Adventure Gamers - Forums

I very much enjoyed Death Gate and Mission Critical.

And Star Control 2 is one of my favorite games of all time.

StarCon3 is good too.  Not as good as 2, but it gets a bit of an unfair rap, IMO.  It’s still basically the next best thing available to StarCon2, which was so damn unique.

So I thought Death Gate is a great game, like I said earlier.

Lots of positives:
- The structure of the game of 5 worlds (Fire, Air, Stone, Water and Labyrinth) with each world having it’s own stories and relationships between races (humans, elves and dwarves) and at the time contributing to figuring out what happened between the 2 “god”-races.
- The magic/rune system integrated into the puzzles. Starts easy getting the player confortable with the system and by the end your messing with the runes/spells to the solve puzzles and not just applying them. The whole dificulty curve of the game is excellent. I can’t remember any frustrating moments.
- Finally very good characters and dialogues. Zifnab, Xar and more. Some funny moments (mostly Zifnab) and lots of drama. Voice acting up to par and some very good art.
- Kickass ending sequence.

I think the only negative aspect I can think of is that the 4th world to explore is very small and pales in comparison to the other 3.

Time for Superhero League of Hoboken, no idea what it’s about.

Mike the Wino - 11 November 2015 01:08 PM

I never could get SC201 to work, so I jumped right to 301. I just wanted to chime in that I actually found (what I consider to be) a dead end in the game. It happens [spoiler](to be) just southwest of Redtide Drive, and just north of the Mansion Grounds[/spoiler] when I ran into it on Tuesday morning. Really! Look at your map! It’s there in black and white! 

“Or at the very least a Fatally Wounded” End

I said several times before, what I like best about Death Gate are the really excellently-designed puzzles. Now I can go into some specifics:
Bide their time to die, although this is considered by many to be a poor puzzle.
Telling apart the colored bottles as a dog.
Everything about your mirror double, from the way you defeat him (which is the only time you ever need to really construct runes) to the fact you can later make scissors since his blade is a mirror image of yours
Everything just fits so perfectly.

As for the plot, it’s similar, but not identical, to the books. The books have the same main cast of characters and a similar structure (each book deals with one elemental world, then some books to tie everything together involving the nexus etc) but are much more detailed in showing the falling apart system that was left behind by the Sartans and better flesh out the tension between Haplo’s original assignment and what his discoveries lead him to believe. The main problem is the books are not written that well, if you’re used to GRRM-quality writing you’ll be disappointed.

As for Superhero League of Hoboken, I love that game to death but it’s nowhere near Death Gate in quality. The good bits are it’s very funny and it has one of the absolute best boss encounters you’ll ever see. The bad is that the RPG parts are rather poorly done, so once you’re already familiar with all the monsters and item descriptions etc, it becomes a bit tedious to click through battles. Also, near the end the map is absolutely huge and some critical items just randomly show up in some locations, which is kind of bleh.

Antrax - 11 November 2015 11:17 PM

I said several times before, what I like best about Death Gate are the really excellently-designed puzzles. Now I can go into some specifics:
Bide their time to die, although this is considered by many to be a poor puzzle.

This is the one to open the door to Assassins Guild, right? Took me some time because I kept trying a lot of combinations before I realized I had to open the window first… But I think it was a nice puzzle.

Antrax - 11 November 2015 11:17 PM

Telling apart the colored bottles as a dog.

I did that by trial and error since there weren’t many options… What was the trick to get the right one?

Antrax - 11 November 2015 11:17 PM

Everything about your mirror double, from the way you defeat him (which is the only time you ever need to really construct runes) to the fact you can later make scissors since his blade is a mirror image of yours
Everything just fits so perfectly.

This was the best one for me, loved this one and before that the changing the ward rune to gain access to the city

wilco - 12 November 2015 04:29 AM

I did that by trial and error since there weren’t many options… What was the trick to get the right one?

I don’t know if that’s true in the real world, but you’re supposed to rely on the “fact” that clear liquid won’t distort the beams going through it, so you need to look at the pattern on the table cloth and see which bottle doesn’t distort it. Very clever, even if wrong

Antrax - 12 November 2015 09:13 AM

wilco - 12 November 2015 04:29 AM

I did that by trial and error since there weren’t many options… What was the trick to get the right one?

I don’t know if that’s true in the real world, but you’re supposed to rely on the “fact” that clear liquid won’t distort the beams going through it, so you need to look at the pattern on the table cloth and see which bottle doesn’t distort it. Very clever, even if wrong

There’s nothing physically wrong here. It’s just light transmission. Imagine you have a white piece of paper and you draw a red line and a blue line on it. If you look at that through a red filter, the blue line will appear black, but the red line will merge with the background and “disappear”—even if you then turn the resulting picture black-and-white. So the colourless liquid is the only one through which you can still see all the coloured lines.

Fun fact: [spoiler]Early Sierra and Lucasarts games used that system for copy protection in the late 80s, because it prevented people from making a (then black-and-white) copy of the CP sheet. Because obviously nobody would ever think of putting a red plastic cover over it before sticking it in the copier…[/spoiler]

(The one thing that’s wrong about this puzzle is that dogs don’t actually see in black and white.)

As for Death Gate, I love it. It even got me to read the (very uneven) books. But the game bugs me a bit: there’s something I love about the puzzle design, but I can’t quite put my finger on what it is exactly.

Kurufinwe - 12 November 2015 10:25 AM

Antrax - 12 November 2015 09:13 AM

wilco - 12 November 2015 04:29 AM

I did that by trial and error since there weren’t many options… What was the trick to get the right one?

I don’t know if that’s true in the real world, but you’re supposed to rely on the “fact” that clear liquid won’t distort the beams going through it, so you need to look at the pattern on the table cloth and see which bottle doesn’t distort it. Very clever, even if wrong

There’s nothing physically wrong here. It’s just light transmission. Imagine you have a white piece of paper and you draw a red line and a blue line on it. If you look at that through a red filter, the blue line will appear black, but the red line will merge with the background and “disappear”—even if you then turn the resulting picture black-and-white. So the colourless liquid is the only one through which you can still see all the coloured lines.

 

Just went back to see and the difference is very small, but it is there. Kind of a very hard puzzle since the only small clue we get is from looking at the tablecloth. But I think it’s not really a stopper since it can be solved by brute force pretty fast (like I did…)

Kurufinwe - 12 November 2015 10:25 AM

As for Death Gate, I love it. It even got me to read the (very uneven) books. But the game bugs me a bit: there’s something I love about the puzzle design, but I can’t quite put my finger on what it is exactly.

Some possibilities:
- Magic system - not the first one to use but has lots of variety and multiple uses and does a good job of not adding arbitrary impediments to using.
- Almost all are logical - The game is not just a couple of usable hotspots like most games today and has lots of stuff but still you almost never have to resort to the “use everything in everything”
- Books are great source of clues - The most difficult puzzles have clues in the text of the bokks without making it absolutely obvious. Example transforming the ward rune with the transfer rune spell
- The game seems to have a difficulty curve and becomes harder without ever feeling overwhelming - something like Portal but of not has polished

So what’s going on with this? What did you think of Superhero League of Hoboken?

Kurufinwe - 12 November 2015 10:25 AM

[spoiler]
Fun fact: [spoiler]Early Sierra and Lucasarts games used that system for copy protection in the late 80s, because it prevented people from making a (then black-and-white) copy of the CP sheet. Because obviously nobody would ever think of putting a red plastic cover over it before sticking it in the copier…[/spoiler]

Would that work though? Wouldn’t the light from the copier reflect straight back from the red plastic so you only got an image of the glare?

crabapple - 13 December 2015 04:35 PM

Kurufinwe - 12 November 2015 10:25 AM

[spoiler]
Fun fact: [spoiler]Early Sierra and Lucasarts games used that system for copy protection in the late 80s, because it prevented people from making a (then black-and-white) copy of the CP sheet. Because obviously nobody would ever think of putting a red plastic cover over it before sticking it in the copier…[/spoiler]

Would that work though? Wouldn’t the light from the copier reflect straight back from the red plastic so you only got an image of the glare?

It definitely works. When I was a kid, we used to share games with our neighbours. My mother would do the photocopies of the copy protection codes at her work using this technique. I’m sure she still has the copies of the Loom and Last Crusade codes somewhere gathering dust with the rest of my old stuff.

They also underestimated the single-mindness of kids. I remember for one game that took 17 floppies, I made numerous trips to a friend who lives 30 minutes away because I didn’t have that many floppies. For Gobliiins 3, I just guessed until I got it right. Manually copying a sheet was nothing to me.

Ha!  When I was 11 years old, I remember borrowing the Freddy Pharkas manual from a friend and copying all 50 pages into a notebook (with my handwriting). I did not have access to photocopying equipment at the time