SerratedBiz said:
LO-fuckin-L.
Sierra got it SO WRONG. In fact, they got it so wrong for so long that by the time they realized what they were doing wrong and corrected it, it was already too late for them.
Leisure Suit Larry 2 has been mentioned, so I'll iterate on that. At one point you find yourself on a lifeboat and need to survive for days (weeks?) relying only on what items you've hoarded in the game up until then.
Like was mentioned, if you don't pick up a 32-gallon "cup" of soda at the start of the game, you'll die of thirst. (As we all know, logic and physics are not reliable when playing some Sierra adventure games, so let's just ignore the cases where they get grossly violated.) But that's not good enough for Sierra. You'll need to eat something too. That means taking the dip from the ship first. BUT, here's the kicker, if you DO take the dip, you'll die from food poisoning! Don't get me starting on the "pixel-hunt" with the sewing kit, or how the endgame only recognizes a strict set of commands at very strict locations. So much for vocabulary, I guess.
Not good enough? Play Police Quest. The "hoops" you're made to go through while playing the Police Quest games are numerous and annoying. Most of them make sense as Police Quest was partially intended as a training guide for police cadets, but there are times you just want to strangle Jim Walsh. Codename: Iceman is even worse.
Best example of Jim Walsh being an ass: You're asked for ID by a guard. You hand over the (fake) ID. Guard checks the ID, finds it OK, then hands it back to you. BUT, if you don't check your ID AFTER it is handed back to you, you lose. But you don't get to know that fact until much later in the game.
Gold Rush is the worst offender of them all. I don't have the heart to list how excruciating it is to play that game.
At least Quest For Glory often gave you fair warning before throwing you into a situation you could get killed in.
But then people are propably asking, do I rabidly support LucasArts's stance of "cannot be killed, never ever forever"? No. Because once you realize that you can't die in an adventure game, there's absolutely NOTHING stopping you from trying whatever you can think of, and combining everything with everything. Because you KNOW that whatever happens will not screw you over, you will not have to re-load a previously saved game. At worst you are simply given a chance to try again.
And this is precisely how every single adventure game released these days acts. Sierra On-Line went so completely overboard with their "Everything can and will kill you for no reason whatsoever" mentality, that nearly all adventure game designers have avoided it like the plague. But by doing so they have completely gone overboard in the other direction. This is why the new Sam & Max games by Telltale are boring as fuck, because even though you're packing a fucking GUN that you can point and click at whatever and whomever you want, you can't screw yourself over with it.
This has to be balanced. Very few games managed to do that. It wasn't until 1996 in Space Quest 6 that Sierra finally implemented a "OOPS" feature in an adventure game, allowing you to undo a stupid mistake that got you killed. A feature that, IIRC, was disabled at key moments in the game. That meant that while you were (mostly) protected by your own in-game stupidity, you weren't immortal either. But it was just too late. People were catching on to the frustrating gameplay of the Sierra games, and the gamer's attention was shifting away to First-Person-Shooters, so it was inevitable that their time was up.
) in a way it provided much more definitive feedback that what you are doing is wrong than the Lucasfilm method where nothing would kill you and you wouldn't be sure if persevering in trying to do something was correct or not.
Also horror games like Black Mirror would be strange without death.