Have Modern Gamers Lost the Patience For Puzzles? 622
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."
Hmm, there are two kinds of puzzles... (Score:3, Informative)
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The infamous cat hair moustache puzzle is outlined here. [gabrielkni...mpaign.com]
Those are the kind that make Penn Gillette say "Suck Death, Puzzle loving pig!" as he shoots you with a .357 Magnum.
Penumbra (Score:1, Informative)
Go play penumbra it's a puzzle game but with puzzles that are actually logical instead of obscure like those in earlier adventure games (oh so I use the rubber ducky with the coat hanger!) which usually caused me to click on everything in frustration.
I didn't even like puzzles much back "then" (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Zack and Wiki - The Wii is the answer (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Games I've played recently (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Puzzles of Old (Score:5, Informative)
I think this [oldmanmurray.com] explains perfectly well why the "old-school" style of puzzle game, ala Sierra and Lucas Arts, have gone by the wayside and it'll be a while till they come back.
I say "think" because my proxy blocked the link. Basically, if it describes a puzzle in which you have to create a disguise by using cat hair and scotch tape to make a mustache in order to imitate a guy who doesn't have a mustache, then you're at the right place. :P
I think it was Kings Quest 6 that basically broke my brain for puzzle games. At least Space Quest made me chuckle while making me do random retarded things.
Re:It's all Jane Jensen's fault... (Score:1, Informative)
Wish I had mod points. I've read that same article in the past and it's great, and right on point. When puzzles are done poorly, they can be endlessly frustrating and dull, and he provides a perfect case study.
Re:Puzzles of Old (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ever heard of a little game called Bioshock? (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, no, the article doesn't mention Portal. Several commentors called him on the lapse, and he notes that he forgot it.
Re:This thread has been eaten by a grue (Score:4, Informative)
Answer from an unlikely source: Grue [urbandictionary.com]
Re:This thread has been eaten by a grue (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I don't buy that (Score:3, Informative)
Keep in mind that the HHGG game was a send-up of the genre. The puzzles were deliberately twisted, and the game narrative would actually lie to you. Pointing out the sillyness of the genre was sort of the point.
Re:perhaps they realize.. (Score:2, Informative)
For every secret code that one used to have to calculate the checksum for, the internet now leaks out all of the codes for the game within hours of it being on store shelves except for the developer code for checking the build version number that they can claim is the 'one more secret' to find.
For every fetch-quest and sequence break, some obsessive fan will write a FAQ.
Honestly, I thought that the reason they put tough puzzles in adventure games was so they could sell strategy guides. If you make it too easy, it's just a thing to do in the game, and no one needs to buy the guide. If you make it too hard and don't leak the answers, people lose interest in the game or don't finish in time to buy the new one. To be fair, I only found the black dot in Adventure (2600) because I was told that it existed and the bridge was required. I only finished Indiana Jones (2600) because one of the older guys in band had figured out the shovel and parachute parts. I never did see the guy's initials in Indy. These happened before strategy guides. Playing around with Nintendo passwords happened before strategy guides. The business has changed again, and I don't think anyone will be drawing maps by hand.
Re:This thread has been eaten by a grue (Score:2, Informative)
according to scholars of the GReat Underground Empire
The Great Underground Empire: The GR.U.E. The Great Underground Empire itself is what's consuming your adventurer, not this mythical grue creature.
Shame on me for trusting you.... (Score:3, Informative)
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/ [dan-ball.jp]
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 :-)
Re:This thread has been eaten by a grue (Score:4, Informative)
I'm guessing you don't know what Atari made. It wasn't Zork ...
Professor Layton? (Score:3, Informative)