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Abandon logic, all ye who enter here - Let's Play King's Quest VII

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  #91  
Old 08-09-2010, 04:03 PM
Sky Render Sky Render is offline
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Those end credits took me quite a while to do. By the time I was 3 animations away from having all of the first segment of them loaded up with nifty animations, I said "screw it, I'm putting more effort into these credits than they put into the entire game" and just left those three blank. Also, I kind of ran out of interesting unused animations by then.
  #92  
Old 08-09-2010, 05:23 PM
poetfox poetfox is offline
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Another fantastic LP, Sky. Thanks for all your hard work. Completely enjoyed it the whole way through, even though the game itself was, indeed, as terrible as advertised. Heh.
  #93  
Old 08-09-2010, 06:41 PM
Mr Bean Mr Bean is offline
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Man, this game was soooo much worse than I remember. Kudos for making it all the way through without going completely insane.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sky Render View Post
Those end credits took me quite a while to do. By the time I was 3 animations away from having all of the first segment of them loaded up with nifty animations, I said "screw it, I'm putting more effort into these credits than they put into the entire game"
And it shows too.

Also, I can't believe they actually had additional death animations and didn't use them. I thought it was Sierra policy to kill the player as many different ways as possible.
  #94  
Old 08-09-2010, 06:50 PM
Sky Render Sky Render is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Bean View Post
Also, I can't believe they actually had additional death animations and didn't use them. I thought it was Sierra policy to kill the player as many different ways as possible.
They actually removed a fair number of deaths from later releases of KQ7, mostly because they were so ineptly coded. The most blatant being the volcano-related deaths, which were all on a CPU-cycle-centric timer (meaning any system more powerful than a 486SX/33 will have the volcano erupt every 1 to 10 seconds). That's also why they removed the firecracker death. It used to be that you could only get to Tsepish's tomb with that thing after about 10 game overs from detonation on a freaking 166MHz system.

Other game overs got removed because they were potential game breakers (like the bit where you're supposed to give ambrosia to Malicia's dog; no ambrosia = infinite game over loop). And a few were removed just because they were so dickish, I guess (like the one where the crystal dragon's tail flattens Rosella; that's only in the 1.0 release).

The game overs not even included in the game proper (like Valanice bravely charging the scorpion with a spike and getting stung to death) were removed due to sequence problems (the spike in question is the one that was in Ceres as a tree; it vanishes after being pulled out in the final version of the game) or because they were replaced by a different animation (the Boogeyman pouncing Rosella was opted for over him bear-hugging her).

Tl;dr version: KQ7 is a mess code-wise as well as design-wise, and that's why it has so many unused game overs and animations.
  #95  
Old 08-09-2010, 08:56 PM
Foxeris Foxeris is offline
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That's a disappointingly large number of removed deaths. That really does sound like it was a mess on the code front. I wonder if the KQ remake projects will ever tackle this one, and imagine it would be an improvement.
  #96  
Old 08-09-2010, 09:31 PM
Heffenfeffer Heffenfeffer is offline
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Default Leisure Suit Larry next, then?
Wow. That was a complete and utter festering pile of suck. Um, the game that is. Your analysis of it was far, far better than this game deserves. Granted, I never played it while it was new, so perhaps not having nostalgia for it is making me come down harder on it than I should. That said, I've also gone from "Wow, this is cool!" as a kid to "This thing's a pile of crap!" years later - I played through Burn:Cycle.

It's amazing what we just accepted back then as par-for-the-course as horrible game design elements in the old days. In the 80's, it was text parsers not picking up on commands properly, in the 90's, it was insane moon logic (with pixel hunts pretty far up there, too. It makes me wonder what design element we're going to hate in five years - I suppose improperly-done waggle controls, or collect-a-thon achievements.
  #97  
Old 08-09-2010, 10:07 PM
Sky Render Sky Render is offline
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Originally Posted by Heffenfeffer View Post
Wow. That was a complete and utter festering pile of suck. Um, the game that is. Your analysis of it was far, far better than this game deserves. Granted, I never played it while it was new, so perhaps not having nostalgia for it is making me come down harder on it than I should. That said, I've also gone from "Wow, this is cool!" as a kid to "This thing's a pile of crap!" years later - I played through Burn:Cycle.
It's easy to miss how bad a game is when you're hyped up or just really want it to not suck. More than a few series have managed to glide along on this fact, and sadly that includes the Final Fantasy series of late (going by the sales numbers, anyway; FF9, 12, and 13 were all notable under-performers compared to FF7, 8, and 10).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Heffenfeffer View Post
It's amazing what we just accepted back then as par-for-the-course as horrible game design elements in the old days. In the 80's, it was text parsers not picking up on commands properly, in the 90's, it was insane moon logic (with pixel hunts pretty far up there, too. It makes me wonder what design element we're going to hate in five years - I suppose improperly-done waggle controls, or collect-a-thon achievements.
Already we're seeing the death of the Quick-Time Event (you know, those annoying "push an arbitrary button at the right moment during an otherwise non-interactive portion or it's game over" sequences that so many games seem to have by law now). FMVs and non-interactive cutscenes are going back out of style too, and I'm sure arbitrary waggle will also die out (though hopefully we'll see the promised-since-Wii-Sports non-arbitrary precision-centric waggle take its place). I'd say that bad game design in general should also go out of style, but quite frankly, that's just not going to happen. Whenever a deadline, executive meddling, and/or a severe lack of talent come into play, something's gonna give.

Also, I probably will not tackle the Leisure Suit Larry series. Sorry, but I don't think I can do them justice since I've quite literally never played any of them before.
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