Thanks for your comment. I agree with you (and roundsquare) that the first point has problems. To give you some idea of what I was getting at:
The way I, and I suspect most gamers, play adventure games is to:
a.) Run through the room graph as far as possible, do everything obvious, and take everything that isn't nailed down
b.) Look at the list of "roadblocks" encountered, and figure out how to get past them
c.) On passing a "roadblock", go to (a.)
To my way of thinking, anything you can grab without solving a puzzle is as good as in your inventory, even if it's in a different part of the room graph.
The post was inspired by Saturday's playthrough of "Leather Goddesses of Phobos" - one of the few Infocom games I hadn't spoiled for myself in my youth, due to Activision's decision to omit it from the "Lost Treasures" collections. Anyway, at one point I was faced with this set of puzzles:
1.) How to get past Thorbast in space
2.) How to get past the ion beam
3.) How to get into the orphanage
4.) How to turn the enchanted frog into a princess
5.) How to capture the mouse
6.) How to get the headlight in Cleveland
I was stuck - it seemed that I needed something "extra" to solve any one of these puzzles. In fact 20-YEAR-OLD-SPOILER-ALERT every puzzle on that list can be solved as soon as you encounter it (assuming that you've previously grabbed everything that was lying around in plain sight) with the very possible and partial exception of (4.).
(BTW, how could that list of puzzles not make anyone want to play that game?)
The way I, and I suspect most gamers, play adventure games is to:
a.) Run through the room graph as far as possible, do everything obvious, and take everything that isn't nailed down b.) Look at the list of "roadblocks" encountered, and figure out how to get past them c.) On passing a "roadblock", go to (a.)
To my way of thinking, anything you can grab without solving a puzzle is as good as in your inventory, even if it's in a different part of the room graph.
The post was inspired by Saturday's playthrough of "Leather Goddesses of Phobos" - one of the few Infocom games I hadn't spoiled for myself in my youth, due to Activision's decision to omit it from the "Lost Treasures" collections. Anyway, at one point I was faced with this set of puzzles:
1.) How to get past Thorbast in space 2.) How to get past the ion beam 3.) How to get into the orphanage 4.) How to turn the enchanted frog into a princess 5.) How to capture the mouse 6.) How to get the headlight in Cleveland
I was stuck - it seemed that I needed something "extra" to solve any one of these puzzles. In fact 20-YEAR-OLD-SPOILER-ALERT every puzzle on that list can be solved as soon as you encounter it (assuming that you've previously grabbed everything that was lying around in plain sight) with the very possible and partial exception of (4.).
(BTW, how could that list of puzzles not make anyone want to play that game?)
Anyway, thanks again.