The group at AGDInteractive has released remakes of King's Quest I, King's Quest II, and Quest for Glory II with the permission of the copyright holders. They pulled it off by approaching the company directly and working out a fan license. The release of those freeware games actually increased the sales for the titles in the same series, it was a boost for the fans and the copyright owners. Another fan-project, King's Quest IX got hit with a cease and desist since they hadn't done their legal homework, but they managed to work out a deal where they changed the name of the game to avoid confusion and could proceed with the permission of the parent company.
It is possible to get stuff like this to work out, and it's often in the best interests of all parties to foster a community that takes an interest in their work. Copyright-holders are also within their legal rights to shut-down fan-fiction being made about their works but it's seldom worth the bad press or harming the community that builds up around such things. But it's crazy to put years of effort into a project without exploring its legality and advertise it before completion so that it can get shut down. The worst part is the same thing already happened to another Chrono Trigger project, a 3d remake of the game called Chrono Trigger resurrection. The lawyers only swooped in when it looked like it had a chance of being completed, apparently like this title
Speaking as the author of this article, I don't think playing to win and playing for fun are mutually exclusive. Without some aspect of playing to win you're eliminating challenge from the game and making it a less interesting experience. The main distinction I want to make is that playing to win at all costs can make a game a less interesting experience. As a trivial example, if a game includes push-button cheat codes, you may be able to enter those in and win, or you could choose a different mode of play that challenges you more. If you're playing an RPG that has a particular build or tactic that dominates everything else, you might choose to avoid that broken feature just to make things more interesting for yourself, and when playing games with other people you might have other goals in mind than winning at all costs. (like the example of Once Upon A Time, a storytelling game)
You could introduce a more precise definition of what "playing to win" means, where the goal isn't to achieve simple victory as defined in the game but to achieve certain conditions, or you could just say that there can often be more to enjoying a game than meeting its conditions for victory in the most efficient way.
Time spent training is a large factor, if not the largest, in attaining a high level of skill. Good equipment helps in real-life games and sports, too. Some even insist that shell and slate stones make them play better go. Go figure.:)
Right, but the article is referring to games in which the time spent on the game is a direct factor in how powerful your character is in the game, by a process of leveling up. Obviously you get better at all games as you play them more, but some games make your avatar explicitly more powerful the more you play, so that time spent translates into both improvements in skill and advantages the game hands you for grinding your skills for hours.
Luckily jumping puzzles aren't the types of puzzles adventure games typically employ... they aren't abstract puzzles at all really, you know what you have to do, but the game mechanics make it frustrating to try to accomplish it.
Although you could also make the case that trying not to fall off of the beanstalk in King's Quest I by slowly pressing arrow keys isn't a fair adventure game puzzle either.
Leisure Suit Larry 7? I think I remember briefly panicking from the horrifying urgency of it all before realizing that they weren't about to let you die, just giving you a simple puzzle they could talk you through at the start.
Unfortunately puzzle games is also an overloaded term, it's used to refer to games that involve procedural pattern-matching, such as Tetris, Dr Mario, or Bejeweled. Those games don't involve explicitly designed puzzles in the sense that a game like Myst does. The common conception of a puzzle game is more about reflex oriented activities than explicit puzzles like crosswords or Sudokus. Professor Layton is a puzzle game that consists entirely of self-contained puzzles and riddles, but it's referred to as an adventure game, and it's much more literally a sequence of independent puzzles than Myst is.
While Myst certainly does have more than its fair share of logic puzzles standing in stark isolation to the rest of the story, there are a few examples of puzzles that meaningfully relate to the story. What to do with Sirrus and Achenar, and how to deal with Gehn. But in any case, the world of puzzle-related games could stand some better definition.
Well, we could split hairs on what we want to consider an adventure game to be. I think of an adventure game as being about puzzle-solving, where the puzzles are related through a story. In Myst, the plot and story are embedded into the environments and journals rather than being presented to you through a narrator, or revealed by interacting with other characters. In a typical adventure game there'd be much more dialog, and traditional storytelling techniques.
Myst is clearly a very different flavor of game from Day of the Tentacle, but I prefer to have a broad enough definition of adventure game to incorporate both, since the activities you're doing are still solving puzzles related to a story.
One analogy I've heard is to whether architecture is art. Unlike music, movies, or books you don't control the order in which the viewer experiences it, and you're not crafting the precise experience they'll get exploring it or seeing everything in some order. You're designing something that's in a sense meant to be practical, but also lend itself to artistic appreciation in a number of ways.
I don't think something has to be a controlled linear experience to be considered art. There's clearly artistry in the design and artistic experiences to be had from it, and I'd discourage any definition of art that doesn't recognize that.
It's interesting they comment on the Valve design philosophy of training the player, to the point where I was afraid I was burning through the game too quickly. The first 13 puzzles out of 20, 0-12, are all incredibly elementary, they're there to showcase a certain "feature" of thinking with portals, and the first 11 puzzles don't even give you full control of the portal gun, and they all have essentially one unique solution. The final 7 set of levels are all very well done, they even have a "challenge mode" to showcase how it's possible to finish the levels with the fewest amount of portals, etc, to show the number of unique solutions you can achieve, and the final challenge and ending are extremely satisfying, but it still feels like they really only made seven levels of significant content.
While I'm all in favor of a tightly scripted experience that is novel all the way through rather than something which forces you to grind and repeat the same gameplay for hours on end, I was left wanting a lot more, and it'll take some significant community effort to keep it alive via map packs after enjoying the 3-4 hours it takes to play through the game.
A number of people have commented on the Pokemon articles as an example of how Wikipedia devotes extensive coverage to every conceivable subject, however, the recent trend seems to be to merge them all into giant lists with only a paragraph each, and all of the Pokemon featured/front page articles have since been de-featured, e.g. Bulbasaur.
One of the things I've really enjoyed about Wikipedia is that you can look up information on TV show episodes, characters from fictional universes, and anything topic that people would be interested tends to have some decently organized content. The fact that they're trying to cut down on that is a shame, they may not be able to scholarly research on Wikipedia but they can do trivia better than anyone.
If I remember correctly, Checkers, sufficiently generalized, is EXP-Time complete, which means that there's no real way to prove or verify a solution without looking at the whole decision tree. In other words, there is no simple elegant formulaic solution, the problem doesn't generalize: the best you can do for a proof is to analyze each step all the way to the end. It can be "solved", but it'll never be done in a way that a human being is capable of verifying. Simpler games like Tic-Tac-Toe can be generalized to a certain extent, but the best you can do for checkers/chess/go is to calculate all the possibilities I'm pretty sure. And as for hashing functions, I don't think it's really known if those can be properly "reversed" or if the best you can do is to brute force it.
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The group at AGDInteractive has released remakes of King's Quest I, King's Quest II, and Quest for Glory II with the permission of the copyright holders. They pulled it off by approaching the company directly and working out a fan license. The release of those freeware games actually increased the sales for the titles in the same series, it was a boost for the fans and the copyright owners. Another fan-project, King's Quest IX got hit with a cease and desist since they hadn't done their legal homework, but they managed to work out a deal where they changed the name of the game to avoid confusion and could proceed with the permission of the parent company.
It is possible to get stuff like this to work out, and it's often in the best interests of all parties to foster a community that takes an interest in their work. Copyright-holders are also within their legal rights to shut-down fan-fiction being made about their works but it's seldom worth the bad press or harming the community that builds up around such things. But it's crazy to put years of effort into a project without exploring its legality and advertise it before completion so that it can get shut down. The worst part is the same thing already happened to another Chrono Trigger project, a 3d remake of the game called Chrono Trigger resurrection. The lawyers only swooped in when it looked like it had a chance of being completed, apparently like this title
Speaking as the author of this article, I don't think playing to win and playing for fun are mutually exclusive. Without some aspect of playing to win you're eliminating challenge from the game and making it a less interesting experience. The main distinction I want to make is that playing to win at all costs can make a game a less interesting experience. As a trivial example, if a game includes push-button cheat codes, you may be able to enter those in and win, or you could choose a different mode of play that challenges you more. If you're playing an RPG that has a particular build or tactic that dominates everything else, you might choose to avoid that broken feature just to make things more interesting for yourself, and when playing games with other people you might have other goals in mind than winning at all costs. (like the example of Once Upon A Time, a storytelling game)
You could introduce a more precise definition of what "playing to win" means, where the goal isn't to achieve simple victory as defined in the game but to achieve certain conditions, or you could just say that there can often be more to enjoying a game than meeting its conditions for victory in the most efficient way.
Time spent training is a large factor, if not the largest, in attaining a high level of skill. Good equipment helps in real-life games and sports, too. Some even insist that shell and slate stones make them play better go. Go figure. :)
Right, but the article is referring to games in which the time spent on the game is a direct factor in how powerful your character is in the game, by a process of leveling up. Obviously you get better at all games as you play them more, but some games make your avatar explicitly more powerful the more you play, so that time spent translates into both improvements in skill and advantages the game hands you for grinding your skills for hours.
Luckily jumping puzzles aren't the types of puzzles adventure games typically employ... they aren't abstract puzzles at all really, you know what you have to do, but the game mechanics make it frustrating to try to accomplish it.
Although you could also make the case that trying not to fall off of the beanstalk in King's Quest I by slowly pressing arrow keys isn't a fair adventure game puzzle either.
Leisure Suit Larry 7? I think I remember briefly panicking from the horrifying urgency of it all before realizing that they weren't about to let you die, just giving you a simple puzzle they could talk you through at the start.
Unfortunately puzzle games is also an overloaded term, it's used to refer to games that involve procedural pattern-matching, such as Tetris, Dr Mario, or Bejeweled. Those games don't involve explicitly designed puzzles in the sense that a game like Myst does. The common conception of a puzzle game is more about reflex oriented activities than explicit puzzles like crosswords or Sudokus. Professor Layton is a puzzle game that consists entirely of self-contained puzzles and riddles, but it's referred to as an adventure game, and it's much more literally a sequence of independent puzzles than Myst is.
While Myst certainly does have more than its fair share of logic puzzles standing in stark isolation to the rest of the story, there are a few examples of puzzles that meaningfully relate to the story. What to do with Sirrus and Achenar, and how to deal with Gehn. But in any case, the world of puzzle-related games could stand some better definition.
Well, we could split hairs on what we want to consider an adventure game to be. I think of an adventure game as being about puzzle-solving, where the puzzles are related through a story. In Myst, the plot and story are embedded into the environments and journals rather than being presented to you through a narrator, or revealed by interacting with other characters. In a typical adventure game there'd be much more dialog, and traditional storytelling techniques.
Myst is clearly a very different flavor of game from Day of the Tentacle, but I prefer to have a broad enough definition of adventure game to incorporate both, since the activities you're doing are still solving puzzles related to a story.
One analogy I've heard is to whether architecture is art. Unlike music, movies, or books you don't control the order in which the viewer experiences it, and you're not crafting the precise experience they'll get exploring it or seeing everything in some order. You're designing something that's in a sense meant to be practical, but also lend itself to artistic appreciation in a number of ways.
I don't think something has to be a controlled linear experience to be considered art. There's clearly artistry in the design and artistic experiences to be had from it, and I'd discourage any definition of art that doesn't recognize that.
It's interesting they comment on the Valve design philosophy of training the player, to the point where I was afraid I was burning through the game too quickly. The first 13 puzzles out of 20, 0-12, are all incredibly elementary, they're there to showcase a certain "feature" of thinking with portals, and the first 11 puzzles don't even give you full control of the portal gun, and they all have essentially one unique solution. The final 7 set of levels are all very well done, they even have a "challenge mode" to showcase how it's possible to finish the levels with the fewest amount of portals, etc, to show the number of unique solutions you can achieve, and the final challenge and ending are extremely satisfying, but it still feels like they really only made seven levels of significant content.
While I'm all in favor of a tightly scripted experience that is novel all the way through rather than something which forces you to grind and repeat the same gameplay for hours on end, I was left wanting a lot more, and it'll take some significant community effort to keep it alive via map packs after enjoying the 3-4 hours it takes to play through the game.
A number of people have commented on the Pokemon articles as an example of how Wikipedia devotes extensive coverage to every conceivable subject, however, the recent trend seems to be to merge them all into giant lists with only a paragraph each, and all of the Pokemon featured/front page articles have since been de-featured, e.g. Bulbasaur. One of the things I've really enjoyed about Wikipedia is that you can look up information on TV show episodes, characters from fictional universes, and anything topic that people would be interested tends to have some decently organized content. The fact that they're trying to cut down on that is a shame, they may not be able to scholarly research on Wikipedia but they can do trivia better than anyone.
If I remember correctly, Checkers, sufficiently generalized, is EXP-Time complete, which means that there's no real way to prove or verify a solution without looking at the whole decision tree. In other words, there is no simple elegant formulaic solution, the problem doesn't generalize: the best you can do for a proof is to analyze each step all the way to the end. It can be "solved", but it'll never be done in a way that a human being is capable of verifying. Simpler games like Tic-Tac-Toe can be generalized to a certain extent, but the best you can do for checkers/chess/go is to calculate all the possibilities I'm pretty sure. And as for hashing functions, I don't think it's really known if those can be properly "reversed" or if the best you can do is to brute force it.