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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1999 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Does the manual show the places where the secrets-to-everyone are? (Edit: no, it doesn't.) My main problem with the game is the "burn the random bush that looks like every other random bush"-type things, which is something that other titles would fix with affordances like cracked walls, etc. Which is something I get is a technical limitation of the system, but then again, trying to make a game that depends on a system that can't display it properly is not exactly good design.

I guess I come more from the AVGN school of software design that demonstrates that if it's not reasonably discoverable without reading the documentation it's probably a net-negative for your game design if it's there, since it's now depending on something you thought was obvious in its balance, but nobody can access it, so you're stuck trying to work around it and your game is less fun as a consequence.

Which is something I get is a technical limitation of the system

I don't think so. The space requirements to add additional burnable bush and bombable wall sprites would have been negligible. But this would have trivialized the game's "puzzles," which consisted entirely of pushing every block, bombing every wall, and burning every bush. If the movable parts are labeled, there's nothing left.

Later games added more elaborate puzzles with multiple moving parts that could be solved without brute force, allowing them to label the moving parts without trivializing the game. I think that this probably could have been done on the NES with a 128 KB ROM, but I'm not sure.

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