Well I certainly cannot relate to the criticism. I played the game early on as a teen (and every few years since) and while, at times difficult, I never thought the puzzles were "confusing", it seemed like a pretty organic combination of styles of puzzles built into the game. The head turning dynamics I have also found to be quiet pleasant as it made me relate to the character more.
Not that criticism is bad but Grim Fandango seems to one of the most if not most loved adventure games (just visit and adventure game forum or subreddit). So one can take it apart and think about the individual parts but the whole is certainly a masterpiece of a game.
There was one particular puzzle involving an elevator that stumped me as a kid. I played the remaster years later and still couldn’t figure it out so I looked up the answer.
Cheating in multiplayer games is obviously indefensible, but I’ve never been above cheating in a single player game. Games are a relaxing outlet for me and if I get frustrated long enough I’ll look up the solution.
That said, I will have one of two reactions upon spoiling a puzzle. I’ll either realize that the answer was right in front of me and I’ll be disappointed I didn’t spend a little more time on it, or I’ll realize I would never have figured it out and be glad I went for help.
The elevator solution was an example of the latter.
Do you know Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders [0]? A Lucas Games video game published in 1988 on C64 and several other platforms.
Puzzles were very difficult at that time in games, possibly intentionally because Lucas Games was selling hint books.
Throughout the whole game you take planes to fly from one location to another, and this eventually depletes your credit card.
At some point you have so little money that the only plane ticket you can afford is a rusty world-war-era biplane that will fly you to some destination through the famous Bermuda Triangle [1]. It's the only option you have so you will eventually take it. But why that? Because when in flight, a tractor beam pulls you up and you find yourself, the biplane and the pilot in an alien space ship, which is how the game justifies the myth of the Bermuda Triangle.
Now if I remember correctly, you will be stuck there and will have to reload a saved game, unless you have a guitar with you. In fact, in the space ship you meet the alien captain who is wearing the classic white Elvis dress. If you earlier purchased a guitar in the shop close to your apartment and now give the guitar as a gift to the alien captain, you will then become friends, and the alien captain will allow you to leave the spaceship with the biplane. Even more, on the ship there is a machine named "lotto-o-matic" or similar, that will predict lotto numbers. So you have to use the machine and collect the receipt. Back to USA, you can use those lotto numbers and win an incredible amount of money that will allow you to take all the planes you need for the remaining of the game.
I remember this particular puzzle as I was stuck for weeks in this limbo without money trying countless useless solutions. I leave in Italy those hint books did not exist and there was no internet. Luckily at some point a local game magazine (Zzap! [2]) answered a letter from another gamer who was asking for a clue.
As much as I love Jimmy Maher's articles, he has a certain bias against any adventure game that's not streamlined. So, he levels similar criticisms against pretty much every Sierra games, Full Throttle and pretty much any adventure game that is not polished to the level of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle.
He's not completely wrong and the tendency of adventure games to sometimes veer into puzzles that are more moon logic based did I think contribute to the fall of the genre but I do think that he overemphasizes those faults and has a tendency to describe puzzles that are merely hard as impossible to figure out.
Also, I disagree with his criticism of the interface, as a kid it definitely didn't bother me, if anything I find it less frustrating than the amount of pixel hunt in some adventure games.
Reminds me of him reviewing Star Control II, which he also seemed to overly criticise, he did however make a legitimate point that the game mechanic of Kohr-Ah only slowly annihilating the galaxy meant that you may have actually already reached a point where winning becomes impossible, but you may not realise it until quite a long time later.
Although I generally remember 90s games being somewhat brutally unforgiving, the lesson they would teach most thoroughly is to save often.
But that's part of the strength of the game! The game world is "alive." Yeah you can fail to win, because you're explicitly told that there is a struggle for control of the galaxy going on!
I don't like how some of these reviewers feel like failure = bad. It's sheer laziness or frustration.
I remember watching my teenage cousin play it as a young child and being really drawn in, then when he let me play I remember getting frustrated because I had no idea what to do, it ended up being more fun watching him play
That doesn't mean too much though, most games don't intend for you to start playing somewhere in the middle. Usually mechanics are introduced incremtally and difficulty of the problems to solve is ramped up while you have a chance to hone your skills. E.g. what may seem as moon logic on its own may actually be very logical in the weird world thhat the game has introduced you to by then.
I definitely found the world a bit harder to navigate for solving puzzles than the 2D games but the really horrible puzzles in grim fandango were the time based ones that the engine could do but not remotely well. There was one in particular with a wheelbarrow that was fairly easy to figure out but an insane pain to coordinate with the game's controls on our PC
I never liked Grim Fandango despite recognizing its importance. I think it's too weird in a bad way. For me, it lacks the optimistic fantasy of LucasArts previous entries and is just too, well, Grim. I wouldn't call it a masterpiece like, for instance, Monkey Island 2.
It’s a film noir coded game. It does nail that dark aspect in many scenes and does it masterfully. I recently replayed it and it was remarkable how great it still is after decades of gameplay evolution.
It's one unlikable candidate after another. How does one fire Democratic party leadership? How is it all democratic to leave the choice of the only "left" candidate be down to... who? Some boomers?
To reflect on HN trends for a second: people seem to really like "uncovered" things. Like some lost song, or archeological piece or, as here, identity of a person in a mostly inconsequential context.
I also don't seem to recall these kinds of posts hitting front page much until recently. What is this? A new wave of nostalgia for long lost past on the internet? Hacker News demographic change? Discovery of a new marketing vector? Or just me seeing a pattern where there is none?
I can't speak to the trend, but for me, it's this idea that invalidates tastemakers and shows that good ideas inevitably stand on their own. Tony Hawk is widely respected, and yet, he's enamored with this forgotten photo of a young girl skateboarding in the rain. And she's holding an umbrella. We all agree-it's a wonderful photo.
Turns out, the girl–in the most respectful way–is just an ordinary person, and the photographer asked her to hold an umbrella, because he felt it would be a good idea. It was a good idea, and many years later the creative result has risen to the surface.
It's like when you go to a concert and witness a special moment that rocks you, and then years later you find out it has millions of views on YouTube. It's democratic validation that we are experiencing beautiful moments all the time, and that we don't need a Tony Hawk to validate them. You could argue that this wouldn't be seen without Tony, or you can reflect upon the many moments that aren't validated, and yet are filled with beauty.
Maybe people are tired of the other stuff that's been crowding all the information channels (related to an event happening today) and are happy for some lighthearted news for a change?
I'm on a no-politics diet today, but I would have loved this article on any day. It's just a delightful story. I think in news jargon it would be called a "human interest" story, which when you really think about those words, really nails it for me. I am deeply interested in other humans, especially of the non-celebrity variety.
Is it a mostly inconsequential context? I think it's exactly the sort of context that is valuable and human and grounds us to events of our past.
That one photo (and the collection of photos from the 70s linked in the article) say a lot about culture, about identity, about life and how things have evolved (or not evolved, or devolved) since then.
It's a story too about celebrity, and how this picture exists in this moment, today, because a celebrity found and shared it. It's completely distorted this woman's day to day. While it seems like a positive for her, it highlights just how much power celebrity has in our mental economies. Should one person have the ability to completely blow up someone else's routine like this? I dunno! But social media definitely facilitates it!
There's a ton of very interesting topics to cover here, in addition to the ones you raise, and I don't think they really are that inconsequential!
I've thought of the related phenomenon as "the only thing you can't buy is time."
I.e. there's no amount of money you can spend today to make something 45 years old
So as we increasingly move into a materially post-scarcity developed world, time becomes the last scarce thing.
It overlaps with nostalgia, but there's also a big component of novelty/rarity. See previous example of tracking down that song that was written for the X-Files and playing in the background in a single bar scene.
I can only speak for myself, but the Internet regularly has me going down rabbit holes into unsolved mysteries that end with no solution. I find articles like this refreshing simply because I can close the tab with a smile rather than with more questions.
What a reference. Incidentally, I started watching The Crystal Maze for the first time a few months ago after finding episodes of it on Archive.org. It's like watching adults running through Legends of The Hidden Temple, but with more urgency and charm. It's such a fun show
One reason for the popularity of that growing could be the accumulation of online things old enough to care about and enough sources to be able to track things down. I mean, only a decade ago some things were still fresh while now they're worthy of some research. See for example Jeffiot working with the community to track down the source of the vision test pattern (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D7I7fmZdOA) or the trumpet skull gif (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYcHOEjGzPA). In 2000s the information wouldn't be out there for the first one and the tools and community would be missing too. The second one would be just one of millions of gifs that nobody really cares about yet.
We have a Smeg oven, not with touchscreen controls, but with two pushable knobs that are easily pressed (thus starting the oven) by brushing past them. This oven has the worst user experience of anything, hardware or software, I've even used.
Despite claiming 24/7 it's a democratic country ruled by the rule of law, there's a lot ideological abuse of the laws used against ideological opponents going on in France. Somehow non-ideologically threatening criminals get a free pass to do whatever they want.
My friends are running a company called FOAM Space that has also put a lot of research into 3D terrestrial-base positioning [1]. Their system, though, can also make "claims" about the position, which is a cryptographic proof that the object that created the claim was at location X at time Y. So, not only you can find where you are but you can also you prove to others that you are there. They use unregulated LoRa bandwidths to operate.
I don't think that it's a good thing if a study which seemed promising turned out to be false. The goal is to have explanations of the world, after all. It's better to have learned that something is false than to go on believing the falsehood, but better still is to have something true which explains things.
> don't think that it's a good thing if a study which seemed promising turned out to be false.
It is definitely a good thing.
It is good that the conclusions of a study that was demonstrated to be unsound have been replaced by those of a better study. If some even better study comes along later and replaces this one, that'll be good too. We now know more. It's not fun or convenient, but is generally aligned with the direction science should go.
If people who've made decisions based on their understanding of the results of this study, it's good that they'll no longer labor under a delusion, and can potentially make better decisions.
Good in the sense that hard things which make us incrementally better are good.
In general the original study felt like a more widely accepted Myers-Briggs of sorts. But as always happens with people and personality related theories the reality is either "more complicated" at best or the theory is outright false.
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