From: bkoike@sdcc13.ucsd.edu (Bryce Koike)
Newsgroups: rec.games.programmer
Subject: Re: Discussion starter
Keywords: discussion started
Date: 4 Oct 92 20:28:11 GMT
Organization: University of California, San Diego

In article <BvM2LJ.MCr@rice.edu> amitp@owlnet.rice.edu writes:
>In article <1992Oct2.171920.14307@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>, vputz@nyx.cs.du.edu (Victor Putz) writes:
>|> ..I tend to agree.
>|> 
>|> Nowadays, there is simply a tendency for more flash, less thought; Ultima
>|> 7, which sold 50,000 copies day 1 of sales, is FUNDAMENTALLY no different
>|> than it was several years ago.  It just looks better and the player
>|> interface is all nice and pretty.  

	I disagree.  Try comparing Ultima 3 ("Duh, hack hack, kill
kill.  Oh, monsters can't walk over treasure chests...   Uh, hack
hack, kill kill...) to Ultima 7.  Ultima 5 was a shock to me.  I
still don't like any of them, but I've found that Ultima 7 is far
more pleasurable that its predecessors.  Perhaps one day they'll
write an Ultima I can play, but I guess I'm not into that type of
game.

>|> The Sierra adventures rea no different;
>|> I will no longer play any of them, since every puzzle seems to be of the
>|> "put tab a into slot b" variety.

	The main problem is that attempt to attract an extremely
wide audience ranging from children to adults (and males to
females).  Children aren't always as clever as teenagers or adults
and have a greater problem with certain kinds of puzzles.  Sure, mom
and dad and sit next to them and effectively figure out the harder
ones for them, but that's not quite the same.  The basic attempt was
to make a very simple interface that a wide audience can enjoy.  I
suppose it worked.  (To me, the newer interface felt more like,
"Click until something works" than anything else.)
	Nice graphics are fine, as are sounds, and while Sierra does
very well by this, their games are too shallow for me.  ("Well, the
whole point behind King's Quest V is to give people things...they'll
give you other things that you can give to other people...oh,
sometimes you've got to do weird things, but there's no complexity
really involved... :(  )
	I strongly dislike the Action Game within an Adventure Game.
Too often this feeble attempt comes off completely bad (Rise of the
Dragon, I believe was one of these?  The action sequences were
awful).  Why bother?  The game seemed fine to me until I hit them.
(Thankfully one CAN skip them!)
	I think that Out of This World (NOT published by Sierra) is
an example of a great one-time-play game (unlike, say, Tetris or
Chess which are multiple-play games).  I don't think that I've
enjoyed a game that much for a *LONG* time.  The graphics while
"bad" (according to my friends) looked very nice to me and worked
quite well.  The puzzles were a lot of fun (although near the end,
things got pretty easy for me) and the flexibility was nice.  The
game was basically similar to Dragon's Lair in many respects, but
you had more control over yourself, giving an illusion of you being
in total control of the situation, which is very nice.  (The two
most impressive scenes...well....THREE, were the introduction, the
scene where you came out of the pool [with animals flying in the
background], and the arena combat scene...very nice...)
	Also, D/Generation was pretty fun.  My biggest gripe is that
you can't save your game and so you must start from the beginning.
I haven't played it much (since I don't own it), but it's fun.  The
graphics aren't anything special, but the playability is great.

>I agree about the Sierra adventures, but not about Ultima -- U6 and U7 are
>object-oriented, and there's a lot more you can do in them.  Richard Garriot
>told me a story about the beta testing of U6:  he had designed some place
>that you couldn't pass unless you brought down a drawbridge, but the 
>crank was on the other side of the chasm.  He had intended the players to 
>use telekinesis to activate the lever; one of the testers killed a character,
>threw the body over the chasm to the other side, and then cast Reincarnation
>and took control of the character and turned the crank!

	I like this!  Flexible games are the most enjoyable, I
think!  "Wait...HOW did you get by that one?"  "Oh, I just shot the
rope."  "Ack..."  [Lemmings is a game that makes me think of
flexibility...my friends and I all had different strategies for
getting past various levels, but the outcome was the same: we
survived to continue on.  This can't be directly applied to games
like Ultima, but it's a good example, I think, of a non-rigid
structure.]

>In the older Ultimas, the only way to solve a puzzle was a way that was 
>thought of by the designers of the game.  (The same with every Sierra
>game I've seen... :(  )  With the new Ultimas, there is sometimes more
>than one way of doing something, which is more realistic.

	Actually, I thought that in early Ultimas, the only way to
solve puzzles was to kill lots of monsters and get cool magic
weapons so you could bash bigger monsters.  (*BIG* frown)  As the
Ultima series increased in size, the story line became more and more
important to the game, the player could interact with people in
cities (thumbs up!), people would go to sleep at night, etc.  Some
people might not be impressed by this, but I certainly was at the
time...
>		Amit
>-- 
>/\\ Amit J Patel, amitp@owlnet.rice.edu
>\\/ I think I'm at Rice University 
Newsgroups: rec.games.programmer