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Have Modern Gamers Lost the Patience For Puzzles?
Brainy Gamer has an interesting reflection on old puzzle games and why their style of gameplay seems to be a dying art. According to the author modern gamers seem more interested in combat and seem to have lost the patience for difficult puzzles. "Despite my fondness for the adventure games of yore, it appears the days of puzzles in narrative games have come and gone. Puzzles - especially the serial unlocking variety found in the old LucasArts games - seem to have become a relic of a bygone era. Where they once provided a necessary ludic element to a—clever and often complex narrative - designed to add challenge and force the player to earn his progress through the story - few modern players have the patience for such challenges anymore."
http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/
I don't know why
I have an odd fascination
with this little java game
There are no puzzles
there are no goals
it's not quite a painting program
but it's not quite a game either
...
...as opposed to ancient gamers? Preindustrial gamers? Renaissance gamers? Pre-war gamers?
Advice: on VPS providers
Plenty of modern games are based around puzzles, they're simply more organic to the game environment and therefore not as noticeable. I don't think it's a matter of modern games not having enough patience, I think it's a matter of gaming evolving into a more immersive and holistic experience.
I miss The 7th Guest and the The 11th Hour
Awesome games, graphics were just amazing for their time, and the puzzles were not that easy.
Or perhaps one called Portal? I hear some people played them in 2007.
I've found the opposite for myself. As I've gotten older, I have less appreciation for killing that last boss, and prefer some puzzle solving/creative thinking in my games.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
The last puzzle games I played and enjoyed were 11th Hour and Myst. I can't really think of any good puzzle games that have come out since.
A story basically whinin' about how the youngin's don't earn anything anymore. With their rap music and their FPS games, damn them.
There are plenty of puzzles in games now. Plenty of innovative games that are purely puzzles. The days of rehashing the same boring puzzles in text or point'n'click adventures are however, dead.
It's called progress.
I'd say that Portal by Valve pretty much dispels this argument. Gamers aren't tired of puzzles. They've simply gotten smarter and like being challenged rather than bored over mindless running around and pressing buttons to make doors open.
_Vishal www.squad9.com
go look at the mobile/j2me/sis space, thousands of puzzles and very popular (especially in eu/asia)
Did you just totally miss Professor Layton and the Curious Village?!?!?!?!
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
Just look at the Wii.
But there are also is a strong culture of arrogant shooter gamers that think "If it doesn't have bleeding edge graphics and a ton of violence, then I don't call it a video game. No, I don't care that the Wii is outselling my personal favorite brand of gaming device. They must be sitting unused in closets. Stop telling me statistics. I'll cover my ears LA LA LA LA LA leave me alone and let me play my shoot-em up game and look down on all other gamers."
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I want to kill something. Is there a gun somewhere?
I'm not a fond of the old Prince of Persia game(s?), the side scrolling and difficulty I have controlling the dude bothers me - lol.
But, the series like Sands of Time, and the likes, I enjoyed quite a lot. The combat was mostly pointless, but, the puzzle aspect was entertaining.
... but the comment thing was just too much of a hassle to figure out.
Also, not enough blood or tits.
So let me get this straight: gamers are too impatient for puzzles, but *not* too impatient to level-grind their characters for days on end without rest or bathing with games like WoW?
I ran a D&D campaign recently with a younger crowd. I created it myself, and naturally incorporated a plethora of puzzles, riddles, and number games in it. But whenever the players got to these things, they'd often resort to just trying to fight their way through whatever mechanical obstacle stopped them.
I think a lot of it has to do with the games that this generation is being brought up on. There's not much strategy or thinking needed for Halo, team fortress II, etc. These newer games through out puzzles and storyline and replace them with better graphics and bigger worlds. Even RPG's these days are less puzzle oriented, and more grind oriented. Thus, most gamers have a mentality that if they can't figure something out they probably just have to overpower whatever it is that is stopping them.
Compare that to the games that older generations were brought up on (Nethack, Mist, older rpgs) and it is pretty obvious to see why this newer generation doesn't endorse puzzles like some of the older peeps here do.
Give it enough time and things will eventually come full circle, people will get tired of the same old shooter with amazing graphics and frankly thats what it's been for the last 7 years its been mostly about shooters with big guns and dazzling graphics. Today thats not good people want great gameplay mechanics, just look at the Wii, which reminds me of the good olde days of when my family and friends would crowd around ye olde Atari 2600. The good puzzle adventure games had their day after the Atari's sunset, give it some time and they'll be back.
That's why Portal was so wildly unpopular, right?
I think it might be a reaction to the highly arbitrary puzzles in past adventure games. Remember FFX and the arbitrary puzzles it forced you into every once in a while, they were maddenly arbitrary and added nothing to the game. Many of the Sierra games had random arbitrary puzzles as well. This is par for the video game puzzles. They add nothing and simply provide a barrier for people. There were a few interesting puzzles but largely they were senseless and distracting. I don't really want to play the towers of Hanoi every 20 minutes so I can open a locker with ammo. I'd prefer not to have to figure out that I need to insert a spatula into a anti-matter reactor so I can power a jar opener to access a gob of acid to eat through a door. If you left it optional, then maybe; but stopping the story and game to play some ridiculous puzzle or some arbitrary item combination is not fun.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Having non-randomized puzzle elements in games made sense before the easy availability of Internet boards and hint sites.
Today, any such content is rapidly bypassed by most. To some degree that is a pity - games like Cruise for a Corpse were great experiences. But alas, the genre just requires too much self-command to be viable.
Of course, randomly-generated puzzlers are still with us - perhaps with increasing computer power, and more sophisticated AI, we will see a revival of randomized puzzle-like adventures?
I have always thought that the old Sid Meier title Covert Action is the best blueprint to follow to revive the puzzle-based action-adventure genre.
I guess the IQ level in Gamers has fallen. Or the IQ level in Game makers has fallen and they forgot how to create interesting Puzzles....
This game series has kept me busy for nearly a year now.
No fancy graphics here; it's pure turn-based puzzle, kind of a mix of Nethack and Gauntlet. Everything from horde monster fights to door-lock puzzles to old classic riddles.
A kind review: http://www.maa.org/editorial/mathgames/mathgames_06_13_05.html
GameFaqs made games easy for some, meaning game creators added some challenges that can ONLY be solved by zealots, which pissed off people, meaning most people use walkthrough for the puzzles. (I'm looking at you, Final Fantasy, where you need NOT to get 4 crates to get the best weapon in the game)
Some challenges are absurd, or blocks the user and are required to continue to play, which means people tend to get to the Faqs again after a period of time.
Some "puzzle" games are all the same crap (I'm looking at you, website I need to change the address to continue by looking at the source code) ... meaning people get annoyed by these puzzles.
But frankly, I _love_ a good puzzle game, and I _love_ to solve challenges, when they can be really solved, like all the friends I know.
But you are right, I hate cheap-@$$ puzzles, I hate copycats of all the same style, and I hate looking at a game for a good hour and not being able to figure out what to do at that point. Up your game while creating your puzzle game and you will have people happy to figure out all the intricacies out of it.
Cheers!
.
The infamous cat hair moustache puzzle is outlined here.
Those are the kind that make Penn Gillette say "Suck Death, Puzzle loving pig!" as he shoots you with a .357 Magnum.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Go play penumbra it's a puzzle game but with puzzles that are actually logical instead of obscure like those in earlier adventure games (oh so I use the rubber ducky with the coat hanger!) which usually caused me to click on everything in frustration.
.. as Old Man Murray points out. Some puzzles may have been great, but I remember plenty of horrible ones, such as the Gabriel Knight one above, where you had to construct a false moustache using cat hair and syrup, in order to hire a moped.
I am really puzzled why they would have that conclusion. Oh well. Guess I'll quit trying to figure it out and go read another article.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
Myst? Monkey Island? Those games were never fun. TFA's author's just a masochist.
I for one never found near endless "maze" type puzzles fun. You know the kind where you enter a pitch black region on a map and have to go left right forward forward right right forward left left - to reach the end and escape the maze. One wrong turn and your dead, possibly erasing an hour of progress along with it. Ditto with having 10 levers that must be pulled and pushed in the exact right sequence to activate a door. I always found those types of things tedious and generally requiring a walkthrough to avoid stress and large bouts of game stopage.
On the otherhand, I was sadend by HL2: episode 1 and 2 which have absolutely no challenging puzzles in them and are pretty much just arcade style blasting your way through for most of the game. I guess what im saying is i'd like to see some puzzles that are somewhere inbetween mind numbingly tedious "myst" puzzles and an arcade game.
Actually thinking about it a bit more, Id have to say fallout 1 and 2 have just the right amount of puzzles in them. They dont really impede gameplay and while challenging, can be interestingly poignant and funny at the same time.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Did not read TFA... wall of text, can someone summarize plz?!1!!
There will be a resurgence in a few years, as the kids who grew up on the classic LucasArts and Sierra games, hit the peak of their careers and want to recreate their childhood. Reference Transformers, the Movie, and all the similar 1980's remakes that are being made nowdays.
The difference will be that they will have extremely better graphics, will be MMPORG/social networking front end hybrids, and will have hooks into real time data. Virtual online avatar worlds are the natural extensions of games like Indiana Jones or Kings Quest / Space Quest, once they go multiplayer and networked.
If you get more women involved in the puzzle creation, there will be less combat and more cleverness, also. Sierra, as a classic example, was founded by a husband and wife team, and that made a noticeable impact on the quality and types of games they produced.
Then of course, there will be the next generation crop of simulators from people who grew up on SimCity, SimEarth, SimLife, and all the early simulators. Expect academic savants, such as Cid Meier, to crop up and supply these niche applications. There is both a financial and academic market for these kinds of simulators, and you can bet that people will work to fill those niches.
Also, I would point out that there is a distinct difference between developing puzzle workflow and modeling 3D environments. A 3D environment is fairly easy to replicate, all things considered. There are architectural design tools, character design tools, and so forth. Less easy is generating a novel story line and novel puzzles.
3D is overrated. Those people who understand this will have to become digital artists to fill the market desire for non 3D, puzzle oriented games.
I loved Portal and I'd like to see more games like it. The key is a comprehensible and consistent set of rules. I don't mind trying to figure out a puzzle as long as it makes sense.
What I hate are those "puzzle" games that have you clicking on every goddamn thing on the screen and using every item on every other item to try to figure out what some designer decided should work based on some arbitrary reason or whim. Of course when you try some similar solution in another level, it won't work. That shit is just annoying. Give me more games like Portal!
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Oh, there's a monkey in my pocket, And he's stealing all my change, His stare is blank and glassy, I suspect that he's deranged...
My sausage tree didn't grow, does that make me a bad mommy?
Zack and Wiki is a great puzzle game for the Wii. It's even pirate themed for a little of that old Monkey Island feel ;) :)
It's not a real adventure though, because it's a sequence of levels where every level is one big puzzle where you have to get to the treasure chest.
And the puzzles are great, not easy and requiring creative thinking. I bought it based on the positive reviews, and I love it
As someone who originally played Adventure on a DECWriter printer terminal I have found the puzzles in games to be increasingly less satisfying in modern games.
A big part of the problem is that in too many case in order to solve the puzzle you generally end up spending a lot of time fighting the game mechanics and game engine rather than actually solving the puzzle. If the gameplay works against my trying solutions or being creative then I'm not interested.
Worst yet is the "puzzles" that require me to follow a script that even an NPC would find degrading and the entire puzzle is figuring out and enacting the lame script the some 4th rate "autuer" has contrived.
-- "Most people prefer a popular myth to an unpopular truth"
Those who mention that game have not played real puzzle games. I was bored with portal because it was too easy.
Anyways, you have to remember that gaming is so pervasive that unlike years ago, when perhaps nerdier types were a greater percentage of the gamer population, a mainstream audience doesn't want difficulty in gaming. They don't want to think.
Perhaps with the leaps in technology and what they allow designers to do lends itself to story and such becoming more and more important and puzzle mini-games becoming unnecessary to lead a user along and make them want to play the game.
You still can't beat the "Ocarina of Time" when it comes to puzzles though. I remember that game having the best puzzles ever. Every labyrinth had a different system you had to figure out and it really was fun and advanced the story.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
I like "puzzles" in the context of a greater goal. Much like the scenes in Half-Life where you have to manipulate your environment to work out a way around a barrier or threat. These are so much closer to the thought-processes you use to solve real-life problems as opposed to juggling random numbers to form a pattern. And, I say this as an avid crossword player.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I grew up on the early Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games, and even some text adventures, but even then - puzzles often felt forced and arbitrary.
"Oh, look -- another door in this dungeon is locked, but has a series of gem-shaped indentations in it! I can't wait to figure out the proper order of the gems! Hooray!"
The best puzzles were the ones integrated into the story, when Character A (whom we already care about, because of previous plot developments) needs Item B and I need to talk to Character C (whom we also already care about) and figure out that I need to use Item D with Item E at Location F to accomplish that goal.
But even then, those puzzles bordered on tedium that you simply had to endure in order to see the next bit of (often wonderfully-written) story.
It was downright schizophrenic: wonderful story, tedious puzzle, wonderful story, tedious puzzle, wonderful story, etc.
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By focusing only on commercial game releases, I think the article completely misses the point. Free puzzle games thrive - if you check regularly any "flash" game site such as Jay is games, you will see that puzzle and adventure games are a legion, and are amongst the most played and popular. Heck, they even have a "room escape" day where they list every Crimson Room clone that has surfaced during the week.
So, maybe you cannot make money anymore by developping an adventure game. However, that does not mean that the genre is dead, far from it.
http://www.senggeng.com/wada/compe/main.html
Isn't puzzle-solving the entire point of most alternate-reality games like Year Zero and Lost Experience?
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Given that it's a short blog post, it sort of ignores the fact that older puzzle games were targeted to the people who owned and played games on the computer; arcade games were never about puzzles. Now we essentially have in-home arcades - why should there be puzzle games targeted to the large number of owners using consoles for games, when they don't fit the profile of the person that likes to be mentally challenged and instead prefers things that require good talent with hand-eye coordination and spatial analysis?
I toggled a toggle and buttoned a button, but when I got done, I was done doin' nothin'.
All this discussion and nobody's brought up Phoenix Wright? That series of games is nothing but puzzles, and all of them make sense. I've played through 2 of them, and there was only 1 time in each game that I felt was ridiculously hard (what do you mean I have to look at the painting then the desk then the painting again? There's no clue on the desk that makes me want to look at the painting again! ARGH!) The "puzzles" aren't puzzles in the truest sense of the word, but you do have to think about the topic at hand and decide which piece of evidence would fit best into the situation... isn't that a puzzle?
Anyone who thinks the puzzle/point and click adventure genre has died hasn't played Zack and Wiki for the Wii yet. The game plays phenomenally well with a lot of personality to boot.
A lot of people are looking towards the Wii as the savior of the genre. Point and clicks aren't always geared towards casuals, but this has always been one of the casual gamers prefered genres. It requires thinking, not quick reflexes and competition.
The DS is also reviving this genre with games such as Hotel Dusk and Trace Memory and ports of games such as Last King of Africa and Myst. I can only imagine it's a matter of time before we start seeing more.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
When I think about video game puzzles, I'm generally thinking along the lines of Professor Layton and the Curious Village or Portal. The Roberta Williams "random series of actions" school of puzzling is more like an extended exercise in manual combinatorics. The only way to "solve" most of those games (and I speak from extensive experience) is to use every single item on every other object or person you encounter. Occasionally, there's some sort of sense to what goes where, and you really can "figure it out." Just as often, though, you're putting masking tape on the hole in the fence so that when the cat goes through some fur will stick to it which you can then combine with maple syrup to make a fake mustache to disguise yourself as a man who, incidentally, doesn't have a mustache.
As many of those games as I played as a kid, I can't really say I'm sorry to see them go.
I think gamers are just sick to the same puzzles repeated through many games.
How many times have you completed the jumping puzzle? You know: the one where if you fail to hit the next platform you fall into the lava/acid/other form of liquid death.
How many times have you completed the senseless "take item and place in completely unrelated item" puzzle? You know: the one where you take a plaque and put it at the base of a statue, rotate it 90 degrees, and a door opens.
How many times have you completed the "talk to this person X times to move forward" puzzle? You know: the one where you have to talk to a character 1/2/3/some other random number of times before they tell you where to find the boss.
How many times have you completed the "stun and slash" puzzle? You know: the one where there is some enemy that cannot be damaged by anything. You have to stun the enemy by hitting a special area and then run in for the kill. Hell, Orcarina of Time used this puzzle for EVERY SINGLE BOSS.
I could go on...
I play computer games since ~1995. I liked the LucasArts adventures at this time most.
One thing I noted, the quality of games went down from time to time. Many game studios went bankruptcy or were bought by big game studios, which made bad sequels out of the games.
What I noted, especially in the last 2 years are two things:
- Games are often made to run on PC and consoles. That makes the developers design it for the most limited platform in terms of input devices. This is usually bad for the PC port of the game.
- Games are made in a way to maximize profit.
Maximizing profit means to appeal as many customers as possible. That often include people who want to play something like an "interactive movie", without any real challenges or parts where serious thinking is needed.
If this matches your definition of "modern players", I think they never had a patience for such puzzles.
The puzzle style of gameplay in Half-Life and Zelda still appeal to gamers.
At least we're getting some new Sam & Max.
I blame the recent console-ization of gaming for lowering our collective attention spans.
I think they need to do a little research first.
God of war 1 and 2 were even balances of puzzles, timing battles, slaughtering minions, and bosses with predictable patterns. Aside from the minions, that could be considered 3 types of puzzles.
Portal mentioned twice is good, but additionally there were sorts of puzzles in half life 2.
Zac and Wiki, one of the best known hidden gems on the Wii is a point and click puzzle game.
Zelda and the Phantom hourglass certainly has it's share of very VERY innovative puzzles, making good use of the touch screen and even at parts the FOLDING of the DS (it says to touch a symbol on the top screen to a map, after about an hour of tapping everything in the dungeon I realized it was just you had to close, then open the DS, brilliant nintendo!) and I'm aware that the rest of the series relied on puzzles too.
Metroid prime 3 had quite a few puzzles and that's an FPS (although some who drink too much nintendo koolaid inist it's it's own "FPA" genre.)
Lego Star wars had many.
Halo 3 did not. Katamari didn't. Mario doesn't so much.
Furthermore, Tetris has been sold well on every system ever, Lumines is quite popular, Meteos did well...
In my limited experience, puzzles are still a staple of many, in fact I'd even say MOST games (aside from racing and strict FPS.) The author only mentioned two games to support his argument, and the fact that kids don't like puzzles. Well, kids don't like a lot of good stuff. When I was a kid, I thought macaroni and cheese was the greatest thing ever invented, so did my friends, yet you never saw any articles suggesting that fine dining is going extinct because MacDonalds does well and a lot of kids think steak is gross.
He's obviously picking a few games that don't have puzzles in them that he's played recently and jumped to the conclusion that developers and gamers all have ADD and don't want puzzles. He's wrong.
The title sais it all really. We have moved away from generation x, y or whatever and over to IGG. The best way to describe this new generation is with the fantastic notion from Leslie in The Big Bang Theory... Stick electrodes in a rats brain and give it a button that causes an orgasm every time it's pressed. The rat would keep pressing the button till it died of starvation. This is exactly what the new games are; orgasm buttons. Short bursts of good feeling with only one lasting effect. After 1 hour of gameplay; you are one hour older.
I guess I am just getting old.
Portal is a hugely popular game with original puzzle solving gameplay and a humourous narritive.
Puzzle solving isn't dying, it's just changing form what you're used to.
It's not that people don't like puzzle games, it's the manner in which they've been used in games lately. In many games they're nothing more than an annoyance, with variants of the same puzzle appearing over and over again in a desperate attempt at stretching the game out and make it seem longer. I have no patience for this sort of thing at all and doubt many people do. If you want to make a puzzle game, or incorporate puzzles into your game, you'd better not make them annoying, mandatory, and long. That sounds like an honest job description; how could anyone not hate that?
I loved Portal by the way. All the puzzles were different, and the rewards for completion (the humorous voiceover and further interesting puzzles) were excellent.
"I do a grep for shit, bollocks, and tits before checking in code. I'm professional..." -RECURSIVE_META_JOKE, reddit.com
Maybe it's just that all the good puzzles have already been presented in past games and there are no new good puzzles for new puzzle games.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It's not like you have to transport into your own brain and rip out your common sense in order to can pick up the Tea and the No Tea at the same time so you can so impress the ship computer that he opens the door for you. Discussing any puzzle less complicated than that is just whining.
This conversation often comes up when i'm talking about games with younger people. I remember playing the same game, the same phase in that game, for weeks, sometimes even months! Remember the Kings Quest series where you had to find numerous ingredients to make some crazy potion and had to go through all kinds of weird places to almost score with a chick in Leisure Suit Larry. The increasingly difficult and hugely entertaining puzzles in 7th Guest and 11th Hour, and not to mention the fun hours playing Day of the Tentacle.
I am a huge fan of ScummVM and play some of these games still every now and then. Some months ago my wife and i re-played The Dig, the game that was supposed to be a movie but due to budget became a video game.
Yeah ..
And Zelda for the NES is just nothing compared to the one for Wii, i'm sorry. Must be because i'm an old fart (damn, i'm only 31!) but these newer games lack the fun and playability (playing for weeks and still finding it amazingly funny and challenging) that the older games had. Sure there are exceptions, but games like KQ,LLL.MI,DOTT and the like are classics which no modern game can top.
GOOD RIDDANCE! I #$@*#&@# hate puzzles in my FPS!!! I want to blow things up, not chasedown colored access cards or have megarmor dangled in my face at the start of the mission, wondering how to get to it. There's a reason I didn't go very far in Half-Life 2, ya know.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
The Incredible Machine was puzzle solving in its purest form. Great fun!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
But unfortunately IMHO many of the later games (including some later offerings from Infocom) copped out and instead of eloquent puzzles they offered painful trial-and-error puzzles or puzzles so obscure and obtuse that you really had to buy the hint books, call the 900 number, or otherwise "cheat" or you were not going to solve the problems. Far from wonderful puzzles, these are just crude hacks disguised as puzzles from writers who either can't or will not take the time to design graceful puzzles. To come up with an absurd series of idiotic steps that a player must somehow recreate to accomplish the goal, with no logic behind doing these either in the real world or in the game world other than that's what the author has decided you must do, is hardly a valid puzzle. It's just an ego trip for the author and the reason for the decline in supposed puzzle games. And as at least one commenter here pointed out, there are still some good puzzle games, such as last year's Portal.
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As being one of my favorite games on the Amiga it was a platformer of sorts and there was some killing of thing..(i think), but the real challenge of the game was to solve the puzzles laid before you by the "gods" that would acually allow you move forward. Sometimes it was a sequence of switched that interacted with one anouhter, or an almost tetris like need to build a platform. It was challenging and fun. Nowadays I can honestly say I've logged more hours on my 360 playing Hexic than anything else.
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
I never liked puzzle games anyway, I just wanted to blow things up. Now that I'm older and can better appreciate puzzles, I jsut don't ahve the time. And only want to blow things up. The more things change...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
No.
Five minutes to load off tape, and then a game that runs on pretty limited hardware but with nothing to distract you (i.e. no internet or even multi-tasking). The whole mindset was different back then - even action games could afford to be a lot harder and require a lot more effort to be put in. Nowadays, games have to go for a bit more instant gratification because there are so many other options if they don't grab you quickly. Even the existence of cover discs and downloadable demos encourages that - before you had to rely on the considered opinion of someone who had played the game for a long time too.
There are exceptions though. A lot of Japanese games are quite "slow" and have a lot of puzzles, especially RPGs.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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The other problem is quality control. I just played NWN2 and the Mask of the Betrayer sequel. ... Oh, and the bugs were so plentiful that the walkthroughs had the script segements necessary to bypass the bugs.
I had to resort to the walkthroughs to convince myself that yes, the game had broken, yet again
I'd done all that was necessary to complete that particular quest and unless I wanted to hack past it I was going to have to restart.
One of the problems with the newer graphics/scripting engines is that more underlying complexity has brought more fragility. Complex annoying quests may irritate some players, but complex annoying BUGGY quests are a decent onto hell.
...I think that it's just the divide getting deeper between those that enjoy a solid game and those that just like to push a button and see pixels react in some way. There will alway be the market for the serious in some way, the games that challenge from the start (like serious scrolly-shooter fans and Ikaruga as an example). And the opposite would be the masses of people making Webkinz a run-away success.
...but I think more and more of the masses just don't get it. A divide if you will.
Another example is Monkeyball on the iphone, and all the people commenting that it's too hard. The game is very playable with a very high gameplay, especially when you can be playing immediately (in the "play immediately" mode) and the practice modes. There used to be a time when all people playing games appreciated the challenge. The definition of a good game is something that allows you to play at the start and progressively gets harder...
The only "puzzle" game I found that was any good was 7th Guest, though the Gabriel Knight werewolf tale wasn't too bad. Most, like Myst and Rama were more about inspecting every square inch to find some trinket that you then had to poke around in random places without any clues as to what to do with it. I found them boring and painful.
In the fine tradition of WarLords, it's an RPG with "bejewelled" like puzzles as the central "battle" engine. I love it.
http://puzzle-quest.com/
It just depends on what the key is to open the door lock.
I'm going to be honest here. Progress Quest pretty much sums up every game out there.
Replace "fetch me a" with whatever puzzle challenge you have and "experience points" with "next level".
Coincidentally, accumulate enough experience points in some games, and you get the "next level".
My older D&D players love them or ignore them.
Some of my younger D&D players got very upset.
Talking to them later, they feel their self-image is threatened when they can't solve them and instead of wanting to push harder until they do solve them they get upset and stop. My response has been to be more careful about leading them into the riddles with game events or easy riddles leading to harder riddles and they are getting better. I was surprised at them being upset tho and I have to assume it has to do with the "no real winners and losers everyone has to feel happy" attitude in school these days. They can't handle losing very well. Instead of viewing it as a challenge, they view it as unfair.
To be fair, it is possible that my older players had similar issues when they were younger.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
So how many of of you got the babel fish? ;)
are pukezels. They are pointless, boring tedious and lame. Do you remember 7th Guest or some of the narrow walkways or peg jumping idiocy in Doom/Quake?
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Back when Sierra and Lucasarts were in the adventure game heyday, The computers that ran those games weren't really capable of much more than animated sprites on a static background. Now that computers have evolved to the level of today, we simply expect more out of the experience than watching a little man walk around on the screen.
Puzzle games are the fastest growing sector of the video game market. its called Casual Games. What has changed is this splitting of dexterity based games for traditional gamers and puzzle games for our aging yet expanding demographic.
I remember sitting in front of a computer for hours playing infocom games, and I still benefit from the analytical skills I gained.
See Portal.
Next question?
I just finished playing Sudoku. You know, paper and pencil based numerical puzzles than can be maddeningly difficult. So at least I still like to play puzzle games. If you meant computer games, then I'd offer Portal like quite a few other people.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
there are no good puzzle games available. End of story.
Hell yeah, modem gamers don't like puzzles!! They MUCH prefer getting that init script juuuust rii@#$%^)(*%&$ NO CARRIER
I'm not sure I would say that gamers have lost patience with puzzles in games as there are just way to many other factors involved.
To name a few...
1. Waxing and waning of an industry...Puzzles, much like Slasher Flicks and Sci-Fi movies, may be a hot/not hot ticket item. One really good, highly profitable game with puzzles as a integral part, and way may see the ebb start to flow.
2. Also much like the movie industry, when a popular style is rapidly duplicated, quality often times suffers. While I enjoyed puzzles in my games, I got sick and tired of guess-the-correct-order "puzzles". Puzzles get lame, gamers get sick of them...that in itself could explain the current lack of them.
3. Which modern day games really lend themselves to puzzles? FPS puzzles almost always more tedious than fun for instance.
4. The internet has to play a big factor. Knowing all answers you seek is but a few mouse clicks away changes the mentality. No puzzles are too hard, none are too tedious. Although I have nothing to quantify this statement...just knowing the solution is within easy reach makes it less interesting (has to do with value's relationship with cost).
5. Talent in the industry. Good puzzles come from good puzzle designers. The industry used to be full of them, as many of the yester-yore game designers were of the (and I don't mean this in a bad way) dork/geek types who thrived on puzzles. Designing puzzles to stump the peers has been replaced with OSS coding skills. Go and Chess replaces with Unreal and Diablo.
On and on...
To this day, perhaps the best puzzle game of all time (excepting Infocom) was Fool's Errand (Apple II, I believe)...http://www.fools-errand.com.
Someone should tell PopCap who managed to get Bejeweled on almost every cheap mobile device out there.
Shadow of the Colossus. Full stop.
... the only puzzles I've heard gamers ever complain about are one of two types: "Jumping Puzzles" where missing a jump resets the mess, or things that just outright break the normal mechanics of the game-- eg: "Cheating Game".
A few examples come to mind:
Assassins Creed the mission out by the boat, where if you land in water it resets you back to the shore after a long load.
I forget what game it was, but to beat the end boss you had to move the controller to the second port on the system (ps1 if I remember correctly.) That's just out of context with the game and obnoxiously stupid.
Oh and as bonus annoyance-- games that pigeon hole you into a obviously completely retarded option that both you as a player would know is a bad idea and your character not having an iq of 12 would know is a horrible idea... but insists on doing it anyway and can't be avoided to advance the storyline.
Shadus
Sure, we live in a day of MTV attention spans but keep in mind that we speak a different language as well.
From years of Sierra and Lucas Arts games, we learned that balloons and bread might combine hours down the road to scare off pigeons and that if you miss a clue now, you'll have to backtrack 2 weeks from now and find it.
Thank god, a few designers in the past decade looked at these little "skills" and using many words such as "arbitrary" and "tedious" decided to slowly change WHAT gamers pay attention to rather than HOW MUCH attention they play.
Think back to a few of those old games and you'll remember an element of tediousness. Even though it may not have dissuaded you back then, you had built up a careful repertoire of knowledge to insulate you from the worst of the events. You knew that something disjointed was probably important. You knew NOT to leave items behind no matter how frivolous. In short, you spoke the language of the game writers enough to pick up on the clues about which today's players would be...well...clueless.
Yes, today's fast paced games are frequently faster paced, but there are plenty of players that enjoy the slower aspects of games. The problem is that modern players no longer have the same context from which to play the older games.
all alike.
Actually, that is a pretty good description of slashdot.
AccountKiller
When you can have a walkthrough loaded up in seconds, too many people do so and then feel ripped off over the hour or so of gameplay.
One of my favorite FPS games of yore was Bungie's "Marathon" series precisely because you had to solve puzzles (granted, they weren't terribly difficult, but tricky when under fire from space critters). Same thing with Half-Life.
I really enjoyed the puzzle part of getting through a level.
But, with both of these games came the next big adrenaline spike: network play against each other. Network game play and broad band networking gave everyone instant gratification to frag and test your skills against real people in real time.
Even if AI gets really good in these games, the bragging rights of arena playing on-line are just too alluring to compete with the puzzle.
Perhaps if you had to do both that might level the playing field for the "smart" people who can do the puzzles and the "fraggers" with inhuman reflexes?
I suppose there are some games out there--usually they are team play with particular roles for each. This keeps trigger happy people in check with the reality of the mission and objective (not just jousting to the death).
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
One neat thing about the Portal puzzles is that some of them can be solved in multiple ways. Watching someone else defeat the turrets in the most unlikely way imaginable was highly entertaining.
I thought that was the description of the Adventure source code!
"Come to bed babe..." "Just one more game of minesweeper" Or maybe I'm just really crap in bed.
an epic production like space quest could be knocked up in flash in a few weeks by one guy at little cost
No, it couldn't. The flash-developing kids don't have hired artists, skilled writers, a sound engineer or competent musician (anyone remember the Fat Man?)... Flash games reproduce much of the engine, but in an adventure game, the engine is the easy part. The content is what's valuable.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
WELL !
HAVE THEY ?!?!?!
What about games like Echochrome? This is one of the most highly addictive games I have played. Pixeljunk Eden is another (or the upcoming pixeljunk Monsters). Pain is somewhat a puzzle game also I think. Flow is another.
Current games are designed to appeal to an escapist audience and thus try to be more "realistic" in their gameplay. Real life is much more like FedEx quests than abstract puzzles.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Interesting that a large enough group of that HALO crowd was interested enough to participate in the HALO 2 ARG, which many wrote off as viral marketing, but it was actually an incredibly elaborate meta game which was driven primarily by solving word puzzles. There was at least one that nobody ever figured out till after the game ended. Mind you, this is the drooling crowd of wii-hating FPS lovers.
Puzzle Quest
Puzzle Pirates
90% of iPhone games
Portal
Viva Pinata
Penny Arcade
N+
It seems to me like the person is complaining not that puzzles have gone away, but that Adventure game-style puzzles have gone away. Honestly, adventure game style puzzles ususally consisted of closing a door to get a set of keys to give to a criminal to get a crowbar to smash into a vending machine to get quarters to do your fricking laundry. And... time travel was involved. These puzzles weren't "difficult" in the traditional sense, so much as "the designer's barely coherent chains of logic" is difficult. You had to get a moldy cheese sandwich from a bartender to feed to a dog to avoid being eaten 4 hours later into the game. And the game doesn't tell you the bartender serves cheese sandwiches.
Modern puzzles are all based around explicit known uses. If you fire a blue portal in Portal, you know that it will open a connection from the red portal. If you move a puzzle piece in Tomb Raider, you will know it will move a platform in an expected way. If, on the other hand, you attempt to use the crow on something in The Longest Journey, there is a 90% chance that you will have no idea what it does, and the attempted action will have no consequences.
The ______ Agenda
To newer gamers defense, though, it was a pain in the ass to figure out that I had to replace the bucket of golf balls with a bucket of fish and also to figure out that I had to take Max's black light bulb or that I had to bend a wrench to unscrew the giant fish.
I think you've confused PUZZLES with TEDIUM. Memorizing (or writing down) a map isn't puzzle solving. It's data storage.
paintball
I wouldn't deny any of the true fans their puzzle games, but I never understood the point of them myself. They fit no definition of fun that I'm familiar all of which many other kinds of games did better with. TFA didn't even attempt to give a reasonable explanation - I suspect an explanation's not possible because those games weren't really fun.
FWIW, everyone I know who solved Myth did so with cheating (and many times even then having difficulty). I think the puzzle-game "trend" TFA is talking about was little more than a marketing effort to publish more cheat books. That or the games were intended for small children that have time to do nothing but digest a game all day every day....maybe that was the plan?
I dunno....when the best the developers can come up with is ways to make me not able to figure out how to play the game, I feel I'm at odds with them. How much of my (or anyone's) time is going to be spent just trying to open a door in a game yet we still call it "fun"?
-Matt
DDO had one nifty difference from its MMORPG competitors... The dungeons often had puzzle rooms, with typical classic small adventure puzzles like "rearrange the tiles on the floor", etc. I found them enjoyable, and sometimes I would even repeat the same dungeon just to play the puzzle again, even though I know I could find a flash version of the puzzle online to play over and over.
A good puzzle is a joy to solve. Each solution you try, if it doesn't solve the puzzle gives you a tiny bit more info to solve it, lets you see how it's structured, helps you understand it as you solve it.
A bad puzzle is a road block until you give up on the game or go get the solution from a web site. I often suspect that a bad puzzle has more ways to not solve it than the designer intentionally added, giving off unintentional red herrings, or that you need to be part of the culture they grew up in to understand some of the clues.
Bad puzzles are why gamers hate puzzles.
ME: Pick up knife
Computer: I don't understand "knife"
ME: Pick up sword
Computer: I don't understand "sword"
ME: Pick up saber
Computer: I don't understand "pick up"
That's when I tended to eject the floppy and try to see how far I could toss it.
I'm only semi-facetious in saying that. I never liked puzzle games because (a) they pretty much require that you read the game designer's mind, and (b) they are almost always what my co-designer Wayne Holder called (derisively) "railroad games" -- that is, you're stuck on the tracks and you can't get off. Also, (c) the "puzzles" are often pretty arbitrary, having little to do with the game itself.
But in the early days of computer games (and my own days go back to the early 1980s), puzzles were a cheap form of complexity precisely because graphics, UI and presentation were so hard and consumed so much of the limited resources.
I frankly think that most "modern gamers" are heaving great sighs of relief at being rid of "puzzle games" and being able to play something else for a change. But that could just be me. ..bruce.. (co-author, Sundog: Frozen Legacy )
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
not gamers. Read this: http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html Unless you mean puzzle games as in things like Peggle, or Puzzle Quest etc etc. These games live on in budget form and web/flash games.
I tend to believe that modern communication and gaming communities killed the puzzle style game. Few people are 'nobel' enough to stick it out in a puzzle game without input from the outside. However these days when you run into a room in a game and you can't find the key, or open the lock you can just pop online and search the local forum for the answer. Presto... and you're through. Since the puzzles were supposed to be the challenge in the game being able to just get the answers readily from a community kills much of the challenge since those people get bored with that genre ("oh that game? yeah... I solved it in 5 hours... I'm not buying the next one because it was too easy"). The few who do quietly work their way through the entire game challenge by challenge are not enough of a user base to make the market viable for game makers.
I remember the first Alone in the Dark.. I was addicted to that game and there really wasn't much of a community to walk you through it. You, and maybe the 3-4 other people you knew personally who owned it had to work through it and you didn't want to share too much because there is competition inside your social circle. When you can post an answer on a forum for strangers... and in turn anonymously get an answer from strangers on a forum... a large percentage of people will cave and look it up.
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
When I was a child, my parents would scoff at a $50 pricetag on a game like Double Dragon. When they would finally break down and buy a game like Metroid, it was only once a year. (3 times a year for the spoiled kids) and so you had your videogame and you had 1 year alone with it to pour across every pixel, bomb every corner, crush every block, test every wall. If you found a new secret, you were king of the school at elementary the next day.
Nowadays, we have 60 videogames being released in the month of October, and most gamers have the resources to easily buy one or two a month, and we don't have the time or care to devote such meticulous attention to every mundane detail. With gamefaqs up, as well, it eliminates the promise of some secret that you, and only you, have managed to discover through your diligence. Overabundance of availability leaves us bombarded by a thousand choices while telling us that none of them truly deserve any sort of lasting engagement. (For the most part, some addictions have developed to some games which have preserved the attentions of several million people)
When the signals became more abundant, adventure games were the first to die.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Also worth mentioning, there are 2 seasons of episodic Sam and Max games available on Steam. I've played a few episodes from season one and they're pretty good if you enjoy the style of old fashioned adventure games.
Name a single puzzle in BioShock. I mean, something you actually had to THINK about.
I didn't see that part of the game....
Ditto the parent. When was the last time you got out pencil and paper to complete a game? Even something simple like solving a simple letter-substitution cipher (without the game assisting you or providing partial keys)?
I admit that my attention span for patiently playing and re-playing a game so that I can win it is diminished, but it's still there. And the sense of accomplishment is much greater.
---nathaniel
Didn't adventure games just make a revival? I saw tons of them released in the last months. I haven't played any but I don't think they focus on combat.
Hugo was terrible for that. My least favourites where the bullion, and the rubber bung. Also equally irritating was the screen with the elephant in the jungle. You put the cage down, open the cage door, and shoot a blow dart in the elephant before he got too far away.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
My wife loves puzzle games. Her favorite series was King's Quest, and she also liked Civilization 1 and 2, but mostly 1.
She hates combat, or anything to do with time-based interactions or interactions that depend upon hand-eye coordination and/or motor skills. She likes to just play along with a good story at her own pace and solve some interesting puzzles, as long as it's not too dark or creepy.
We've been looking, unsuccessfully, for new games for her to play. Maybe the Harry Potter games, but she's not really a Potter fan.
I think it's pretty indicative of the state of gaming, and gamer's expectations, when almost all of the responses to this article attempt to refute it by citing combat-centric games that happen to contain puzzles.
Any advice? Or are we just 1% market share left in the dust by 99% who want kinetic mayhem?
Seriously, the DS is has tons of adventure games with a lot of hard non-linear puzzles. Try the Phoenix Wright series or Hotel Dusk. Those have the same kinds of puzzles and problem solving that you'll find in the old Monkey Islands, Mysts, and similar games. Then you have the more epic Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Okami, and Zelda games, that offer a combination of adventure puzzles with action elements.
As a fan of really puzzly adventure games, I really don't agree that puzzle games are disappearing. In fact, I think they're getting more involved and more difficult. Sure, the puzzles are becoming more integrated into the setting, but I think that's a really good thing.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
I turn to games to escape from thinking. The puzzles in Max Payne (more skill tests, than puzzles) were annoying.
Perhaps if I wanted games to make me think it would be different. I used to like that, but its been a while since then. When I do want to play and think, I turn to Civ, or Sim City or some similar clone.
Think Deeply.
one point but i have to say it loudly
PORTAL!!!!!!!!
Phoenix Wright was a moderetly popular game series, and they are basicly just a series of puzzles one after another.
My wife and I just put one together today. Wait, is this what we are talking about?
I think that's what the real topic is here. For me, puzzles always seemed out of place in an adventure game. You kill all the zombies and find the magic flute, then all of a sudden the excitement comes to a standstill while you solve some number puzzle. It completely blows the fantasy. If you can make a puzzle that's synergistic with the whole of the gameplay, that works, but that's not what you typically see in adventure games.
Most puzzles in modern games are obtuse rather than clever.
Modern players have very little patience with content developers who see puzzles as a chance to "out geek" the players.
I never had patience for puzzles. I wasted so much time trying to catch that damn babelfish as it shoots out of the dispenser. Grrrr.
Does anyone here remember those old "Choose your own adventure" books that was basically a printed form of a decision tree? (There used to be hundreds of the things throughout the 80's and 90's.)
Although the stories were a bit lacking, it did make reading as a kid much more enjoyable since it was interactive.
To be honest though, I'm amazed the genre never expanded to more adult readers. There's so much that could have been applied to the format to make them more interesting. For example, requiring the reader to solve complex puzzles to determine what their choices are, or remembering previous elements from the story to know what they need to do next. Span that over 1,000 pages, and you could have an adventure last several hours.
One interesting approach, a story involving a mystery requiring you to gather evidence and take statements from witnesses to build a case, then going to trial with it where the reader can choose to be either the prosecution or the defense.
Something like this could make for an interesting project for writers like Tom Clancy or John Grisham, who already write incredible linear stories like these. This would simply be an extension of their talents to make the reader far more involved in the story and the outcome.
8==8 Bones 8==8
I miss the classic adventure games -- which were really puzzle games -- like King's Quest, Space Quest, and Monkey Island.
Those had great stories and lots of humor along with reasonable puzzles to be solved.
I think they'd do fine today but no-one seems to make anything quite like those.
So, don't be worried about people not buying puzzle oriented games, but just don't expect the sales to be as big as other genres.
What I DON'T have patience for is WALKING. It's one thing to have to figure out how to unlock some complicated door puzzle, it's another thing to have to spend 20 hours walking back and forth gathering bits and pieces to "solve" a puzzle.
The problem with puzzles in games is that the nature of the puzzles deteriorated over time to be moe time consuming and tedious and less clever.
Get rid of the extraneous travel time associated with the puzzles and a lot of people will suddenly have a lot more patience for them.
Oh, and that will have the added bonus of stopping developers from artifically increasing the playtime of their games via incredibly long travel times.
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
All these posts and not one (moderated) person mentions the new episodic Sam & Max games! I bought them all and absolutely adore them.
The story is ridiculous and over-the-top, and they have stylish graphics that don't need the latest hardware to run.
They're not very hard as far as adventure games go, but if you find a segment challenging, in Season 2 you can turn on an in-game hint function. If you do that, Max will usually spit out something like, "I'm bored. Let's go back to the office," which generally doesn't automatically spoil the next part of the mission, but points you in the right direction. Much better than alt+tabbing for GameFAQs.
I love Myst. I'll be the first to admit that... even got an armband tatt written in D'ni a couple of months ago.
But Myst sort of killed the adventure game genre. Everyone tried to copy Myst (see Sierra's "Shivers," fr'ex) and everyone failed.
Myst and Riven were fantastic. Myst III was pretty decent, but Myst IV was just a big pile of nonsensical puzzles-for-the-sake-of-puzzles. The puzzles weren't part of the story, but slapped on top because obviously Myst games need lots of puzzles.
Myst V and Myst Online: Uru Live got far better in that regard. I miss Uru, and can't wait for Cyan to start 'er back up again.
I also really miss Sierra's "quest" series. Was never that into King's Quest, but I loved Space Quest and definitely Quest for Glory. Best series ever.
There aren't a lot of adventure fans these days, at least not in terms of percentages of the gamer community. But there are still some of us around. Their VGA remake of QfG 2 is right around the corner.
Soylens viridis homines es
If my life is any indication lots of gamers still like playing games but can't really dedicate that much time to them. I might be able to play an hour or two a week, and if that's the case solving the same puzzle I started a month ago isn't what I would consider an efficient use of my unwinding time. Now ten years ago... I'd spend a whole damn week chipping away at those video games. Anyone else have a similar experience or am I just crazy?
This article is not about "puzzle games", it's about puzzles within your average action/adventure game. The case of actual puzzle games is much worse, they're quite well on their way to become an extinct genre like beat'em ups and shoot'em ups; games you can only find in indie and homebrew productions, not in the mainstream. Long gone are the days of Puzzle Boy, Boxxle, Adventures of Lolo, Bombuzal, The Brainies, Lemmings (a best-seller at the time) and so many more...
Each puzzle is a test. The same puzzle that is too easy for a more intelligent player may be utterly impossible for a less intelligent one. Only players within a certain IQ range will enjoy any given puzzle. You can offer puzzles with a wide range of difficulty in your games so that nearly all of the players will be challenged at least some of the time, but the smarter players will be bored most of the time and the less intelligent players will be stuck and frustrated most of the time. So even with clever, utterly ingenious and creative puzzles only players on a very narrow portion of the bell curve are going to find them challenging but not impossible. I suppose you could offer different versions of a game written exclusively for players withing a given IQ range, but it still wouldn't get around the fact that you are writing for a niche market and the more you try to make your puzzle game appeal to a wider audience the more the players are going to be experiencing either frustration or boredom as their typical game emotion.
Of course I am talking here about good puzzles. Bad puzzles are solvable by anyone. They are an issue of tedium (or guessing the how the puzzle writer thinks) instead of complex problem solving. I am referring to the find the red key and all those kinds of "puzzles", the point of which is to not challenge even the bottom 1% of the market. It does seem the only practical way to try to escape the exclusionary nature of puzzles. So it is easy to imagine why puzzle games are not being written more.
It is true that solving a puzzle at the upper end of your IQ range will require some patience and perseverance, two qualities that do seem to be getting even more scarce than they used to be. When the answer to even relatively obscure questions can nearly always be found in less than 15 seconds, perhaps it doesn't exactly encourage more P&P. I certainly don't believe for a second that people have gotten any less intelligent in the last quarter century, but I think we have all been infected by the Google disease. Even old geezers like myself. Yet all of the difficult, unsolved problems still require just as much P&P.
As computer gaming becomes a large industry, more and more like the movie industry, we are seeing the games become more and more simplistic and dumbed down in order to promote an "embrace and extend" philosophy which tends to produce the highest profits. So it is not at all surprising if we don't see as many puzzle games as before. From a profitability POV the entire genre has failed, and what I am proposing here is that it was doomed to failure from the start due to its inherently exclusionary nature.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
My username.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
My favorite story about this was the game where all the commands were of the form "verb noun" where only the first four letters counted. The correct action was to "scream bear" which caused the bear to run away. However, if you got really frustrated at trying to guess the correct command and wrote "screw bear" instead, the bear also ran away.
The guy who wrote the article said that he was rather surprised at that result...
> GET YE FLASK You can't get ye flask!
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
In those days the game world was smaller, and a single person could, through diligent gaming, acquire a thorough knowledge of every character class.
Take L30n4rd0, the wizard/technologist/tank/healer/DPS/accountant. And he was good at all of them.
Nowadays there's just too much to learn; you have to specialize :(
there is no god but truth, and reality is its prophet
I ever enjoyed were the early ones when there were no cheats available. Figuring out the very first puzzle in The Hitchhiker's Guide text adventure was really cool. A friend and I were fighting with it for hours. --Or rather, we were stumped by it and then we discussed other things, and goofed around like teenage boys, and then when we went back to it, my friend suddenly realized, "Hold on. . . One of the five senses is missing. . ." And he keyed in "Smell" or whatever it was, and the game opened up. That was awesome! But it took time and a willingness to let problems stew for days and weeks on end. But life was slower in the Eighties.
Later on, the best puzzle game I played was Full Throttle. The story and voice acting made the puzzles worth solving. But for the most part, puzzles were just highly annoying things which weren't fun so much as they were annoying. Back when I still played video games, I remember being deeply frustrated with Lucas Arts Star Wars games because they kept making me stop and figure out stupid on-off switch sequences when all I wanted to do was blast storm troopers.
I have spent some time with those tower-defense games, and they are sort of like dynamic puzzles in and of themselves. I suppose all games are like that in the end; learning how to win is a matter of working out successful pathways through computer logic. Such is life, really, except in computer games, you are limited in that you are only allowed to solve problems in the way envisioned by the game writers. That was always the most ridiculous thing about video games. Everybody has experienced that one, I am sure. "But there's a graphic of a wrench right there on the work bench! Why can't I pick it up? Why do I need to find a stupid coat hanger to fish the key out of the drain pipe when I could just disassemble the plumbing? Who wrote this silly program, anyway???"
Real life is a better puzzle game than any computer could offer. The difference is that the rewards come less quickly and you have to actually sweat and take real risks. But people have proven that they are much more willing to put up with digital mediocrity in order to have fast, safe albeit empty rewards rather than live and win for real.
How many real experience points did you earn today?
-FL
If you had checked the behavior on Windows:
C:\Documents and Settings\admin>"c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_07\bin\appletvie
wer.exe" http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/
Warning: Can't read AppletViewer properties file: C:\Documents and Settings\admi
n\.hotjava\properties Using defaults.
Warning: tag requires name attribute.
Warning: tag requires name attribute.
java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 288
at d.a(Unknown Source)
at d.a(Unknown Source)
at dust.a(Unknown Source)
at dust.init(Unknown Source)
at sun.applet.AppletPanel.run(AppletPanel.java:425)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)
How's that for write-once, run-anywhere? Not even Java can give you the same behavior on different platforms when you invoke different programs or provide different input. The web page doesn't validate and may even be miscoded (though I couldn't figure that out for sure.) The browser must clean up the page before passing data to the applet plugin.
Do you see now why I stick my neck out for Java, even to the point of downloading the entire frickin' JDK and installing it on a five-year-old Celeron laptop, just so I could reproduce the same behavior under Windows? Don't think I would have done that if I wasn't sure I would get some satisfaction from it :-)
http://www.nekogames.jp/mt/2008/01/cursor10.html
On the off-chance you haven't seen it yet.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
A true puzzle game from 1991: http://www.iangilman.com/software/heavenearth.php
Go download it, answer the copy-protection question (answers are on the creator's webpage as well), and on the startup screen, click on the cube symbol and then select 'Changing Bodies', or 'Identity Maze'. The starting puzzles are easy, but later on it can get quite difficult...
Floppy? You think floppies were "really early"? You're kidding, right? The early puzzle games came on cassette tapes, and took half an hour to load. The really early ones came on punched cards.
Also, you're on my lawn. Fix that.
Question is: Do we want the good old times of Lucasart games back or not? On my opinion there were 3 - 4 facts which caused the die off of a genre Lucasart dominated. 1. When the first ego shooters came more people played that and hence the demand on adventures went down. 2. Lucasarts focused more on their Start Wars section and probably less money was available for their adventures. 3. In Germany "Doc Bobo" left the translation team and all the following games not translated by him where a little bit less funny. 4. No competition. As said before Lucasarts dominated that genre, and Sierra wasn't a real opponent. Restart - Restore - Save isn't what the people really wanted. I only played Sierra games because I have played all Lucasarts games and there wasn't any left... Today there is nothing arround what is really combining all the facts. There are planty of ideas no gaming company is interested. It's just murder - death - kill, sports, driving, 3D and more 3D. Why don't we form a company and get the fun back we had decads ago?
ME: Pick up saber
Computer: I don't understand "pick up"
That's when I tended to eject the floppy and try to see how far I could toss it.
Usually a quick look around would help you find the right word. The good old times when one had to actually read the text and not mindlessly click the highlighted words in the text.
ME: look
Computer: You are standing in a dusty room. The ceiling is clogged with webs from long dead spiders and the windowpanes have gone blind, giving the room an abandoned feeling. A musty odour fills your nostrils. The floor is covered in a dusty carpet. In the twilight you can make out a door to your east and when to the north.
An ancient knight's armour with a big claymore, once placed at the western wall has fallen over, it's parts now scattered on the carpet.
ME: pick up claymor
Computer: I don't understand claymor
ME: puck up claymore
Computer: Learn to type you moron!
ME: take claymore
Computer: You stagger under the weight of the big sword. You can barely carry it and how someone could weild this in a fight is beyond you. ...
I believe as the market spreads and diversifies the larger range of "gamers" there are... gone are the days where the cellar-dwelling hardcore types were the only ones to pay attention to computer games... with a large range of people playing games, the obvious statistic would be to say that the majority stray away from puzzles... just like when you look at a majority of a population and ask them what their favourite movie genre is...
Damn, now this is messy. I just *HAVE* to play myth again, thanks for the tag. Additionally, I just noticed I missed realMyth. What a shame, it looks pretty nice - and fun.
But: where to get it? It's more than sold out, nothing on ebay, amazon, ... - to complicate things, I'm stuck in germany. Great.
Any hints? International shipping won't be much of a problem...
I really hate 'guess what the author had in mind' games...it makes me pick apart some egoists mind to solve their puzzle. That's not my idea of fun (it is for some people...the thrill of solving a carefully crafted and difficult puzzle, that find -- not me). I like the adventure -- combination of some puzzles but ways to keep the game moving and not get stuck, be it hints or skips, whatever...On some game that have had harder puzzles I could skip - I enjoy getting through "the story" -- that implies having a good story line -- Oblivion was my favorite so far. Allowed user mods, console access to get around game bugs or stuck points -- or make it playable in any way I wanted -- I could play ever part and didn't have to start from scratch each time. Bought all the extras they sold..even though I quickly got the game hack to play w/o the DVD (what a pain!). But it had real action -- not totally fighting to solve everything -- but different ways to play the game -- not a "script", but a wider-quest/story line. Puzzles virtually never devolved down into pure guessing -- which is pitting me against dice -- oh, how challenging! (sarcasm) The AI of the game...throughout enjoyable.
I liked Lara Kroft Legend as a balance between story and puzzle - but I had a puzzle guide through all of it that made it bearable. I didn't like it anywhere near as much as Oblivion though, and Anniversary -- just was too much work/no fun. Never finished it. It wasn't challenging -- just work. With enough mindless repetition I could do it, but that requires no-mind...too booring.
So maybe audiences are becoming more diverse -- other types of audiences -- not that puzzle games are disappearing, just that they are not the only ones out there.... Just off the top of my head -- it seems there are more now, in fact, than there were 20 years ago.
-l
NDS is a great platform for such games. Phoenix Wright, anyone?
In the same vein making the mistake to "eat apple" received from a bum 5 minutes into the game, needed to get it on with the last babe "Eve", in the first Leisure Suit Larry. You couldn't go back and get it, had to replay the entire sodding game. 20 years ago and I still remember the frustration - in the end I snuck a peek at a solutions book in the store to crack that one.
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
one of the most fun puzzle games i've played
tetrisphere for N64
and i got really sick of tetris after it being my only gameboy game for 3yrs.. but tetrisphere is AWESOME
Great puzzle / adventure game from a while ago. Where's QFG6?
That dialogue could be shorter:
Me: look
Computer: You are in a room. A sword hangs on the north wall.
Me: get sword
Computer: I don't understand "sword"
eject and toss disk
How many games do you see being released, in a similar vein to the lucas arts classics. Even more modern throws like Broken Sword.
I think gamers would happily play puzzle games as long as they were up to scratch.
The success of Portal proves that gamers still want to solve puzzles. The fact that developers are busy hammering out waves of shitty FPS clones is hardly our fault.
For the newer players, that learned at a very early age that if they cry/whine long enough they will be given something to placate them, these players want instant gratification with a minimum of work. To them, they don't care if they beat the game on their own, they just care to finish the game.
They don't want to be challenged to think. They don't care how long it takes them, since they've been accustom to sitting in front of the TV/monitor for hours just staring blankly with minimal brain activity. They just want the gratification. I don't blame these new players, I blame their parents.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
Queue Hitman? Another one of the puzzle games coming out these days. It has a very deep experience that requires logic, prediction, and sometimes dumb luck (ever tried those balance boards with a marble and the printed path to the center? needs all three of the above).
my $0.02
Most people who play games nowadays are only interested in the "OOOOOHHHHH SHINY!" part of games. They will move on to the next shiny/mass promoted thing in a couple of months.
I tend to see games as being an outlet. Do the puzzle-solving in real life, and leave the shooting and blowing shit up for games. Sure, the occasional puzzle is interesting, but why let it get in the way of doing ridiculous things?
I do miss the old King's Quest games.
"Let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average." - A. W. Tozer
you young whippersnappers.
Puzzle games are fun, (even though a lot of times the puzzles were way too aribitrary.)
I thoroughly enjoyed one of my first PC games, Fool's Errand. That is the puzzle gamers puzzle game, as it requires you to solve a series of puzzles in order to get puzzle pieces that you have to arrange to solve the main puzzle.
I also liked Hero's Quest and Zak McKracken, despite the bad graphics (even for a 286 game, Zak looked bad, and implemented a clumsy mouse interface -yes the game had the mouse, not the OS).
I no longer have the time for any game longer than a game of chess, though, so most of my gaming nowadays is relegated to card games and board games, preferably with real cards and boards and real people. As a bonus, I don't have to upgrade my computer and graphics card every 18 months just to play a mindless first person shooter, like my son seems to think are fun. (personally, I think he's bored but addicted)
It is the logic they use only making sense to the game developer
After I finish playing Monkey Island.
Who read the title of the article as "Have Modern Germans Lost the Patience For Puzzles?" ... gonna be a long day!
/.), and with our society structured the way it is, it's no surprise that video games of war are becoming as popular as they are. They feed and quell the instinct that would otherwise be ignored (unless you're in some kind of armed forces).
On a more relevant note, however, I find myself in love with the "point-and-click" adventure games. The Myst series set a very high standard of beautiful graphics mixed in with great storyline and mind bending puzzles (except for Myst 3, which I only got stuck on 3 times). The Monkey Island series, I believe set the standard for comedic content. I've played through a few of those games several times and find myself STILL laughing at the witty jokes and silly things that happen, not to mention quoting the jokes in front of friends.
Now, being a guy, I will say there is something for picking up a virtual carbine, plowing down interlopers, or taking up a flanking position and waiting to ambush the enemy detachment. The desire to combat is ingrained in the male instinct (my apologies to the female who might read
What would happen, then, if you take a combat type game and combine it with a puzzle element. While lacking in the area of combat, Half Life: Portal treads closer to that ground having to combine fast, out of the box thinking, with quick reflexes, and once done, doing it all again as quickly, or in as few steps/portals as possible.
Other more mondern RPGs, such as Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights, with questing features, often require a bit of lateral thinking combined with massive amounts of combat to achieve your goals.
I think the issue here is, and forgive me if this sounds trollish, or flamebaity, but in today's ADD society where TV, computers, instant access to everything, and harmful amounts of multitasking are the norm, taking the time to appreciate a well crafted storyline and witty humor seems a bit to... slow for a lot of people. The single click of a mouse button is being dwarfed by the 20 button controllers of the modern gaming systems.
With games like Sam and Max making a selective return in the current video game market and people like me eating every last episode up, I can only partially agree. Yes I like shooting people in the head but the original LucasArts and Sierra games still hold a large place in my heart which is why I'll give any of the adventure/puzzlers a fair shake.
Professor Layton?
The author seems to wax melancholy for the era where gamers played nothign but puzzle games. Sorry, sat the same time I was enjoying Myst, 7th guest, 11th hour, dark eye, full throttle, grim fandango, et al, I was ALSO blowing things up in X-Wing vs TIE fighter, killing nazis and demons with whatever ID slopped out at the time (quake maybe? or maybe HAXAN, not sure...), stockpiling lumber in Warcraft, changing the fate of the netherworld in Afterlife, and so on. There are PLENTY of puzzle games out now, this guy just comes across as old and uninformed. Nothign to see, move along.
Tell tale has been pouring our point and click puzzles for years now. The only real changes from the old lucas art games is the switch to episodic content which works wonderfully with the genere.
->Played through all the seasons of Sam& Max
->Waiting for Strong Bads Cool Game for Attrative People.
Point and click puzzles are alive and well. The author needs to go get a gametap account.
How can this article claim modern gamers don't like puzzles when a recent smash hit like Portal is based solely around environment puzzles? What about big-selling games like Zelda and its mind-bending temples?
Valve has a big thing about puzzles being an emotional cooldown for the gamer before the next action sequence.
An amazing puzzle game came out for the DS a little while ago called Professor Layton. It's pretty fantastic and if I'm not mistaken a sequel is coming out soon...
Retail Puzzles are not competitive with
free Flash games designed by hobbyists.
I can't believe nobody mentioned Zelda. :(
I am a little behind the times generally. I am still trying to beat the final Myst game (there were 5, not counting Uru, for those who don't know) not because its hard, just because I like to space it out for when I have a whole day free. (also, seeing as I'll be finished soon, any reccomendations for Myst-like games?)I still love the series, and will be buying the original Myst on the DS soon.
But here's some problems with puzzles in games:
1) running around. Its fine to explore, but when I need to pull lever A and then push button B I do not have fun when they are on the opposite sides of a freaking castle. Thats just pointless running. This is worse when I need to solve some kind of observation puzzle, Pull lever A, see what changed in arbitrary point C on the roof, push button B, see what changed. If the object that is changing has to be across a huge distance, make the controls at a point that can easily see this object.
2) Obscurity. Why no it did not occur to me that Joe Blow secretly loves Novels about Vampires and that I should hand him this useless item that i've been carrying around for days. And no, I do not have fun handing random object after random object to random NPC after random NPC. Same goes for keys in doors.
3) If im playing a game to shoot the crap out of people and suddenly I have to do some math to unlock the next area to shoot people, I'm not having fun. The key word here is suddenly.
4) Make me care about it. Puzzle oriented games are only good when you are engaged in the story or the characters. If i dont get any story or any character interaction for long enough then why exactly am I busting my butt to open this door? if your characters are flat, make the game really fast paced or the puzzles easy. if your characters have depth then I will actually want to take the time to figure it out. Or, alternatively, make the puzzle extremely intriguing. Im thinking Shadow of the Colosus here, the characters weren't really anything out of the ordinary, but DAMN! how am I going to climb onto that guys FACE?
I think a lot of the downward spiral of puzzle games can be contributed to bad design. You really need to think about storyline, character and excecution to make a good puzzle or puzzle game. In a FPS you only need to think about a good excecution (har har).
any of you guys played not pron? (www.deathball.net/notpron/) a good puzzle
I have enjoyed Runescape (a Jagex browser game). The combat certainly doesn't rival console gaming experiences but it is there as a complement to quests - many of which are of the puzzle variety.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
What about Tomb Raider? Brilliant franchise, excellent puzzles. Anniversary brought back the difficult larger-than-life puzzles into the mix and Underworld has no way to go but up.
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When I first played the game, I noticed the sounds at each intersection, but I could never find any rhyme or reason to them. Nor did I ever find any clues anywhere else as to an order of the sounds. I eventually found my way through that by trying every direction (and ended up with a pretty nice, detailed map in my notebook) and brute-forcing my way through.
That always seemed like such an un-MYST-like way of solving the puzzle, so I was wondering if there is an actual solution other than brute-force. Is there? Anyone know?
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
it really is n.
I assume you are talking about the underground tram in the Selenetic Age (or whatever it was called). Stupid question, as I haven't played the game in years. Is there an actual "solve the puzzle" solution to that part?
The sound played whenever you were on the right track, and indicated the direction at which you should be heading. It can either be a pure sound for one of the cardinal directions, or a combined sound if it's NE/SE/NW/SW. This is the same sound that you hear when in the spinning fortress (where that sound indicates the orientation.)
Even with the walkthrough in the masterpiece edition, I still didn't understand the significance of the sound until later in the game. Based on that maze, I felt that it was critical to use the walkthrough in order to proceed because it would take an excessive amount of time to go through the maze for the first time.
...had plenty of cut scenes!
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
In stead of paper you now have wikies for various games.
Part of the problem with games is that the intended audience is very large and has difference skill sets that need to be accounted for in games; otherwise those people might not want to play. For example, some one that is dyslexic might not want to play a word game to unlock the next step.
However, I do think most puzzles are well hidden in the game. As for the complexities of the puzzle, it depends on the game. I have seen some nice puzzle ideas in Guild Wars and other games. However, they are not complex and are all figured out for you on various wikies or guide books. Which brings up the next point, the balance between the puzzle and the amount of fun someone is having with the game because the game is suppose to be fun.
Another note, if you spend all day solving problems do you want to go home and pop a game in to do more solving or do you want to do something else?
So yes, the game industry has
The game begins with you trapped in a room, tied to a chair.
You could hit yourself and turn into the HULK! but gas would immediately fill the room and you would wake up as bruce banner again.
If you left the room you were crushed by gravity.
apparently i wasn't the only one thwarted by this piece of crap
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Damn kids... ;)