Simon Holmes: The Secret of the Silver Sorcerer II
oh hai I meant to write this earlier when it was fresh.
So I finally got to playing Simon the Sorcerer II weekend-before-last-ish, after NOT having played I because I somehow mistakenly thought I had ordered a two-pack that had both games, and... well. All I knew about Simon I was part of a demo I had tried and had trouble understanding because, unlike MOST point-and-click games, it had NO SUBTITLES. Not even an option to turn them on! So I was understandably in the dark because the first time I'd tried it I had a computer with no sound. Very useful.
Part II wasn't much of an improvement, though I have a fully-capable computer. First, though the case says "XP-compatible", it's only seems to be as compatible as knowing a few token phrases of a language while in a foreign land. It came with NO documentation, so every single playthrough starts with the opening cinematic, and I had to LOOK AT A WALKTHROUGH TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SAVE. REALLY. F10, which is supposed to highlight every active item on the screen, crashes the game. Fun times! I'm going to assume most of these problems is from it being a repackage, since lots of game repackages I've tried seem to suffer from no-manual-itis, but it still seems like poor implementation.
Game-wise, it reminds me a little too much of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, down to the Bad Ending [though YMMV], but Simon is rude as hell and Guybrush is generally just dimwitted. I'm not really sure whether I'm interested in playing Simon I anymore at this point [or the other THREE--??], but it depends on how much I feel like vegging out now that I'm back OUT of a productive groove.
After that, I carried on to Sherlock Holmes: The Secret of the Silver Earring, which was... uh. Let me describe my first Holmes game if I haven't already:The Mystery of the Mummy has one instance of the mummy. He jumps out and goes, "GRAAAAAAAR!"
Holmes gives him a curious look as though to say, "Oh, look! A mummy!"
The mummy sulks off like, "...damn it."
What Earring does better than Mummy is NOT use first-person 3D perspective. It felt rather forced in Mummy, and while I'm still not excited about the awkward, unintuitive camera angles going between rooms [thank you, FFVII], I could at least navigate the game without getting motion sick.
Sometimes... navigate, I mean. There are too many places where it's difficult to tell him, "Go left" or whatever, and the "elude the guard and dog" portions are frustrating as an understatement. At least the puzzles were a little more story-related than "Hey, I found a Sudoku, now you have to solve it to proceed" kind of crap that plague Nancy Drew games, though that didn't make them much less frustrating--literally, a "play the card that follows in logical sequence" game included a V of spades... what the hell is a V of spades?! I ended up solving it by brute force, though I had to look up the solution to a "put the animals in order" puzzle when there is only reference to four of the eight animals. Maybe that's a natural leap of logic to assume the other four don't matter, but I couldn't figure it out for the life of me.
Also, the whole "Let's quiz ourselves on what happened today" thing. What. Funk dat.
In conclusion, good puzzle games are hard to make, but two things greatly improve them: disability considerations [if I'm deaf and/or don't want to replay the section a million times to figure out what's being said] and PROOFINGgad Holmes, why are you so typoed T_T
Actually, lots of things improve games, but those are my biggest complaints.
Off to try the next one, despite better judgement... 9_9
So I finally got to playing Simon the Sorcerer II weekend-before-last-ish, after NOT having played I because I somehow mistakenly thought I had ordered a two-pack that had both games, and... well. All I knew about Simon I was part of a demo I had tried and had trouble understanding because, unlike MOST point-and-click games, it had NO SUBTITLES. Not even an option to turn them on! So I was understandably in the dark because the first time I'd tried it I had a computer with no sound. Very useful.
Part II wasn't much of an improvement, though I have a fully-capable computer. First, though the case says "XP-compatible", it's only seems to be as compatible as knowing a few token phrases of a language while in a foreign land. It came with NO documentation, so every single playthrough starts with the opening cinematic, and I had to LOOK AT A WALKTHROUGH TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SAVE. REALLY. F10, which is supposed to highlight every active item on the screen, crashes the game. Fun times! I'm going to assume most of these problems is from it being a repackage, since lots of game repackages I've tried seem to suffer from no-manual-itis, but it still seems like poor implementation.
Game-wise, it reminds me a little too much of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, down to the Bad Ending [though YMMV], but Simon is rude as hell and Guybrush is generally just dimwitted. I'm not really sure whether I'm interested in playing Simon I anymore at this point [or the other THREE--??], but it depends on how much I feel like vegging out now that I'm back OUT of a productive groove.
After that, I carried on to Sherlock Holmes: The Secret of the Silver Earring, which was... uh. Let me describe my first Holmes game if I haven't already:The Mystery of the Mummy has one instance of the mummy. He jumps out and goes, "GRAAAAAAAR!"
Holmes gives him a curious look as though to say, "Oh, look! A mummy!"
The mummy sulks off like, "...damn it."
What Earring does better than Mummy is NOT use first-person 3D perspective. It felt rather forced in Mummy, and while I'm still not excited about the awkward, unintuitive camera angles going between rooms [thank you, FFVII], I could at least navigate the game without getting motion sick.
Sometimes... navigate, I mean. There are too many places where it's difficult to tell him, "Go left" or whatever, and the "elude the guard and dog" portions are frustrating as an understatement. At least the puzzles were a little more story-related than "Hey, I found a Sudoku, now you have to solve it to proceed" kind of crap that plague Nancy Drew games, though that didn't make them much less frustrating--literally, a "play the card that follows in logical sequence" game included a V of spades... what the hell is a V of spades?! I ended up solving it by brute force, though I had to look up the solution to a "put the animals in order" puzzle when there is only reference to four of the eight animals. Maybe that's a natural leap of logic to assume the other four don't matter, but I couldn't figure it out for the life of me.
Also, the whole "Let's quiz ourselves on what happened today" thing. What. Funk dat.
In conclusion, good puzzle games are hard to make, but two things greatly improve them: disability considerations [if I'm deaf and/or don't want to replay the section a million times to figure out what's being said] and PROOFINGgad Holmes, why are you so typoed T_T
Actually, lots of things improve games, but those are my biggest complaints.
Off to try the next one, despite better judgement... 9_9