It seems replay games have aquired the rights to the Larry franchise (thank god, no more Larry rip-offs) and are planning to do a complete overhaul (graphics, speech) of the first part (in case of success more, i'm sure) together with the promise to make it available on modern platforms (which looks like it's PC, iOS and Android, meh)
Hmm...i like the graphics, true to the style and Al is on board
I hope, they'll fix the frustrating dead ends (may be optional), and also add the retry button to the death scenes in Larry 1-3. Then, I would definitely buy them.
The death actions/scenes were part of the charm for Sierra adventures. It was sure annoying when you had to retrace some steps, that's how they were designed/played so I'd stick with it. Not sure the more casual player would agree with my thoughts however
Reckless wrote:The death actions/scenes were part of the charm for Sierra adventures.
Of course. I'm not suggesting removing those. Just to add the retry button which the later Larry games had. It's for convenience only and won't change the game at all.
My other suggestion was about those dead ends which there are a lot of in Larry 2 and 3 where you not only had to retrace some steps, but huge parts of the game in the worst cases.
Still not sure I agree having a retry button would not remove something that Sierra [rightly or wrongly] used in their early adventure games. Having the ability to save "at any time" was powerful and it was up to the player to use it. If you didn't then when you inevitably faced one of the deaths you'd kick yourself for not doing so
I do agree on the dead ends however - having been caught by them and had my gaming experience somewhat deflated. But then some may argue that I perhaps shouldn't have any different feelings to the provision of replay buttons and the like
I think having to stop every 5 minutes to save your game deflates the gaming experience. It breaks the flow of the storyline. And I am not a casual gamer. I don't play adventures to stare at a save screen 1/3 of the playtime.
If you want the oldskool experience, simply load a save instead of retrying. But I bet you wouldn't do that if you had the option not to, would you?
For the most part, I never had a big prob with dead end's. Until I played SQ2 recently. And I realized all the stuff that you use at the end of the game. If you didn't have them, you would have almost had to start the game from the beginning again. That would irritate me to no end and I'd probably just decide the game was stupid and stop playing it all together.
Josh Mandel has said that there are two kind of dead ends in Sierra games. Unintentional ones, which are mostly found in the early AGI games and the intentional ones that were designed into the game play. The unintentional one were simply design flaws. Nobody wants the unintentional dead ends, especially if you have to backup to far to correct, but the intentional ones were mostly avoided of you just didn't do anything stupid. It really is not that big of a deal if you don't need to replay from too far back.
Collector wrote:The unintentional one were simply design flaws. Nobody wants the unintentional dead ends, especially if you have to backup to far to correct
Actually, it is frequently said that those were in fact intentional too, to artificially increase the playing time. With the side effect of major frustration.
That inspired LucasArts to take the no dead end approach in the first place, I think. And Sierra copied that concept shortly after.
That was such an important decision, that it was kept in almost every adventure by almost any company up today. So I'd say, Sierra should fix those in their remakes too.
