Poll of the Day > This is why Sierra games sucked

(+) Yeah! (+)

They looked really nice and the worlds they made were cool, especially as the years went on, but these games were riddled with stupid puzzles that made the games unwinnable if you did something wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apIBmgHP390

...that is why they were loved by a cliche before LucasArts simplified the genre for the masses.

Foppe posted...

...that is why they were loved by a cliche before LucasArts simplified the genre for the masses.

LucasArts games arent perfect either but this factor makes them way better than Sierra games

i'd say that's part of their charm. yeah kinda fucking annoying without a guide but if you could get things figured out it was fun to play around with the world. experimental stuff like that is cool.

^Being able to make the game unwinnable at any time for any reason isn't fun though. It's like if you were playing Mario and went to get a mushroom below, but when you tried to get back up there are invisible blocks blocking your path and you have to reset the level

It's like that but worse

That was kind of the charm of the old Sierra games. If you knew what you are doing, you maybe lost a minute of progress at the most. They let you save whenever and wherever you want and told you to "SAVE EARLY AND SAVE OFTEN!!!"

Even if you weren't following that advice, the games were short enough to go from start to finish in half an hour, hour at most.

They did have the best Spyro games and EE:AoC was better than AoE.

They were designed to make you call the Sierra hint line.

There is a bridge in King's Quest 2 that you can only cross seven times without it breaking, and you must cross it seven times to beat the game. If you ever cross the bridge without doing what is required or when you can't do what is required, you are softlocked, but won't know it until near end game.

Jeremy517 posted...

There is a bridge in King's Quest 2 that you can only cross seven times without it breaking, and you must cross it seven times to beat the game. If you ever cross the bridge without doing what is required or when you can't do what is required, you are softlocked, but won't know it until near end game.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UnwinnableByDesign/Sierra

That bear's pose after it decks the player is quite amusing.

I also appreciate what the older games did to pioneer the genre, but a lot of those games just aren't very good... and as the games got newer they didn't change their game design to accommodate the graphic design. In the older games you could find a lot of stuff by typing "look" everywhere and "look at (item)" to get more detail. In the newer games you had to hunt for pixels. Much tougher. And the stupid logic/puzzles are consistent throughout

There's this puzzle in the first King's Quest game that requires a full written explanation

There's this gnome in King's Quest 1 that offers to give you a prize if you guess his name correctly. The game is all about fairy tales, so you may guess that his name is rumpelstiltskin. And you're... close.

Somewhere else in the game you find a note that just says "sometimes it is wise to think backwards". The note doesn't seem to have any relation to the gnome puzzle, but it's not THAT hard to figure out that it does

So you go back to the gnome and guess his name is nikstlitslepmur. The game says you have the right idea, but not quite.

So what is the answer? Rumpelstiltskin was in fact very close and nikstlitslepmur was in fact the right idea, but what you have to do is write the alphabet backwards (Z,Y,X...C,B,A), and spell rumpelstiltskin replacing each letter with the corresponding letter in this backwards alphabet. For example, R is the 17th letter of the alphabet, and the 17th letter when the alphabet is written backwards is I. And you must do this for every letter in rumpelstiltskin until you figure out that his name is ifnkovhgroghprm

To be fair this puzzle is only for high score and you don't need to get it right to beat the game, but it's just mind numbingly stupid

played king quest 5,6,7
totally never played leisure suit Larry (lie) I played 5 ,6,7 (Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude PlayStation 2 )
red baron

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QreKKW-syOg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx8wsb_1eYU

I never played Love for Sail, even though that's the one I remember the most advertising for

I haven't clicked on the video, I am going to guess that it is the cat and mouse scene. There's a timed sequence where you have to save a mouse from a cat and it is very "blink and you miss it"

if you miss it, your game is hard locked and unwinnable and THE GAME DOESN'T TELL YOU it is. The game lets you progress much further into the game too.

torin's passage was easily my favorite. it was so pretty. ;-;

Damn_Underscore posted...

^Being able to make the game unwinnable at any time for any reason isn't fun though. It's like if you were playing Mario and went to get a mushroom below, but when you tried to get back up there are invisible blocks blocking your path and you have to reset the level

It's like that but worse

PC-88 RPGs are filled with games with such scenarios and that genre didn't get better until Dragon Quest, The Legend of Heroes, and Final Fantasy came about.

A classic is to have a hidden item on one of the first screens that is required on one of the last screens to proceed.
The game wont tell you what you lack, or even that you lack anything, and most of the time you wont be able to return to the first couple of screens once you leave them.
Add to that that you can only carry a limited ammount of items at the same time, that you cant recover them if you drop them, and you can use them at the wrong place which removes them from your inventory.
These were for hardcore gamers.

I think these games are best experienced through Let's Plays or Playthrough/Summary Videos rather than actually playing them yourself

I actually really enjoy Sierra games. Its like they can make a lot of them without substance. Like some topic-makers on this board.

King's Quest 3 is insane. Most of the game is you trying to escape from the evil wizard that enslaved you, but it's filled with RNG and an extremely important in-game-timer

I have no idea how you would figure that game out without a guide, and the worst part is if you ever start the game over you are required to do a lot of pointless waiting even if you know exactly what to do.

Damn_Underscore posted...

King's Quest 3 is insane. Most of the game is you trying to escape from the evil wizard that enslaved you, but it's filled with RNG and an extremely important in-game-timer

I have no idea how you would figure that game out without a guide, and the worst part is if you ever start the game over you are required to do a lot of pointless waiting even if you know exactly what to do.

I appreciate how back in the day the philosophy (shaped by arcade cabinets where games were monetized on playtime and buying more livees) was that a game should be experienced and completing a game was called "beating the game." It was an achievement for the hardest of hardcore.

Every generation has a preferred method for padding games out and the way they did it in Gen 2-3 was making them balls hard.

For King's Quest and other adventure games of the time, getting lost and fumbling around with zero clue what to do was the point of the game.

The paradigm shift where games started being made to be completed was a good move, but I think we lost something along the way. We now interpret losses as failures on ourselves or the game design instead of just letting it be a part of the experience.

I think the Broken Sword series does that well. For one thing you can't get softlocked at all, let alone not knowing it.

I guess they didn't think of games as vehicles for telling a story back then