This article is great! I miss playing adventuers in a vacuum. Or near as possible at least. Monkey Island 2 was the first adventure game that I played (well, liked enough to play for more than a couple days), and it took
months for me to get through it. Even with my friends all playing their copies along with me at their houses. A couple weeks in one friend finally broke down and called the LucasArts 900 number hint line, only to discover to his dismay that my brother solved the puzzle back at our house (putting the rat in the soup) while he was on the phone.
I miss those times but I never have enough time for them anymore. Any adventure game I play, with very few exceptions, I play with a walkthrough only a step or two from basically sitting in my lap. I want to solve some stuff on my own, because it's fun, but if I ever get really stuck I can't be bothered at this point - I just need to beat the game and see what happens. That's better than putting two weeks of my evening-time into it only to get so
with the thing that I have to put it aside and never complete it. What a waste.
