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in reply to: Puzzles Too Hard, Or Am I Just Too Stupid / Lazy? #4164

I hate to look up hints when playing adventure games and tend to delay it until I’m really at my wit’s end. If I do have to resort to hints, I always first check https://www.uhs-hints.com, which provides hints with decreasing subtlety, so one doesn’t have to surrender completely to “cheating”.

Illogical solutions can drive me mad! If you’re into that sort of thing, however, I can recommend the Gobliiins series. I believe *all* of the solutions are completely random!

I happened to be playing Bureaucracy recently; good if you want a tough, but somehow still fair, challenge. In this one, you can get stuck, so: save often and don’t be afraid to restart the game now and then to see whether you missed something.

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in reply to: Maniac Mansion #4156

I remember playing Maniac Mansion as a kid, but not getting very far because of insufficient knowledge of the English language (and intelligence in general). At least I got to enjoy the awesome opening music on the C64 🙂

I played it again as an adult, and I think was able to finish it. I really enjoyed the game. The fact that you control multiple characters gave the game an extra dimension compared to other adventure games. Especially because the characters have different skills and you also need to make them work together.

If I remember correctly, the different ports of the game were slightly different. I think in some ports the central door on top of the stairs had an electronic lock, where in other ports it was a plain door. Or maybe that depends on which characters you choose at the start of the game?

About the version included with DOTT, I recall reading that it doesn’t include save functionality, making it difficult to complete unless you already know what to do. Is that correct?

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in reply to: First impressions #4096

After reading most of the “Beginning the game” and “Basic Exploration and the Hamlet” manual chapters, I eventually managed to make some progress in a game at the intro difficulty setting. On all of my attempts I chose Freya (nature magic) and the high men race.

It quickly became obvious that I needed to exercise some patience and “wait” for a large number of turns before I had enough troops to attack some of the sites and nodes guarded by monsters. In the meantime, I could of course start building outposts, expand my home town and research spells. For the latter two, some guesswork was required because of the overwhelming amount of options.

The automatic building choices made by the Grand Vizier didn’t seem very helpful to me, since he always seemed to be producing too many troops so that I wouldn’t have enough food for them. I personally chose to first increase food production and only then produce more troops.

The tactical combat didn’t strike me as very interesting. But maybe that’s because I’m used to (and love) the more detailed combat in games like X-COM and Jagged Alliance. It seems the key to success is to first test the waters and gauge the strength of the enemy, retreat, and come back later with more and stronger troops and better spells (after researching). Or that may of course just be at the intro difficulty level. My towns weren’t attacked, but I can imagine that preparing for that in time might be a difficult task.

Unfortunately, this game didn’t grab my attention like X-COM did, so I didn’t even finish a single game. Looking at my wizard’s power compared to the other two that I encountered so far, I’m pretty confident my current game should be easy to beat, though. While the sheer amount of content (buildings, troops, spells) promises a lot of depth, it’s also a bit overwhelming. Nowadays I just don’t have the amount of time required to explore all of that content, which somehow tempers the enthusiasm I’m afraid. While X-COM has perhaps similar depth, it somehow seems more manageable.

I can’t wait to listen to the podcast on this game though. I expect there will be two camps: those that have mastered it by now and love it, and those that are overwhelmed (i.e. everyone that started playing it this month). 🙂

Cheers!