Extract ascii strings from the binary and look for interesting stuff.

mombarak wrote on 2025-09-10, 06:29:

So I am wondering if these companies made these games with the purpose of selling some extra services and made them extra complicated. Whats your opinion here?

I don't think they made them extra-complicated on purpose. I suppose it was a natural development. The games were made with the technology that was available. Then during playtesting someone must have realized that players can get stuck, and that it is also an opportunity to make more money.

The game documentation didn't include a full list of parser commands (that I've ever seen). You can check out the documentation for Space Quest 1 EGA here:

https://www.spacequest.net/sq1/manuals/

The reference card (at the bottom) includes some more info on what to input into the parser, but it's certainly not an exhaustive list.

But these games were difficult by necessity. They had to justify a $50 price tag, and if you could figure out everything easily, you'd finish in an hour. The core gameplay mechanic is really "lots of trial-and-error, sharing discoveries with other people, and getting lucky", and if that was too much, then yeah, you could fork over the $7.50 to buy the guide book from Sierra.

I've always viewed arcade games as the first pay-to-win games.

mombarak wrote on 2025-09-10, 06:29:

Whats your opinion here?

their difficulty is part of the game. text adventures in the 70's had hint books before sierra made sq1.

now sierra is know for its moon-logic, puzzles that dont make sense but it was part of the design in everything back then so cant really fault them for all the in game deaths it takes to learn things.

Shponglefan wrote on 2025-09-10, 12:09:

I've always viewed arcade games as the first pay-to-win games.

This one I would disagree with. Because I think these arcade games were designed so that you have to permanently spend money to keep retrying. In a weird unrealistic world scenario the best player of the world could play it through with only one credit. Others would have to retry and retry. So your are renting the game kind of for a limited amount of time because I also think these games had mechanisms which enforced that you cannot stop and pause to get a snack.

For these adventures, they give you unlimited retries. You can try as long as you want, you can reset it as often as you want. It all depends on your capacity of understanding what the developers thought in each of the scenes and to know how they named it.

BloodyCactus wrote on 2025-09-10, 16:24:

now sierra is know for its moon-logic, puzzles that dont make sense but it was part of the design in everything back then so cant really fault them for all the in game deaths it takes to learn things.

They were not the only ones. Much as I am a fan of LucasArts, in part for how they made the rules of the genre much more player-friendly, I have never really been fond of adventure games in general because I am more interested in moving the action and/or story along instead of getting hung up on someone's ludicrous idea of a puzzle (if I want to solve puzzles, that's a different genre so far as I'm concerned). In recent years I have gravitated towards RPGs because that offers more the kind of challenge I 1) expect from a computer games and 2) can figure out and move things along as I like.