Which is how I always interpreted before knowing about the term 20 years later.
The red herring is the same thing but as @Ema said it’s the beginning of the game.
But there’s another difference: you HAVE to cross the bridge to reach other parts, while the pump is unclear. So you might not want to use it, while the troll is blocking your path.
Anyway I always thought it was hungry. I just tried to give all I had and he accepted the herring, never thought about the hints because they made no sense in Italian.
I wasn’t that bothered by the red herring, even if I may have only learned about the saying in English thanks to that puzzle (not sure I fully get the meaning though, since a red herring would rather be the betamax tape in TWP, but I digress).
The HUGE difference between both puzzles is that you need to solve the red herring puzzle quite early in the game, when you haven’t acquired a lot of inventory. And the troll clearly says he wants you to GIVE him something. So it is pretty simple to brute force your way to a solution by simply trying to give everything you have or come back later once you found your way in the kitchen. The toll bridge is also a lot easier to reach.
The pump… well, it is most probable you found this in your first exploration of the island. Tried pushing/pulling it, even combining all of your inventory- which is a lot bigger- on it… and then forget about it for the next hours/days/weeks while you’re looking for all these treasure map pieces. If you happen to go there as one of the final puzzles, like I did, your inventory is quite long. I still remember trying to use everything with it. All the logical things first of course, and then all the silly things which for sure aren’t going to work… and then my jaw dropping that this actually was the solution !
It is not a dead end though. Because you cannot get stuck in an unwinnable state (although it might have felt like it).
While we are on the topic of trolls on bridges… I found the one in King’s Quest even more ridiculous! Apparently the solution there had something to do with a very well known faery tale, at least if you grew up in Norway in the 19th century or the USA in the 1960’s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Billy_Goats_Gruff
At least you are rewarded with a funny animation for solving both the red herring and the monkey wrench puzzles
You’re right. I thought there were multiple exits on that screen, but it is a dead end. Also I realise that playing it on the Amiga gave little clue to the connection between the pump and the waterfall – but on a PC you are hammered with the noise of the waterfall on both screens, which helps you make the connection. Hmm.
Yeah, I understand, but in English that’s literally the definition of a “red herring”. Even in English the “monkey wrench” is a stretch of logic. Especially at the point in the game when you have three islands to explore, with countless pointless inventory items. Still, I’ll concede that my Amiga experience made it worse than the PC experience.
I don’t consider either of them a stretch of logic in English. Maybe a fun little stride of logic akin to a rebus. My point is that a red herring outside of adventure and perhaps literary jargon is something that distracts from the problem being discussed. So yes, it does attract attention and with regard to the problem it’s of no real importance. But it’s a bit cryptic.
The monkey wrench will be understood by just about every native speaker of American English. The red herring has the advantage of being World English instead, but it’s only literally the definition if you know adventure gaming jargon.
Jojo received years of psychiatric counselling to help him cope with the degrading experience. He finally found closure and pursued his dreams to become a full time professional musician.
The song he wrote about it during therapy became a modest hit that he still performs at most of his shows.
Also this song isn’t about Robbie Williams’ issues with drugs or alcohol or whatever but about the time Jojo hung out with him after leaving Guybrush behind.
And so it is, in the original version. Not so much when translated into a language where a red herring is but a fish. But that’s the unfortunate fate of almost all clever wordplay; it’s easily lost in translation.
Yep. All wordplay and references are nearly impossible to translate. Makes you wonder why adventure games are so popular in countries where they had to be translated
I have a theory as to why the monkey wrench puzzle is the way it is: if they had given you an actual monkey wrench in the inventory, you would have used it on the pump without knowing why; just because the wrench kind of makes sense to use on the pump. So you would have solved the puzzle by chance. So they needed to come up with a stranger object; an object that you would never try on the pump, unless you were very committed to the pump in the first place. Because you needed to show commitment, to prove that you had understood that the pump would serve to stop the waterfall (which by the way is the real puzzle! The real puzzle is not to understand what to use on the pump, but to understand that the pump serves to shut down the waterfall).
So that would explain the monkey wrench puzzle: it is a bad solution to a user interface limitation. A correct solution would be to make the player somehow connect the pump and the waterfall directly; maybe composing “[PUMP] [can shut down] [WATERFALL]”.
Bottom line: when designing, we should always spell out what the puzzle actually is, in English. Is it to understand the purpose of the pump? Or is it to understand how to shut down the pump, given that you know the purpose of the pump?
As an aside, I just realized that the “use banana with metronome” puzzle actually makes some sense, but is implemented very poorly.
The core puzzle is probably to understand that the metronome can be used to hypnotize the monkey, if you can convince the monkey to stare at it.
IF you realize this, the puzzle becomes: “how can I convince the monkey to stare at the metronome?”. And sticking a banana onto it is a perfectly reasonable way to do it!
the problem is that nobody could ever realize that you need to hypnotize the monkey, just like that, out of nowhere. (or maybe there was a clue? Did Guybrush say “this metronome is very hypnotic”?)
So, to summarize: if the game made it clear that you needed to hypnotize the monkey, and the puzzle was to understand HOW to do it, it would have been a perfectly good puzzle. The problem was that the puzzle requires you to understand at the same time that you need to hypnotize it, and how. Too many things at once.
Maybe the banana should also have come from a plant growing next to the pump. That would have meant
(a) no hypnotizing the monkey before there’s a need for it. Though I guess you could still fail to see the need and just do the somewhat obvious monkey + banana (on metronome) combination
(b) establishing a connection between the monkey and the room with the pump, however vague it is
