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.
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.
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."
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UnwinnableByDesign/Si...
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 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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
This is some true quality of life improvement when playing these games and have to make dinner.
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
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.
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
I only briefly scanned it - are you referring to Claude being an extensive commit contributor?
It's like making a beautiful chocolate praline and shipping it in a shoe.
I love writing code and avoid using an LLM for pleasure projects, but c'mon, this kind of derisiveness is getting old and tiring.
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.
https://www.kensblog.com/update-on-our-journey-through-the-n...