Resonance

[toblix]

I've struggled with the fuse box for four or five hours now, and I just realised that

the order of nodes and how many times you pass each don't matter – only the set of touched nodes affect the outcome

.

[brkl]

Yup. Also, there's an alternate puzzle.

[toblix]

Hah, got it! I'm always annoyed when puzzles use physical metaphors or motifs, but have solutions that don't fit them. I would probably have gotten this faster if it didn't look like electronics.

[brkl]

Yeah, I agree. I just finished the game, really liked it. I think they went overboard with the party mechanics, but that's their time spent, not mine.

[Moosferatu]

Where is the fuse box puzzle that was causing trouble? Is there one besides the one with the three fuses in the vault? Did I miss something?

Too bad you can't save Anna...

[toblix]

Very early on, at the blown-up

lab

, after you've turned off the

water

, there's a huge

door

controlled by a

keypad

. I had to

unscrew

it and mess with the

wiring

to get it open.

[toblix]

Also, in-line spoiler tags are broken.

[toblix]

Wow, this is hard. I keep hitting points where I'm not sure where to go next or what to do. I haven't become familiar enough with the flow of the game to know if I should be able to solve multiple "leads" one by one, or if they all depend on parallel progress. The slowness of everything adds to the frustration, in addition to having to keep a bunch of stuff in my STM in case I need it. Lots of walking back and forth with very little progress. I'm currently stuck at

the archive computer. I've readjusted the arm, but I'm not sure how to trigger another search... I hacked the computer, but it only shows the recent search, or asks me for a 4 digit security code, which of course I can't hack (though I figured out the password by myself, which was satisfying).

Now I'm back to not knowing where to go or what to do (with who), and talking to people never seems to help.

[brkl]

Yes, unfortunately the game doesn't communicate this properly, but you need to advance the other threads before you can solve that. You'll get another item to search for from another puzzle.

[Erkki]

Finally got around to playing this. Great game, although I'm beginning to dislike the fact that "AGS Game" seems to be it's own genre even separate from "Adventure Game" -- low res graphics, bad controls and so on. Really, the whole menu system was quite horrible, although I liked the principle of the LTM and STM. And I also had the problem with STM that I forgot to put stuff in there and then kept having to walk back and forth. It should have maybe been automatic. But I only had problems with it in the section where you get the quartet and can explore in parallel. Had the same problem as Toblix and had to look up the solution in the walkthrough. It turned out IT DID DEPEND ON PROGRESS IN ANOTHER BRANCH OF THE INVESTIGATION!

I'm kind of sad I didn't figure out myself that

Ed was the bad guy

. I should pay more attention to details, like the

subway map

.

[Tanukitsune]

I've never heard of a hi-res AGS game, I don't think the engine can even handle hi-res graphics?

[Erkki]

I've never heard of a hi-res AGS game, I don't think the engine can even handle hi-res graphics?

Why not move to a different engine, then? Well, to be honest, the low-res graphics doesn't bother me that much (I guess the reason for lowres might be that for the artists who create them, it's easier to do with limited dev time or they just want to express themselves that way), but they always seem to come with bad controls & interface, which I assume may be partly caused by cramming stuff into a height of 240 pixels or whatever the number is exactly (200 even?). The box I'm typing these words takes up a tiny part of my screen (and together with it's toolbar 200 pixels of height) and feels like peeping through a keyhole as I'm making this paragraph longer and the beginning of the quote is starting to disappear into the mysterious place where all pixels go when they get pushed outside of the clip rectangle by a scrollbar. AGS game developers make entire games feel the same way, just zoomed in a bit!

And already having bad controls seems to make them not want to do nice things that would alleviate the effect of said bad controls, like I don't know, letting me press 1,2,3,4 on the keyboard to select a different one of the four characters.

I guess I may have been exaggerating by putting all the AGS games into the same bucket, but every time I play one, I think: why do they keep doing this? To be honest, I haven't read many interviews with the creators, maybe they have explained it.

[brkl]

Up to 1024x768.

[Tanukitsune]

I'm no expert so I don't know if that's due to limitations with the engine or not... :|

[Erkki]

I actually went and found an audio interview with Vince Twelve.

The reason for low-res graphics is pretty much what I thought (artistic and budget), but one thing he explained with the ShortTermMemory is that it's there to eliminate brute force solutions: when you have to remember the items and actually drag them to the dialogue yourself, you can't really use the "try all combinations" or "expand all of dialogue tree" tactics any more.

That makes me think if I want to take back my comment that the STM should be automatic -- perhaps I do, I actually really like the idea of making players discover things instead of seeing them presented to them, and to paraphrase the author "to have the player communicate to the game what they want to do and not to have the game offer suggestions". But I wonder if that mechanic isn't defeated by The Interconnected Nets of Web. At least for me, when I'm getting close to the point where I'd start trying everything with everything, I'd rather look up the answer online. And since trying things is now a bit harder (not quite as bad as The Cave with it's traipsing) with you having to go back and add something to STM, the point when I want to go online might come earlier.

Still, I think the STM/LTM is a somewhat clever system. Have any other games had them? The original Sam & Max basically had an automatic version of that, as I recall -- everything you encountered was entered into your STM.

[Tanukitsune]

All the Blackwell games had a notes/clues section, which is more or less your STM and you could combine them to create new clue or ask people about them.

[Erkki]

All the Blackwell games had a notes/clues section, which is more or less your STM and you could combine them to create new clue or ask people about them.

But the things get there automatically, right?

[Tanukitsune]

Yes, as far as I know this is only one where you have to do this manually.

[Erkki]

I can see a few downsides if you'd try to use the automatic equivalent of STM for the purpose of making players not do the try-everything approach:

* You either put a lot of crap into the equivalent of STM, resulting in huge menus.

* Or you put only the important things there, in which case you are defeating the goal of what the STM was for: now the game offers suggestions rather than letting players come up with their own ideas.

But I still kind of think the STM concept can be improved somehow. To be honest, the core thing what I didn't like about the interface was that the dragging felt a bit slow, maybe due to the speed the menus pop up and mouse speed. Maybe if the dragging was more "fluid" (for lack of better term) or there was just a click/keypress involved I would love the STM more. But still, it probably doesn't combine very well with the widely parallel puzzle lines that you open up when you get the quartet in this game. Or maybe it does, actually.

PS. It'd be very interesting to see a similar game made in 3D! I hope Vince Twelve decides to do his next one in 3D (in the interview he was talking about trying Unity). Also I should play Linus Bruckman.