Adventure Gamers - Forums

zobraks - 06 February 2013 07:45 AM

I got two of the word riddles (#4 and #5) without even looking at the dictionary!

I’d congratulate you if I didn’t know you’ve already played the game.

I experienced a freeze in the same place twice last night, at the end of the dialogue with Fugato just after the word puzzle.  Naturally, the first time I hadn’t saved my game for a while so I had to redo a bunch of stuff, but it did go much faster when I wasn’t stopping to read and try every little thing.  The third time I clicked quickly through the dialogue and got past the sticking point easily, but be warned.

By the way, I found the second word puzzle much harder than the first, so if you need a hint, just holler.  I have the answers memorized after going through them 3 times in a row.

I loved the bit with the jukebox, and the different ways you exit the trap get funnier the more trips you make.  This is now at the top of my list of the funniest games I’ve ever played.

Sefir - 06 February 2013 08:18 AM

zobraks - 06 February 2013 07:45 AM

skeeter_93 - 06 February 2013 06:01 AM

Okay, got it installed using the installer, but now the patch won’t work…

Uh-oh. I’m playing CCS with no patch installed. 

You can continue patchless (sic) if you like. That way however, it is possible that the game sometimes will “freeze” for no apparent reason (In that situation, it is said that restarting the game and loading latest saved game usually works fine).
Mind you, the first time I played the game, it was without the patch and I didn’t experience any problems then…

The first time I played CCS I had a major freeze in the second case and never could get past it. I’m on a different computer now so that might not happen again. Ah well. Anyone else with Win 7 used the patch? It says it’s not compatible with my windows. I’m just going to have to continue without it I think.

I just copied the patch files to my CCS directory and launched it in DOSBox.

The only commands in DOSBox that you’d need for that are:

mount c c:\Games\Adventures\CCS (or whichever path you have it installed in)
c:
update

TerminusEst - 07 February 2013 01:27 AM

For now, the thing that stands out for me the most is the crazy amount of detail - number of objects on screen, possible interactions, dialog paths etc etc. Clearly the game was a labor of love.

I agree completely.
And I want to thank Sefir for giving us two weeks per chapter, because I’m spending over an hour per screen just to read every little comment…

But not everything can be perfect… The short loops of music grow repetitive and annoyingly intrusive pretty quickly. It’s a pity one can’t access Spider’s lovely songs outside of Callahan’s…

That’s also the only remark I have so far.

TimovieMan - 28 January 2013 12:48 PM

DOSBox ... really doesn’t use a lot of resources at all.

TimovieMan - 28 January 2013 01:05 PM

DOSBox doesn’t lower your computer’s productivity and speed at all, unless for the requirements of the games you’re trying to run.

diego - 28 January 2013 01:44 PM

DOSBox is not like a virtual machine. It’s just a teeny tiny program that takes ZERO of a modern computer power.

Maybe you’re right, but how come my pointer is so sluggish (while playing CCS in DOSBox) then?
The arrow hardly moves.
I have a 2007 laptop (too old for DOSBox? too old for 1997 game?) with XP.

TimovieMan - 31 January 2013 01:39 AM

it’s odd that Spider wasn’t interested at all in the game.

There’s a very interesting story about that, and I’ll let Mr. Robinson tell it to you:

Spider Robinson (in CCS Adventurer's Survival Guide (1997)) - 31 January 2013 01:39 AM

I’m not much of a cyberguy. A website is maintained for me, but my own steam-powered Mac II can’t surf. I’m vaguely aware that alt.callahans is in the top 2% of Usenet newsgroups, with over 60,000 members, and that there are innumerable other Callahanian websites, chatlines, channels and forums throughout cyberspace - none of which I’ve ever visited. But to me Callahan’s Place has always been words on paper: nine books that have stayed in print for twenty-five years. (Tor Books will publish an omnibus of the first volumes in September of 1997.)

I also don’t play computer games; I’d already maxed my personal addiction-quota by the time they came along. When Legend Entertainment bough the rights to Callahan’s, I planned to spend the money and ignore the results.

My first clue that I was missing something came when Josh Mandel called up and fulfilled my heart’s dearest dream.

See, what I really wanted to be when I grew up was a folksinger.
I was on the verge when the industry collapsed in the early 70’s. So when Josh asked me to cut four songs for the game with my favorite guitar player of all time on lead… well, there are no words.

But grateful as I was to Josh, secretly I still wasn’t terribly interested in the game itself. I’d seen just enough computer games to know that my creation could not possibly be adapted to that format. Only a madman would try, and only a lucky genius could hope to pull it off…

Then last month Josh walked in my door with a laptop, said hello, and booted up this game. We broke twice to pee and make coffee, but both forgot to drink both cups. Fourteen hours later he closed up the laptop, shook my hand and drove back to Seattle. I never got to ask him how many wives he has or children he’s aware of or any of that social stuff; I barely had time to tell him that he is a madman and a lucky genius. But he already knew.

This is the best adaptation of a literary work I’ve seen since Phil Alden Robinson (no relation) turned my friend Bill Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe into Fields of Dreams. Somehow Josh captured not just the letter, but the zany spirit of my Callahan’s Place - and then added value of his own, producing a genuine tilted picnic. Thank God it’s not available for Mac! As it is, I’m going to be bugging the hell out of all my friends who have PCs.

So turn the page, and enter the labyrinthine byways of the twisted mind of Josh Mandel, the best collaborator I’ve never worked with.

Thanks everyone for the help. I didn’t realise I needed to use the patch in DOSbox. I read the readme and got the files pasted over to the directory, but was trying to double click them in explorer to make them work. Thanks for the DOS text, I am not so good with that. Now I have the patch installed, and just have to replay through the bar until Pyotor.

I got most of the riddles, and quite enjoyed them, but I had played that bit years ago, so the answers were probably in the back of my mind. I did remember they were bands. Of the 3 or 4 I had trouble with, my mum looked over my shoulder and helped. With number 10 we were stumped, and raiding the CD rack. It’s funny how that seemed like creative thinking, when google felt like giving in, but they were basically the same thing.

zobraks, my game runs quite slow and sluggish too. It takes forever to do anything. I put it down to running an old game on a new computer. It played like that on my old XP computer as well though.