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Gabrielrtrooney

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Controversial adventure game preferences and opinions?

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Karlok - 10 August 2020 06:05 AM
Vehelon - 09 August 2020 09:46 PM

No doubt a lot of games were pirated, but if I were going to pirate a game I’d also try and get my hints free. I wouldn’t buy a $30 hint book.

The didn’t cost $30, more like 8 or 9.

LOL! What about asking your friend to give you a hint.

When my Mother died my Father sent me all her computer games and manuals which included 3 hint books. Prices as per the books themselves:

1:  The Journeyman Project 3 -            US $19.99 Canada $27.99 UK £15.99
2:  Indiana Jones & The Infernal Machine -    US $19.99 Canada $27.95 UK £12.99
3:  The King’s Quest Companion (Games 1 - 6) - US $19.95

     

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Those are not hint books. Strategy guides and background info. I have a few Prima guides myself.

EDIT: Hint books are actually booklets. With invisible ink in the case of Infocom, which you made visible with a special marker. Sierra had something called an Adventure Window. I still have one, so I must have bought one of their hint books, can’t for the life of me remember anything about it. The text on the piece of cardboard with the “Window” says: Place the red ADVENTURE WINDOW over the red patterned areas in your hint book to reveal the HIDDEN clues.  Weird, but after all these years the red window is no longer red, just transparent plastic. Smile

     

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The Infernal Machine??
“Hmm.. do I need to a) push the giant block, b) jump over the chasm using my whip, or c) kill the enemy here?”

Grin

     

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Donuts McGee - 10 August 2020 06:52 AM

The Infernal Machine??
“Hmm.. do I need to a) push the giant block, b) jump over the chasm using my whip, or c) kill the enemy here?”

Grin

Haha, yes.
There are some alternative strategies here and there though. For instance, in some places you can try to snipe enemies from afar or run over them on a jeep.

That game also has one of the most atmospheric parts ever, when you need to sneak around that Soviet cargo ship and try to survive with whatever is available there. Very few adventure games have such great immersive surroundings.

But when you get to some stupid place where you need to whip over some lava streams… yeah, boring.

     
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Karlok - 10 August 2020 06:05 AM


LOL! What about asking your friend to give you a hint.

yeah, that already was the case, i remember every time i went to the computer store i made friends with whoever were buying adventures i had gotten their numbers.

     
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Karlok - 10 August 2020 06:49 AM

Those are not hint books. Strategy guides and background info. I have a few Prima guides myself.

EDIT: Hint books are actually booklets. With invisible ink in the case of Infocom, which you made visible with a special marker. Sierra had something called an Adventure Window. I still have one, so I must have bought one of their hint books, can’t for the life of me remember anything about it. The text on the piece of cardboard with the “Window” says: Place the red ADVENTURE WINDOW over the red patterned areas in your hint book to reveal the HIDDEN clues.  Weird, but after all these years the red window is no longer red, just transparent plastic. Smile

Now that’s interesting as I’ve never heard of, nor seen, anything like you’ve described Karlok. They must have existed in the UK as I can’t see the publishers missing out on that market but it would appear that the strategy guides/walkthroughs/hint books (as I always thought of them Smile ) were what was pushed in our market - presumably because there was a greater profit margin, but that’s purely conjecture on my part.
Anyway, cheers for the correction/education Thumbs Up

     

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Sierra hint books looked like this:

When I got connected to the Internet in 1995 I was delighted to find all sorts of Usenet groups for adventure game players, plus the UHS hints. I started buying Prima guides, like the ones you mentioned, much later to get the most out of special games I loved. They are excellent, lots of general info, alternative solutions to puzzles, extras. Replaying Obsidian with the Prima guide next to me was an immensely satisfying experience.

     

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true Karlok, but this was post 91-90, before as i wrote earlier they used dark mixtures of text and background-pages colors that made them hard to be copied.  i dont know about all LucasArts hint books but i know of the last crusade which had this red-plastic-lens/adventure-window style as well.

     
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no Karlok cant not be copied in that case of when one has to use that adventure window (you mentioned) over the text to view an underlying text which cant be seen without it (the adventure window)

sorry, i thought i have answered this but then I ‘ve seen now that haven’t.

     
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Again: typewriter to retype all the text(how many pages do these booklets have?). Anyway probably 2 hours of work. After that copy and sell off to other people or hand out to friends.

     
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Origami - 15 August 2020 12:36 AM

Again: typewriter to retype all the text(how many pages do these booklets have?). Anyway probably 2 hours of work. After that copy and sell off to other people or hand out to friends.

YEAH, even on eBay

     
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Origami - 15 August 2020 12:36 AM

Again: typewriter to retype all the text(how many pages do these booklets have?). Anyway probably 2 hours of work. After that copy and sell off to other people or hand out to friends.

I think a much better option would have been to use the hintbook to solve the game, and then type a walkthrough in your own words, and sell it to some game magazine to print it. You get some money from the magazine, possibly enough to cover the cost of the hintbook, and thousands of readers get a copy of the walkthrough when they get their hands on that magazine.

Of course time is a factor there, but back in the day people could wait for a few weeks to get their hints anyway. Even months.

Anyway, as there are no hintbooks, not many magazines, and generally speaking not even real need for walkthroughs much these days, this is all historical speculation really.

     
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blah, blah !

and what/how magazines could violate companies’ copywrites for those walkthroughs?

     
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those were the 80s and 90s, i spent years some time to finish one adventure, LSL2, i reached the end and the last puzzle before the outro and the ending credits i couldn’t solve until 2 years later when i met someone by chance who told what i needed to write to finish it.
Riven took me more than a year with spaces between that i didn’t touch it for months until i have had an idea to come back to it, and so on.

so it wasn’t easy to get hold of hints at those decades, that why when some say, a magazine with the game walkthrough, or copying hintbooks, or typing them at a time there was no internet to sell (sounds too crazy for those decades) when finding and adventure gamer was like finding someone who is a fan Tesla the rock band..

     

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