I like being able to see what the character is doing. But the animations were incredibly crude because the sprites were inexplicably limited to half-horizontal-resolution sprites! And so were the backgrounds! I originally thought this would be for a speed increase or storage requirement decrease -- but on closer examination, the text boxes that pop up show that the game is running in 320x200, which is not half-horiz-res. And since the game backgrounds were all vector graphics, it would not have taken up that much more space to hold 320x200 coordinates. It drove me nuts to see, game after game, graphics created and displayed at 160x200 running in a 320x200 graphics mode! I swear, if I ever get in contact with Jeff Stephenson I am going to throttle that guy :-) I would LOVE to ask him why he designed the entire thing in low-res when all the output devices were regular res. > Third, the action sequences. OK, I didn't actually like this, but the > addition of the 3D movement allowed Sierra to put in such "challenging" > tasks as making sure you didn't fall off the bridge into the moat, or > running away from the dwarf. This was much much more of a hinderance than providing any actual benefit. Like climbing the beanstalk/walking up the stairs to the ogre -- remember how many times you had to go over that sequence over and over before you got it right? You had about 12 pixels leeway before the game was over. > Which tree do you mean, the 1st tree, the 2nd tree, the 3rd tree, the 4th > tree....etc. I have never encountered that, but then again I've only played about 7 IF games to completion. Still, I find it hard to believe that the creators of the game would allow something like that to get in the way of playing. > OK, maybe not such a great example. But when I played Kings Quest 2 for the > 1st time (the 1st Kings Quest I played), I was always typing "LOOK DOWN". > This actually gave logical responses based upon where on the screen you were > standing. So it might say "You see nothing of note" or "You see a hollow > stump". I found that cool also. In general, I think they did a fairly good > job with the system. But that was so much extra effort! Walk, type, walk, type, walk, type... > I will admit though, that it's more fun to click on a spot on the screen > with the mouse and have the character move there automatically (and start to > interact with something), than to first have to move the character with the > arrow keys and then type something in. Sierra eventually realized that too. > So maybe its original AGI system was ahead of its time, waiting for mice to > become popular. Based on the 160x200 argument, I am having a hard time believing it was ahead of it's time. :-) And vector graphics were the *only* game in town for IF+G games until about 1986. -- Jim Leonard ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
