Sceptic
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2010
- Messages
- 10,873
One of my biggest pet peeves with accusations of unfairness and walking dead in Sierra games is that a lot of them are simply not true. Failing to save the mouse? absolutely. Missing the boot? nope. You cannot miss the boot. If you don't get it the first time through the desert, you can go back and map the desert properly to see if you missed anything. The cat-chasing-mouse event does not trigger until you have the boot in your inventory. As for not saving the mouse, I don't consider it an unfair scenario. You can criticize it if you consider dead ends bad out of general principle (a sentiment I'm ambivalent about actually) but the reason I don't consider it unfair is that it doesn't happen behind the scenes without you being aware; something happens right in front of you, the cursor takes an appearance that you ONLY see in these scenarios, and there is a clear, visible, telegraphed consequence to not doing anything. I don't know how a modern gamer would approach the situation, but back then nobody simply considered this an acceptable outcome and carried on. And again, if this was time-based and happened even if you didn't have the boot it would still be unfair; but it doesn't. I don't think it's even semi-unfair for these reasons, though I get what you're saying and don't particularly mind if these kinds of dead ends are removed.there were a few semi-unfair walking dead scenarios in later games (such as missing the boot in the desert in KQ5
The bridle from KQ2 is much worse because there's no indication you need it, you can go past the snake by simply killing it, and although it doesn't put you in a strict dead end you'll then spend hours trying to navigate the maze and pulling your hair out without ever knowing there was an alternative solution.