Yeah, that’s my feeling as well…
Every time someone mentions it, it’s like there are a million mazes to solve first of all…
Then you run out of money and can’t complete the game unless you exchange your shoes for a hat then give it to a homeless guy who flies somewhere else, exchanges the hat for a violin, give the violin to another character, they will exchange it for some shoes and some money, they mail you the shoes, you now have shoes and money, but you forgot to use your space helmet, so now you’re dead anyway…
Unfortunately that is true. But fortunately you have to solve the mazes in later parts of the game and not all at once.
In addition, the game doesn’t tell you exactly what to do next. So you have to explore the world yourself. This is an advantage and a disadvantage at the same time. Some like that and some hate that. As @DZ-Jay said: Zak seems to be very complex. But it isn’t that complex.
If you don’t like Maniac Mansion then chances are high that you dislike Zak too.
My suggestion: If you liked the other LA games, play Zak and/or MM with a solution. You can get at least Zak for only a few bucks. It’s an interesting trip into the history of the LA games.
You’ll find another one in MI2, with a lot more anachronisms.
I think that Zak deserves a try, just for its historical value. I started it a few weeks ago and I had an hard time to understand what kind of gameplay it was, but I think that the story is good enough to motivate me to proceed, slowly. It will be my “background” long adventure game that will fill the gaps between other shorter adventure games that I’m more interested to play.
You are not the only one, but I felt that Zak was a bit more “modern” than MM.
Maybe my reaction in that thread is a bit misleading, because I never (really) played adventure games that weren’t designed in a logical and more linear way. Once I understood how the game was intended to be played, it didn’t appear complex anymore to me. My brain still screams “uninteresting” all the time, but the story is compelling and that’s why I’m motivated to (slowly) proceed.
I know what you mean, for I am on the opposite side of the spectrum. I played plenty of Sierra and Infocom games as a young child, and only discovered LucasFilms games later as an adult. Day Of The Tentacle was my first one and it showed me that puzzles could be reasonable and logical; they could be wacky and crazy yet still remain consistent within the confines of the game world’s logic, like cartoons; that deaths were not necessary; and that all solutions could be fair.
This is how I always felt all games should be. Every time I encountered an arbitrary death or illogical puzzle solution in Space Quest I always thought, why? Why is this here? There must be a better way.
That’s what endears me to LucasFilms style of adventure games now: they reflect close to my ideal of an adventure game.
Well, yes and no. It’s true, game doesn’t tell you what to do, but there was a newspaper with the game (if you bought a legal copy) that actually tells you most of this stuff. So it may seem random to go to these places and do stuff, but it’s not. It’s something you should’ve read about.
If you abandon the concept of rooms from the classical adventures, then realMyst (the 3D remake of original Myst) feels relatively big, especially because you can wander around and see more of the world’s beauty and walk to some places and see perspectives that weren’t available neither in original Myst nor in Myst Masterpiece Edition (which was basically Myst with rerendered graphics in more than 256 colours + probably better quality videos in newer QuckTime version).
As for playing time, you could cheat by traveling form Mars to Earth with the van. But AFAIR it was just a dead end screen, I think somebody tried letting the game run for some years or looked in the scripts. But I can’t find it currently.
a) You can skip this cutscene-like-scene-although-not-being-a-cutscene.
b) Maybe you shouldn’t skip this scene. The flight scenes will be automatically skipped after solving all relevant puzzles on the plane.
→ worlds’ actually
This book thing was a neat idea in Myst to explain all those very different and diverse places and being able to travel to them.
Indeed. I have the games, I have the 3 books. I still hope that one day the 4th book will be published. The whole concept is great how yout write the world or actually create a link to an already existing world and that by changing the book you change the world or link to another world which is similar but different.
