Regarding a recent view on Anchorhead

[Peter_Piers]

I haven’t. It’s a V, it’ll be a while before I get to it. I have, however, played Bellclap and Crystal And Stone Beetle And Bone and I know that some games do have fun mudding the waters and making the best (and sometimes the most confusing) use of the medium.

I can see the waters being muddy in the parser/narrator distinction, and I can see where the natural language and imperative commands would make talking to the parser similar to talking to an entity. I guess I never thought of it that way. I sometimes do rave against the author, and I rave against the parser when I run into implementation problems or when it pretends to know more than it does - but I’m not sure I ever saw the parser as GlaDOS, or the mastermind behind the puzzles I’m trying to solve…

…anyway, surely, in the majority of the games, the parser is simply not a separate entity, is it? Violet and all are special cases… aren’t they?

[Roody_Yogurt]

I don’t remember if it applies to Anchorhead (it probably doesn’t), but one of my pet peeves is things like shelves or transparent containers that you have to specifically examine to see their contents. I mean, it’d probably be okay if the room description says the shelves are full of junk and you have to examine the shelves or junk to get a further description of the junk, but I feel like it’s bad design to just list the containers and leave it up to the player to check every little thing for contents.

[busterwrites]

@busterwrites

Otherwise, the parser shouldn’t know more than the PC knows.

Yikes, that came out wrong. To clarify, I don’t think a parser should be anything - authors can make a game however they want! It’s up to us to decide what we like.

I prefer that the parser is consistent with how it presents itself. A parser that wants to be an active participant in the story can say things like “That’s not important.” To me, it feels like a parent is in the room with me, telling me what I can and can’t touch. Now that I think about it, “that’s not important” is totally something my mom would have said!

Does it really matter if the limitation is “That is not important.” or “You’ve have a phobia of candles since you were a child. A nasty business you prefer not to talk about. Naturally, you steer well away from this one”?

…well, granted, the latter makes for more interesting reading. Marginally.

From my viewpoint, you literally listed an example of lazy/poor writing and an example of great writing, and then said they’re marginally different. Not much else to say except we’ll agree to disagree!

one of my pet peeves is things like shelves or transparent containers that you have to specifically examine to see their contents

Funny, I’m actually okay with that. I’d prefer an uncluttered description paragraph with the extra step of examining.

[Peter_Piers]

From my viewpoint, you literally listed an example of lazy/poor writing and an example of great writing, and then said they’re marginally different. Not much else to say except we’ll agree to disagree!

I’ll agree to that!

[Matt_W1 (Matt_W)]

@Peter Pears

I’ll probably have a few more things to say later on tonight, but I can address the quoted bit right now - in a bygone age, long long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the Elder Gods were still pretty much the Teenage Prankster Gods, useless scenery used to be minimally implemented by redirecting every single action to it to display “That’s not important” or some such variant. There’s even an extension to replicate that behaviour.

Ah. That makes Spider and Web’s subversion of that trope (among many others) even more interesting.

[Lumin]

Necroing a thread here, but speaking of Anchorhead, I ran across a let’s play of it on another forum the other day. Huge spoilers obviously since the guy is going it through step by step (but are there really people in this community left who have never played this game?), but otherwise it’s a nice bit of nostalgia with some added illustrations by the OP:

The SA forums have always been pretty responsive to CYOAs and classic gamebooks but you don’t often see IF games. Unfortunately it’s a pay site so you won’t be able to comment unless you’re registered and the thread might get broken up with some annoying banners now and then, I believe this is their way of discouraging pubbie scum from hanging about.

[HanonO (Hanon Ondricek)]

@Lumin

Necroing a thread here, but speaking of Anchorhead, …but are there really people in this community left who have never played this game?)

I’ve never finished it. Started it and liked it, but realized if it’s going to make me search for a key old school that it was going to be a gigantic time commitment and I’ve never gotten back to it.

Right. I’ll go stand in the corner now.

[Lumin]

@HanonO

I’ve never finished it. Started it and liked it, but realized if it’s going to make me search for a key old school that it was going to be a gigantic time commitment and I’ve never gotten back to it.

Right. I’ll go stand in the corner now.

Turn in your IF card, you are not worthy and hereby banished forever.

[Peter_Piers]

Huh. That illustration is curiously cartoony given Anchorhead’s content.

It’s atmospheric, though, which is more important. Thanks a bunch - I keep hearing about this, but I guess I must be pubbie scum as I feel very discouraged from paying to read the thread.

[SimonChris (Simon Christiansen)]

@Peter Piers

Huh. That illustration is curiously cartoony given Anchorhead’s content.

It’s atmospheric, though, which is more important. Thanks a bunch - I keep hearing about this, but I guess I must be pubbie scum as I feel very discouraged from paying to read the thread.

It’s no longer necessary pay to read the thread, as long as you don’t mind a few ads. You only need an account if you want to post.

[Peter_Piers]

Many thanks for that!

[Lumin]

Yeah I linked it on the ADRIFT forum but there are like three people hanging out there presently so when I saw this Anchorhead thread I figured I might as well give it a mention here too.

The cartoony artstyle was something I wondered about too, but the guy has obviously played the game a couple times before so it’s not like it should come as any kind of surprise how dark it gets.

Was the thread actually blocked before? Usually it’s fine except for the ads. I used to lurk there all the time until I finally caved and got an account because it turns out I enjoy reading about games far more than actually playing them.

edit: This already has it’s own thread whoops I am dumb

[spankminister]

@Lumin

Was the thread actually blocked before? Usually it’s fine except for the ads. I used to lurk there all the time until I finally caved and got an account because it turns out I enjoy reading about games far more than actually playing them.

My understanding was that the subforums that are publicly readable rotate in and out over time to encourage people to get accounts?

[Peter_Piers]

Bumpitty-bump.

Deja-vu! A review on Anchorhead prompts me, just as it prompted me months ago, to wonder about player’s expectations of a parser game today. Whoo-hoo!

ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1 … view=33257

Note that it’s a long review, very detailed, explains very clearly what the reviewer didn’t like, and it’s properly spoiler-tagged. Worth a read.

I sort of cover my points in my comment to that review, but… it makes me really uncomfortable, some of that criticism. This particular player came with certain expectations that are, indeed, all around us today - make a bunch of things clearer, more obvious even - while, back in the day, the rule of thumb was to allow the player to discover a bunch of stuff. Insinuate, not tell, and let the player have fun figure it out.

Sure, we’ve all seen THAT backfire horribly so often, but it bothers me to see this directed at Anchorhead, which did it all so right, or so I thought when I played it at the time.

The review, and the reviewer, aren’t wrong, and I’m not bashing them; let me make that clear. But… but I’m uncomfortable with the bashing Anchorhead’s getting, for being a product of its time (and yet, it’s perfectly valid, in general, to look back at something old and say “Well… it’s dated. We’d do it differently today. It’s not as good as it should be”; we do it all the time when experiencing old media). And as I said in my comment, in Anchorhead’s particular case, I even felt that some of the grinding (i.e., the bits where the parser didn’t jump all the intermediate steps) helped me get into the PC’s shoes.

There is naturally a trend against old-school trappings, especially since choice-based stories started to mix in with parser IF. That’s normal; to paraphrase Jon Ingold, parser IF deals with small decisions and puzzles, whereas choice-based stories deal with big decisions that can’t really be translated to the step-by-step parser model (well, generally speaking, at least). Getting these two worlds together, of course expectations would clash, and still clash all the time. That’s normal. But having that bleed over into being frustrated by Anchorhead’s oldschool-ness…

…I’m having difficulty expressing myself. I’ll just stop. I’m finding it hard to put in words. I get why a newschool player would be frustrated by oldschoolarity. But Anchorhead was such a great game to play, such an experience, that part of me is screaming “Don’t touch it! Leave it as it is! Enjoy it for what it is, not for what you wanted it to be!”.

…“Enjoy it for what it is, not for what you wanted it to be”? Huh, I guess that sums up what I feel, and I often apply it to other things, but it’s a can of worms waiting to open…

EDIT - To play devil’s advocate for a moment, I’ve seen reviews praising old Scott Adams games and saying that that’s what adventure games should be like. That’s not lost on me.

[David_Whyld1 (David Whyld)]

I haven’t actually played that far into Archorhead - it’s one of those games on my ever-expanding To Be Played list - but I kind of agree with the reviewer’s comments about some of the puzzles. “Ask librarian ABOUT book” should work as well as “ask librarian FOR book”. That it doesn’t is just bad guess the verb.

[Peter_Piers]

I just replayed it.

ASK LIBRARIAN ABOUT BOOK does work…

…but not until you’ve showed proof that you can take a book, period. ASK LIBRARIAN FOR/ABOUT BOOK is indeed a synonim.

…it’s this sort of casual approach to IF I’m scratching my head against, and the quick bash thereof: quick to dismiss it as guess-the-preposition when it’s nothing of the sort. I know IF has a reputation for that, but Anchorhead is one of the friendlier old-school games.

…well, apart from the last day. That section is tight and hard and I have a prejudice against the whole pin thing.

[mathbrush (Brian Rushton)]

This person has been going through and giving low scores to quite a few old adventures, like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Aisle. Gentry couldn’t ‘fix’ the stuff he’s complaining about without ticking off a lot of other people who like many of those things.

[David_Whyld1 (David Whyld)]

@Peter Piers

I just replayed it.

ASK LIBRARIAN ABOUT BOOK does work…

…but not until you’ve showed proof that you can take a book, period. ASK LIBRARIAN FOR/ABOUT BOOK is indeed a synonim.

I can still see his point to a degree though. If ASK LIBRARIAN ABOUT BOOK only works after you’ve showed proof that you can take a book, it seems like a problem. Not a big problem in the scheme of things, and certainly not something that would put me off playing game or make me give it a negative review.

[mikegentry]

I try not to respond to reviews (good or bad), except maybe to say “thanks” – but I’m making an exception here because, funny enough, I agree with many of this reviewer’s criticisms.

(Not all of them. There were a one or two where the reviewer clearly misread a room description, but that’s happened to me plenty of times, and when it does it’s INCREDIBLY frustrating, even after I figure out that it was my fault for missing some crucial detail.)

But a lot of them, yeah. The locked attic door is not a great puzzle. Twenty years ago it was not great because it’s the exact same keyhole-and-doormat puzzle from Zork II and about a dozen other adventure games in the day; now it’s not great because new players who weren’t weaned on those games won’t recognize the hints (the keyhole separately called out when no other door in the game has a keyhole; the space under the door) and think “Oh, right; it’s the keyhole-and-doormat puzzle from the Zork II.” And, in truth, there is no reason, logical, supernatural, or otherwise, why the key would be locked inside that particular room. So that’s my bad.

And the wine cellar puzzle – oof. I’ve always hated that puzzle. I hated it when I first wrote the game. I was never satisfied with it, but you get to a point, sometimes, when you just can’t think of anything better, and you feel locked in by all the design decisions and dependencies that you’ve constructed up to that point, and all you really want to do is get it finished so you can release . . . so I just left it in.

But yeah. If I had a chance to rewrite the whole thing from the ground up, there are definitely a few puzzles and interactions that I would completely redesign.

(But not locking the front door. Back then I was convinced everyone would hate that detail, but overwhelmingly the feedback I’ve gotten is that players liked being forced to go close and lock the front door before going to sleep. Not what I would have anticipated, but the verdict is in. The reviewer will have to chalk it up to a difference in taste, I suppose.)

[Jamespking (Marco Innocenti)]

@mikegentry

1. But yeah. If I had a chance to rewrite the whole thing from the ground up, there are definitely a few puzzles and interactions that I would completely redesign.

2. (But not locking the front door. Back then I was convinced everyone would hate that detail, but overwhelmingly the feedback I’ve gotten is that players liked being forced to go close and lock the front door before going to sleep. Not what I would have anticipated, but the verdict is in. The reviewer will have to chalk it up to a difference in taste, I suppose.)

Ok, erm…

1. I’d play it again. Probably not on an iPhone 3, though.

2. That was part of the story, not a puzzle. It added to the tension more than many other things in the game.

So: when is the remake out?