Keyrock

I'm playing HITMAN and having a lot of fun with it. It's a nice return to form for the series. I very much like slowly, methodically casing a place, figuring out patterns, finding vulnerabilities and opportunities, then formulating a plan of action (I almost like formulating the plan more than executing the plan) so obviously this game is right up my alley.

The Wizardry series as a whole was extremely punishing, bordering on unfair. Wizardry IV took that to another level, I'm convinced the game was designed by sadists.

Next up I present one of the most well known utterly bonkers puzzles in point & click gaming history, the Moustache Puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. The Gabriel Knight series revolves around the titular main character, a struggling New Orleans based novelist who, unwittingly, becomes an investigator of sorts as his research for a novel gets him mixed up in all kinds of voodoo shenanigans. It's a very well known series from Jane Jensen, renown for its stories and charactes, with the first game in particular being considered a true classic of the genre. The puzzle in question has you trying to impersonate a a police officer so that you can get his scooter because the scooter Gabriel already has isn't as cool (I'm not kidding). To do so first Nothing ridiculous so far, right. Well, here's where we take a sharp left turn into bat****crazyville. See if you can follow along with the logic here. I couldn't make this up if I tried, but the kicker is that we haven't even gotten to the truly insane part of the puzzle yet. Here's a picture of the solution: As an aside, don't hate on Jane Jensen for that utter trainwreck of a puzzle, she didn't design it. The story is that it was put in the game last minute by someone from publishing to replace a puzzle Jane had there originally. I don't know what Jane's original puzzle was, but I have a hard time believing it was worse that what the game shipped with.

Of course.

I loved The 7th Guest. Not all the puzzles were bad, some of them even made sense and were somewhat clever. There was quite a bit of variety to the puzzles, which was nice, but the quality was all over the place. A few of them you pretty much had to fall back to trial and error to "solve" them, which is never a good thing, but there were quite a few that made sense too. Mainly, though, I loved that game for the exquisitely cheesy FMV scenes. They were... /kisses tips of fingers Magnifique! I've never played Eric the Unready. Is it a point & click? Do they sell it on GOG?

There have been a lot of really stupid and illogical puzzles in video games over the years. Obviously, point & click adventure games jump to mind immediately when discussing illogical puzzles, particularly those from the late 80s and early 90s, but other genres of games have had their share of really ridiculous puzzles as well. I thought it would be fun to share and discuss some of those here. SPOILERS, OBVIOUSLY. (I'll spoiler tag them for double safety) I'll start off with the infamous Cans Puzzle from Trilobyte's The 7th Guest from 1993. For those not familiar with the game, The 7th Guest was one of the main CD-ROM seller games. It was one of the very first games released on CD-ROM shortly after CD-ROMs became available to the general public and it garnered a lot of buzz and sold a lot of CD-ROMs in its day. The game was a horror mystery game. Henry Stauf was a drifter who committed a bunch of atrocities as he meandered through life then one night had a vision and immediately after started creating really amazing toys that would lead him to become rich and build his mansion. The children that received the toys, though, had a tendency to get ill and die sometime afterward. One night, Henry Stauf invited 6 guests over to his mansion for a dinner party. They all died mysteriously. You play the game from first person perspective and are searching through that mansion trying to piece together what happened on that night. There is a lot of wandering back and forth throughout this mansion where you encounter FMV scenes giving you (hilariously poorly acted, as is the case with most FMV games) bits of what happened on that night and puzzles to solve. The puzzles vary wildly, both in design and quality. Perhaps the most infamous puzzle in the game is the cans puzzle. You look in a cabinet and see a bunch of cans with letters on them. No real instructions are given to you, but it doesn't take much of a leap of logic to figure out that you need to rearrange them to make a sentence. So far so good. The problem is that there are no vowels except a bunch of "Y"s and no real direction given as to what you are trying to write here. In essence, the developers thought it would be fun to flip through a dictionary and find a bunch of words that use "Y" as a vowel and create a rather nonsensical "sentence" out of it. The solution to the puzzle is: Here's a picture of the solved puzzle: How the **** are you expected to deduce that bunch of nonsense? Now, you can go into a certain room in the mansion and get hints for puzzles, an action which costs you game score. If you do that you get the following hint: That does at least give you some direction and if you match it up backwards from the solution it works, but even with the hint it's an utterly ridiculous "sentence" to try to construct and without the hint there's literally nothing to give you the slightest bit of guidance toward a bunch of gibberish. What are your thoughts on the cans puzzle, or perhaps you have an asinine puzzle you'd like to share? I'll add more ridiculous puzzles in the future, there are tons of them from Sierra alone.

Crafting being abandoned is a positive in my book. On the one hand, the lack of communication, combined with the delays this game has suffered is worrisome. There is definite reason for concern. On the other hand, content gets cut from games all the time. Probably just about every game ever made has had content cut from it, large chunks in many cases. The content being cut being stretch goals that were met does suck for backers (Disclaimer: I am a backer), but that's the way the cookie crumbles. I guess we'll find out soon enough if the concerns raised by the cut content, lack of communication, and delays were founded or if it was all just part of the creative process and for the better in the end (I'd rather have less companions and have them better fleshed out than more companions that are hastily written).

Those 2006 graphics tho.

Glorious 75 degree February day here in The Queen City. I spent much of it outside, including grilling up some cheesy sausage and garlic, olive oil, and rosemary potatoes.

There is a definite not so subtle Neo/Morpheus call back moment they obviously put in the movie on purpose. It made me smile. It's the equivalent of a video game easter egg.

They explain how John Wick was able to get out of the assassin game in the first place. His motivation ties into that. I won't say anymore since I'm already encroaching on spoiler territory.

John Wick 2. Freakin' fantastic. I really didn't expect it to be as good as the first movie, simply because the first movie set the bar so high, I was just hoping it would be pretty good and the quality wouldn't drop off that much. John Wick 2 is even better than the first. It manages to keep the cool, mysterious vibe of the assassin secret culture that the first movie had going and it kicks it up a notch in the action department. This is how action movies are supposed to be done. No crappy shaky cam, all the action is clear and easy to follow and badass as ****. This movie is right up there with The Raid and Terminator 2: Judgement Day in terms of pure unadulterated action movie badassery, in my opinion.

Did you play it the proper way, Ranger Mode?

How many different politics threads do we need? Answer:

I meant 10 more.

Of course not, that would be too functional. Give Valve 10 years or so, they'll get there.

Not yet, anyway. I quite liked Bound By Flame, so hopefully we get a sequel eventually.

Speaking of soap opera, what I wouldn't do for a rasslin' game that doesn't suck.

I don't trust this person very much, he keeps talking about that horrible 'Mordheim' game, whatever it is. Worst of all, he never posts any screenshots, so we don't even know if the game even exists, as "pics or it didn't happen". I'm not convinced this "melkathi" character is even a real person. I have my suspicions it's a bot.

I guess I missed a crazy 4th quarter comeback. I was asleep by the time it happened. I slept well, I regret nothing. /shrugs