Long after we’ve played a game for the last time (or even, just one time), some parts stick in memory. It could be a dramatic moment, an unexpected revelation, a terrific Foozle fight, a beautiful graphic scene. Those make sense. Then, there are the others.
The others that won’t go away, that mean nothing anymore, that hang around in your mind for no good reason. Like a certain snare in Bard’s Tale 2.
I mentioned this in a comment on How Obnoxious. The snares were horrible real-time puzzles, no saving allowed, that had to be solved quickly. Otherwise, back to square one and try again.
This particular atrocity had a magic mouth that asked: “What is the value of rote actions?” I could give several responses, most of them unprintable. The real answer was “endurable”.
I guess you could say that was true, since I still remember it, all these years later. Not that I want to, I just can’t get it out of my head. Gaahhh.
Another comes from Might & Magic. In those wonderful days, when we all mapped by hand, designers would sometimes be cute. They’d have the walls on a certain level spell out something.
Often, that would be the designers’ names or initials. However, there were occasions when the “spelling” was vital. As in the first Might & Magic. Foozle, like Rumpelstiltskin, wanted you to tell him his name.
The answer was spelled out by walls: “My name is Sheltem”. And that is the only thing I can remember from the game. I even had to go look up which M&M that was. Urp!
(Okay, I also remember the “Inner Sanctum”, but that was a “revelation” thing. Still, I couldn’t recall where the Sheltem bit came from.)
Y’know, those aren’t quite like Wizardry: The Knight Of Diamonds. Almost everyone who wrote to me about it had the same problem; it was what I called a “one-question game”.
There were several riddles in TKOD, and the answer to the last one was “The Knight Of Diamonds”, an anagram of “That king, he finds doom”. What people were overlooking was “The”. They actually had the answer, almost.
Only they’d type in “Knight Of Diamonds” and it would be wrong. I responded to enough letters on this one, that recalling makes it sense. Only why I also remember the anagram, that’s another matter.
So what about you? Are there parts of games that cling tenaciously to your mind, that are meaningless now? Stuff you shouldn’t be remembering, but keep creeping in now and then? That just won’t go away?
oh yeah i remember The.. we spent like a 9 hour session mapping lvls 2 to the bottom hit that puzzle and were stopped cold. It could have been a typing mistake, as i don’t recall that as you typed the answer(entry) was displayed on screen or what but it took us then over a MONTH to go from that question/puzzle door to the end. You know get inside get a piece of armor go up walk to center wearing entire armor.
would have finished TKOD in about 10 hours if we got that riddle right the first time ;(
OR how about the first time Murphy’s Ghost attacked you in PGotMO aka Wiz I.
Or the fluffy things in II. At about lvl 13ish I ported over a team of what I though were heros from I and started exploring II. Frist encounter was with those puff balls and titlowatt did nothing and MORE were appearing. I ran screaming for the exit and didn’t bring back the heros until they were a more heroic lvl 23ish. OF course in the first battle I’d reacted baddly and hadn’t REALLY observed that the puffs weren’t doing any damage only multiplying! but the sheer number of them and the fact the strongest spell did nothing had me running for the exit, what fun.
Which Bards tale was it that you came to the city of amazons where suddenly you needed females or you took damage. that was a shocker.
Or in Wiz III where after traveling with the same party thru I and II you get to stairs up where OMG we can’t enter. Sorry only Evil permitted inside. SO now you had to create NEW evil players, pair them with your neutral party and explore like levels 3 and 5 while the orgianls could explore 1, 2, 4 and 6.
Of course M&M II had one section that also sticks out. you went N two squares to enter a narrow 1 square valley between unclimbable mountains. AND for some reason I ran into sh*tfest of dinosaurs. When the number of oppoents hit 350 I hit the power switch and just revereted to a save.
Or that moment in Infidel, when a certain someone let out such a flurry of explitivies that it made the Krakatoa explosion seem like a fizzling firecracker – the explivitives heard ’round the world!
Strange that a lot of the OLD ones had something unique and unforgetable in them while the later glut of games is mostly forgetable.
Don’t know about that (“later glut…”), SS.
In Baldur’s Gate, I was shocked & more than pleasantly surprised to meet & get autographs of “…my name is Larry, and this is my brother Daryl, and my other brother Daryl.” — a goblin, a xvert, & some other monster.
And the only saving grace in the newest NWN2 expansion, SOZ, are two aptly named bards singing a parody of Simon & Garfunkel’s Scarborough Fair/Canticle
The very worst case I can recall was in the original Bard’s Tale. There came a time mid-game where one of your characters had to sit on a throne to continue with the game. But it only worked for a Bard! Now this may seem like sacrilege, but none of my characters was a bard (I hate bards!). So I had to restart the game with a bard. Ugh.
Things that stuck with me:
Wing Commander III – Hobbes betrayal
Strangely enough, you only get half the story on the PC version. It wasn’t until years later that I saw his explanation that he was a sleeper agent and the phrase “Heart of the Tiger” triggered it. That cut scene was omitted from the PC version but was in the 3DO and other versions.
Ultima Underworld – Pac Man 3D
Similar to what Scorpia described with maps spelling out words, one level of Ultima Underworld had treasure every few steps, but the area was haunted with ghosts that would chase after you. After navigating the maze I saw that it was really the same maze as Pac Man, except it was in 3D.
Ultima III
Accumulating too much gold and having the counter roll over to zero
Redneck Rampage
Finding the secret passage from the well to the outhouse. Putting 2 and 2 together and realizing that meant they were drinking the same water that they $hit in.
Bob, the name of the game was a GREAT clue that you needed a bard in your party to complete the game. After all, it is The Bard’s Tale. Do you agree, Scorpia?
The snare answer is neither grammatical nor on point. “Endurable” is not a noun and does not refer to a quantity. I never felt any guilt over hex editing all the wand segments into my inventory, then trotting off to the perfunctory final battle. It was payback for having to slog through BT1 with a brand new party and no cheating.
I remember the unfair Star Trek puzzles from the M&M series. They broke immersion and usually had zero clues towards their solutions. I ended up writing a program to give me all 720 possible solutions to the anagram puzzle in World of Xeen, which turned out to be the Trekpuzzle du jour. Even a hint that the mummy was bald or “Adventurer, tell me my name–make it so!” would have been enough to make the puzzle reasonable. As it was, the series’s habit of random, barely pronounceable names meant that I had to scan through my printout, trying every third or fourth item for dozens of attempts.
It was M&M1 that had the amazon city which drained males’ HP every few steps.
So that’s why Hobbes did it? I always took it as a standard “shocking” case of “It was in the script.”
there was a bards tale with amazon city as well.
in was it bards tale III, you needed a thief to sneak up to kill a miniboss and if i remember rightly (that is suspect) a thief was the only way to win.
That’s probably why the game’s subtitle was The Thief of Fate.
Thanks for the Hobbes video comments. It would have been nice to not have the cliched traitor subplot in Wing Commander 3, but then losing the Behemoth or Cobra would not have hit as hard. I’ve long since played past that point to the first Wing Commander game for a YouTube video compilation.
Too many memorable RPG moments for me since I tend to keep memories of games LONG past the uninstallation moment.
In Fallout 2 there was a glitch that would not allow me to get rid of Vic. I took him out to a remote piece of wasteland and clicked my gun to automatic. “What’s up boss?” he asked with a strange calm. “Just look at the rabbits Vic”.
Space Quest IV had that tongue icon allowing you to taste certain items. I’ll never forget putting it on the electric fence.
An amusing thing about “I am Sheltem” is they reused the exact same puzzle in Darkside of Xeen, in which Sheltem was masquerading as Alamar just as he had in MM1. Apparently the guy had an OCD about building the name in his dungeons.
Verbose: the star trek puzzles in Xeen couldn’t have been *that* unfair, because I, with my siblings, all of us kids who had never seen any of Star Trek (it wasn’t very popular in my country so it didn’t get aired a lot, and certainly not in english like our copy of Xeen was), did manage to solve all the puzzles without external help. All the Trek stuff in Xeen appeared in puzzles where you didn’t really have to guess, instead they were cyphers and anagrams and whatnot.
CGW, ha,ha, yes you are right! But at that time I was so used to Wizardry and M&M that it never dawned on me that you couldn’t finish the game with any party. Plus, my mind automatically shut out bards! Incidentally, the name of the game was technically something like “Tales of the Unknown” with “The Bard’s Tale” as a subtitle. But you are right, I should have known. I was fairly new to RPG’s at the time, having played mostly adventure games. Anyway, after that, I never played BT 2 or 3. (I hate thieves also!) Basically, I only like fighters and mages. However, I did play the NEW Bard’s Tale, a good spoof and a fairly good RPG! So I’m adaptable!
Actually I never have to deal with most of those situations anymore. I no longer play any game until I have the hintbook or a walkthru, and also the final patch! Saves a lot of aggravation! And while I’m waiting I will replay my favorite games, sometimes as many as 5 times!
Bob, the final patch? You must be waiting to play a lot of games then ;)
Bob, The first game put out by Interplay (then a studio of EA) back in 1985-6 was indeed called Tales of the Unknown with the subtitle The Bard’s Tale. But you would be surprise how many didn’t pick up on the GREAT hint in the subtitle “The Bard’s Tale.” Even a certain Ms. S didn’t pick up on this. although, I don’t know why you don’t like Bards, Bob, since in Bard’s Tale, the bard really was a great character. He was the only one that could play musical instruments with spell-like effects. It would not be until Wiz 6 came out when you had this type of bard again.
Oh yes, the NEW Bard’s Tale (2005?) was a very funny game.
Scorpia, well the final official patch, yes (not community patches). I’m really only waiting for Sacred 2 and Fallout 3 (is that last patch final?) — there really aren’t many good games (of the type I like) coming out lately. I played Gothic 3 and King’s Bounty each twice. They were great!
And also, I want to thank you for dicussing Geneforge. I had never played the series and am now playing GF 1. It is good but not great. I like the general style and gameplay, but it does get a little repetitious after a while, a little bland. Not sure if I want to play the entire series. I did not really like Avenum 5 after the first level. I liked Eschalon much better than either of these.
Scorpia, if Bob was still waiting for the final patch for NWN2, he would still be waiting for that one. Patch 1.22, I believe, was just released of a projected 100 patches (which should be out around 2025 or until NWN3-The Novel comes out).
Completely unrelated: Did the CGW archive / museum go away?
Dave, as I mentioned in my Reflections post, there isn’t much change over the GF series. Since it’s now reached the conclusion, you might want to play just the final game rather than the whole thing.
Coyote, no, it’s still there. However, the link at the top of the page is pointing to the wrong URL; it should be .org not .com. Thanks for pointing that out. Unfortunately, I don’t seem able to change it at the moment. Another call to Dale is in order.