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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."
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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."
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."
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.
I think this explains perfectly well why the "old-school" style of puzzle game, ala Sierra and Lucas Arts, have gone by the wayside and it'll be a while till they come back.
I say "think" because my proxy blocked the link. Basically, if it describes a puzzle in which you have to create a disguise by using cat hair and scotch tape to make a mustache in order to imitate a guy who doesn't have a mustache, then you're at the right place. :P
I think it was Kings Quest 6 that basically broke my brain for puzzle games. At least Space Quest made me chuckle while making me do random retarded things.
The enemies of Democracy are
Exactly. And having a leprechaun kill you a couple screens away from the end of the game just because you forgot to pick up a four-leaf clover in the second screen of the game isn't a challenging puzzle, it's just fucking sadistic.
I'm so excited I just made water in my pantaloons!
Answer from an unlikely source: Grue
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale. Also: WHOOSH!
I'm guessing you don't know what Atari made. It wasn't Zork ...