Occasional livestreaming [was Live streaming on YouTube and Twitch every Mon, Wed, and Fri at 6pm Pacific!]

One day troll votes won’t win Request Wednesday.

… but not today

D’oh! I was watching The Vietnam War, so I missed the stream. The archive is not live yet, right? I’m curious to see a new RTS.

What won Request Wednesday?

Trinity. A game from Infocom.

This link will get you to the playback of Monday’s stream.

TRINITY

Hah! That’s so awesome. Trinity was one of my favorite Infocom games. I never replayed it, but I have quite fond memories.

I’m pretty thrilled. I know I played Trinity but I have no recollection of it beyond the basic premise. I’ll definitely be tuning in.

It’s Request Wednesday! This winner for this week is the Infocom classic Trinity - Abaondonware link.

You can find the Twitch stream here.

You can find the non-night mode YouTube stream here.

You can find the YouTube night mode stream here.

Trinity was a Request Wednesday winner. If you have a game that is on Steam or that Tom owns on the PS4 that you would like him to stream, you can leave a vote in the comments section of one of the videos he’s posted on YouTube or stop by the Monday or Friday stream and submit your vote in the chat.

So that happened.

I’d love for some of the folks who voted for it, such as @justaguy2, to explain why they wanted a stream of Trinity. Obviously I didn’t fully appreciate it in the short time I played, but what am I missing? It just looked like another text adventure mired in the usual tortured adventure game logic.

-Tom

I missed the vote but it was a little thrill for me to see an Infocom game getting streamed. I realized while I was watching that I had played it, some aspects were familiar, but I couldn’t remember much of the game. I may never have beaten it, some of their games just defeated me.

You mentioned during the stream that you just don’t care for adventure game logic, and that’s fair. There’s definitely a mindset involved in playing through them, and my adventure game muscle has definitely atrophied - I had trouble getting through Full Throttle Remastered recently, and I remember just blazing (ha!) through that one twenty or so years ago. But going back to them is almost like wrapping in an old blanket, or eating comfort food. Newer puzzle type games also give me that feeling too though, I find. Stuff like The Room on iOS or The Witness or the Layton games on handheld. They’ve just boiled the old adventure games down to their essence and give you that little rush of victory without much story wrapped around it.

I tried playing it last night. I found a room full of icicles and broke one off to carry with me. It melted. When I wanted an icicle later on, I went back there and tried to break off another one. Nope. That was the only icicle in a room full of icicles that I was allowed to take, so now I couldn’t win. I would have rage uninstalled if it was worth the click to free up 178kb of disk space.

I have good memories of the family getting together to solve adventure game puzzles, but I don’t think we would have bothered if we knew how illogical they were. Back then you thought you weren’t smart enough to win. Now you can instantly look up a walkthrough and see that it’s all nonsense.

Maybe you had to grow up with these things to see their charm. Where some see illogical systems, I see games that follow their own logic. The trick is getting yourself into the game’s (or more accurately, its creator’s) headspace. Sometimes you just try anything you can think of and hope it makes sense retroactively. And sometimes you just don’t get there. I never beat Starcross or Deadline, they were just too tough for me. Even the point and clicks could be tricky - I remember using the phones hintline for the first Gabriel Knight game. Those were different times. I wouldn’t have the patience now.

I’m afraid if I get too far into Jane Jensen’s headspace I’ll completely lose touch with reality.

But seriously, that always bugged me when I play adventure games. You’re expected to read the mind of the creator and I could never do that. It’s worst when it uses a parser. You don’t just have to read their mind, you have to express their ideas using the same words they would.

It was a fun game 30 years ago and text adventures haven’t really aged well and I have no idea on god’s green earth why anyone would want to watch someone stream the playing of one for an hour.

In the worst cases, yes. But I think the best designers weren’t trying to create arbitrary difficulty by making games more difficult than needed by forcing you along a narrow path. Generally speaking, I think LucasArts games were better than Sierra On-Line in this regard, partly because of the SCUMM interface and getting away from the parser completely, but also by design. I’ve always been partial to stuff that Gilbert, Grossman and Schafer were doing.

As far as text adventures go, Infocom were really the best about trying to make it easy to actually communicate with the game. It started a little rough but moved away from the whole “subject + verb” two word parser and accepting more natural language commands. Not always 100% successfully, but they got pretty good.

Well that’s the thing, we weren’t just watching, we were participating.

It’s Friday and tonight Tom is streaming Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire - website link.

You can find the Twitch stream here.

You can find the non-night mode YouTube stream here.

And you can find the YouTube night mode stream here.

Voting for Request Wednesday is now open so if you’d like Tom to stream a game that’s on Steam or that he owns on PS4, why not stop by and vote for what game Tom will stream on Wednesday.

The new week has started and that means Tom is streaming. Tonight’s game is Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire - website link

You can find the Twitch stream here.

You can find the non-night mode YouTube stream here.

And you can find the YouTube night mode stream here.

The draw for Request Wednesday will be held tonight at 7:00 pm Pacific so why not stop by before that and vote for what game Tom will stream on Wednesday.

The Request Wednesday winner this week is DEFCON.

If Tom plays this without McMaster, I ragequit.