[SWCollect] Vintage games w/fatal flaws

[Dan Chisarick]

Just wondering if anyone has any good stories of an older game they 
were playing that was somehow unbeatable due to a coding flaw, or just 
downright not fun for design reasons.  I've been looking for an 
original 'Doriath' for years.  I stumbled on this site, and my free 
time being what it is these days, say "what the hell" and just read the 
walkthrough.  The game is unbeatable!  That's not in the good sense:

http://members.shaw.ca/Doriath/Walkthru.htm

If you read the walkthrough and then follow the links at the bottom, 
you never get an acknowledgment from the game that you've won.  There's 
a link to an interview w/the developers that explains you've 
essentially "won" once you make it to a certain room.  Its sad to see a 
game never being polished because of artificial deadlines (like that 
never happens anymore) or even more frighteningly, running out of 
memory/disk space.

Second to this are games that take hours to beat, give you one life, 
have no save feature, and you can put the game in an unwinable state 
and not realize it.  Console games (at least earlier ones) seem 
particular guilty of such offenses.  Thrown in certain Mindscape games 
("Spell of Destruction" and "Fairlight" I think fell into this hole, at 
least partially).

Third would have to be needless player frustration: Jumping puzzles, 
tedious movement puzzles (Sierra 3D games are notorious for this), and 
I'd have to throw in my entering the words of "Truth, Love and Courage" 
in the wrong order after spending 2.5 hours getting to the bottom of a 
certain 8-level dungeon to get the Codex of Infinite Wisdom just to be 
kicked back to the surface.  Augh!  (Its "corveramo" , no "veramocor" 
:)

Last, and somewhat humorously, ever type in a game in Basic or assembly 
from a magazine, and it didn't work?  Seems the feature title ALWAYS 
had some little typo in it that would require you to buy next month's 
issue to resolve? :)

With DVD-ROM titles, cheat codes, strategy guides, and every game 
either being Real Time Strategy or 3D shooter, endings are very well 
defined :)  How else would they sell level add-on packs?

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