I think the audience that was targeted when hit the road came out, which was successful, could be targeted once again with culture shock. People like funny games, Sam & Max could be enjoyed by a wide range of people. Are telltale trying to get some kind of half-life like sales? I think the entire Sam & Max audience is reasonably big in the scale of people purchasing games from telltale.
Okay. True. Production costs are also a lot lower so they don't need that big an audience. I am just highly pessimistic about all kinds of things, so I'm probably underestimating a lot.
Just played through it, took about 2.5h. Personally I found the difficulty level to be pretty much spot on, though I wanted the rabbit do some funky things more. Overall I really enjoyed the atmosphere and witty dialogue. As a foreigner my english doesn't quite twist that far when wielding it myself but I can sure understand and enjoy it.
I think some people feel that episodic games are too short because people are not used to episodic content yet. 2.5h for one episode may seem little for some, but if every episodi is as long, then I just got 6*2.5h=15h of game entertainment for my $40. Just my 2c.
I actually don't think it's a length problem - it's a pacing problem. Episode 1 is great and short but it has the pacing of a much longer adventure like Hit The Road. Things happen quite slowly, that is. And because things happen quite slowly, over not much time, not much actually happens in the game.
I'm not a TV series fanboy, but I think you can look to these to learn a few lessons about pacing - the TV series was pretty hyperactive because it only had 10 minutes in which to tell its story. But tell it it did and sometimes it was surprising just how much STUFF they could fit into that 10 minutes.
With a longer game like Hit the Road you can afford to slow things right down because by the end of it, there's still plenty of stuff that's happened and plenty to look back on.
With a 3 hour game like Culture Shock I think what's needed is a slightly faster pace so that by the end, even though it didn't take very long, it seems like lots has happened.
Would you like some nicely designed puzzles which make logical sense and fit into the context of the game, OR would you like an obscene amount of illogical pointless puzzles which make the game more of a chore than fun?
I personally don't enjoy having every little thing turn into a pointless quest with the logic of 3 year olds. Hmm... I need to get out of the office... First, find the door knob (hidden in the fruit box), find my magnet for later (stuck down the back of the old couch, need enormous ball of twine and paper clip from Kentucky to pick up), etc.
I've found the difficulty level for Bone and Sam & Max to be just about right so far. I'd rather pay for quality, not quantity.
Would you like some nicely designed puzzles which make logical sense and fit into the context of the game, OR would you like an obscene amount of illogical pointless puzzles which make the game more of a chore than fun?
why cant you have nicely designed puzzles that make logical sense, fit in with the game and are difficult? Take the psychoanalysis puzzle.. that was great and required thinking..
Here are just some important points from a recent Retronauts podcast dedicated to Sam and Max Hit the Road, that I think should be considered. They do conclude in the end that they believe in Telltale and think Telltale will do just fine.
A: "Sam and Max is the one game so far, that I love! Sam and Max is awesome."
B: "Well that's going to make an interesting podcast, I really like the graphics and the animation of Sam and Max; I love the writing, but I don't think it's all that fun.
A: "Do you just not like adventure games?"
B: "Because it's an adventure game. And as much as like the idea of adventure games, they ultimately boil down to this pointless BS where you're just like clicking on stuff and hoping that you can make compilations and connections. "
C: "Yes! I was thinking today..."
B: "I was playing Sam and Max this weekend... and I kind of had this epiphany...this remembrance of what the genre was like and why it's dead now, why people don't play it anymore. There's just too much of... I'll just combine stuff and then eventually I'll get something right."
C: "There's this peculiar dream-logic in adventure games where the solution you're acting out only makes sense in adventure games."
B: "It makes sense retroactively, it's like you do it, and then you say, 'Oh, I kinda see how that happened, but it wasn't really intuitive in terms of logic or gameplay."
...
A: "You just start sweeping your cursor."
B: "That's what happens in every adventure game, at some point you get to the area where you're like, 'Alright I'm completely stuck, so I'm going to spend an hour making every possible click combination."
...
A: "(The illogical adventure puzzles) felt maybe a little more offensive in Sam and Max because the rest of the game is so good."
C: "...there was a certain masochism to the logic..."
...
B: "...I feel good when I saw a solution that had a logical build-up, when I solve a puzzle that is kinda arbitrary, I don't feel satisfaction... I'm just annoyed that they made me jump through so many stupid hoops."
...
C: "There's a strangeness, where if you played enough adventure games, you would be able to start to thinking as crazy as they did, to kind of circumvent their craziness."
...
B: "...(in the 90s) adventure games had become so insular and so recursive, so that only if you played adventure games, then you spoke the language. In a way adventure games became as insular and stagnant as fighting games, like you can't be good at a fighting game now, unless you played all the fighting games and you really master them. Adventure games were about the same way... a kind of niche genre that continues to fold in on itself until it eventually dies."
And if anybody asks, the reason why I bring outside gamer opinions in here is just for a little perspective... We need to face the reality that Sam and Max fans discussing something in a Sam and Max forum do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the majority of gamers. It's the equivalent to Star Trek fans discussing whether or not Star Trek should change certain aspects of their shows to appeal to a greater audience... in the end, the creators rely on more objective opinions to know what their audience really thinks. We can go on and on about whether or not we think there is a sufficient fanbase to make profitable games of a certain type, but saying something like "I know I'll play it, and a couple of my friends would too if the difficulty were back to Hit the Road levels" is really not the most reliable indicator of reality.
Basically my argument boils down to this:
It will be more difficult, but you are not going to get to the level of past adventure games where you get stuck for an hour or more on a puzzle, nor reach those insane levels of illogicality.
Dan Connors, CEO of Telltale, on where he expects episodic gaming to be like in the future:
"The more things that pull people into playing an episode, and sustaining that episodic feel where you're always getting new content and stories, that's growing. You know, on Monday I can play Sam & Max, on Tuesday I can play Half-Life, on Wednesday I can play Penny Arcade, and on Thursday maybe I can play the new Simpsons game. It starts to validate it as a way of getting content in a way that's an intelligent evolution from television, gaming, web surfing--bringing it all together. There is a critical mass approaching."
A: "Do you just not like adventure games?"
B: "Because it's an adventure game. And as much as like the idea of adventure games, they ultimately boil down to this pointless BS where you're just like clicking on stuff and hoping that you can make compilations and connections. "
C: "Yes! I was thinking today..."
B: "I was playing Sam and Max this weekend... and I kind of had this epiphany...this remembrance of what the genre was like and why it's dead now, why people don't play it anymore. There's just too much of... I'll just combine stuff and then eventually I'll get something right."
Such stupid comments like these from Retronauts makes me wanna punch peope in the face.
1. If it boils down to "Just clicking on stuff" when you´re playing, then you are either playing a crappy adventuregame (Simon the Sorceror, Discworld 2), or you aren´t really interested in the game.
2. The adventuregenre IS NOT DEAD. Nor has it been dead. It would be pretty impressive for a dead genre to just recently have gotten games like Fahrenheit, Dreamfall, Broken Sword 4, Bone 1&2, Sam & Max and have upcoming games like Sam & Max ep 2-6, Bone Episode 3, Runaway 2, Overclocked, A Vampyre Story, Omikron 2, Heavy Rain etc...
I wish people who have no knowledge about the genre would stfu. :mad:
If you just emphasize that only adventure gamers can talk about adventure games, you just PROVE their point. Especially this point:
"...adventure games had become so insular and so recursive, so that only if you played adventure games, then you spoke the language. In a way adventure games became as insular and stagnant as fighting games, like you can't be good at a fighting game now, unless you played all the fighting games and you really master them. Adventure games were about the same way... a kind of niche genre that continues to fold in on itself until it eventually dies."
Anyway, their point about how it was previously a dead genre is in terms of where they exist in the wider world of video games--15-20 years ago, they were probably a VERY big part of the video game world--you were not a gamer unless you had played a Sierra "Quest" game, or a Lucasarts SCUMM game. Go into a video game store, and there would be a adventure section full of those. In the past decade however, I would say most video gamers consider it more of a niche genre, go into any video game store, at least in America, and you won't find any such section today.
And I would argue that the episodic model and differences in the Telltale adventure gamers is the beginning of a resurgence of such games, with changes that really alter things. If you listen to the podcast for example, you'll learn a theory about why Telltale games only have one "verb" for the cursor, compared to past adventure games that had "talk to, pick up, use, look at" and how this change makes it much more intuitive for all gamers.
Face it, if you are an experienced adventure gamer (I am), every time you entered a room, your brain would automatically go into the "adventure-game trance":
1. Right click/navigate cursor to "look at" verb
2. Left click object to "look at object"
3. Right click/navigate cursor to "pick up" verb
4. Left click object to "pick up object"
4a. Object goes into your inventory.
4b. Object does not go into your inventory.
5. If object can't be picked up, right click/navigate cursor to "use" verb
6. Left click object to "use object"
7. Repeat steps 1-6 for for every other object in the room.
Veteran adventure gamers expect this activity and don't mind it, but it's not really a stretch of an imagination to imagine why people don't find this activity fun. Making the mouse automatically pick up something if it can be picked up really cuts out a lot of this activity, but also shortens the game a bit, and I've seen some people on this forum actually request the old implementation.
If you just emphasize that only adventure gamers can talk about adventure games, you just PROVE their point.
I din´t say that you have to be an adventuregamer. I said that you have to be someone interested in playing an adventure game. If other genres like the strategygenre was trying to satisfy non-interested games like him in retronauts, then there wouldnt be any Total War-games, just hordes of Command&Conquer-clones.
1. If it boils down to "Just clicking on stuff" when you´re playing, then you are either playing a crappy adventuregame (Simon the Sorceror, Discworld 2), or you aren´t really interested in the game.
I stand by my statement that Sam & Max: Culture Shock is still missing something. There is a lack of depth/lack of creativity when it comes to the puzzles that needs to be addressed. The ease of the puzzles is a part of it, but not the whole part. I felt some of the puzzles to be very bland and not very creative.
I liked the game, don't get me wrong, they are on the right track, but if I were to compare the game to a swimming pool, then Sam & Max would have about 6 inches of water in it, while some Lucas Arts classics were about 10 feet deep.
I also felt the plot line was too linear, and that there should have been a couple of sub plots thrown in for good measure.
I really can't say much about the difficulty of S&M because I have yet to play beyond the demo (waiting for the Paypal option to come back) but I have some thoughts about that in general:
1. Why is it that people always say you can't be successful with adventures only aimed at adventure gamers anymore. I can't really believe the market became smaller. I know lots of people here (Germany) who enjoy adventures and we're in our twenties now so we have more money to spend on games than we had when we first played them. And there *were* good and successful adventures in recent years (take Runaway or Tony Tough). I guess since sequels are made for both of them they must have been successful. But they weren't made by Americans and it seems that in the US there is this whole mindset of "adventures need to appeal to every gamer or they won't be successful". Well, I don't get it. And I completely agree with Tobias (nice name ). I'm not good with strategy games or first person shooters but I don't think that game developers of these games would ever consider making it easier so that I enjoy them.
2. I don't understand the trend of adventure games. I didn't need a walkthrough for HtR or Day of the Tentacle. I think that their puzzles were so well designed and logical in their own world that it was just rewarding to figure them out. However I completely stopped playing Syberia 2 which is supposed to be targeted at a non-adventurer audience because I just didn't get it. The puzzles were so badly designed that I never knew what I was supposed to do. I'm standing in a wood and need to make fire. Oh, yeah, it makes perfectly sense that I need to walk two screens away to find wood. Right...
Now, I'm pretty sure that the puzzles in S&M won't be like that at all because there are some very good designers working on that. My point is: I don't get how anybody could prefer a game like Syberia to a game like HtR, except for people who don't like cartoon games. But I think *if* you like cartoon games you also enjoy a certain amount of craziness to puzzles because it's just so rewarding. And no, I'm *not* talking about search for the one-pixel-chewing gum kind of puzzles but for well designed crazy-but-logical puzzles like the ones in Day of the Tentacle.
3. Having said all of this I want to say that I have confidence that the designers will make the coming episodes harder. I just wonder... if the difficulty level is as easy as most people are claiming, why does it say on the download side that it's difficulty 4 out of 6? I really wonder what 1 out of 6 is? Watching a movie?
Ok, I'll stop talking now until after I played the whole game. Thanks for making this game in any case. I know I will enjoy it even though I might wish for more.
numble, I know your question wasn't pointed at me but for me an example of classic Lucas Arts puzzles is when in Day of the Tentacle you're stuck in the tree in the future and to get down you need to convince George Washington to cut down the tree in the past by painting the fruits red so it looks like a cherry tree. These are puzzles I can still laugh about and talk to friends who also played it years later. And for me that is part of the fun of adventure games.
numble, I know your question wasn't pointed at me but for me an example of classic Lucas Arts puzzles is when in Day of the Tentacle you're stuck in the tree in the future and to get down you need to convince George Washington to cut down the tree in the past by painting the fruits red so it looks like a cherry tree. These are puzzles I can still laugh about and talk to friends who also played it years later. And for me that is part of the fun of adventure games.
Tobias
I would agree with that actually. Since you haven't played the game yet, I won't reveal/spoil it, but I will say that I think the last puzzle in Culture Shock is actually more difficult and complex than the final puzzle in Day of the Tentacle.
Any way, I think I'm through here. My only points have been that yes, I do expect the games to be more difficult in the future, but no, I don't expect them to be quite like the games of the past.
I really absolutely just love adventure games but realize that if more quality games of these are to be made, some things need to be sacrificed for that to happen. I would be happy if changes don't have to be made, but the reality, at least in America, is that people haven't been buying these things that much.
I haven't played Psychonauts yet, but from what I gather, Tim Schafer--legendary creator of Grim Fandango and Full Throttle--basically adds a TON of action/platformer elements into it while still preserving his adventure essentials of humor, dialog and story. There are a couple of puzzles I heard, but aren't major and aren't hard. But the game, like Culture Shock, received rave reviews everywhere due especially to its writing, humor, and characters--Psychonauts even won the equivalent of the Academy Award in Britain for best screenplay for a video game. I can only imagine how he would be ripped to shreds by you guys that demand harder puzzles and wishing that you can get stuck every once in awhile.
Maybe you guys really are just very hardcore adventure gamers that have tons of experience from playing lots and lots of adventure games (Sorry Incognito, but I only recognize Bone, Sam and Max, and A Vampyre Story from your list of games----and I have played every Lucasarts adventure, a bunch of Sierra games, Return to Zork, Zork GI and the Last Express, amongst others) so maybe puzzles in those games take only 15 minutes of thinking for you guys. For me, I would say I often found myself stuck for an hour or two on a puzzle at a time (maybe because I played them at such a young age), and I would end up resorting to a walkthrough more often than not. But if your 15 minute puzzles take me (a fairly experienced adventure gamer) an hour or 2, imagine how extremely difficult and put off somebody that is new to the genre is.
It looks like nearly everyone on Gametap has played Culture Shock, and that looks great, since it looks like before S&M, Gametap players don't really play much adventure games according to the rankings. If I can get into my "dirty political and strategic mode," I'd say this bode wells for a Season 2. If Telltale doesn't release it to Gametap, a lot of Gametap players will be thirsty to open their wallets anyway (they appear to be the type to be willing to spend $60-$120/year for what amounts to a video game rental service already). And if they do give it to Gametap, Telltale can charge a ton of money since they know how popular and valuable they are to Gametap. Win/Win.
(Sorry, I've exposed that disdainful greedy and conniving part of me that now desires swiss cheese...)
No one demanded Psychonauts to be harder since it was more of an actionplattformer than an adventuregame, and as such hade enough challenge.
But Telltale choosed to make an adventuregame, and because of that they need to build to challenge around the puzzles. Episode 1 is getting good reviews, but if you look at the criticism against the game it is in nearly all reviews about the low difficulty-level and the gamelength. And everyone understands the importance of reviewratings.
Increasing the difficulty of the puzzles is one thing, but stopping spelling out the answers to the puzzles in 10 foot high flashing neon lights would also help. It would be nice to have to think about a puzzle rather then just follow instructions. I know not all the puzzles in Culture Shock were like that but I think the majority were.
Jokieman: In your opinion, what is an example of a puzzle with creativity and depth from a Lucasarts classic?
Ok I'm rewriting this, So ignore everything I wrote before.
#1 The Game was too Linear. There was only one way to end the game, there were no choices to be made. This caused a lack of depth because there wasn't more than 1 way to solve the game. In just about every Lucas Game I've played there was more than 1 way to solve the game. There were lots of puzzles, some of which were essential, and some of which weren't. There were some puzzles that were strictly "gag" puzzles. Puzzles that once were solved were meant to elicit a chuckle or an OMG. (Like Guybrush falling off the cliff, with a little GAME OVER being displayed on the screen. Then suddenly Guybrush flies back onto the screen, makes a joke about the Rubber Tree. and it inevitably puts a smile on your face. After you get freaked out because you didn't save the game in the last 2 hours. hehe)
#2 The puzzles were easy enough to figure out in most cases, that any 8 year old kid could have done them. They were too easy, but worse, they weren't very imaginative. They were way too logical in a real world sense. (The Puzzles did not match up to the craziness of Sam & Max. A talking dog and a talking rabbit do not think the same way people do, yet in order to solve the puzzles, you didn't have to think like sam & max, you had to think like you normally do. This does not add to the immersiveness of the game.) Someone else mentioned the DOTT puzzle (and yeah that was a really good puzzle.) Any of the Lucas games are FULL of puzzle's like the DOTT puzzle, they required real thinking to solve them, and they required you to try and think like the character you were playing to solve them. Sam & Max lacked this kind of creativity with it's puzzles.
#3 There were at least 2 instances in Sam & Max where you can ask the same question over and over a couple of times and get different answers. In some Lucas Games they used these as Dialogue puzzles where you keep asking the same question and you keep getting a different answer until finally the character gives in and helps you out. That's creative, that's thinking smart. In the case of Guybrush, he was an annoying kid, and when he kept "nagging" the "adults" in the game like a "kid" is supposed to do, the adults finally gave in, like they're supposed to do, that's immersiveness that Sam & Max lacks.
#4 A game as an Episode should follow certain successful episodic rules. If you're going to have a game that runs like a T.V. show, then it needs to follow a T.V. series formula. We'll use the XFILES here because I don't think anyone can say that the Xfiles wasn't a good show. Fact of the matter is, Xfiles had one big overall plot, with a lot of sub-plots that would occasionally advance the overall plot closer to a resolution. Sam & Max had no sub plots (and you know, even all the old Lucas Games usually had Sub Plots. that tied into the overall plot of the story, and Sam & Max is missing that here.)
The lack of Sub plots gave the game an overall feeling of moving too slow, like others commented. The pace of the game is fine, if it's a full feature game, but as a small episodic game, the pace was incredibly slow. episodes need to have a lot of stuff happening in a short amount of time, that you just don't have with Sam & Max or the Bone games, and I'm not the only one who feels this way.
#5: Sam & Max weren't Edgy enough. There was some wittiness going on, and yes, I got all of the jokes, but again, the pacing of the overall game was too slow, there was none of the raciness I was expecting from Sam or Max. I mean if you had to rate this game by today's standards, it'd be given a solid G rating. I was hoping for something more along the lines of PG or PG13. Sam Put me to sleep with the slow pacing of his Bogart-type voice at times.
All of these things add up to a lack of depth. Like I said, If Sam & Max: Culture Shock, were a pool, then that pool would be about 6 inches deep. Compare that pool to the Secrets of Monkey Island, say, and we're talking about a 10 feet deep pool.
And one more thing: Towards the end of the game I started noticing more graphic/sound glitches that were going on in almost every scene. Made me feel like the game hadn't been properly tested for bugs and that it didn't receive a proper "final touch" before it went out. This will be another problem with an Episodic game platform because of the time constraints in getting rid of all the bugs.
i think there is a very fine line between challenging and fun puzzles and just plain bad design.
as with most adventure games you end up trying every item with every clickable thing in the game..not good gameplay in my book.
you mention series formuals like x-files and things.
this is probably just a "pilot" episode. i am not sure but i sortoff expect the next episodes to have an overall plot. atleast thats what i hope^^
Everything important has already been said. After finishing Episode 1 i have to admit there is some bad aftertaste, playing the game was refreshing but it was a very very short refreshment. No Item Combining Puzzles, etc.
I really hope Telltale will make the puzzles harder in Episode 2 as they were not challenging at all. Don´t get me wrong, the game is an enjoyment to play for old adventure enthusiasts, but i miss getting stuck, having to think my way out like in the old times.
For the glitches, yes there seem to be some memory leaks towards the end of the Game (Where you face Brady). That added with some animation errors (Missing running animation when doing certain things in dream sequence) etc, leads to the fact that it hasnt been tested properly.
Well I'm going to give my 2 random cents.
Adventure games are a bit of a niche market but they have a huge potential.
I think it has lots of potential though since the market for female gamers is pretty untapped. (now only if we could get girls to stop blowing so much cash on make-up and crap like that then we could get more of this money into the adventure game industry.... ok ok lofty goals and to some members a bit sexist but I'm 1/2 kidding anyway) I don't think watering down these games because they might be too difficult for beginnners? (somehow I'm reminded of doki doki panic. I'm a bit offended at nindendo for that sham but thats a little off topic)
I don't think that this type of game is dying out but it might need to change a little. I personally don't like how verbs have been stripped from the games. I think it allows for more humor and can sometimes increase the difficulty a bit.
It's like if you had a fighting game where all the moves were mapped to one button... ok ok! it isn't that bad but I barely had to think this episode. The puzzles were just too transparent Still I give the game somewhere in the range of an 8/10.
I hope that we can see the increase in difficulty by next episode.
If you listen to the podcast for example, you'll learn a theory about why Telltale games only have one "verb" for the cursor, compared to past adventure games that had "talk to, pick up, use, look at" and how this change makes it much more intuitive for all gamers.
Face it, if you are an experienced adventure gamer (I am), every time you entered a room, your brain would automatically go into the "adventure-game trance":
1. Right click/navigate cursor to "look at" verb
2. Left click object to "look at object"
3. Right click/navigate cursor to "pick up" verb
4. Left click object to "pick up object"
4a. Object goes into your inventory.
4b. Object does not go into your inventory.
5. If object can't be picked up, right click/navigate cursor to "use" verb
6. Left click object to "use object"
7. Repeat steps 1-6 for for every other object in the room.
Veteran adventure gamers expect this activity and don't mind it, but it's not really a stretch of an imagination to imagine why people don't find this activity fun. Making the mouse automatically pick up something if it can be picked up really cuts out a lot of this activity, but also shortens the game a bit, and I've seen some people on this forum actually request the old implementation.
I think the last puzzle of the game was probably the one that showed best what puzzles in Sam & Max should be like, because it had you think along the lines of a classic comic/comedic Tex Avery-like stereotype, which makes absolute sense in a comic adventure.
I hate hunting widgets and connecting them to thing-a-ma-jigs to pass by the arbitrarily puzzle-like keeper of the gate. I thought the puzzles in Episode 1 were intelligent, well related to the story, creative, and fun.
I also hate bashing my brain into a wall because the relation between two objects is so obscure that I can't tell it's a solution to a puzzle until after the solution is complete (or I cheat and find the answer).
Fact of the matter is, Xfiles had one big overall plot, with a lot of sub-plots that would occasionally advance the overall plot closer to a resolution. Sam & Max had no sub plots (and you know, even all the old Lucas Games usually had Sub Plots. that tied into the overall plot of the story, and Sam & Max is missing that here.)
Given only one episode has come out, how do you know the seeds of the uber-plot haven't been planted in Episode 1?
The Game was too Linear. There was only one way to end the game, there were no choices to be made. This caused a lack of depth because there wasn't more than 1 way to solve the game. In just about every Lucas Game I've played there was more than 1 way to solve the game.
Adventure Games by their very nature are linear. It's not an RPG. there is a story to be told, and other than splitting into 3 separate paths in Fate of Atlantis (which all had the same endgame sequence regardless) I cannot recall a single LucasArts adventure with multiple ways to complete the game. Sure there were the occasional bonus screen like when you sunk the ship in MI2, and the occasional puzzle may have has 2 solutions (fight / talk in Last Crusade), but I'm not recalling anything that could be called multiple solutions to 'solve the game' in any of the LEC classics.
I thought having all 3 poppers able to be interacted with in any order (even if they can't be dehypnotised in any order) was great - really gave the feel of openness and, dare I say it... non linearity.
The puzzles were easy enough to figure out in most cases, that any 8 year old kid could have done them. They were too easy, but worse, they weren't very imaginative. They were way too logical in a real world sense.
I thought the psychoanalysis and dream puzzles were absolutely outstanding, at least equal to any other inspired puzzle in games gone by.
And for most people having illogical puzzles is the worst thing possible in an adventure. I assume you mean we didn't have to think like an anthromorphic gumshoe dog to solve puzzles - and yet the very first puzzle was solved by unloading your gun on an inanimate object.
#4 A game as an Episode should follow certain successful episodic rules. If you're going to have a game that runs like a T.V. show, then it needs to follow a T.V. series formula. We'll use the XFILES here because I don't think anyone can say that the Xfiles wasn't a good show. Fact of the matter is, Xfiles had one big overall plot, with a lot of sub-plots that would occasionally advance the overall plot closer to a resolution. Sam & Max had no sub plots (and you know, even all the old Lucas Games usually had Sub Plots. that tied into the overall plot of the story, and Sam & Max is missing that here.)
Maybe you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Telltale have said that there will be an overall story arc tying the season together. In the context of the season, perhaps Culture Shock was the sub-plot.
The lack of Sub plots gave the game an overall feeling of moving too slow, like others commented. The pace of the game is fine, if it's a full feature game, but as a small episodic game, the pace was incredibly slow. episodes need to have a lot of stuff happening in a short amount of time, that you just don't have with Sam & Max or the Bone games, and I'm not the only one who feels this way.
See, I've only seen you comment about the game being to slow. I thought it was incredibly well paced - every location had at least one puzzle and at least one NPC to interact with. To me the interactivity density was wonderful. Things to see, do, interact with, talk to in every location. And to-ing and fro-ing to collect objects to solve puzzles with was kept to a minimum - it's needless traipsing that in my mind upsets the pace of the game. And wouldn't sub-plots, by their very nature, actually slow the pace of the story advancement down?
I cannot get my head around how you feel the pace was dragging. It was incredibly tight as far as I'n concerned.
Anyway, to each there own. Just pointing out that there are others of us, who are seasoned adventuregamers too, who do not share your viewpoint on the "faults" you have raised.
Ok, I finished the game and first of all let me say that I loved it, laughed a lot and am looking forward to the next episodes. But since this is the puzzle difficulty thread, I have some things to add.
*** POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD! ****
First of all, numble, which puzzle do you mean when you say that the last puzzle was more complex than the DOTT puzzle? Because I thought both of the last puzzles (dream sequence and soda poppers) were quite creative but VERY easy. I didn't have to think much about it and as somebody else said it seemed as if it was written in bold flashing letters what I was supposed to do.
I thought that all the puzzles were very clever, logical, and some of them even really unique and hilarious. There were no badly designed puzzles and you never had to walk for ages just to complete puzzles. So well done there. But still I had some problems with them (spoilers in brackets):
1. Too many hints! And I'm talking about hints being given without asking for it (
Like when I only need to talk to Sybil to get diagnosed for the former childstar thing instead of having to give the form to her
)
2. Sometimes there were just not enough possibilities so it was easy to do the right thing accidentally (
for example I put the cheese in the box of one of the soda poppers without thinking much about it and was kind of disappointed to see that this results in him getting knocked out even though I did not think about this at all. It might help if I have to do some more preparation before.
).
3. Some puzzles could have been awesome but missed it, again because of not enough possibilities. (
Like the first dream sequence that could have been really hard (finding all the right things) but it was enough to just get two things right (Max was obvious because of the peers thing and then you just had to find the birthday cake). I thought I'd need to get the right thing everywhere. And this would have been so much better. However the ink puzzle was better here.
)
4. Finally sometimes it seemed that I didn't have any chance to do anything but the right thing (
Like in the second dream sequence where except for the Max head puzzle I felt like I had no chance to not do the right thing
).
I know that 2-4 sound like the same thing without the spoilers. Sorry for that.
So I guess what I want to say is: The puzzles were great but maybe you should really consider only helping if asked for. Because otherwise you ruin the whole fun of "getting the puzzle".
I thought having all 3 poppers able to be interacted with in any order (even if they can't be dehypnotised in any order) was great - really gave the feel of openness and, dare I say it... non linearity.
actually you can, if you dehypnotise whizzer before specs you will get a different chase sequence.
Something else too add to the difficulty debate. I'm hoping the episodes will be cumulative eg the locations and/or items in one episode will be brought over to the next. While this might not work for some things, I think it would slowly increase the difficulty as we have more items to choose. I guess it would be hard to keep every location but I imagine the office and the two shops will be kept on for possibly the rest of the season. In past adventure games you often picked something up simply because you could and then find it to be useful later, in the episodic format you pick something up to solve a puzzle in the short term then are presently surprised when you find it solves something in a later episode. I think this is something that could work really well if done right.
Comments
Your evidence is overwhelming. I surrender!
I think some people feel that episodic games are too short because people are not used to episodic content yet. 2.5h for one episode may seem little for some, but if every episodi is as long, then I just got 6*2.5h=15h of game entertainment for my $40. Just my 2c.
Well that's probably a valid point!
True though I have bought both HL2 Episode 1 and Sin Episode 1 and they are both substantially longer, though substantially more expensive.
I'm not a TV series fanboy, but I think you can look to these to learn a few lessons about pacing - the TV series was pretty hyperactive because it only had 10 minutes in which to tell its story. But tell it it did and sometimes it was surprising just how much STUFF they could fit into that 10 minutes.
With a longer game like Hit the Road you can afford to slow things right down because by the end of it, there's still plenty of stuff that's happened and plenty to look back on.
With a 3 hour game like Culture Shock I think what's needed is a slightly faster pace so that by the end, even though it didn't take very long, it seems like lots has happened.
If that makes sense.
I personally don't enjoy having every little thing turn into a pointless quest with the logic of 3 year olds. Hmm... I need to get out of the office... First, find the door knob (hidden in the fruit box), find my magnet for later (stuck down the back of the old couch, need enormous ball of twine and paper clip from Kentucky to pick up), etc.
I've found the difficulty level for Bone and Sam & Max to be just about right so far. I'd rather pay for quality, not quantity.
why cant you have nicely designed puzzles that make logical sense, fit in with the game and are difficult? Take the psychoanalysis puzzle.. that was great and required thinking..
A lot more of things are said in the podcast itself, and here's the link:
Retronaut's podcast on Sam and Max Hit The Road
A: "Sam and Max is the one game so far, that I love! Sam and Max is awesome."
B: "Well that's going to make an interesting podcast, I really like the graphics and the animation of Sam and Max; I love the writing, but I don't think it's all that fun.
A: "Do you just not like adventure games?"
B: "Because it's an adventure game. And as much as like the idea of adventure games, they ultimately boil down to this pointless BS where you're just like clicking on stuff and hoping that you can make compilations and connections. "
C: "Yes! I was thinking today..."
B: "I was playing Sam and Max this weekend... and I kind of had this epiphany...this remembrance of what the genre was like and why it's dead now, why people don't play it anymore. There's just too much of... I'll just combine stuff and then eventually I'll get something right."
C: "There's this peculiar dream-logic in adventure games where the solution you're acting out only makes sense in adventure games."
B: "It makes sense retroactively, it's like you do it, and then you say, 'Oh, I kinda see how that happened, but it wasn't really intuitive in terms of logic or gameplay."
...
A: "You just start sweeping your cursor."
B: "That's what happens in every adventure game, at some point you get to the area where you're like, 'Alright I'm completely stuck, so I'm going to spend an hour making every possible click combination."
...
A: "(The illogical adventure puzzles) felt maybe a little more offensive in Sam and Max because the rest of the game is so good."
C: "...there was a certain masochism to the logic..."
...
B: "...I feel good when I saw a solution that had a logical build-up, when I solve a puzzle that is kinda arbitrary, I don't feel satisfaction... I'm just annoyed that they made me jump through so many stupid hoops."
...
C: "There's a strangeness, where if you played enough adventure games, you would be able to start to thinking as crazy as they did, to kind of circumvent their craziness."
...
B: "...(in the 90s) adventure games had become so insular and so recursive, so that only if you played adventure games, then you spoke the language. In a way adventure games became as insular and stagnant as fighting games, like you can't be good at a fighting game now, unless you played all the fighting games and you really master them. Adventure games were about the same way... a kind of niche genre that continues to fold in on itself until it eventually dies."
Basically my argument boils down to this:
It will be more difficult, but you are not going to get to the level of past adventure games where you get stuck for an hour or more on a puzzle, nor reach those insane levels of illogicality.
Dan Connors, CEO of Telltale, on where he expects episodic gaming to be like in the future:
"The more things that pull people into playing an episode, and sustaining that episodic feel where you're always getting new content and stories, that's growing. You know, on Monday I can play Sam & Max, on Tuesday I can play Half-Life, on Wednesday I can play Penny Arcade, and on Thursday maybe I can play the new Simpsons game. It starts to validate it as a way of getting content in a way that's an intelligent evolution from television, gaming, web surfing--bringing it all together. There is a critical mass approaching."
Such stupid comments like these from Retronauts makes me wanna punch peope in the face.
1. If it boils down to "Just clicking on stuff" when you´re playing, then you are either playing a crappy adventuregame (Simon the Sorceror, Discworld 2), or you aren´t really interested in the game.
2. The adventuregenre IS NOT DEAD. Nor has it been dead. It would be pretty impressive for a dead genre to just recently have gotten games like Fahrenheit, Dreamfall, Broken Sword 4, Bone 1&2, Sam & Max and have upcoming games like Sam & Max ep 2-6, Bone Episode 3, Runaway 2, Overclocked, A Vampyre Story, Omikron 2, Heavy Rain etc...
I wish people who have no knowledge about the genre would stfu. :mad:
Anyway, their point about how it was previously a dead genre is in terms of where they exist in the wider world of video games--15-20 years ago, they were probably a VERY big part of the video game world--you were not a gamer unless you had played a Sierra "Quest" game, or a Lucasarts SCUMM game. Go into a video game store, and there would be a adventure section full of those. In the past decade however, I would say most video gamers consider it more of a niche genre, go into any video game store, at least in America, and you won't find any such section today.
And I would argue that the episodic model and differences in the Telltale adventure gamers is the beginning of a resurgence of such games, with changes that really alter things. If you listen to the podcast for example, you'll learn a theory about why Telltale games only have one "verb" for the cursor, compared to past adventure games that had "talk to, pick up, use, look at" and how this change makes it much more intuitive for all gamers.
Face it, if you are an experienced adventure gamer (I am), every time you entered a room, your brain would automatically go into the "adventure-game trance":
1. Right click/navigate cursor to "look at" verb
2. Left click object to "look at object"
3. Right click/navigate cursor to "pick up" verb
4. Left click object to "pick up object"
4a. Object goes into your inventory.
4b. Object does not go into your inventory.
5. If object can't be picked up, right click/navigate cursor to "use" verb
6. Left click object to "use object"
7. Repeat steps 1-6 for for every other object in the room.
Veteran adventure gamers expect this activity and don't mind it, but it's not really a stretch of an imagination to imagine why people don't find this activity fun. Making the mouse automatically pick up something if it can be picked up really cuts out a lot of this activity, but also shortens the game a bit, and I've seen some people on this forum actually request the old implementation.
I din´t say that you have to be an adventuregamer. I said that you have to be someone interested in playing an adventure game. If other genres like the strategygenre was trying to satisfy non-interested games like him in retronauts, then there wouldnt be any Total War-games, just hordes of Command&Conquer-clones.
Right, that's it! No-one insults Discworld 2!
*storms out*
I liked the game, don't get me wrong, they are on the right track, but if I were to compare the game to a swimming pool, then Sam & Max would have about 6 inches of water in it, while some Lucas Arts classics were about 10 feet deep.
I also felt the plot line was too linear, and that there should have been a couple of sub plots thrown in for good measure.
I really can't say much about the difficulty of S&M because I have yet to play beyond the demo (waiting for the Paypal option to come back) but I have some thoughts about that in general:
1. Why is it that people always say you can't be successful with adventures only aimed at adventure gamers anymore. I can't really believe the market became smaller. I know lots of people here (Germany) who enjoy adventures and we're in our twenties now so we have more money to spend on games than we had when we first played them. And there *were* good and successful adventures in recent years (take Runaway or Tony Tough). I guess since sequels are made for both of them they must have been successful. But they weren't made by Americans and it seems that in the US there is this whole mindset of "adventures need to appeal to every gamer or they won't be successful". Well, I don't get it. And I completely agree with Tobias (nice name
2. I don't understand the trend of adventure games. I didn't need a walkthrough for HtR or Day of the Tentacle. I think that their puzzles were so well designed and logical in their own world that it was just rewarding to figure them out. However I completely stopped playing Syberia 2 which is supposed to be targeted at a non-adventurer audience because I just didn't get it. The puzzles were so badly designed that I never knew what I was supposed to do. I'm standing in a wood and need to make fire. Oh, yeah, it makes perfectly sense that I need to walk two screens away to find wood. Right...
Now, I'm pretty sure that the puzzles in S&M won't be like that at all because there are some very good designers working on that. My point is: I don't get how anybody could prefer a game like Syberia to a game like HtR, except for people who don't like cartoon games. But I think *if* you like cartoon games you also enjoy a certain amount of craziness to puzzles because it's just so rewarding. And no, I'm *not* talking about search for the one-pixel-chewing gum kind of puzzles but for well designed crazy-but-logical puzzles like the ones in Day of the Tentacle.
3. Having said all of this I want to say that I have confidence that the designers will make the coming episodes harder. I just wonder... if the difficulty level is as easy as most people are claiming, why does it say on the download side that it's difficulty 4 out of 6? I really wonder what 1 out of 6 is? Watching a movie?
Ok, I'll stop talking now until after I played the whole game. Thanks for making this game in any case. I know I will enjoy it even though I might wish for more.
Tobias
numble, I know your question wasn't pointed at me but for me an example of classic Lucas Arts puzzles is when in Day of the Tentacle you're stuck in the tree in the future and to get down you need to convince George Washington to cut down the tree in the past by painting the fruits red so it looks like a cherry tree. These are puzzles I can still laugh about and talk to friends who also played it years later. And for me that is part of the fun of adventure games.
Tobias
I would agree with that actually. Since you haven't played the game yet, I won't reveal/spoil it, but I will say that I think the last puzzle in Culture Shock is actually more difficult and complex than the final puzzle in Day of the Tentacle.
Any way, I think I'm through here. My only points have been that yes, I do expect the games to be more difficult in the future, but no, I don't expect them to be quite like the games of the past.
I really absolutely just love adventure games but realize that if more quality games of these are to be made, some things need to be sacrificed for that to happen. I would be happy if changes don't have to be made, but the reality, at least in America, is that people haven't been buying these things that much.
I haven't played Psychonauts yet, but from what I gather, Tim Schafer--legendary creator of Grim Fandango and Full Throttle--basically adds a TON of action/platformer elements into it while still preserving his adventure essentials of humor, dialog and story. There are a couple of puzzles I heard, but aren't major and aren't hard. But the game, like Culture Shock, received rave reviews everywhere due especially to its writing, humor, and characters--Psychonauts even won the equivalent of the Academy Award in Britain for best screenplay for a video game. I can only imagine how he would be ripped to shreds by you guys that demand harder puzzles and wishing that you can get stuck every once in awhile.
Maybe you guys really are just very hardcore adventure gamers that have tons of experience from playing lots and lots of adventure games (Sorry Incognito, but I only recognize Bone, Sam and Max, and A Vampyre Story from your list of games----and I have played every Lucasarts adventure, a bunch of Sierra games, Return to Zork, Zork GI and the Last Express, amongst others) so maybe puzzles in those games take only 15 minutes of thinking for you guys. For me, I would say I often found myself stuck for an hour or two on a puzzle at a time (maybe because I played them at such a young age), and I would end up resorting to a walkthrough more often than not. But if your 15 minute puzzles take me (a fairly experienced adventure gamer) an hour or 2, imagine how extremely difficult and put off somebody that is new to the genre is.
It looks like nearly everyone on Gametap has played Culture Shock, and that looks great, since it looks like before S&M, Gametap players don't really play much adventure games according to the rankings. If I can get into my "dirty political and strategic mode," I'd say this bode wells for a Season 2. If Telltale doesn't release it to Gametap, a lot of Gametap players will be thirsty to open their wallets anyway (they appear to be the type to be willing to spend $60-$120/year for what amounts to a video game rental service already). And if they do give it to Gametap, Telltale can charge a ton of money since they know how popular and valuable they are to Gametap. Win/Win.
(Sorry, I've exposed that disdainful greedy and conniving part of me that now desires swiss cheese...)
But Telltale choosed to make an adventuregame, and because of that they need to build to challenge around the puzzles. Episode 1 is getting good reviews, but if you look at the criticism against the game it is in nearly all reviews about the low difficulty-level and the gamelength. And everyone understands the importance of reviewratings.
Ok I'm rewriting this, So ignore everything I wrote before.
#1 The Game was too Linear. There was only one way to end the game, there were no choices to be made. This caused a lack of depth because there wasn't more than 1 way to solve the game. In just about every Lucas Game I've played there was more than 1 way to solve the game. There were lots of puzzles, some of which were essential, and some of which weren't. There were some puzzles that were strictly "gag" puzzles. Puzzles that once were solved were meant to elicit a chuckle or an OMG. (Like Guybrush falling off the cliff, with a little GAME OVER being displayed on the screen. Then suddenly Guybrush flies back onto the screen, makes a joke about the Rubber Tree. and it inevitably puts a smile on your face. After you get freaked out because you didn't save the game in the last 2 hours. hehe)
#2 The puzzles were easy enough to figure out in most cases, that any 8 year old kid could have done them. They were too easy, but worse, they weren't very imaginative. They were way too logical in a real world sense. (The Puzzles did not match up to the craziness of Sam & Max. A talking dog and a talking rabbit do not think the same way people do, yet in order to solve the puzzles, you didn't have to think like sam & max, you had to think like you normally do. This does not add to the immersiveness of the game.) Someone else mentioned the DOTT puzzle (and yeah that was a really good puzzle.) Any of the Lucas games are FULL of puzzle's like the DOTT puzzle, they required real thinking to solve them, and they required you to try and think like the character you were playing to solve them. Sam & Max lacked this kind of creativity with it's puzzles.
#3 There were at least 2 instances in Sam & Max where you can ask the same question over and over a couple of times and get different answers. In some Lucas Games they used these as Dialogue puzzles where you keep asking the same question and you keep getting a different answer until finally the character gives in and helps you out. That's creative, that's thinking smart. In the case of Guybrush, he was an annoying kid, and when he kept "nagging" the "adults" in the game like a "kid" is supposed to do, the adults finally gave in, like they're supposed to do, that's immersiveness that Sam & Max lacks.
#4 A game as an Episode should follow certain successful episodic rules. If you're going to have a game that runs like a T.V. show, then it needs to follow a T.V. series formula. We'll use the XFILES here because I don't think anyone can say that the Xfiles wasn't a good show. Fact of the matter is, Xfiles had one big overall plot, with a lot of sub-plots that would occasionally advance the overall plot closer to a resolution. Sam & Max had no sub plots (and you know, even all the old Lucas Games usually had Sub Plots. that tied into the overall plot of the story, and Sam & Max is missing that here.)
The lack of Sub plots gave the game an overall feeling of moving too slow, like others commented. The pace of the game is fine, if it's a full feature game, but as a small episodic game, the pace was incredibly slow. episodes need to have a lot of stuff happening in a short amount of time, that you just don't have with Sam & Max or the Bone games, and I'm not the only one who feels this way.
#5: Sam & Max weren't Edgy enough. There was some wittiness going on, and yes, I got all of the jokes, but again, the pacing of the overall game was too slow, there was none of the raciness I was expecting from Sam or Max. I mean if you had to rate this game by today's standards, it'd be given a solid G rating. I was hoping for something more along the lines of PG or PG13. Sam Put me to sleep with the slow pacing of his Bogart-type voice at times.
All of these things add up to a lack of depth. Like I said, If Sam & Max: Culture Shock, were a pool, then that pool would be about 6 inches deep. Compare that pool to the Secrets of Monkey Island, say, and we're talking about a 10 feet deep pool.
And one more thing: Towards the end of the game I started noticing more graphic/sound glitches that were going on in almost every scene. Made me feel like the game hadn't been properly tested for bugs and that it didn't receive a proper "final touch" before it went out. This will be another problem with an Episodic game platform because of the time constraints in getting rid of all the bugs.
as with most adventure games you end up trying every item with every clickable thing in the game..not good gameplay in my book.
you mention series formuals like x-files and things.
this is probably just a "pilot" episode. i am not sure but i sortoff expect the next episodes to have an overall plot. atleast thats what i hope^^
I really hope Telltale will make the puzzles harder in Episode 2 as they were not challenging at all. Don´t get me wrong, the game is an enjoyment to play for old adventure enthusiasts, but i miss getting stuck, having to think my way out like in the old times.
For the glitches, yes there seem to be some memory leaks towards the end of the Game (Where you face Brady). That added with some animation errors (Missing running animation when doing certain things in dream sequence) etc, leads to the fact that it hasnt been tested properly.
Adventure games are a bit of a niche market but they have a huge potential.
I think it has lots of potential though since the market for female gamers is pretty untapped. (now only if we could get girls to stop blowing so much cash on make-up and crap like that then we could get more of this money into the adventure game industry.... ok ok lofty goals and to some members a bit sexist but I'm 1/2 kidding anyway) I don't think watering down these games because they might be too difficult for beginnners? (somehow I'm reminded of doki doki panic. I'm a bit offended at nindendo for that sham but thats a little off topic)
I don't think that this type of game is dying out but it might need to change a little. I personally don't like how verbs have been stripped from the games. I think it allows for more humor and can sometimes increase the difficulty a bit.
It's like if you had a fighting game where all the moves were mapped to one button... ok ok! it isn't that bad but I barely had to think this episode. The puzzles were just too transparent Still I give the game somewhere in the range of an 8/10.
I hope that we can see the increase in difficulty by next episode.
I also hate bashing my brain into a wall because the relation between two objects is so obscure that I can't tell it's a solution to a puzzle until after the solution is complete (or I cheat and find the answer).
you couldn't start a puzzle, and try another one meanwhile... An area of movement that was restricted to just 3 rooms/houses?
Given only one episode has come out, how do you know the seeds of the uber-plot haven't been planted in Episode 1?
Adventure Games by their very nature are linear. It's not an RPG. there is a story to be told, and other than splitting into 3 separate paths in Fate of Atlantis (which all had the same endgame sequence regardless) I cannot recall a single LucasArts adventure with multiple ways to complete the game. Sure there were the occasional bonus screen like when you sunk the ship in MI2, and the occasional puzzle may have has 2 solutions (fight / talk in Last Crusade), but I'm not recalling anything that could be called multiple solutions to 'solve the game' in any of the LEC classics.
I thought having all 3 poppers able to be interacted with in any order (even if they can't be dehypnotised in any order) was great - really gave the feel of openness and, dare I say it... non linearity.
I thought the psychoanalysis and dream puzzles were absolutely outstanding, at least equal to any other inspired puzzle in games gone by.
And for most people having illogical puzzles is the worst thing possible in an adventure. I assume you mean we didn't have to think like an anthromorphic gumshoe dog to solve puzzles - and yet the very first puzzle was solved by unloading your gun on an inanimate object.
Maybe you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Telltale have said that there will be an overall story arc tying the season together. In the context of the season, perhaps Culture Shock was the sub-plot.
See, I've only seen you comment about the game being to slow. I thought it was incredibly well paced - every location had at least one puzzle and at least one NPC to interact with. To me the interactivity density was wonderful. Things to see, do, interact with, talk to in every location. And to-ing and fro-ing to collect objects to solve puzzles with was kept to a minimum - it's needless traipsing that in my mind upsets the pace of the game. And wouldn't sub-plots, by their very nature, actually slow the pace of the story advancement down?
I cannot get my head around how you feel the pace was dragging. It was incredibly tight as far as I'n concerned.
Anyway, to each there own. Just pointing out that there are others of us, who are seasoned adventuregamers too, who do not share your viewpoint on the "faults" you have raised.
Do it now.
*** POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD! ****
First of all, numble, which puzzle do you mean when you say that the last puzzle was more complex than the DOTT puzzle? Because I thought both of the last puzzles (dream sequence and soda poppers) were quite creative but VERY easy. I didn't have to think much about it and as somebody else said it seemed as if it was written in bold flashing letters what I was supposed to do.
I thought that all the puzzles were very clever, logical, and some of them even really unique and hilarious. There were no badly designed puzzles and you never had to walk for ages just to complete puzzles. So well done there. But still I had some problems with them (spoilers in brackets):
1. Too many hints! And I'm talking about hints being given without asking for it (
2. Sometimes there were just not enough possibilities so it was easy to do the right thing accidentally (
3. Some puzzles could have been awesome but missed it, again because of not enough possibilities. (
4. Finally sometimes it seemed that I didn't have any chance to do anything but the right thing (
I know that 2-4 sound like the same thing without the spoilers. Sorry for that.
So I guess what I want to say is: The puzzles were great but maybe you should really consider only helping if asked for. Because otherwise you ruin the whole fun of "getting the puzzle".
Tobias
actually you can, if you dehypnotise whizzer before specs you will get a different chase sequence.