Yes. The guy explodes out of Shinetop’s body, scattering human flesh and blood everywhere.
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Always cheating with a human form! His most intimidating moment(s) in Tales also used a human form.
That scene was a powerful rejection of the human form, another confirmation that he embraced his afterlife nature fully and that he found in his death an opportunity to become, in his eyes, superior to petty humans.
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Yes, that was Zak.
See… that is were it fails. If I wanted to give the wet towel to him, because I hope to get a new dry one, this puzzle auto-solves itself because there is no verb list.
I am not saying the generic “use” verb would lead to players only using that when they have guessed the precise word (slap in this case). Perhaps they wanted to throw the towel at him.
So although it leads to more grammatically correct sentence lines, the one click interface increases the risk of backwards puzzles getting solved prematurely.
I’m still on team Verb Grid!
That’s exactly how I solved that one! I wanted Jojo to take a dump on this crappy pump! 
I only started thinking the solution to that puzzle was unfair a couple of years later when I read/learned the word monkey wrench; and by that time anything with “monkey” reminded me of “island”. At the time of solving the puzzle, I just thought it was an absurdly funny solution.
Yeah, let’s simply start new threads. I don’t think there will be a whole new category per game.
It will be difficult enough to keep things on topic anyway. (Yes I am looking at you, this here thread that may have reached the record of longest thread so far, with our usual straying off and back on topic… and everyone being chill about it. So I don’t see why the admins would change that)
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That’s a big downside of binary verbs when it comes to inventory objects. It’s always either use or give.
I saw one jam game where the interface had many verbs and you had to equip an inventory object and the interface became “do X to hotspot with inventory object”. It wasn’t a serious attempt, but the idea in itself was good - a ternary system.
Instead of “use towel with boy” you could have “caress boy with towel”, “slap boy with towel”, “dry boy with towel” and “scare boy with towel” for all we know.
But also here, you either get 200 verbs all at once, or the mere fact that you’re offered “slap” when in other contexts you never saw it is kinda spoilering the puzzle again.
So… back to text parsers?
traditional UIs have a problem when the puzzle is to use an object on a person in an uncommon way, but there is a common way to use that object on that person.
Example: use coffee with customer: there is a common way to use it: GIVE the coffee to the customer. And there is an uncommon way: POUR the coffee on the customer.
In this case, the verb is a crucial part of the puzzle. Without the verb, you will have accidental puzzle solving. But also with the verb, if the verb is only shown there (context sensitive), you will still have accidental puzzle solving.
So, you need to remove the use verb completely, and only have “give” and “pour”, everywhere in the game. Just for that one puzzle.
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That’s not ideal, because as you add puzzles, you will have to add more verbs (like “throw” and “tamper with”). And this will create problem of overlapping verbs, and borderline solutions. There will always be a verb that is needed for one puzzle, but is borderline for another puzzle.
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And anyway , verbs don’t solve the other big problem, namely the “use saw on peg leg” problem. Even if you add the “cut” verb, you don’t solve anything: the user will still not understand why he is cutting the peg leg. Why this is useful. So you still have accidental puzzle solving.
So the verb UI is both problematic and insufficient.
There are interfaces between those two extremes. 
Why not? Larry 7 did this for example. But there only the approach was good - I wouldn’t use Larry 7 as a blueprint.
Not necessarily/in general: The “best” UI depends on the game, the story and the puzzles. Have a look at Loom for example. That UI works only within that game. So a verb UI could be sufficient for some games.
Yep, but we don’t see the puzzles that the developers had to drop because the UI could not express them. We don’t see the “puzzles that could have been” 
Or maybe here the new AI technologies might come in handy.
If you explain the AI what you are trying to do, it can understand if you got it right regardless of the precise wording. It could ask you to elaborate if your command is ambiguous. It may even give you incremental and intelligent hints if you need, since it can understand if you are on the right path.
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My idea is that you should overcome these shortcomings with good design.
We saw it in Delores, where the puzzle was not depending on the verb itself, but the verb was just a prerogative to solving the puzzle. You could have unusual verbs on objects that didn’t spoil the puzzle because the puzzle was understanding whether that action was needed for the photo or not.
So, if your problem is pouring coffee on the customer… well, you redesign it into something that can be expressed with usual verbs. Use the safety pin to punch a hole on the bottom of the coffee cup so that it drips on the customer once he refills.
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That’s clever but often unfeasible. Suppose the puzzle was followed by a specific dialog about your clumsiness. Those are jokes that now you will have to drop.
In general, what you are doing is changing the plot because of limitations of the UI. IMO the UI should serve the plot, not the other way round.
So I just recently replayed Grim Fandango, where one of the Year Four puzzles is to pour coffee on some performers. I remembered that I needed to get the coffee on them, but not how. 
Using coffee on them normally causes Manny to refill their coffee cups. The solution is to climb a ladder behind them (where you find the snow machine), and use the coffee on them from that screen. I remembered this solution, after I finally realized the performers were selectable objects from that screen - Grim Fandango always gave me trouble with finding objects and exits.
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Forum with one thread lol.
Has anyone here reached out to any of the forum moderators via Twitter, and asked them directly about plans for this forum, or if it could/should be promoted as a space for MI fans and RTMI as well?
I don’t think it needs to be entirely rejigged for MI either, but I feel like making more direct contact would be more effective than just spitballing on a forum they’re not really visiting as of right now. I won’t do it, as a new member I feel I would be overstepping my boundaries with the existing community. I’m just hoping to give one of you old timers a suggestion (although this is an obvious idea you’ve probably all thought of yourselves).
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Not via Twitter, but here in the forum and they have replied. Calypso visits the forum quite often and she has replied to our requests in the thread that you mentioned a few posts above.
To sum it up, they will not make modifications of any kind to the forum, at least for now. We don’t know what the reason might be. Either they have no plans for this forum or they are intentionally not revealing them for now.
I don’t really think this is a real issue, though. The quantity of active users is quite low, it might even decrease when some of us will avoid the forum for fear of reading spoilers. I also think that, after the release of RtMI, it’s unlikely that the developers will promote this forum to RtMI players, but this is just my speculation. So, in my opinion, a major reorganization wouldn’t be justified by the low quantity of people here and things will remain exactly the same. 
In a few days Ron and Dave will be at PAX West (which starts tomorrow)! 
@ephialtes already shared a tweet about a super-panel happening this Saturday (September 3rd) with Ron and other adventure game legends. Here is also the official page:
ADVENTURE GAMES: HEROES AND LEGENDS
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Aha! That’s where all those weird puzzles come from that require far-fetched methods to do something quite simple.
I replayed it too a year or 2 ago. Can’t remember that part. Nor a snow machine.
Great!
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These guys:
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Regarding RTMI discussion, I probably won’t have any interest in discussing the game during my first play through, but in general I think more topics would be good. I say this in the sense of—RTMI seems to be mostly relegated to this one thread and sometimes I come in here after a day or two and there are 100 new posts. Some of which are interesting to me, some of which (what is my theory on this thing we saw for two seconds?) are not.
But because it’s all in the one thread, we’re stuck reading every reply until we figure out if it’s something we’re interested in.
Does this make sense? I get that it’s weird in that this is a board meant for a different subject and therefore it feels like making a million threads about this very specific but different subject is odd.
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I think that, in theory, it would make sense to create multiple, more specific, topics and trying to stay on topic. In practice, I don’t know if we are interested enough to do it, especially considering that some people will just avoid the whole forum to avoid spoilers.
I am trying to figure out if it is possible to find a combination of different sites/services that will allow me to both enjoy the game and chat about non-gameplay topics in a spoiler-free way.