The discussion here reminded me of the "Cruelty Scale" (https://www.ifwiki.org/Cruelty_scale) It was originally created specifically in relation to text adventure games, but seems appropriate to a broader range of game types.
The rankings are based on criteria like how far the game lets you go after making a get-stuck choice before you realize you're stuck, and whether that realization comes with clear information about what the wrong choice was.
Aha, but there's an added dimension to this Sierra-branded cruelty:
A young 8-year-old me, playing Police Quest for the first time. Sits through the briefing. Gets the gun, the ammo, the briefcase, from the locker room. Grabs the car key. Heads out to the parking lot, gets in the car, starts driving... and immediately dies: "you failed to perform the prescribed vehicle walkaround."
A bit of a "gotcha" for sharewareing the game, because said prescription was in a manual I definitely did not own (remember the games that would ask you for, say, the third word of the tenth page of the manual, as a form of DRM? brilliant.)
NO PROBLEM: ASSIGNMENT RECEIVED: I WILL SAVE THE GAME EARLY AND OFTEN!
Begin another playthrough. Lather, rinse, repeat. Play for several hours, carefully save scumming my way to glory: I have built a complex ladder of 10 save slots that I am slowly rotating through. Then the action gets heavier and heavier, and the saves come faster and faster, until the climax of the game, where you have the Death Angel cornered. "Radio for help."
And there it says: "With what radio?"
The one I had left back at the station, I don't know, 10 hours ago? But that's okay, because I can head back to the station and grab it from one of my convenient saves!
No, no I cannot. I have over-indexed and let fear win the day and save scummed myself into oblivion. The earliest save is in a walking-dead state as well. I am toast.
I died a bit that day. A painful lesson for an 8-year-old to learn. As Bennett Foddy says in his Getting Over It soliloquy, "When games were new, they wanted a lot from you; daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone’s turned off by that."
tangent: this unfortunate design choice by the old Sierra adventure games has been discussed a number of times on the Designer Notes podcast, focused on game design [1]. Soren opens each discussion by asking the guest which is the first game they remember.
I remember using a single save game and soft locking myself in Space Quest 2 by not getting the glowing gem, and in Space Quest 1 I think by not picking up the shard of broken glass, and being so pissed off about having to replay.
The LSL dip and sunscreen issues you fixed were particularly egregious, by that point I feel like they should have fixed things.
While Sierra should absolutely be recognized for spawning an entire genre of games that were legitimately fun, it is crazy that they were fine with shipping games with these broken states, when it was eminently preventable.
Thanks!! I mean, I can kiiiinda see it as a design philosophy... It does make games harder and make them feel higher stakes. What really gets me is some of the later games that look like they would be safe, but aren't. For example Gabriel Knight 1 has a day structure that looks like it would prevent you from getting stuck... but it doesn't, you can trigger a day's end without getting everything you actually need. That's just, like, evil haha
Nice job! I actually wrote a blog article about my love/hate relationship with KQ4 in particular - with a particular shoutout to my incredible irritation with the whole golden bridle scene [1].
Without spoiling anything, are you accounting for stuff like a player saving in the Minotaur's Labyrinth without a... shall we say crucial item necessary for a trap scene?
Yes I'm with you on that bridle! And you can only get it by typing "look down", which is infuriating! I'm also discovering, working on KQ5, that it is really evil in allowing you to use items in certain ways that look fine at first (the action succeeds), but bite you in the butt later because you needed that item for something else and there was an other option you could have used. For example, throwing the leg of lamb at the cat to chase it away will work... but then good luck surviving the mountains. I love these games but MAN.
In KQ6, the patched game prevents you from returning to the Labyrinth entrance unless you hold everything you need for inside. Stepping on the mountain will just not work. So you can save inside... you should be "safe" at that point (as safe as you can ever be in a Sierra game, lol).
> In KQ6, the patched game prevents you from returning to the Labyrinth entrance unless you hold everything you need for inside. Stepping on the mountain will just not work
Nice~
> throwing the leg of lamb at the cat to chase it away will work... but then good luck surviving the mountains.
Agree! Some of the KQs will even give you a few points (not the maximum, since it’s not the optimal action) for doing something that’s considered “good,” even though it puts the game into an unwinnable state later on.
Thanks! No, this needs your own copy of the game, like eg ScummVM does. You run the tool on it and then you can point ScummVM/DOSBox to the patched directory.
True, but it looks for me like a tool that can generate a „nice“ path for every game. The path is true for every instance of the same game. If the path is done once, everyone can benefit from it. So a patch would not bundle copyrighted material, only the changes made from your tool that anyone else would end up with anyway. It is just a convenience thing. One would need the path, not running your tool over and over again for everyone wanting to play the sane version of the game.
The discussion here reminded me of the "Cruelty Scale" (https://www.ifwiki.org/Cruelty_scale) It was originally created specifically in relation to text adventure games, but seems appropriate to a broader range of game types.
The rankings are based on criteria like how far the game lets you go after making a get-stuck choice before you realize you're stuck, and whether that realization comes with clear information about what the wrong choice was.
Aha, but there's an added dimension to this Sierra-branded cruelty:
A young 8-year-old me, playing Police Quest for the first time. Sits through the briefing. Gets the gun, the ammo, the briefcase, from the locker room. Grabs the car key. Heads out to the parking lot, gets in the car, starts driving... and immediately dies: "you failed to perform the prescribed vehicle walkaround."
A bit of a "gotcha" for sharewareing the game, because said prescription was in a manual I definitely did not own (remember the games that would ask you for, say, the third word of the tenth page of the manual, as a form of DRM? brilliant.)
NO PROBLEM: ASSIGNMENT RECEIVED: I WILL SAVE THE GAME EARLY AND OFTEN!
Begin another playthrough. Lather, rinse, repeat. Play for several hours, carefully save scumming my way to glory: I have built a complex ladder of 10 save slots that I am slowly rotating through. Then the action gets heavier and heavier, and the saves come faster and faster, until the climax of the game, where you have the Death Angel cornered. "Radio for help."
And there it says: "With what radio?"
The one I had left back at the station, I don't know, 10 hours ago? But that's okay, because I can head back to the station and grab it from one of my convenient saves!
No, no I cannot. I have over-indexed and let fear win the day and save scummed myself into oblivion. The earliest save is in a walking-dead state as well. I am toast.
I died a bit that day. A painful lesson for an 8-year-old to learn. As Bennett Foddy says in his Getting Over It soliloquy, "When games were new, they wanted a lot from you; daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone’s turned off by that."
The delay is the real killer. You don't realize you're driving off a cliff until you’ve already hit the ground.
tangent: this unfortunate design choice by the old Sierra adventure games has been discussed a number of times on the Designer Notes podcast, focused on game design [1]. Soren opens each discussion by asking the guest which is the first game they remember.
[1] https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/
This is so cool, what a great project!
I remember using a single save game and soft locking myself in Space Quest 2 by not getting the glowing gem, and in Space Quest 1 I think by not picking up the shard of broken glass, and being so pissed off about having to replay.
The LSL dip and sunscreen issues you fixed were particularly egregious, by that point I feel like they should have fixed things.
While Sierra should absolutely be recognized for spawning an entire genre of games that were legitimately fun, it is crazy that they were fine with shipping games with these broken states, when it was eminently preventable.
Thanks!! I mean, I can kiiiinda see it as a design philosophy... It does make games harder and make them feel higher stakes. What really gets me is some of the later games that look like they would be safe, but aren't. For example Gabriel Knight 1 has a day structure that looks like it would prevent you from getting stuck... but it doesn't, you can trigger a day's end without getting everything you actually need. That's just, like, evil haha
Nice job! I actually wrote a blog article about my love/hate relationship with KQ4 in particular - with a particular shoutout to my incredible irritation with the whole golden bridle scene [1].
Without spoiling anything, are you accounting for stuff like a player saving in the Minotaur's Labyrinth without a... shall we say crucial item necessary for a trap scene?
[1] - https://mordenstar.com/blog/kqiv
Yes I'm with you on that bridle! And you can only get it by typing "look down", which is infuriating! I'm also discovering, working on KQ5, that it is really evil in allowing you to use items in certain ways that look fine at first (the action succeeds), but bite you in the butt later because you needed that item for something else and there was an other option you could have used. For example, throwing the leg of lamb at the cat to chase it away will work... but then good luck surviving the mountains. I love these games but MAN.
In KQ6, the patched game prevents you from returning to the Labyrinth entrance unless you hold everything you need for inside. Stepping on the mountain will just not work. So you can save inside... you should be "safe" at that point (as safe as you can ever be in a Sierra game, lol).
> In KQ6, the patched game prevents you from returning to the Labyrinth entrance unless you hold everything you need for inside. Stepping on the mountain will just not work
Nice~
> throwing the leg of lamb at the cat to chase it away will work... but then good luck surviving the mountains.
Agree! Some of the KQs will even give you a few points (not the maximum, since it’s not the optimal action) for doing something that’s considered “good,” even though it puts the game into an unwinnable state later on.
That's evil! But it does make me feel a little better about not using points as a proxy :D
This is great. Would you provide the changes as patches like they do for romhacks?
This is some true quality of life improvement when playing these games and have to make dinner.
Thanks! No, this needs your own copy of the game, like eg ScummVM does. You run the tool on it and then you can point ScummVM/DOSBox to the patched directory.
True, but it looks for me like a tool that can generate a „nice“ path for every game. The path is true for every instance of the same game. If the path is done once, everyone can benefit from it. So a patch would not bundle copyrighted material, only the changes made from your tool that anyone else would end up with anyway. It is just a convenience thing. One would need the path, not running your tool over and over again for everyone wanting to play the sane version of the game.
This is so cool - very impressive!
Read the whole ReadMe to understand how you pulled this off.
Halfway through, I shiver, wait a minute I recognize this writing style…
I would have so preferred to remain impressed and excited by what a fellow human came up with - sometimes I really hate what AI is taking from us
It's true that Claude wrote most of the Readme... But the design is human :)
The readme and 100% of the code - according to that readme - was also AI.
If you came up with the design of the parser for the decompiled graphs, then I’m glad to still be impressed.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a cool project… and I was actually impressed and excited
> 100% of the code - according to that readme - was also AI
I only briefly scanned it - are you referring to Claude being an extensive commit contributor?
Yes, as in 100% :-(
Why not rip and replace the parts of the readme then?
It's like making a beautiful chocolate praline and shipping it in a shoe.
but not any of the actual work.
The Readme is actual work.
I quote one of the parent comments: "It's true that Claude wrote most of the Readme... But the design is human :)"
So while writing the readme could be considered actual work, it was still not done by the human. So I don't know what your point is.
Talking of being softlocked on a boat crossing:
https://www.kensblog.com/update-on-our-journey-through-the-n...