Adventure Gamers - Forums

I guess I should post some overall thoughts on JP3. Well, it gets a “meh” from me. Shangri La was mostly enjoyable, but El Dorado was pretty bad and Atlantis wasn’t all that great either. If I had been playing by myself, I would probably have finished it, but without enthusiasm.

One thing that struck me about this game is that it doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. It owes much to Myst, but the locations feel incredibly small and drab. (Seriously, the fabled city of Atlantis was some sort of open-air sewer where people produce olive oil?! El Dorado is 5 guys in boring temples?!) It has puzzles, but they’re generally weak and feel like busywork. It has a lot of characters, but it doesn’t manage to make them interesting (or, more often than not, even likeable). That the game doesn’t even manage to use the fact that all those secondary characters are about to die the following day for the emotional punch just shows how weak the writing and characterization usually is. The overarching story is even weaker, the game seeming busier trying to undo everything it established in the two previous games than making the player care about the new story.

At the end of the day, it always boils down to the same question: why should you keep playing? If it’s not for the locations and exploration, not for the gameplay, not for the characters and not for the story, then what for? I’ve played enough games, and I’m obsessive enough about completing things, that not being aggressively awful is usually enough for me (and JP3 certainly wasn’t awful). But, well, meh.

(I realize now that I didn’t write anything about Arthur. I found him unfunny 80% of the time, grating 10% of the time and funny the remaining 10%. Once again, meh.)

Still, it wasn’t an unpleasant experience, the game had some good moments (mostly in Shangri La), and reading everyone else’s thoughts was fun and a great incentive to get back to the game. I understand that JP3 is quite different from the other two games in the series, so I’m not ruling out playing those at some point down the road.

And finally, I want to thank diego for doing a great job as playthrough leader, making sure that the thread always kept moving and that conversation always remained lively and interesting.

Am I the only one who liked the ferryman?
Feeding him coins wasn’t a big deal considering I had coins that magically reproduced themselves so I never ran out.
I was disappointed when the ferryman ran out of stories.
It would have been more interesting if there were alternate ways of getting around in Atlantis, like bridges, tunnels, or underground passages. Until the end of the chapter, the ferryman was your sole method of getting around. Although it doesn’t specifically say so in the game, I like to think that all the “2nd class” citizens managed to escape before Atlantis was blown up the next day.

I never found Arthur to be the least bit funny. Corny, yes. Full of “groaners.”
It was unfortunate that you couldn’t consult Arthur for historical information only. You couldn’t choose the type of thing he’d say. I’d click him to see if he had any historical information, and he’d come out with an unwanted hint or bad joke. The light bulb or cloud over his head didn’t seem to be specific for any one type of response. And even when set to “chatty” he didn’t have much historical information. I’d have been interested to know more about whether there was any actual evidence for the use of balloons in constructing Nazca lines. Did ancient peoples have a way of collecting gases that could be used for such balloons? Could they produce fabrics that were airproof? You have to seek out that information for yourself because Arthur certainly doesn’t tell you.
http://www.hallofmaat.com/modules.php?name=Articles&file=article&sid=96

Once you find the map in Shangri-La, and Arthur marks it for you, the maze isn’t that bad. I’d have preferred to spend more time in exotic locations above ground though. I liked the greenhouse and the temples.

I was disappointed by the visuals. Most locations seemed very generic—especially in Atlantis. I would have expected El Dorado to have more elaborate decor than what we saw. Isn’t El Dorado supposed to be “The City of Gold?” Where was the gold? I expected to see a lot more gilt decoration—especially indoors.

Even though the visuals were supposed to be “DVD quality,” they often seemed fuzzier than in some older games (older as in pre-1998).

This may be a game that doesn’t hold up as well with age.

crabapple - 14 February 2014 01:56 PM

Am I the only one who liked the ferryman?
Feeding him coins wasn’t a big deal considering I had coins that magically reproduced themselves so I never ran out.
I was disappointed when the ferryman ran out of stories.
It would have been more interesting if there were alternate ways of getting around in Atlantis, like bridges, tunnels, or underground passages. Until the end of the chapter, the ferryman was your sole method of getting around. Although it doesn’t specifically say so in the game, I like to think that all the “2nd class” citizens managed to escape before Atlantis was blown up the next day.

I liked the Ferryman. He’s fairly nice to everyone, even the beggar, and he smiles about constantly. Its a nice smile

Yes, I was glad that the coins constantly replenished too, though I wondered if he was really getting anything at all from us. It seemed odd that these coins were the only object we couldn’t use up. Maybe it was a projection from Arthur/the Chameleon Jumpsuit that fooled him into thinking we paid him over and over.

You could just see him waking up on a hill the next day. Wow, he just did escape with his life. At least he has all those coins from that last big day of ferrying folks around. *checks his pockets and finds exactly 1 coin* Nnnnooooooo!

crabapple - 14 February 2014 01:56 PM

I never found Arthur to be the least bit funny. Corny, yes. Full of “groaners.”

This may be a game that doesn’t hold up as well with age.

I guess its a matter of taste. I enjoyed a lot of the bad puns, and a number of pop refs. Given most of them are for the 1990’s, I expect Gage would find Arthur more annoying than we would. I didn’t actually laugh a whole lot, but I found Arthur’s chatter friendly and companionable.

As for the graphics, yes, of course many scenes now look fairly crude, but I adjusted my thinking fairly easily. In a way, the FMV makes the bad graphics stand out more, but in another it adds really good-looking NPCs. Computers still have trouble making digital equivalents as nice as they were/are.   

LOL at cartoon ducks for a dizzy Gage

I finished the game.

The steam tunnel puzzle still gave me a bit of trouble, even though I knew basically what I had to do. It’s fairly picky in that you have to close off every branch on the path from the first steam cave to the wax room (i.e. you’re not allowed to have any short “dead-end” branches for some reason). My first try was to create a path through all three caves to the wax room, and when that didn’t work I started closing off the first cave. I think when I played the game for the first time, I gave up on this puzzle after creating that path through all the caves and not getting any feedback at all. Arthur’s not much help here either, he just tells you what you’ve already figured out - not the details on how to do it.

It’s funny how Arthur’s hints always spell out the exact puzzle solutions if you click him enough times, except for the two most difficult puzzles in the game; the steam tunnels and the Legacy puzzle at the end.

I still think the ending is underwhelming, and there are some things that seem unclear and rushed. Everything just happens by itself, and sort of just peters out into nothing. The aliens about to shoot each other watch Gage spinning in a column of light and speaking in tongues, and just agree to give up and go home? Okay.

And what’s with the Quo’thalas (sic?) vomiting out another Cyrollan-looking alien. The other Cyrollans seem surprised at that. Is it supposed to be a plot twist, that the Quo’thalas are actually close relatives to the Cyrollans and the latter species weren’t aware? What does it mean!?

I’m still not saying I don’t like the game, though. I really do, despite some trite puzzle design. I just think the second game is more deserving of being considered the series’ best.

Thanks for the playthrough, folks (and thanks diego for leading)! I hope I’ll be able to join the next one too.

harald - 16 February 2014 01:38 PM

I just think the second game is more deserving of being considered the series’ best.

Can we play that one next?

You are NOT going to escape this time diego. You WILL finish this playthrough before the voting of the next one.