With the recent addition to these games to the Good Old Games catalogue, I felt it a good time to talk about them.
These are classical games. Yet, they are classical in the same way that bloodletting and leeches are classic medicine. So many things these games do was being done for the first time, which can explain many of the oddities in the interface, the limited-vocabulary parsers. There's almost no puzzle in the parser games that truly merits the use of a parser; there's large tracts of Fake Difficulty, where things that aren't a reasonable danger to a child will quite easily get you killed (falling out of a tree, not noticing you're straying near a crocodile) or render the game unwinnable (choose the right food item, with no actual guidance to do so) that Save Scumming is the only natural learned response.
The thing is... that's actually fun. I mean, there are gamers who remember these games with a certain fondness. If you're the kind of gamer who feels that the point-and-click genre is too easy because you just wander around applying objects to other objects until you find the byzantine process that the original game designers conceived to pull you through the plot, then this is probably the game series for you. Your protaganists are rarely all that powerful, you don't get to do much ass-kicking, and there are lots of ways to die.
Provided you go into the games knowing what to expect, remember to save and acknowledge that most of the skill in the games is taken through the medium of patience rather than the virtue of innovative, clever thinking, they can be a pleasant roam through storybook settings; a classic. To be appreciated for what it taught us about what not to do, these games merit respect that it's sad to say, they probably do not truly receive.
Thank god the load times are low these days, though.
Classics, In Both The Good And Bad Way
With the recent addition to these games to the Good Old Games
catalogue, I felt it a good time to talk about them.
These are classical games. Yet, they are classical in the same way that bloodletting and leeches are classic medicine. So many things these games do was being done for the first time, which can explain many of the oddities in the interface, the limited-vocabulary parsers. There's almost no puzzle in the parser games that truly merits the use of a parser; there's large tracts of Fake Difficulty, where things that aren't a reasonable danger to a child will quite easily get you killed (falling out of a tree, not noticing you're straying near a crocodile) or render the game unwinnable (choose the right food item, with no actual guidance to do so) that Save Scumming is the only natural learned response.
The thing is... that's actually fun. I mean, there are gamers who remember these games with a certain fondness. If you're the kind of gamer who feels that the point-and-click genre is too easy because you just wander around applying objects to other objects until you find the byzantine process that the original game designers conceived to pull you through the plot, then this is probably the game series for you. Your protaganists are rarely all that powerful, you don't get to do much ass-kicking, and there are lots of ways to die.
Provided you go into the games knowing what to expect, remember to save and acknowledge that most of the skill in the games is taken through the medium of patience rather than the virtue of innovative, clever thinking, they can be a pleasant roam through storybook settings; a classic. To be appreciated for what it taught us about what not to do, these games merit respect that it's sad to say, they probably do not truly receive.
Thank god the load times are low these days, though.