Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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
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'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.
I also think Myst qualified as a puzzle game. Although it wasn't puzzles in the traditional sense, it still had clues and things to solve. I guess Myst could be compared to modern games where you have to complete quests and such. But in Myst you had to complete these tasks or you couldn't progress in the game. I do think that kind of game play is gone.
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 don't think you CAN do this..."
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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
While those are both a couple of my favorite games, the word puzzles really put me off to playing them anymore. Not only do they lose any value once you've memorized them, originally figuring them out merely took a small app (wrote mine in QBasic) to search a dictionary for words that contained the letters you were staring at. It didn't take much effort.
However, the first chess puzzle in 11th hour was absolutely great. I remember drawing out the board and moving pennies around trying to figure out the solution... and then the click, when I finally realized that it is more or less a path with a fork in the road. Genius.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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."
.. 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 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
The Longest Journey was a wonderful adventure / puzzle game. The puzzles were ingenious and generally pretty logical (with one exception that I recall). And the story line was fantastic... easily the best story of any game I've played. Came out about 8 years ago but well worth buying and playing if you enjoy puzzles that fit nicely into the story.
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
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.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
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."
The author misses his puzzles, and now yells at the neighbourhood kids to get off his lawn.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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.
Hell yeah, modem gamers don't like puzzles!! They MUCH prefer getting that init script juuuust rii@#$%^)(*%&$ NO CARRIER
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
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 also think Myst qualified as a puzzle game. Although it wasn't puzzles in the traditional sense, it still had clues and things to solve.
I'm not sure I understand... Myst's "turn the knobs the right way and push the buttons in the right order to make the doohikey do its thing" style is pretty much what I consider the definition of traditional puzzles.
The enemies of Democracy are
WELL !
HAVE THEY ?!?!?!
I think you've confused PUZZLES with TEDIUM. Memorizing (or writing down) a map isn't puzzle solving. It's data storage.
paintball
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 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.
The fun in most adventure games comes from getting an understanding of the world that surrounds you in the game. The fun in a puzzle isn't getting stuck on it, but gaining an understanding of the underlying mechanic and finding the solution or just in interacting with the world. The hard part of course is the balance between frustrating the player and actually giving him something he has to think about, which however can be worked around quite well by always having alternative puzzles the player can solve and by having a world that is actually interesting enough to explore.
The problem with todays games is that most games don't even try to create a good puzzle, either they are so easy that they are hardly noticeable or they are so stupid and non-integrated into the game that they just annoy ("Here is a locked door, go find the key"). The classic LucasArts adventure almost never had any puzzle of such blunt stupidity, instead you had to figure out how to dress a mummy to win a competition and other crazy fun stuff that integrated seamlessly into the story. There was no "play the game" or "watch a cutscene" separation, it was pretty much all the same thing.
Also the thing to realize is that puzzles are not only there to stop you from making progress, but also a means to explore the world, to touch it if you will. In an adventure game you can grab things, smell them, eat them, open them, talk to people and a lot of other stuff. In most mainstream games today on the other side you have the choice between shooting people in the head or blowing them up with a grenade, you have no way to talk to them and no way to use items in a meaningful way. Its all just run and gun without ever stopping and looking around and getting an idea what really is happening.
Now of course not every action game needs to be riddled with puzzles, but most of them really could need some calmer moments that departure from the standard run&gun.
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.
Play BioShock on Hard, with Vita-Chambers and every other hand-holding disabled, and with no save, except for the automatic saves at the beginning of levels. The result is it will transform a light and very simple pastime into a heavy thinking game. For example, after some thinking you'll realize that the "useless" security bullseye plasmid is in fact one of the most powerful (I'll let you think about why).
Actually myst like most puzzle games were a waste of time for me. I could never figure them out. Infocom games were a good example of you had to be in the designers shoes before you even had a chance. I just was sick of wasting money on games I had no clue what they were getting at and that even just guessing didn't get me anywhere. FPSes and sims at least you could see a reference to do things with and didn't completely lock you out if you didn't understand something the way the designer did.
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
Argh. No. Never. The important part is I am not bitter.
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.
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.
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...
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
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 :-)
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. ...
Strategy is mostly about managing resources (like ammos and health) in order to achieve a general goal (like killing ennemies). Puzzle is about finding one solution (not necessarily unique) to one particular problem.
What it means is that choosing a weapon instead of another depending on the resource you have and on the penalty for using a less adequate weapon is strategy. But using first a Hypnotize Big Daddy plasmid to lure him in front of a security camera and then using the Security Bullseye Plasmid to kill him requires close to no resources. It also requires close to no action skills. The only thing it requires is finding one solution to a single problem. The difficulty is finding THAT solution. This is a puzzle kind of problem to me. The only difference with the classical adventure game where you have to search through you inventory to find out what object to use on the "problem" is the game don't tell you explicitly it is a puzzle and it doesn't block you if you don't find a good solution.
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...