MRY
Wormwood Studios
Now that the game is finally easy to buy, I'm playing it with my kids (who have been eager to try it since we finished MI2). A major thing that leaps out to me is how much talkier and more generally passive the game is. The MI series always had a fair amount of talking, but, like, the game starts with a reasonably lengthy cutscene (not true of MI1 or MI2), then the first puzzle involves a fair amount of talking to the little fake pirate, then another cutscene, then a single room/single puzzle sequence, then another cutscene, and very shortly after that you have a lengthy dialogue with the voodoo lady, all before any significant puzzling takes place. Kind of annoying.
Another thing that has popped out is how relatively unpurposive the game is compared to the predecessors. I previously gushed about how great MI2's first area is in this respect, but the opposite is true here. Puzzles are rarely advanced by seeing a goal and going for it. When there is any connection between goal and puzzle, the connection often turns out not to be what you were actually going for. Some examples:
(1) You can take a ramrod when you have no reason to need it. You can't actually use the ramrod to load the cannon. You can't use it to hit the fake pirate (his name keeps escaping me), even though that is a totally reasonable use for it (to paddle his bottom if nothing else). Instead, you deal with the pirate by talking to him. This gets you a fake pirate hook before you have any reason to need/want the fake pirate hook (or any reason to expect that would be the fruit of your effort), and nothing else of use. Then you use the cannon to shoot the skeleton pirates (fine, though not related to anything I need to do). This causes a skeleton arm to float by the ship. You can get the arm by using the hook+ramrod, but there's no reason to think the arm will be helpful. As it turns out, the arm has a sword attached to it, and this leads to the first goal plus logic puzzle (cutting the rope on the cannon to create a loose cannon).
(2) When you're in the hold of the ship, there are tons of items that might be of interest but you're not allowed to interact with/take them. You have helium balloons and a hole above you but you can't use the balloons on the hole (for no real reason). The item you need to take is a burlap sack (the least noticeable item) and the reason you need to take it is because there's a diamond behind it and you can use it to cut a window to let the ship flood so you escape. I mean, the diamond on window is semi-reasonable (I guess), but getting the diamond is literally just "click on everything until something happens" design.
I remember really liking the game back in the day, but I feel like it is a pretty strong demonstration of the way in which design quality collapsed as the veterans faded away -- even though the animation and story-telling and sound are all great, the puzzles are not what they used to be.
Another thing that has popped out is how relatively unpurposive the game is compared to the predecessors. I previously gushed about how great MI2's first area is in this respect, but the opposite is true here. Puzzles are rarely advanced by seeing a goal and going for it. When there is any connection between goal and puzzle, the connection often turns out not to be what you were actually going for. Some examples:
(1) You can take a ramrod when you have no reason to need it. You can't actually use the ramrod to load the cannon. You can't use it to hit the fake pirate (his name keeps escaping me), even though that is a totally reasonable use for it (to paddle his bottom if nothing else). Instead, you deal with the pirate by talking to him. This gets you a fake pirate hook before you have any reason to need/want the fake pirate hook (or any reason to expect that would be the fruit of your effort), and nothing else of use. Then you use the cannon to shoot the skeleton pirates (fine, though not related to anything I need to do). This causes a skeleton arm to float by the ship. You can get the arm by using the hook+ramrod, but there's no reason to think the arm will be helpful. As it turns out, the arm has a sword attached to it, and this leads to the first goal plus logic puzzle (cutting the rope on the cannon to create a loose cannon).
(2) When you're in the hold of the ship, there are tons of items that might be of interest but you're not allowed to interact with/take them. You have helium balloons and a hole above you but you can't use the balloons on the hole (for no real reason). The item you need to take is a burlap sack (the least noticeable item) and the reason you need to take it is because there's a diamond behind it and you can use it to cut a window to let the ship flood so you escape. I mean, the diamond on window is semi-reasonable (I guess), but getting the diamond is literally just "click on everything until something happens" design.
I remember really liking the game back in the day, but I feel like it is a pretty strong demonstration of the way in which design quality collapsed as the veterans faded away -- even though the animation and story-telling and sound are all great, the puzzles are not what they used to be.
