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BitingWit - 12 February 2017 05:22 AM

2: “Monkey wrench” is a uniquely American term, and only few outside of America had ever heard the term.

Not quite - I’m definitely British rather than American and the term is quite familiar. Definitely one of MI’s weaker puzzles though! I have no problem with wordplay-based puzzles if that’s what the game is about - I loved - but a puzzle based on a straight pun rather than in-world logic doesn’t fit in Monkey Island.

     
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Phlebas - 13 February 2017 05:02 AM
BitingWit - 12 February 2017 05:22 AM

2: “Monkey wrench” is a uniquely American term, and only few outside of America had ever heard the term.

Not quite - I’m definitely British rather than American and the term is quite familiar. Definitely one of MI’s weaker puzzles though! I have no problem with wordplay-based puzzles if that’s what the game is about - I loved - but a puzzle based on a straight pun rather than in-world logic doesn’t fit in Monkey Island.

The fact that some (many?) Brits also know the term, doesn’t change the fact that it is cultural dependent and not something all English speaking know, not to mention it doesn’t translate to other languages.

Incidentally I found this in an old interview with Dave Grossman:

Can you give us an example of a bad puzzle?

Well it took us a while to learn, for example, that you shouldn’t base a puzzle on either a play on words or a cultural idiom that might not be true in other cultures.  For example, the red herring puzzle does not hold up or the monkey wrench puzzle from LeChuck’s Revenge.  That was impossible to solve for anybody from Europe, where they don’t call a wrench a monkey wrench.  They call it a spanner incidentally.  So other than the little things like that that go wrong over the years, it’s usually something about the translation or the way the puzzle is going to come across to different audiences.  You really want to think about not just “what is the cleverness of this puzzle”, but how are the audience going to make the mental leap that is necessary to solve it.  Are they actually all going to be able to do that, or is it only just someone exactly like me?

     

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That is an interesting quote Iznogood. What interests me is that back then, they knew it was a very difficult puzzle. That’s why they chose to include only one in the whole game. But now, some games throw in dozens of similar or worse puzzles without a care for the poor gamer who must endure the nonsense. Not much thought seems to go into making inventory puzzles logical, sensible and clued-in anymore.

     
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I guess you could argue that many modern developers tend to rely a bit too much on their players already knowing the conventions of AG, and will automatically try to use everything on everything, instead of making their puzzles logical and provide proper clues.

As for the Monkey Wrench puzzle, then I don’t think they realized the problems with this until much later. They were warned that it wouldn’t translate to German, and ignored that warning, but that many English speaking also would have problems and it really wasn’t a good puzzle, was probably only something they realized many years later.

     

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This game started out really fun and I didn’t understand why people were having so much difficulty with it.

Now it’s giving me anxiety.

     
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Iznogood - 14 February 2017 02:22 PM

I guess you could argue that many modern developers tend to rely a bit too much on their players already knowing the conventions of AG, and will automatically try to use everything on everything, instead of making their puzzles logical and provide proper clues.

I’d suspect it’s less about knowing AG conventions and more that if someone gets stuck these days they can easily look at a walkthrough. A lot of developers these days tend to put less work into anything that won’t be on the walkthrough, whether it’s clues or specific responses for trying the wrong thing.

     
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i lost faith in adventurgamers.. Pah!

Gameplay: tho the game goes with the classical right and left click but mostly it’s almost useless as objects 99% only have one option, it would have gone with the smart cursor but that doesn’t take anything outta of its true old Skool classical approach with all the modern features; hotspot reveal, and map shortcut, fast existing.. etc all required fast paced features.

Music/Audio and Sound Effects: are very limited you will (i.e) hear sometimes the same sample or a short piece of music without any variation over and over again,  tho sometimes they did their job but however, the poor production to this element is very obvious.. same goes for voice over.

Puzzles: Very varied and fun to do, but yet too obscure… but the point that you would like them or feel satisfied each time you figure them out on your own is somehow can make you forgive some of those obscure puzzles.

Graphics: The strongest point of this game, it looks good and lively, will transfer you to the traditional feeling of the 90s, wondering if of that era’s companies had a bit of more graphic quality would they have done at it a similarly represented artwork?

Story: what story? either you do like Haruki Murakami (bedtime stories) or not?

Final conclusion: reserved*

     

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