All of the Sierra games, as much as I loved them, would just piss me off with dying constantly. Having to do a specific thing at a specific time or dying. You had to do SUCH specific things. I remember the park/lake scene and pulling people over driving in PQ being impossible until I found hints.
I'm not sure I ever beat a Sierra game outside of LSL. Maybe a KQ and potentially a QFG, but I definitely didn't beat a PQ. I LOVED PQ3. I think out of all of them that SQ was the one that really, really pissed me off, and scifi is my favorite genre, with no other scifi adventure games back then (other than beneath a steel sky which I also got nowhere with), total bummer.
Whenever I discovered LucasArts (DOTT I think was first), Legend of Kryndaria, Discworld, etc, it was such a breath of fresh air. There was a Black Cauldron game that I LOVED.
I remember all of these games so vividly. I don't think I remember many other games nowadays to that degree. Baba Yagas hut, the wizards house, cleaning the stables in qfg, Otto standing outside the bar.. Could very well be because I died so much and played scenes over and over..
edit: This made me want to give them a go again.. https://playclassic.games/games/point-n-click-adventure-dos-...
edit2: I forgot how slow you walk.. ugh. There are a LOT of modern Adventure games now on Steam. It's had a bit of a comeback and they're usually affordable games. I'm playing the Plague Doctor of Wippra right now. All of the Wadjet Eye games are really cool too.
The manual tells you to "save early, save often" for a reason.
The narrator (Gary Owens) was also amazing in the CD version.
I was sure to have plenty of savegames before I tried anything, of course.
One is a Sierra Spoof complete with a Sierra death dialog. That one lets you continue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6F55am-rOY
The other has to do with the fact that Guybrush can hold his breath for 10 Minutes. And only ten minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah5o3aAeZso
If I remember correctly that is the only real game over in any later Lucasfilm/LucasArts adventure game.
EDIT: I just remembered the jumping puzzle in Indy3 where you died all the time when jumping on the wrong tile. Or the Knight Statue that axed either Indy or his father. Or you got shot when you punched Hitler... You could also die in Manic Mansion and Zak McKracken.
Lucasfilm games killed you quite a lot. LucasArts stopped doing that.
Interesting! When I played SQ II, it was a pirated copy and I had no hint book. Also, no access to the Sierra Hint Line from my country. And no Internet websites to google the answer, either. So I beat them all by myself. All of those games were pirated, and the hardest was SQ 4 which would randomly crash to desktop, and I wasn't sure if this was supposed to happen, or some badly cracked copy-protection thing, and to this day I still don't know.
Spanish is my native language, so the inspiration to try things like this was pretty cool: "mooom, how do you say "rub" in English? I think I'm supposed to rub these berries on the dude!"
> I forgot how slow you walk.. ugh.
Oh, yes. Those early adventures didn't let you teleport to the next screen either, you had to very slowly walk all the way. I used to use savegames for fast teleporting: "ok, this didn't work, I want to go back to that other screen but it's so far, let's restore my savegame".
I remember it because I actually called Sierra to tell them about it. The person on the other end even fired up the game and verified it, then told me vaguely that the solution to the puzzle was something else. I'm guessing the tech support weren't allowed to give hints because they had a paid tip line.
Wait, I'm pretty sure that's the crash to desktop I'm remembering! It was definitely in the arcade. I tried randomly clicking to avoid the Time Police (or whatever those androids were called) and the game would error out. I was never sure if it was an error or copy-protection. I remember winning the game, but don't remember what I did to bypass this (remember: no access to any hint line).
So it was an actual bug, and not copy-protection after all? Wow.
Discworld MUD or some other game? The MUD is still alive and well!
Some puzzles are quite nonsensical, true to adventure game standards of the day. Sierra gamers found it too easy, people new to the genre too hard.
Eric Idle as Rincewind is amazing though.
It just didn't have as big an impact on my young self as SQ II.
Regardless of whether an EGA version existed, the style of the sprites was already different. The sprites from SQ I, II & III belong to an earlier era -- hard to describe, but if you remember them you must know what I mean. More abstract & pixelated, designed for low-res and low-color displays.
They bring back memories! I don't want to wax nostalgic -- but I will anyway. I've come to think the more primitive/abstract the graphics, the more they engage the imagination. Similar to Scott McCloud's concept of "closure" from Understanding Comics, maybe? While playing SQ II, I could believe the world was enormous even when it was actually quite limited. In the jungle of planet Labion, I believed I was exploring a vast wilderness. Games with more realistic graphics -- even when they are sandbox games -- don't give me the same feeling anymore. Of course, I'm also older and more jaded, so there's that too ;)
I played SQ I way later in life, and SQ III didn't resonate as strongly with me. The rest were no longer EGA "text input" games either.
SQ II brings back memories. I learned some of my English with it, too. I remember the feeling of satisfaction when I discovered I could "rub berries" on Roger Wilco ;)