Topic: Looking for cheese

[idolminds]

Great article

Dave Grossman (Telltale, LucasArts) sits his mother-in-law down to play the new Sam & Max. Its kind of mind blowing to find out just how much game designers (and gamers) take for granted when it comes to what is "obvious" or "easy to learn".

To be fair, the "gun + cheese = swiss cheese" stumped me for a bit as well.

[gpw11]

Yeah, I did get that, but I was stumped at the store immediately following.  That's the thing about adventure games like that; a lot of it requires you to kind of just guess shit.

[Cobra951]

It's why I don't much like the genre.  You're supposed to guess shit because, smart though you may be, your mind doesn't function along the same pathways as the author's.  What's obvious to him may be obscure to you.  Invariably, I'll get stuck somewhere, and given that the entire gameplay consists of figuring out puzzles, I can't bring myself to look up puzzle solutions.  So I put the game away "for later" and never return to it.

[idolminds]

Some of that feels like certain old text adventures where you had to come up with the exact word the author used when writing the game.

[Cobra951]

I remember one game from Adventure International where you had to use the right words in the right sequence.  Otherwise, the explosive gas you had to use would blow you up instead.  Then the game would tell you gleefully that you blew it.

I read the whole article this morning.  Interesting.  I don't think people like his mother-in-law will ever really care about games, though.  Heh.