[QFG]

And wow, it was great!!

I never had a chance to play it when it was new, but just picked the "talkie" version up cheap on eBay.

I was VERY pleasantly surprised. I didn't realize there were three tracks you could choose from until I was well down the "Team" path and needed a hint somewhere. Now I'm just beginning the "Wits" path.

My verdict through 1/3 of the paths: a really superior game with some great, great puzzles. What's the consensus on this one? How did I miss it for so long??

Lastly, is Last Crusade worth picking up?

[Kurufinwe]

I really like it. The design's very good, the puzzles are nicely balanced (and the various mini-games are fun too, and don't get tedious), and the three paths really add a lot to the game (by the way, don't make the mistake of writing off the Fists path, as I know some people do; while it does have more fighting, it also has lots of adventure elements which do not appear in the two other paths).

I must say I'm a sucker for alternate solutions and scores, so this one was really up my alley, and kept me busy (on and off) for over a decade, until I finally reached the full series score (actually, I technically never did, since there are two (otherwise avoidable) fights I never managed to win, but having found everything but that was satisfying enough for me).

Last Crusade has some good moments (and a couple of complex and extremely clever puzzles), but it's definitely a couple of notches below Fate of Atlantis. There's a long sequence in a German castle which is just a long series of fights / conversation-puzzles-to-avoid-the-fights which is not much fun, and everything that comes after that is not really great either.

We should do a collective FoA playthrough one day.

[Huz]

Fate of Atlantis is fantastic! I didn't rate it very highly when I first played it soon after release, but that was more due to a sadly deficient Amiga port than anything else. Having had the opportunity to play it on the PC, I can finally see why it garnered the praise it did. Not many games go to such effort to provide multiple possible routes through the game - and some puzzles in Indy 4 have more than one solution even within the same path - but Fate of Atlantis manages it really well.

Have fun on the remaining paths! I personally found the Wits path much more satisfying than the team one, so you've got a treat ahead of you!

[Sky Warrior Bob]

There is a fan project currently under development which is trying to capture the feel of FOA, called Indiana Jones & the Fountain of Youth.

They've got a demo, and its fairly good. However, given the amount of setbacks that delayed the release of that demo, I'm slightly pesimistic about a full release.

Then of course, there's always the looming chance that Lucasarts might step in & quash the project.

Still worth a looksee.

SWB

[tsa]

It was one of the best adventures I ever played.

[jcornwall]

Originally Posted by Huz

Fate of Atlantis is fantastic! I didn't rate it very highly when I first played it soon after release, but that was more due to a sadly deficient Amiga port than anything else.

Heh, I remember that one. I think my A600 managed about a single frame every two seconds in the Algiers marketplace.

Awesome game though. I wasn't so keen on Atlantis itself, having to play avoid the guards again, but it wasn't nearly so bad as in the Last Crusade. Still have fond memories of most of the locations and characters, I should dig it up for another play some time.

[Ariel Type]

The same feelings. It was like "Wow, the quality of Monkey Island!"

[Ninth]

I see it as the best AG ever.

[AFGNCAAP]

Heh. I must be the only person on the planet who wasn't impressed with FoA. I'll be lazy and copy-and-paste my main gripes with it from elsewhere (with minor tweaking), so some of you might recognize it:

I honestly don't know why Fate of Atlantis is held in such a high regard. Even until the terrible and tedious Atlantis section (one big maze with two puzzles repeated ad nauseam:

Spoiler:

the "put pearl in hole" and the "three discs" puzzle.

), the game is pretty hit-and-miss. Granted, the branching approach was/is pretty novel, and I haven't tried the supposedly best Team path yet, but what I've seen had way too much repetitiveness and trial-and-error gameplay.

It was very straightforward - which I wouldn't mind; I think that's very fitting to a fast-paced (again, until Atlantis...) Indy's adventure. But it made the occasional guess-the-designer's-mind puzzle (eg. the parrot! I never understood this one. ) all the more jarring. And don't get me started about the final dialogue puzzle - not only is it frustratingly long series of trial and error, but also blatantly throws the whole illusion of the non-linearity, FoA's greatest asset, out of the window. Fahrenheit has nothing on Fate of Atlantis in terms of how disappointing the ending was.

As for repetitiveness:

Spoiler:

How many flat-out mazes there are (Jungle, Outer Circle, Inner Circle)? Or large areas seen from bird's view, with lots of virtually identical rooms to visit, to find the important one (Monte Carlo, Desert, Thera)?

Enough rambling to stir the pot, I guess.

[Kurufinwe]

^ I think I'm going to follow somebody's advice and not be afraid to report that negative and trollish post.

[AFGNCAAP]

Originally Posted by Kurufinwe

^ I think I'm going to follow somebody's advice and not be afraid to report that negative and trollish post.

But... but... I was just trying to balance things out and badmouth an old game for a change!

Ah, what am I arguing for? *bans Kurufinwe and effectively wins the conversation*


(But seriously, lest I upset all the Indy lovers more than I had intended to: there are great ideas in FoA modern adventure designers could look up to. It's just that there are too many those poorer ones, and my overall enjoyment of a game as a whole didn't even come close to the holy-grail-of-adventuring level.)

[Huz]

Originally Posted by jcornwall

Heh, I remember that one. I think my A600 managed about a single frame every two seconds in the Algiers marketplace.

Same here. I think it speaks to the quality of the game that I persevered through all three paths several times, even if it did make me grind my teeth. Mind you, in fairness, the game was much snappier in the more sparse Wits and Fists paths. With that encumberance (not to mention disk swapping) gone on the PC, I really loved Fate of Atlantis.

Originally Posted by AFGNCAAP

Enough rambling to stir the pot, I guess.

Boo. At the risk of repeating myself from the Half Life: Opposing Force thread in General Gaming, the puzzles you mention made perfect sense to me! The desert and the jungle weren't even true "mazes", at least not in the usual painful adventure game sense, because the 'map' was built into the game - to a lesser extent for the desert, granted.

And if you thought searching random rooms in Crete/Theora was painful for you, that was one of the areas where the Amiga version ground to a virtual halt. Weep for me...

[bruno321]

Tomorrow I will be introducing an open-minded, non-gamer person to adventure games. FoA will be my flagship.

[Captain Blondebeard]

Originally Posted by AFGNCAAP

Heh. I must be the only person on the planet who wasn't impressed with FoA. I'll be lazy and copy-and-paste my main gripes with it from elsewhere (with minor tweaking), so some of you might recognize it:

I honestly don't know why Fate of Atlantis is held in such a high regard. Even until the terrible and tedious Atlantis section (one big maze with two puzzles repeated ad nauseam:

Spoiler:

the "put pearl in hole" and the "three discs" puzzle.

), the game is pretty hit-and-miss. Granted, the branching approach was/is pretty novel, and I haven't tried the supposedly best Team path yet, but what I've seen had way too much repetitiveness and trial-and-error gameplay.

It was very straightforward - which I wouldn't mind; I think that's very fitting to a fast-paced (again, until Atlantis...) Indy's adventure. But it made the occasional guess-the-designer's-mind puzzle (eg. the parrot! I never understood this one. ) all the more jarring. And don't get me started about the final dialogue puzzle - not only is it frustratingly long series of trial and error, but also blatantly throws the whole illusion of the non-linearity, FoA's greatest asset, out of the window. Fahrenheit has nothing on Fate of Atlantis in terms of how disappointing the ending was.

As for repetitiveness:

Spoiler:

How many flat-out mazes there are (Jungle, Outer Circle, Inner Circle)? Or large areas seen from bird's view, with lots of virtually identical rooms to visit, to find the important one (Monte Carlo, Desert, Thera)?

Enough rambling to stir the pot, I guess.

Those were my gripes with the game. I enjoyed it but it would not be near my top 10.

Last Crusade was a better gaming experience at the time. There wasnt many games up to its mark at the time of release. Ironic thing is I went through both of those games without knowing about the sucker punch.

[Udvarnoky]

I don't think Last Crusade featured a sucker punch. It should also be noted that while you could win any of the normal fistfights in Fate of Atlantis (the guy you have to crush with the boulder being an obvious exception) just by randomly hitting the punch keys, the tougher guys in Last Crusade actually required a certain degree of proficiency with the fighting controls, unless you happened to know every way to talk yourself out of them. SCUMMVM's ability to save everywhere in that game is nothing less than a godsend. I've appreciated that game a lot more upon replays and perusing the hint book after the fact because it turns out there actually are a lot of different ways to get out of situations. There are still some awful dead-ends though.

Also I don't think it's fair to call the stuff in either of the Indy games mazes. I mean by today's standards they seem lazy and dated but if you compare them to actual mazes in other adventures at the time they are absolutely nothing.

[AFGNCAAP]

Originally Posted by Huz

The desert and the jungle weren't even true "mazes", at least not in the usual painful adventure game sense, because the 'map' was built into the game - to a lesser extent for the desert, granted.

What do you mean by saying "the map was built into the game"? Seeing all doors at once is hardly equivalent of a 'map' if you don't know which will lead you where.

Originally Posted by Udvarnoky

Also I don't think it's fair to call the stuff in either of the Indy games mazes. I mean by today's standards they seem lazy and dated but if you compare them to actual mazes in other adventures at the time they are absolutely nothing.

It's not... fair? Although I often dislike them, the term "maze" is not a comment on quality, but a label for a type of the puzzle. The existence of more challenging/frustrating mazes elsewhere doesn't change the fact that nature of multiple challenges in FoA is inherently maze-ish.

[jcornwall]

Originally Posted by Udvarnoky

There are still some awful dead-ends though.

FoA had dead ends?

Unless you count deaths (which were annoying, but didn't leave you trying to complete the game afterwards) nothing obvious springs to mind. Or maybe I was just lucky.

[Huz]

Originally Posted by AFGNCAAP

What do you mean by saying "the map was built into the game"? Seeing all doors at once is hardly equivalent of a 'map' if you don't know which will lead you where.

The critter in the jungle led you down the right paths, the nomads in the desert told you which way to go, and finding the right intersection in Monte Carlo was more a process of elimination than random guessing. I'm not saying FoA was a maze-free zone - Theora/Crete and Atlantis were certainly mazes - but there were fewer true mazes than you make out!

[ATMachine]

Originally Posted by Huz

and finding the right intersection in Monte Carlo was more a process of elimination than random guessing

Especially since, if you looked closely,

Spoiler:

the streets were laid out in alphabetical order!

Last Crusade was a much less friendly game, though. AFGNCAAP thought the dialogue puzzle at the end of FoA had too much trial-and-error? Every single conversation in LC was trial-and-error to find the right path (with a fistfight if you failed), especially since you're given the same few opening lines for all the Nazis you meet!

[MadTricks]

Actually this is the first tr00 adventure game i played.
I was about 11-12 maybe?
Anyway it got me hooked....

Still I didn't manage to finish it.
I promise, I'll do that in my life.