The unrelated 7th Guest port to the iPad

Scarlatti · Post by **Scarlatti** » Tue Dec 28, 2010 1:53 pm

Thankfully they sped up the game quite a bit, making the transition cutscenes much more bearable now. I wonder if they're using new renders, or recycling something they had archived for later use. The movement seems much smoother now, unlike the original transitions (I think they were rendered with 15 or 20 frames per second, something like that).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnbmjnvSJN4

http://youtu.be/pVO2vwJAm8U?hd=1

http://youtu.be/V7FN_Zkq1IA?hd=1

Seems like they had problems implementing the microscope puzzle as well.

This, the piano puzzle and the pentagon puzzle were removed from the port:

http://toucharcade.com/2010/11/22/cut-c ... 7th-guest/

BeleG · Post by **BeleG** » Tue Dec 28, 2010 2:31 pm

Pretty cool indeed. It resembles much more accurately the way it moves when you play it through the Windows player, though it looks even smoother. I wish they released it on PC too.

Reckless · Post by **Reckless** » Tue Dec 28, 2010 9:11 pm

Seems odd that they "didn't bother" updating the puzzles with technical issues for the release. Seems that in this day and age it's all to 'easy' to say that it may be added at a later date

Episodic puzzles

ScottT · Post by **ScottT** » Tue Dec 28, 2010 9:25 pm

It looks like they've just increased the framerate for the video files that don't contain audio (hence several visual sequences are out of sync with the midi music - much like the Windows player). Not sure whether it's just a linear increase or slightly slower at the start/end to smooth the look a bit.

The reason for cutting the knife puzzle is because only a small portion of the screen is used for the puzzle, but the above Youtube review shows you can zoom in...

clone2727 · Post by **clone2727** » Tue Dec 28, 2010 9:41 pm

ScottT wrote:The reason for cutting the knife puzzle is because only a small portion of the screen is used for the puzzle, but the above Youtube review shows you can zoom in...

I'm not too sure what "technical issues" they could be having with the other two puzzles either. Sounds like BS to me....

ScottT · Post by **ScottT** » Wed Dec 29, 2010 2:44 am

Microscope puzzle would involve porting the AI over, but I can't see any 'technical' issue that would have prevented the piano puzzle - perhaps it was culled to stop the frustration

Post by **sev** » Thu Dec 30, 2010 11:11 am

Weird, since the microscope puzzle AI is pretty straightforward and could be used as is, i.e. there is just byte shuffling around which represents the board.

Probably they were afraid of frustrated users smashing their gadgets against nearby walls

Eugene

SuperDre · Post by **SuperDre** » Sun Jan 02, 2011 5:55 pm

ScottT wrote:Microscope puzzle would involve porting the AI over, but I can't see any 'technical' issue that would have prevented the piano puzzle - perhaps it was culled to stop the frustration

I cannot see any reasons why porting the AI over would be any problems, 7th guest ran on much much lower hardware than the iPad runs.. I think it's just laziness and trying to make a fast buck.. hell they didn't even really optimize it for the iPad (or a touchscreen device)..

ScottT · Post by **ScottT** » Wed Jan 05, 2011 9:22 pm

SuperDre wrote:I think it's just laziness and trying to make a fast buck..

You may call it that, but they could view it in terms of cost benefit. For all the other puzzles, the scripts themselves run the puzzles - just for the microscope, they would have needed to port extra code over. Obviously, time spent fixing/fine-tuning parts of the game (opcodes, video decoder, etc) that affect a lot of the game would have priority - particularly if they also wanted to drop the AI difficultly slightly.

Personally, I'd have preferred to see the whole game similar to how it was in the DOS version (as opposed to the slight Windows version bias the app seems to have, but I don't own an iOS device so can't comment), and to be honest... is the game that much worse with that optional puzzle removed?

Scarlatti · Post by **Scarlatti** » Sat Apr 16, 2011 2:01 pm

They are going to release the microscope puzzle as a separate app with a new option for selecting difficulty levels:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7th_Guest:_Infection

SuperDre · Post by **SuperDre** » Sat Apr 16, 2011 4:05 pm

Scarlatti wrote:They are going to release the microscope puzzle as a separate app with a new option for selecting difficulty levels:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7th_Guest:_Infection

Just as I said, Making a fast buck..... because I doubt they will release this for free if you already own the 7th Guest game..

BeleG · Post by **BeleG** » Sat Apr 16, 2011 10:11 pm

That's quite ridiculous

. Shame on the new Trilobyte for misusing the name of the saga.