Adventure Gaming: Lights Out vs The Longest Journey

Adventure games have some fairly well-defined genres of puzzles. There's the inventory puzzle, the logic puzzle, the task puzzle, the dreaded slider, and a few others. Perhaps one additional genre should be the talker.

We started out The Longest Journey with high hopes. The voice acting was so much above some of the previous adventure games we'd been playing that it was so refreshing. It wasn't long, however, before we found out how much we would be hearing it. At least we could skip past some of the dialog, unlike some others that would torture us with it.

We hit a certain point in The Longest Journey where basically we needed an encyclopedia's worth of knowledge to continue and only had one way to get it: A lecture from one character. As it started, it became clear that we needed about an hour's worth of talking to be able to continue. It was pretty much at this point that Andrea gave up in disgust and Given wasn't far behind. (I'm more persevering than most, I guess — I grew up on a ranch and had to put up with a lot of crap, quite literally.) Too much talking is the kiss of death for an adventure game for us.

So I installed another game I had handy, Light's Out. This was one that I saw while walking by in a store and was impressed that it was pretty much all put together by one person. We were immediately drawn in by the spooky atmosphere and the minimal dialog.

Finding a floppy disc while being in the early twentieth century didn't hurt, either.

Basically, we played a mapmaker called to a lighthouse, where its three keepers had mysteriously disappeared. The game play was fairly similar to Myst and hotspots were pretty easy to find. The puzzles were enjoyable except for one: The dynamite puzzle, which actually wasn't a puzzle, despite the interactive interface.

I really enjoyed the game, although afterwards the explanation for the disappearance was less than satisfying. It was more like a hand wave than anything else.

Puzzles in Fiction: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen

When I'm looking for puzzles in fiction, I'm looking primarily for puzzles that are intricate to the plot and that can be solved by the viewer/reader. Die Hard with a Vengeance is my favorite example of this: Although somewhat standard puzzles are used, they were solvable and necessary for the plot.

The Puzzling World of Winston Breen has a few puzzles necessary to the plot — a treasure/puzzle hunt written many years ago in a failed attempt of a father to get his children to work together — but also has many many other puzzles thrown in just for fun. The main character just can't seem to stop making puzzles about everything and his friends do the same for him. All these puzzles are in the book to be solved, and if one doesn't like writing in books or is using a borrowed copy, the author has included them on the website, although sans instructions.

Of the puzzles that the plot requires the main characters to solve, the first one is the best (page 98), the second one pretty good (page 122), and the last (pages 155 & 170)... well, is it really a puzzle? Real life puzzle hunters would be through with the father's hunt in about a half hour and the better teams would probably have time for a lunch break during that half hour. In the book, it took them the better part of two days. Of course, part of the problem was tracking down missing pieces so I can cut them some slack.

The problem with the non-plot-related puzzles is that if you take the time to solve them, it distracts from the plot. It's almost better to finish the book and then work on them.

As for the rest of the book, the plot is predictable and pretty much all the characters but Winston's felt one-dimensional. However, I thought the Three Investigators series was the top of literature back in my much younger days, so maybe Eric Berlin has hit his mark square on.

Unsatisfied with Sherlock Holmes' Earring

Our Wednesday Night Adventure Club finally finished The Secret of the Silver Earring and we're glad to be done with it. Obviously not written for a small group of friends with poor memories who get together once a week to play, we were so thoroughly confused by the end that even the 15-20 explanation of the case couldn't clear up all of our questions.

It didn't help that the interface was so frustrating. For example, moving the cursor over certain parts of the screen would change it to feet, indicating that you could, in theory, click there to go to the next screen. In reality, those clicks didn't always take you to the next screen, let alone cause the character to move. For reasons we could never figure out, the cursor would sometimes change in the middle of a hotspot. And in other cases, clicking on a hotspot would only cause Holmes to respond "I have no interest in that." Then why make it a hotspot???

The end of day quizzes were also ambiguous. Questions like "Is there any evidence that X is directly connected to the case?" when the only evidence we had was that many years ago X worked in a building that today we found a body in. "Directly"? I think not. And even when the answer to a question was clear, the evidence required to back up the answer which two of the four documents that showed Y was in jail should we use to prove that Y was not an honest person? Could we use the documents that implied that Y was blackmailing his employer? UHS Hints was invaluable at this point, and the commentary ("Believe it or not, the answer to this question is yes.") made us feel a little better about not being able to answer the questions to the game's satisfaction.

Most mysteries I know start with a simple concept ("This person has been murdered"), widen out to many different pieces of evidence ("This person was involved in racecar driving, gambling, and had mob connections"), some of which get eliminated ("This person had no gambling debts and was on good terms with the mob."), narrowing suspicion ("This person was sleeping with another driver's wife."), until all the evidence that's relevant points directly at the solution. In the case of the Silver Earring, none of the evidence narrowed; instead it continued to spread out until there were so many paths and motives that the murderer or murderers could have had that we kept thinking there's going to be some final evidence that ties it all together. The final blow came when we were unexpectedly asked who was responsible for each of the deaths that occurred in the game, but we were not allowed access to our body of evidence. And it didn't even matter! You get shown the ending movie regardless of your answers.

And in the end, it turned out that Sherlock Holmes, the character we had been playing, was keeping some of his deductions from us! He had sniffed a suspected murder's hand while kissing it to verify that she couldn't have used the gun. He had eliminated one suspect early on and had secretly had him act suspicious in order to help flush out other suspects. Why, then did we have to continue investigating his involvement? And why did he lie to the police and say one day he wasn't interested in the inheritance and the next demand to have his share?

One final thing: I told my friends from the get-go that one character mention in passing was the key to the whole mystery. During the final exposition, it was revealed I was right. But during this entire time, we did absolutely no investigation into said character and he wasn't even shown on-screen until this final scene!

All in all, The Silver Earring is a frustrating, overly-complex game that may have worked in novel form (as it was originally intended), but in game form was simply out of control.

Aura: Fate of Ages and Sherlock Holmes

Andrea, Given, and I surprisingly finished Aura: Fate of Ages last week. By "surprisingly", I mean it took us by surprise: We finished one world and expected to head to the next, only to find there was a sequel (Aura: The Sacred Rings). My thoughts: The game started with some real quality puzzles that I truly enjoyed, but the quality steadily declined until we got to the end of the game, where the only puzzle was hitting some drums in the right order. There were some pixel hunting problems we ran into (such as picking up a single leaf in a rain forest) that soured our view of the game. I don't know that we'll try the sequel.

Ending early, we tried to find another game to play. Andrea recommended Schizm/Mysterious Journey since she had played it before, had fun, but couldn't remember a single thing about it. It's gotten great reviews and I'm sure it'll be a fun game, but as we started playing, I realized it that it was another "empty landscape" game, and I just wasn't in the mood for another one.

This week I tried to install Tex Murphy: Overseer since I've played it, had a good time, and can't remember a thing (except that there's a cliff-hanger ending that never got resolved in another game). Unfortunately, there's a bunch of hoops needed to go through in order to install it and I haven't been able to find some of the software needed to make this Win95 game work on an WinXP system. So we played Sherlock Holmes: The Silver Earring instead.

It's an interesting game. It brings the idea of pixel hunting to a new level, but since that's your job as a detective, it's not as bad as the leaf example. It starts out with a long exposition ("We're not playing a game, we're watching a movie!" quipped Given), but once gameplay commences it's the standard "ask questions and collect evidence" that I've seen in other mystery games. The level of detail in the graphics, though, was impressive to me. Some things looked like photograph, instead of rendered detail. This didn't stop us, though, from missing a scrap of cloth.

One thing different from standard mystery games is the quiz at the end of each day. Not only do you have to answer questions such as "Can you tell what type of weapon was used in the murder?", you have to back it up with evidence from details in your notebook or evidence collected. It was late when we stumbled across this, so there was some grumbling as I insisted we finish it before heading home. But eventually we got it right, and as we dispersed for the night, the general consensus was it was fun... so far.

My first review!

There's a brief but positive review of nonoriddles over at Puzzlinks, a blog that lives up to its name. Defintely a confidence booster, but I'm really just glad that someone enjoys them.

Good is Good

One thing about writing in the blogosphere is the small amount of feedback there tends to be. In many a case, it's similar to giving a speech to a large box that may or may not be filled with people who are listening. Schrödinger's audience, essentially.

Today, surprisingly and quite by accident, I found that somebody (poor guy) had "reviewed" this journal/blog and found it to be:




I guess I can live with that :)

Wednesday Night Adventure Games - Agon and the Mysterious Codex

Summer months apparently mean Andrea, Given, and I will be playing adventure games on Thursdays instead of our normal Wednesdays. We recently finished AGON: The Mysterious Codex, which is a packaging of Agon parts 1, 2, 3 of a supposed 14. We shall see.

It was a fun game overall, with quality graphics, sound, and some good puzzles. The first episode, "The London Scene" is a fairly slow start to the game, but at least it's short and has the key puzzle which I enjoyed. The second part takes place in frozen Lapland, were most of the game consists of trying to find a way to get transporation to the village where the ancient game is hidden.

The third episode, "The Pirates of Madagascar" was our favorite. It was longer, had better graphics, as well as a wider variety of puzzles. On one puzzle specifically, Andrea mentioned that it would make a good puzzle for a puzzle hunt; both Given and I agreed.

One thing we noticed in Agon was the proliferation of "look behind you" puzzles. There are objects you need to interact with that on one screen you can't touch, but if you go past it and turn around, voila! It's now a hotspot. That process was irritating but we adapted.

We were going to start up the fourth episode The Lost Sword of Toledo, but its system requirements exceed that of any system the three of us own. Or at least they did - looking around for a link to the system requirements, I can no longer find the game for sale anywhere. Even the Agon website simply says "Coming Soon". This, despite the walkthroughs and reviews available. Hmmmmm...

Speed Racer Screening

Last night, thanks to La Vera Pizza, I got to attend a screening for the Wachowski brothers' take on Speed Racer and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.

Maybe it was latent disappointment with the Matrix finale or the way the trailers made it look like all the racing was going to be on cheesy-looking fake tracks (a la Tokyo Megaplex in SSX Tricky) or the fact that most of my knowledge of Speed Racer comes from parodies or the iffy record studios have turning old TV shows into movies, but I had no real expectations going into the film. In fact, I was halfway tempted to switch theaters and go see Iron Man instead.

Maybe no expectations is a good thing. I found myself very quickly caught up in the characters and plot, somewhat predictable as they may have been (it is a sports movie after all). The visuals were astounding; it really felt like I was watching live-action anime. Kids and adults alike laughed at Spritle and Chim Chim's antics, cheered as Speed and family overcame their obstacles, and thrilled to the racing scenes.

I see that critics aren't enjoying the film much. Rotten Tomatoes has it rated at 40%, with one reviewer saying that it's "...an eyesore, a shambles, with incoherent action and ear-buckling dialogue."

I'm no film critic. All I know is that I really enjoyed Speed Racer and judging from the large amount of applause it garnered at the screening, I wasn't the only one.