Re: There is usually something to make me quit playing a game after a while

On Thu, 26 Jun 2025 19:29:24 -0000 (UTC), ant@zimage.comANT (Ant)
wrote:

Anssi Saari <anssi.saari@usenet.mail.kapsi.fi> wrote:

Do games generally have stupid hard puzzles these days? I've been
playing the 1997 Outlaws game and just puked through this whole puzzle
*level*. Water canals, swimming, diving, choking, fiddling with gates to
direct the water flow, loads of fun NOT. So I just followed a
walkthrough. Good thing is, as it's an old game the level is still
reasonably small.

Ugh. It reminded me of Dark Forces' safe puzzle. Annoying!

I LOVED the Dark Forces vault puzzle!

But perhaps that's because I played it when the game was new? Back
then, most Doom-clones (as we still called them back then) had fairly
static levels that didn't really re-act to player actions, or even had
much in the way of resembling 'real' places or having puzzles at all.
They were just mazes that existed for the sake of being mazes, filled
with monsters that were only placed there because we expected to kill
monsters.

The vault was the first step in changing this trope, leading
ultimately to games like Half Life.