[grawprog]

Not long ago I got this urge to go back and replay the Hitchhiker's Guide game.

>Then there were the puzzles, and it’s impossible to talk about Hitchhiker’s without talking about the Babel Fish puzzle.

Going through that part again and trying to remember it and figure it all out was a bit of a challenge.

But I don't think the puzzle itself is really all that hard, it's the whole beginning on the vogon ship, all of it, that makes it so hard. You've got a hidden time limit, then the poetry section, then you're thrown back in the room with an active time limit and you're supposed to remember to do the other puzzle quickly that you hopefully noticed while figuring out the Babel fish stuff, or you get a delayed game over that'll leave you wandering aimlessly around the heart of gold scratching your head.

On a related note, if you like Douglas Adams and quirky adventure games, I highly recommend his later game Starship Titanic. I played the hell out of that game when I was young, I don't know if I ever beat it. It's not the classic that hitchhiker's guide is, but if you enjoy Adams and frustrating obtuse adventure games with a strange sense of humour and somehow missed this game, I recommend checking it out.

[II2II]

Such difficulty was almost forgivable in the Hitchhiker's Guide since you usually ended up meeting a humorous fate, yet it still led to frustration. I recall thinking that you pretty much had to read the book at the time to simply understand the significance of what was coming up on the screen.

Many games had wonderful worlds to explore, but I am firmly in the camp who believes that obtuse puzzles took the adventure out of adventure games (may they be text or graphical) which led to their premature demise. Thankfully modern IF writers seem to live by a different set of rules.

[bleair]

I'm pretty sure I read the game was "a carefully crafted artificial intelligence test" as in how artificial is your intelligence. :)