Why did this bother people (and it did!), when having to replay huge chunks of Maniac Mansion to get all 7 kids through?
Actually I did not get all 7 kids through exactly for this reason. (I did not feel like replaying from scratch. )
(OTOH I regularly replay Monkey 2 and Indy 4)
You don´t need to. Only 4. You have to take Dave, Syd an Razor are exactly the same and Jeff doesn´t have anything special about him. That leaves the meteor contract(Wendy), Tentacle befriending(Syd or Razor), Ed befriending(Michael) and Meteor police(Bernard) solutions (you can even combine the meter police and contract ones).
Well, in my opinion, that is just common sense. Some things shouldn’t have to be spelled out explicitly. 
It sounds like you play the game, reach the end, and get the story. Then if you play again, you may get a different story. I guess it should be obvious that it is not a completely different game, just a different story within the same game world, so elements will overlap.
I’ll reserve judgement until I play the game. Going by yours and other’s descriptions, the complaints seem capricious.
Hehe, I will play it, now I am very curious. 
One last thing I want to point out: I am not suggesting that it is in anyway wrong or unreasonable to wish to follow all stories. I think that is natural. I am saying that, in my opinion, it is not very reasonable to complain about a game that reuses its elements in order to tell separate yet related stories.
Again, I’m going by your description; I’ll go play the game first and discuss it further with you then. Perhaps I’ll share your mind after playing.
dZ.
By all means do! It is a great puzzle platformer. The mandatory common sections are pretty much its only downside and one can easily look over it. That does add maybe about an extra hour of not so exciting gameplay for reaching the end with each character at least once, but it is still worth the effort.
Of course, you wouldn’t know that when you are new to the game. Or would you read a walkthrough first?
I guess, many people only played the Bernard solution anyway, as this was recommended by many magazines.
Well, I think Unity is better because I have tried it out myself and its really easy to use!
I have not played “The Cave”, because I was not interested in the platform elements of the game but I know how the game works. The issue for me is that if I have to play every time the same 80% of the game to get only that 20% of different things, I’m sure that it would be boring as hell for me.
I have the same problem with that Full-Motion-Video game that I played a few weeks ago: it’s practically a movie. Too see a different branch of the story I have to watch again the already-watched part of the movie that comes before the fork.
Sure, because that one is the least likely to get you into an dead end (you don´t have to fetch the package or worry about ripping the envelope etc). Also with either Bernard or Jeff on your team you basically never have to get yourself caught because you can distract Edna on the telephone.
So I think that´s the reason why this was the recommended solution, I think that was only the one I played. I played the others only years later. But Maniac Mansion is also a lot more of a cryptic game than the Cave is, I never once needed a guide for The Cave.
Since I missed the question on Twitter, I’m actually more interested in the answers.
What is better, as a C++ expert? Unity or Unreal?
There are 12 sections where 7 of them are for indiviual characters. So you play 8 section with each playthrough, ie. 5 out of 8 are mandatory repeats where 3 of them are the main part and the other two are the intro and the end part of the game. Not exactly 80%, but still quite a bit.
You can read the answers that Ron received (and his comments) on the Twitter post:
As you can expect from any “X vs Y” discussion on the Internet, the people who commented harmoniously reached a shared and firm conclusion to the question.
(but Unity official language is C#, not C++)
It should be easy for a programmer to switch from C++ to C# (and similar object-oriented languages).
Hehe, yes, that’s true. 
Bad xp, @grumpygamer? Just curious, I don’t use it.
I’m not Ron, but in most cases it’s just a personal preference. That’s similar to real languages: You don’t like (the syntax) of all languages in the same way.
the latest version of C# is very very good. it has lambdas, closures, type inference, async/await, higher order functions, and many more useful things. You (arguably) don’t even need a scripting language when you have all that. (plus, it is strongly typed)
TIS-100 has a useful JRO instruction.
That’s the question. 
Current languages tend to get more and more “modern” features that
a) you don’t really need in most cases or
b) the features are so complex that the readability of the source code is worse (try to read some code with lambdas and async/wait written by other developers) or
c) a lot programmers don’t understand the concepts (I just say “JavaScript” )
So sometimes a simple and lean language is much better than the current versions of well-known languages. But that’s just my opinion.
I don’t like too much complex and abstract languages. They are almost indispensable to improve scalability, productivity and code management for medium-to-big projects, but when I have used them for my small pet projects my impression was that I’m launching a Space Shuttle just to go buy some groceries.
Maybe the question of what Ron would like to use them for is not as hard to answer as it seems. A month ago, Ron tweeted the following:
I think, it sounds interesting. However, UnrealEngine is awesome.
