Award for Outstanding Achievement

[davidn]

Here is proof that I have finally completed Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion. It only took me thirteen years. It was actually one of the first games I found genuinely frightening (although Whitney thinks I'm scared of just about everything) - it has just the right feel of being constantly underpowered against the next thing that's going to leap out at you from around the corner or materialize out of the wall, wondering if you can afford to keep moving or stop to reload the shotgun that never seems to have enough in it. The detailed (for the time) death animations don't exactly help either. In some ways it predated Resident Evil as the first survival horror game.

But a realization came to me as I was killed by a werewolf for the eight hundredth time on Level 7 - as gamesplayers go, we're all too soft these days. Look at the evolution of the Final Fantasy series in particular - from it being challenging in the early days, to softening up considerably (although largely by accident) in FF8, to the level of restoring all your health points whenever you touch a save point in the latest two games. We've also been spoiled by the increasing ability to snapshot-save, encouraging repeating sections over and over again to get them perfect by luck or coincidence rather than spend the time to actually become good at the game. Of course, disallowing instant saving and loading means that you have to get the balance exactly right, and have the game absolutely free of places where the player can die through something that wasn't their own fault, or it's just frustrating. Look at Prince of Persia - in my view, a game should just frustrate you up to the level of writing out a hit list of the developers' names and addresses (but - and this is important - frustrate you in the right way), then reward you for the effort. That's what made them addictive in the age of the shareware war - the sense of achievement at beating them. I'll stop all this now because I'm starting to sound old.

Strangely, the next two games in the series are dramatically different compared to this one. (This is uncomfortably placed as the second of the series although it's the first of the "new" series of games - the very first one was a simple puzzle platformer written years before.) The third game is a lot more bright, cheerful and arcadey somehow, even though it's bloodier - it's just so over the top that it becomes silly again. It did improve a bit on the weapon system, though - rather than having a limited capacity of eight bullets at a time that you could reload by standing still, your capacity was reduced to six and you had a total ammo stock to keep track of as well. The fourth one is just dreadful, having entirely got rid of the weapon system that made the game tense in the first place, and it's also held back by frustrating scrolling problems.

What's even worse is that in the first two games, your weapon had an instant hitscan - when you fired, your bullet reached its target at the same moment. The third game kept this but removed the handy compensation that you were allowed for diagonal shots, allowing you to aim at more than just three angles. But in the fourth, the whole system is replaced with a projectile one - a badly-drawn bullet (that doesn't even rotate according to which direction you fire it!) zooms out from you when you fire, and collides shakily with the background or whatever you're pointing at. Frankly it looks like something a beginner made in a few minutes with an MMF tutorial.

I did wonder why this had all happened, and looked at the credits for Softdisk Publishing for the third and fourth games. Greg Malone, Nolan Martin, Carol Ludden... they're not exactly the most recognizable of names in the software world, but there aren't any Uwe Bolls of the game industry in there either. Then I found the credits for Haunted Mansion.

John Carmack	Programming
John Romero	Programming
Tom Hall	Creative Director
Adrian Carmack	Art Director

Suddenly, everything becomes clear.

It's also worth mentioning that thanks to the above team (who would later go on to found id Software after they realized they were much better than the rest of Softdisk Publishing), the very first side-scrolling platformer on the PC was named "Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement". To test the theory of getting the screen to scroll, which in those days involved pointers to the start of the EGA buffer and other frightening things like that, one of the developers had taken the old Dangerous Dave sprite and stuck him into a mock-up of the first level of Mario Brothers 3. Apparently they nearly got Nintendo interested in the idea, but they didn't want to enter the PC market at that time. It's all true, you know.

Comments

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

I'm currently playing Spider-man 2 for playstation 2 (the fact that I own a playstation amazed my S4s). There's a few bits that are utterly, utterly frustrating involving the ability to time jumps and aim properly, which I've never been good at. However, once you get that mastered by replaying the same section 20 times, you have skills and an understanding that you can use in the rest of the game.

And face it, there is not much in the world of single player gaming than webslinging around Manhattan Island. Up to the Empire State Building, across to the Chrysler and then (though i haven't done this yes) hitch a helicopter over to Liberty Island. Complete freedom with a good grasp of physics and agility and speed. it's great.

[davidn]

Pupils seem not to think of teachers as fellow human beings with real lives - more as dark creatures from another dimension.

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

this is true. my main point still stands; get your hands on a copy of spider-man 2 for a few hours. it's a riot.

[davidn]

I know, as much as I go on about it here, I always do it when it's available. I'm not proud of myself.

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

I don't even want to think how many saved games i used to complete Star Was: Jedi Academy.

[kjorteo]

I think your example of Final Fantasy games getting more and more easy is captured perfectly by Final Fantasy III DS.

Final Fantasy III DS is, of course, a port of Final Fantasy III for the Famicom. (And Neo Demiforce translated the ROM, a project which singlehandedly made Neo Demiforce my favorite translators ever. Having done EarthBound Zero as well probably helped. But anyway....)

They left all the oldschool evil-ness in FF3 DS. It's pretty much just a graphical upgrade. It even still uses the tiered MP system! The most obvious example of how much less friendly games were back then, though, is that there were no save points in dungeons, ever, and the last dungeon was incredibly long and had about six bosses after a point-of-no-return. With all the cutscenes and everything going into the last battle, which I barely won, I'm honestly unsure what I would have done if I had died. I mean, that is a hell of a lot to have to go through again. I save my game almost literally every single chance I get, and in the span between the just-before-last-dungeon save and the clear game save, I had gained six levels.

On the other hand, I always found the old Rogue clones to be way too unfriendly, and I like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon for essentially being a watered-down, theoretically possible version of those.

I have twice beaten Lagoon without using a single healing item. I know this because I only recently learned that you can actually use healing items--I had always assumed they just hang out in your inventory with all the other important items for which possessing is more important than actually manually using, like keys. Lagoon, if you haven't played it, is one of the most evil games of which I am personally aware, and to this day I'm not sure how I was able to consistently win back then. I promise you I could not do it today.

[davidn]

You certainly know a lot about games (I've been thinking of posting some experiences to the videogame_tales community myself after finding it through your profile, in fact).

It's certainly possible to go over-the-top with the evilness, as exemplified by the King's Quest games - it's often possible to end up in a situation where you're completely stuck and won't realize it until about five hours later in the game, whereupon you're forced to restart as you've already saved over all your old games by then. The scene that sticks most in my mind is the part with the cat and mouse in King's Quest 5, where you're given a generous span of two seconds to realize that you're meant to intervene, get the boot object from your inventory (if it's there at all) and click it on the fast-moving cat. Otherwise, it'll pass by along with the vital item you get for chasing the cat off.

[kjorteo]

Thank you! It'd be awesome if you did...while it's not my group, I'm very partial to it, and it has been a little dead recently.

It's funny you should mention King's Quest. I actually thought of that about ten seconds after replying, but you can't edit your replies, and I didn't think it was worth replying to myself to add. Anyway, as far as adventure games go, whether you can die (any of the later King's Quest or Space Quest games, old MacVenture games like Shadowgate or Deja Vu) or not (The Longest Journey) is one thing, and I'm cool with either, but being allowed to completely screw yourself like that is inexcusable. If it's one of the games that actually punishes mistakes instead of just holding still until you do it right, that's one thing, but the punishment should come before you have a chance to save over your game.

King's Quest 1 was the most evil, unforgiving game I have ever played, from chances to miss, drop, or be robbed of vital items, to unintuitive things like just having to somehow magically know that the gnome's name was "Rumplestiltzkin" backwards. (Not to mention the fact that that name is hard enough to spell forwards. This is one of those old text parser games. Recipe for disaster, much?)

I did like King's Quest 7, though. You could die, but you couldn't do anything irreversable. The only thing you could fail at without being punished with instant death was a point after you completely beat the game, in which you had about five seconds to do something they hint pretty strongly that you should do, just to determine which ending you get.

In other, random news, may I recommend MOTAS?

[davidn]

I actually remember that (in the remake at least), my brother solved the Nikztlitslepmur puzzle almost instantly, saying it was obvious because he was unweaving the gold (smug git that he is). But I'd never have got it.

I remember MOTAS - I played it years ago when I was in first year of university, but that was when it had far fewer rooms. It was enough of a challenge at that stage, I've no idea how big it's become now...

[kjorteo]

I would have never gotten that. It's...I don't know. I call shenanigans. It's not what I would consider a good puzzle.

And I have no idea how big MOTAS is in total, as I haven't completed it yet. However, I can tell you that I just barely beat what it calls level 13 and am starting on 14. The levels aren't that small, either, so there's a fair deal of content I've already gone through.

[davidn]

I spent a morning of my life stuck in it thanks to you. :P But I eventually got all the way through, thanks to remembering some of the solutions to the older puzzles and with some luck on the new ones.

[kjorteo]

I just made it all the way through (or at least to the "To Be Continued" room) last night. I'm so proud!

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

My brain doesn't get the logic needed for graphical/text based adventures.

Haveing said that, my first experience of them was Discworld where you not only had to deal with solutions like "Put octopus in lavvy. give shopkeeper figs. Follow shopkeeper to lavvy. take belt buckle" but also the added confusion of L-space and dealing with problems in two different time zones with added causality.

[davidn]

Far too many graphic adventures have moments like that... the one that got to me most was the infamous "Wear dog" from Simon the Sorceror 2. There's one in Monkey Island 2, "use banana on metronome" that's just so ridiculous that it somehow becomes obvious again.

[kjorteo]

Most of The Longest Journey makes sense, except for one particular puzzle where you have to get a key out of a high-voltage pit. I don't even remember the exact solution, but I know it involves an inflatable inner tube on a fishing pole, taped up so that it has a leak but it's a slow leak. That was excessively ridiculous, but the game makes perfect sense before and after. It's just that one moment. It's very strange.

By contrast, while I haven't played it, I'm told Runaway is nothing but completely illogical puzzles, and have been warned strongly to avoid it if you don't appreciate having to be criminally insane to think the way the game wants you to think.

Also. King's Quest 7. Taking the faux shop with a grain of salt. AAARRRGH. (Fantastic game though.)

[kjorteo]

Also, let me take a moment to randomly declare that I hate Myst. I hate each individual Myst game, but especially hate Riven. We're talking major hatred, here.

See, I like my adventure games to at least be forthright on what the problem is. In a King's Quest game, for example, you can find someone guarding a treasure chest while whining about how they haven't had any cheese for weeks, and you get an idea of what the game expects you to do. If you find any cheese, you can pick it up and put it in, holy shit, your inventory. Then you take it back to the guy, and progress is made!

Myst? Oh, no, screw that. You steadfastly refuse to ever pick up anything, ever. The most you can ever hope to do is stare at it really closely or tap it to see what kind of sound it makes, hoping that searing the mental image in your brain will somehow help you later. The puzzles? Usually figuring out what the puzzle even is is step one. Instead of a guy to tell you what his problem is, you'll come across a machine. No explanation, just some sort of machine sitting in the middle of the room. It may be broken. It may not be. When you press a button, something may or may not happen. It may even magically unlock a door way the hell on the other side of the island. Maybe. Maybe you need to interact with this machine right now to progress! Or maybe you need to come back once you have a part that somehow fixes it, despite you not even confirming that it was, in fact, broken. Wait, sorry, I mean that you should come back once you've seen a part that somehow fixes it, and committed what it sounds like when poked to your awesome memory, so that you may recreate that sound on the broken machine through some complicated electrical problem involving sine waves. And all of this while the overall main goal is nothing more specific than "Enter this book and save everyone somehow."

On a side note, my dad got Riven, and it came with a demo for The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time. Now that was an awesome game.

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

first this, then saving excessively will be criminalised (http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,,1969920,00.html)

[davidn]

Germany has always been silly about censorship in games, but that's going even further than I thought.

[kingradix.livejournal.com]

Resident Evil was not the first Survival Horror game, it just coined the genre name.