Frustrating Games

[Shadowknight]

Years ago, I bought two collections of all of the Infocom games. For you young whippersnappers, these games where interactive text. No graphics at all, just words. Occasionally, it was frustrating to play because the designers had an out sort of logic, or there were certain words that would work, and others that wouldn't fortunately, the commands to type were fairly short, and there were a few shortcuts to make things quicker (ex: type "l" instead of "look").

Here's the frustrating thing; some games if you did something wrong, the game wouldn't say "game over", nor would it tell you not to do that thing. I pulled "The Lurking Horror" out of mothballs, a game I had enjoyed, but only ever got 3/4 of the way through. I've been stuck for the last 2 hours.

Apparently, the Urchin in the hallway steals anything you drop. ANY YOU CAN'T GET IT BACK. So, the flashlight I need to finish the game? Gone. Game doesn't tell me this, so I've wasted two hours trying to finish a game that is now impossible to win :| Guess I'll have to start over again.

 

[Jzero]

Originally posted by: Shadowknight
Years ago, I bought two collections of all of the Infocom games. For you young whippersnappers, these games where interactive text. No graphics at all, just words. Occasionally, it was frustrating to play because the designers had an out sort of logic, or there were certain words that would work, and others that wouldn't fortunately, the commands to type were fairly short, and there were a few shortcuts to make things quicker (ex: type "l" instead of "look").

Bwahaha! I spent so long arguing with the command interpreter about the well riddle in Zork II because I could not figure out how to actually give the answer, even though I knew damn well (no pun intended) what it was!

Here's the frustrating thing; some games if you did something wrong, the game wouldn't say "game over", nor would it tell you not to do that thing. I pulled "The Lurking Horror" out of mothballs, a game I had enjoyed, but only ever got 3/4 of the way through. I've been stuck for the last 2 hours.

Apparently, the Urchin in the hallway steals anything you drop. ANY YOU CAN'T GET IT BACK. So, the flashlight I need to finish the game? Gone. Game doesn't tell me this, so I've wasted two hours trying to finish a game that is now impossible to win :| Guess I'll have to start over again.

YES! So annoying! And then it would let you save, and you only have so many save slots!

It was revolutionary when LucasArts decided to make adventure games where you might wander aimlessly for hours trying to solve a puzzle, but you could not screw yourself no matter what.