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."
You could have also learned how to edit the saves to give yourself the radio :) . A tall ask of an 8-year-old of course, but not beyond the realm of possibility. Funny you mention Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It, because that's kind of how I "beat" it. After about 6 years of on and off attempts that always died around the church, I got fed up and edited the physics constants to make the game significantly easier. Since I used my own skill to hack the game and not an outside patch, I consider that "beating" the game in a sense.
I am now thinking if you can pull off an adventure game where some puzzles require editing the save file. It would be pretty tricky to make it understandable to most people. Now that I think about it, I wouldn't put it past Deltarune to eventually have an easter egg that can only be reached from a save state, which is impossible to achieve through normal gameplay. I know it doesn't have one right now, because all the scripts have been examined in depth and nothing like that was found.
I remember in Kings Quest 6 you can meet a guy early on in the bookstore which becomes relevant (but not critical?) right at the end. I never knew how relevant though, as the time I played it through right to the end wasn't one of the times when he'd happened to be in the bookstore early on.
I guess that's not enough of a dead end to block progress.
Maybe it'd be enough just to know what happens in the castle if Prince Alexander had befriended him. Otherwise I guess I'll carry that unresolved thread around with me for another ~25 years.
Edit: went looking for spoilers and yeah, alternate ending which admittedly sounds better than the one I got
Was the idea that these were incredibly complex and convoluted puzzles that you'd be expected to "solve" by playing over and over until it was completable?
You'd expect one or two of these things to slip through by mistake, but so many indicates it was a bizarre but deliberate design decision?
I'm not sure how it became the norm in text adventure games, but for platformers part of it was a hold over from games being designed to be quarter eaters in arcades. Kids that played those became adults that made the next ones. I /suspect/ that a similar thing has happened with the kids that grew up on the N64 and gamecube had four player local coop as the ceiling and now lots of games that probably could have more than 4 players at a time (albeit with balance probably thrown out) are capped at 4. Looking at you, concerned ape :|
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.
> it is crazy that they were fine with shipping games with these broken states, when it was eminently preventable.
Given what I know about Sierra (nothing first-hand, just impressions based on what I've read), I would not be surprised at all if this was entirely intentional.
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
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.
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.
Or the author could get in touch with GoG, who currently distribute several classic Sierra games. I'm sure they would be happy to offer patched versions.
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.
I just don't mind it so much. I realized a bit of the way through that the readme was AI generated, and then I read the Show HN intro on this post, and realized the entire thing was AI generated.
But... so what? Is it useful? Yeah, looks like it. Has someone else built it, by hand, and written a readme for it, by hand? No, I don't think so. The world is a slightly better place because this exists, so maybe we shouldn't complain so much about how it was made to exist.
Someone had a frustration, and had an idea about how to solve that frustration, but decided to use a tool to write the code for him, based on his design for how the problem should be solved. That's maybe not how I would have done it, because I enjoy coding for pleasure, but that's just me, and I can absolutely sympathize with someone wanting a problem solved with code, but not wanting to write that code themselves.
> sometimes I really hate what AI is taking from us
I agree that LLMs have not been all roses and rainbows, but in this case, an LLM has given us something that we wouldn't otherwise have.
Maybe don't feel entitled to the author's time? Perhaps he'd rather spend time playing the games that the software patched, instead of spending time doing writing for you.
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."
"use nightstick" - took me ages. I didn't know what a nightstick was, it's not a term known in my country
You could have also learned how to edit the saves to give yourself the radio :) . A tall ask of an 8-year-old of course, but not beyond the realm of possibility. Funny you mention Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It, because that's kind of how I "beat" it. After about 6 years of on and off attempts that always died around the church, I got fed up and edited the physics constants to make the game significantly easier. Since I used my own skill to hack the game and not an outside patch, I consider that "beating" the game in a sense.
I am now thinking if you can pull off an adventure game where some puzzles require editing the save file. It would be pretty tricky to make it understandable to most people. Now that I think about it, I wouldn't put it past Deltarune to eventually have an easter egg that can only be reached from a save state, which is impossible to achieve through normal gameplay. I know it doesn't have one right now, because all the scripts have been examined in depth and nothing like that was found.
The delay is the real killer. You don't realize you're driving off a cliff until you’ve already hit the ground.
I remember in Kings Quest 6 you can meet a guy early on in the bookstore which becomes relevant (but not critical?) right at the end. I never knew how relevant though, as the time I played it through right to the end wasn't one of the times when he'd happened to be in the bookstore early on.
I guess that's not enough of a dead end to block progress.
Maybe it'd be enough just to know what happens in the castle if Prince Alexander had befriended him. Otherwise I guess I'll carry that unresolved thread around with me for another ~25 years.
Edit: went looking for spoilers and yeah, alternate ending which admittedly sounds better than the one I got
For those wondering just how pervasive this is:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UnwinnableByDesign/Si...
Was the idea that these were incredibly complex and convoluted puzzles that you'd be expected to "solve" by playing over and over until it was completable?
You'd expect one or two of these things to slip through by mistake, but so many indicates it was a bizarre but deliberate design decision?
I'm not sure how it became the norm in text adventure games, but for platformers part of it was a hold over from games being designed to be quarter eaters in arcades. Kids that played those became adults that made the next ones. I /suspect/ that a similar thing has happened with the kids that grew up on the N64 and gamecube had four player local coop as the ceiling and now lots of games that probably could have more than 4 players at a time (albeit with balance probably thrown out) are capped at 4. Looking at you, concerned ape :|
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.
> it is crazy that they were fine with shipping games with these broken states, when it was eminently preventable.
Given what I know about Sierra (nothing first-hand, just impressions based on what I've read), I would not be surprised at all if this was entirely intentional.
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
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/
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.
Or the author could get in touch with GoG, who currently distribute several classic Sierra games. I'm sure they would be happy to offer patched versions.
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
As soon as I saw bold text, I knew. Humans never bold things.
I just don't mind it so much. I realized a bit of the way through that the readme was AI generated, and then I read the Show HN intro on this post, and realized the entire thing was AI generated.
But... so what? Is it useful? Yeah, looks like it. Has someone else built it, by hand, and written a readme for it, by hand? No, I don't think so. The world is a slightly better place because this exists, so maybe we shouldn't complain so much about how it was made to exist.
Someone had a frustration, and had an idea about how to solve that frustration, but decided to use a tool to write the code for him, based on his design for how the problem should be solved. That's maybe not how I would have done it, because I enjoy coding for pleasure, but that's just me, and I can absolutely sympathize with someone wanting a problem solved with code, but not wanting to write that code themselves.
> sometimes I really hate what AI is taking from us
I agree that LLMs have not been all roses and rainbows, but in this case, an LLM has given us something that we wouldn't otherwise have.
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.
Maybe don't feel entitled to the author's time? Perhaps he'd rather spend time playing the games that the software patched, instead of spending time doing writing for you.
but not any of the actual work.
Designing a parser and deciding how to solve the problem isn't work? Writing code is not the only work involved in building something.
I love writing code and avoid using an LLM for pleasure projects, but c'mon, this kind of derisiveness is getting old and tiring.
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...