[zoky]

Some players might have enjoyed extremely punishing games, but I think most players—and game designers—simply didn’t know any better. Creating a challenge that still feels fair is a difficult balance. Look at the old Sierra adventure games, for example. While they are excellent in terms of storytelling and creativity, they tend to be absolute garbage in terms of gameplay by modern standards. Many of the puzzles were outright impossible unless you had a guidebook, and you sometimes wouldn’t even be told what you did wrong earlier in the game that made the game unsolvable (looking at you, Space Quest jetpack puzzle).

But those games were rightly hailed as pioneers of the genre, and were considered to be the very best in their time. By today’s standards, though, they would be universally panned as abusive of the player, if they could even be released at all.

[glimshe]

I have incurable nostalgia for the genre (both graphical and pure text adventures) but it's hard to play them without a walkthrough nowadays. The games are simply not fun by modern standards. Their mere existence was a miracle back then and a lot of the excitement was related to interacting with the computer at all. I'd love to be able to recover this sense of wonder but I suspect that most of it was about discovering the world as a child.

[ghaff]

I wasn’t a child; post-college but also at a stage where I was willing to devote more time to games than I am today though never a serious gamer. I also knew/know a lot of the people involved early-on. I do fiddle with the games now and then but not super-seriously.

[jbd41]

I've been playing through every adventure ever made in chronological order, so you can watch me do it so you don't have to

http://bluerenga.blog

just reached 1983 which has Planetfall