Karl Kuras wrote: > > Now your main gripe seems to be with the fact that you can't just be in a > room and say I want to do X. This was at first mainly a technical problem > of doing pathfinding routines (notice that later Sierra and Lucasarts games > all take care of this for you automatically through mouse controls. KQ1 was > meant to be played with a joystick or keyboard, so you didn't have a mouse > to point at stuff and intereact with it through icons (granted the Amiga and > I believe Mac versions both had mouse support but they were just ports made > at a later time. When Maniac Mansion is released these problems are dealt > with).
I have to stop you there -- any game requiring text input couldn't possibly have been meant to be played entirely with a joystick. While it was lack of foresight not to create an icon-based system controllable with the joystick, not changing that formula until 1991 is inexcusable. (Tass Times in Tonetown, in 1986, is the first game I can remember that perfected this. You could indeed play the entire IF with a joystick.) > Also, the old descriptions in text adventures were replaced by graphics. > This changed the nature of the puzzle solving from the old "ok, what items > are listed in the descrption and let's play with those" to "what items are > drawn with any kind of detail and let's play with those". Part of the I can accept this argument as what they were going for, but since the graphics were 160x100 low-res, there wasn't much room for detail and I think they missed the mark. It didn't work, initially. Later releases didn't improve on this because they used the higher res of 320x200 to just draw smaller objects. > appeal, especially in those early games was to try to find the items of > interest, like watching an old detective movie and spotting which character > was missing from the scene, because he was off murdering someone. Text > adventures just had to tell you what happened and give it away or not tell > you making it unfair. You haven't played enough text adventures. Even the original classic "you are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike" was like you describe -- a single room was described slightly differently than the others. Witness also Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where a description changes in a subtle way. And those are just some small Infocom examples. I haven't played much IF to completion, but I have played more Sierra games to completion and at the end of almost every one I have questioned the use of my time. :) > Despite the fact that this post is coming out a bit disjointed, another > great addition of the Sierra style game was that you could finally have > something besides straight choose your own adventure style gameplay. Action > sequences were added to the games (Conquest of Camelot being probably the > best example of this), which began to bridge gaps between genres and giving > much more realistic feeling experiences, especially since you could now > actually see scenes played out that would otherwise just be described. Yes, but you've jumped too far ahead. Those games (post-1991) are out of the scope of this debate as they allow full mouse control. Besides, the action sequences were a bit clunky IMO -- better than nothing, I guess, but worse than even a bad pure action game. Despite my writing, I'm not specifically declaring that Sierra games sucked. :-) I wouldn't have played so many (about 8 to completion) if I didn't enjoy *something*... What I'm trying to understand is why they survived for so long when they were clearly a novelty and not a true innovation to the IF (or any interactive storytelling) genre. I think you hit the nail on the head when you wrote "more accessible to younger audiences that were quickly bored by pages and pages of text". -- 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]/
