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From: meta@pobox.com (mathew)
Subject: Re: Most difficult Infocom game?
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Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 21:39:53 GMT
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John Bowers <jb2101@my-deja.com> wrote:
> I recently resumed playing the old Infocom games, going through those
> which I had not played at all.  When I started on Trinity, I realized
> that it was a very difficult game (at least for me).  In fact, without a
> hints file I'm sure I would never have gotten through it.
>
> I recall one of the Infocom founders stating that Spellbreaker was the
> most difficult game he ever wrote, but my experience is that Trinity is
> far more difficult than Spellbreaker.

Trinity is certainly tricky, but not unreasonably so.  Spellbreaker, in
my opinion, goes over the line.  It's the only Infocom game I've given
up on in disgust because the puzzles were just excessively and
unreasonably hard.  (Well, the Zork III baseball puzzle could be added
to the list...)

I've played Bureaucracy, Hitch-Hiker's Guide, Nord & Bert, AMFV and
Deadline, and didn't have any particular problems with any of those --
except for a couple of Americanisms in Nord & Bert that I'd never heard
and couldn't reasonably have been expected to guess.

I actually found Zork Zero difficult, because of the sheer size of the
game and the way it opens up so rapidly.  I got to a point where I lost
track of what I had been doing where, and didn't really know what to do
next.  I started to feel like I was spending huge amounts of time
trekking across the map juggling dozens of objects and looking for
things I'd dropped.

This surprised me, because I'm generally more into exploration than
puzzles -- I'd never have guessed I'd find a game with too much
exploration...


mathew
--
No taxation without representation!
