clueless1 wrote:henryVK wrote:I'm impressed that you can put so much time towards Wizardry, @clueless1! That's some real dedication. Do you read the CRGPaddict? I didn't read all of his stuff on Wizardry but it's usually quite edifying.
Yeah, it's been awhile since I visited that site, but now that I've gone back and looked at his Wiz6 stuff, I'm shocked he finished the game in 38 hrs with characters with roughly 1.5 million XP. I've been grinding my characters to level 12 (currently at 1.14 million XP) just to have an easier time moving forward at an area prior to the endgame. And he describes a battle near the end requiring more than 20 reloads, which in my experience would've taken at least a few hours by itself. I'm not sure how he tracks time spent playing, but I have a spreadsheet that I do it on, and I include all time I spend in front of the game screen, even if I'm looking through the clue book with the game paused. But still, his characters only take 38 hrs to gain 1.5 million XP while it's taken me 80 hrs to get 1.14 million? Something seems weird.
And regarding the amount of hours I put toward the game, keep in mind I've been playing this game for about two months now. 😀 I consider this game really good because I've been able to sustain almost 1.5hr/day on average without getting tired of it. Even Baldur's Gate and Pillars of Eternity, which I spent about 80 hrs each on, started getting old near the end and I was pushing to beat them so I could move on to another game.
Hmm, not sure how he tracks or calculates tbh, but he usually plays games the honest way, so idk how the playtime could be so much shorter!
I think, for what it's worth, that the "small portions" approach of playing some 1,5 hours or so is the way to go to keep games from feeling like they're overstaying their welcome. With adventure games, my desire to go look at the walkthrough rises somewhat proportionally with the lenght of the session 😀
Speaking of which.. I knew that Journey: The Quest Begins had some kind of conceptual issue, and now I found what it is. In spite of the game manual encouraging you to explore freely and not save-scum, it's ridiculously easy to render your session unwinable and the game basically won't tell you until you've exhausted every possible action of whatever branch you're in. I'm about 3/4 through the game but I can't go on because I ran out of essences to cast a particular spell due to a decision I made in the very beginning of the game. That is just horrible design even by 1988's standards.
I'm stuck at the base of Sunrise Mountain. The way to the top (and the wizard Astrix's fortress) is a maze of six forks where you can go either left or right. You can skip this puzzle by casting a spell on a map you can buy, but if I do this I run out of spells later on for a puzzle that, afaik, there is no alternative solution for. So, if I'm thinking correctly, for the six forks there's 2^6=64 combinations of left/right that I have to go through in order to solve this? I looked at a walkthrough, but the combination given there doesn't work.. maybe because it's for the Amiga and I'm playing the PC version.
I think I need to do a spreadsheet for this one.
EDIT: nevermind, I found a website with a macro that does it