Makeovers For The Mystery House

nickmontfort writes "In Mystery House Taken Over, a group of us reverse-engineered and reimplemented Mystery House, the 1980 Sierra game. With some others, we've created eight "occupied" houses (remakes and mods of the original) and provided a downloadable kit (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) and a web-accessible system to let people easily create their own versions."

Comments

Sucky

[Meagermanx]

I just played it, and I must say, it was pretty stinking bad. Like, you have to find a candle and matches really quickly, or it gets dark, and you can't do anything (as far as I can tell), and if you go in one room, you trip on a rug and light the house on fire... Every time. It is interesting if you are into old adventure games, but otherwise it is really pretty bad. Also, the graphics are hilarious. There's a wall going through a refrigerator in the kitchen.

Re:Sucky

[oskillator]

I recall liking Sierra games in my youth. Hell, after reading Steven Levy's Hackers, they were heroes of mine. It was only later on, when I discovered Infocom and LucasArts games, that I found out just how poorly-designed Sierra's games are. The puzzles often seem designed to sell the 900-number hint line -- not just hard, but unfair.

I won't attribute to malice, because that type of bad game design was ubiquitous in 1980s (save for a few developers as progressive as the aforementioned Infocom). But as the rest of the world moved on, Sierra refused to improve. It's sad that they were always the most successful adventure game developer, because arguably, it was their persistently unintuitive and ridiculous puzzle design that killed adventure games.