>I think that this feeling is partly a remnant of the "every object must be
>useful in a puzzle" mentality. There are a zillion things in Legend that
>have nothing to do with puzzles. People seem to be able to handle that.
>But likewise, there are some things in there only for the sake of the
>setting. What happens to the old guy on the couch on Foon is not important
>--- he isn't there for the sake of the plot. He's there for other reasons.
<SPOILER WARNING, as if it were necessary at this point.>
An interesting point about the guy on the couch: I kept trying to get him
to react to something. All through the game - and I discovered Foon before
I discovered Terminal Velocity - I kept coming back to him. Why? Because
of a mistaken idea that he was part of a puzzle. They way I had it figured,
he would call off the dog, enabling me to visit Cassandra and her eggplant.
(Eggplants were predictably essential.) Every time I learned about a new
EV station, I would try it out on him. It never worked.
Because I thought he was puzzle fodder, it took me a couple of days after
completing the game to see him in the light of the game's thematic content.
Make of this what you will. The good side of it is that it helps to make
it a work that you keep thinking about afterwards.
>Second, I thought that the Squirt puzzle would be more than interesting
>enough, and more than time-consuming enough. Aside from perhaps the
>CraneMaster, I was most proud of Squirt --- I think that's my most inspired
>puzzle. And wasn't I peeved when I found out about the mouse in Curses! I
>didn't know Graham had already beaten me to it...
Squirt was the better puzzle, though. The mouse was flawed by the
"guess-the-syntax" aspect of the puzzle, not to mention the inconsistency
with Infocom command interpretation. (That is, you couldn't give the mouse
multiple commands on a line; "mouse, w. e" would parse as "mouse, w."
followed by "e", which is inconsistent with Enchanter, where you have to
give multiple commands to the turtle in yet another similar puzzle. I
wouldn't mind this so much if Inform didn't make such a big deal about its
Infocom compatibility. But I digress.)
Speaking to the thematic issues, though, I wonder what you were trying to
say there. Squirt is such an obvious artifact of Technology, and yet is
crucial to the final victory. Technology working against itself? Come to
think of it, the two largest forces for good in the game - JC and Kuulest -
exist only as electronic constructs, protectors of the human spirit in the
same medium as its oppressors. And both sides of the struggle are mysterious
and possibly ancient in origin.
Hmmm... two sides to the disk, white and yolk^H^H^H^Hblack...
Ah well. A game that bears some afterthought. What a concept.
-- Carl Muckenhoupt | Is it true that Kibo habitually autogreps all of Usenet baf@tiac.net | for his name? If so: Hi, Kibo. Like the sig?