Adventure Gamers - Forums

Gk3 had most educational story and puzzles in any game.
Seriously intellectual stuff.

TimovieMan - 12 January 2016 07:02 AM

Still haven’t played GK3, though.

TimovieMan - 12 January 2016 09:25 AM

diego - 12 January 2016 09:21 AM

What are you going on about? GK3’s own cat-moustache killed it! (NOT!)

Do you realize that I contemplated putting “and whoever links to that ‘AGs committed suicide’ article gets banned” in my previous post?

Well, adventure games did commit suicide by not eliminating awful, nonsensical puzzles, and it deserves to be pointed out again and again lest designers forget about it.

Now, lampooning GK3 for it, which generally tried to move away from that kind of design and to bring fresh gameplay ideas to the table, is probably unfair, but I won’t lose sleep over it.

Much more at fault was the rise of the online walkthrough, which greatly reduced the time and effort people were prepared to spend in experimenting, looking for clues and so on to try and solve a puzzle rather than looking up the answer and deciding the puzzle was unfair.

Call it Old Man Murray’s Fallacy: the idea that it’s obvious how good a puzzle was if you look at the solution. Even the infamous cat hair moustache puzzle isn’t nearly as bad as it’s generally made out to be, if you actually play the game:
I have someone else’s ID which Gabe wants to pretend is his.
I have a marker pen. Maybe I can modify the ID to look more like it belongs to Gabe?
(use pen on ID)
Gabe’s drawn a moustache on the picture. WHAT ARE YOU DOING GABE?
Ohh, that actually makes sense. Adding a prominent feature like that could stop someone noticing that the rest of the face doesn’t look too similar.
Right, I’ll need a fake moustache. I wonder where I can get one of those.

Obviously what ensues is silliness, but the sequence of thought and play leading up to it makes sense - someone actually playing the game might reasonably get that far; someone just reading the walkthrough is more likely to go away and write an article whining about making a fake moustache so as to impersonate someone who hasn’t got a moustache.

(Rant over. As you were.)

Nancy Drew: Stay Tuned for Danger. Unlisted Favorite

I was torn between Discworld Noir & GK3 but decided on GK3, despite hating the interface & the ending sequence, because the story was to me a little more intricate & compelling. 

Phlebas - 12 January 2016 10:46 AM

Much more at fault was the rise of the online walkthrough, which greatly reduced the time and effort people were prepared to spend in experimenting, looking for clues and so on to try and solve a puzzle rather than looking up the answer and deciding the puzzle was unfair.

Call it Old Man Murray’s Fallacy: the idea that it’s obvious how good a puzzle was if you look at the solution. Even the infamous cat hair moustache puzzle isn’t nearly as bad as it’s generally made out to be, if you actually play the game:
I have someone else’s ID which Gabe wants to pretend is his.
I have a marker pen. Maybe I can modify the ID to look more like it belongs to Gabe?
(use pen on ID)
Gabe’s drawn a moustache on the picture. WHAT ARE YOU DOING GABE?
Ohh, that actually makes sense. Adding a prominent feature like that could stop someone noticing that the rest of the face doesn’t look too similar.
Right, I’ll need a fake moustache. I wonder where I can get one of those.

How can you not see that that’s exactly what’s awful about this puzzle, and all those of this type? You’re not trying to figure out how to deal with the problem at hand*, you’re trying to react to the completely arbitrary elements that the game throws at you. It’s not “How can I impersonate one of the guests?”, it’s “I’ve got Mosely’s ID, and if I try everything on it, the game draws a moustache, so I guess I need to make a moustache.” The logic is completely backwards! That’s lazy puzzle design and it needed to die.

* By the way, let’s not forget how artificial the entire situation even is. A baby has been kidnapped, but we’re going to put that on hold until Mr Knight can get the bike of his dreams. The only way the game could say “We don’t take the story seriously, and neither should you” is if it actually printed that in big red letters on the screen.