Forums > Submission Feedback > bloomer's Dracula review

Awesome review. I've never played this one, but I know what you mean when you wonder how people could have made it through some games without clues. I sometimes go back and re-play an old game, and wonder how on earth I ever managed to figure out how to beat it. Some "puzzles" are really obtuse. Especially when they don't really seem like they should be puzzles at all.

//Zig

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Thanks Zig. Yeah, I was just having this discussion at infiction.org, about whether there are adventure games around that nobody ever beat without clues.

For instance, if at the playtest stage you find nobody is getting through your game (and without offering the playtesters any help), I think you either need to keep trying playtester(s) to verify that someone can do it unaided, or maybe tweak your game. But I wonder in the case of a lot of older games whether they ever passed (or were subjected to) this test?

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Sometimes I wonder if the difference between a bad (or merely decent) game and a good or great one is the amount of attention developers pay to their testers. I imagine that most of the stuff that makes bad games bad is pointed out by testers and the developers just make a judgment call based on the resources they have and publishing deadlines.

That's something I wonder about for newer games, I mean. I think a lot of older games didn't have a budget for testers, outside of maybe "My brother played most of the way through it before he hit a wall and I figure most people are at least as smart as he is so the game must be good to go."

Obviously, there were some people who knew what they were doing and they moved the genre forward, but older interactive fiction benefitted from the entire industry being pretty new and novel. There wasn't a lot of competition from Mario and Zelda, Halo and Call of Duty, so if a player hit a wall he had more incentive to keep trying and eventually to get through it... the same way that when I was a kid I'd keep playing the same game until I kicked its ass but now I won't spend long stuck on a game before I look up a FAQ or move onto something else.

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2

Really good review. I noticed you mentioned no internet to help those who were stuck. You may remember there were BBS back then. One of my favorites was Questbusters magazine which helped me through many early games.

Age is a condition not a state of mind.