JRPG: Gateway Games - DTNS 5308 Experiment Week  🔗 **Source:** [JRPG: Gateway Games - DTNS 5308 Experiment Week](https://share.snipd.com/episode/a56835eb-7219-40e0-86e1-f3b51cf2a80c) ## Highlights - **Arcade Star Trek Hooked Roger On Gaming** - Roger Jank's first gripping game was the arcade Star Trek Strategic Operations Simulator, which combined a captain's view with a top-down sector map. - He remembers rotating the ship with a dial, thrusting like Asteroids, then docking at a Starbase between sectors—an early immersive IP experience. Transcript: Speaker 1 So these are the games that really pulled me in because when I saw them, it's like, man, I really want to play that. And the first one, and this is going way, way, way back, is the Star Trek Strategic Operations Simulator. If you think of the old Star Wars video game where it was just all vector graphics where you try to blow up the Death Star and you do the trench run and all that, very similar in the kind of Stylized graphics that you played. But the idea was that you would be in the Enterprise and you would have to destroy the enemies within a sector. And you do that through two playing fields one was what you would be looking at in the view screen if you were in the captain's chair and then another view was on top of it which was a top-down View and so it was 2d one way and then you would spin a dial to rotate the ship so you would be facing the right way and you would press the button and then you would move on to uh move forward With another one button to thrust think of it if you played like asteroids but you played it from like sort of as quasi two and a half d sort of uh viewpoint and you went through and you destroyed Everything. ([Time 0:01:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/64a09a03-9b7b-4d39-a254-4b48da74124b)) - **Grandpa's PC Gave Jenn Her First Platformer Fix** - Jenn Cutter grew up playing PC platformers like Pharaoh's Tomb and Dangerous Dave on her grandfather's 286/386 machine. - She and her brother cycled through random DOS games, typing commands and enjoying simple jump-and-collect mechanics. Transcript: Speaker 2 Pretty cool i had a very different experience because my first gaming grab bag, let's call it, I grew up a lot with my grandparents and my grandpa had a computer. I don't know whether it was a 286 or a 386, but it was in the 86 genre. And he had a whole bunch of very, very random games that my brother and I would just kind of cycle through. So there was a Donkey Kong that wasn't Donkey Kong, like the one where you jump over the barrels kind of thing. I managed to ask people in the know. So I was actually able to identify these games I did not know the names of before. Pharaoh's Tomb was one of the games, just like a little platformer that you run around collecting stuff in pyramids for. And Dangerous Dave, which was also you run around collecting jewels and stuff. Grandpa had a type, I guess. So it was a lot of running around and jumping. Speaker 1 There was a thematic with a lot of the games that came out then, especially for PCs. Because PCs, unlike the C64 and the Atari 800, didn't have a hardware sprite generator. So the CPU had to draw and redraw everything. So the more simplistic the game was, it was easier for lower end PCs to run them. I do remember because I did have a Donkey Kong knockoff, but it was called Donkey Kong. Speaker 2 What's copyright doesn't matter. Speaker 1 You know, listen, I'm going to be straight and level and fully transparent. When I was a kid in the 80s, and I mean 80s, I mean like 86, 87, 88, in junior high, all the games I had, I got from other people. And that was because I had two disk drives and I had a lot of like floppies. Speaker 2 You were the guy. Speaker 1 I was the guy because that's what you did at school, right? It's like, oh, what do you have? You know, you trade a floppy for a bag of cookies. I mean, that's the gateway to swap. It's a fair price, honestly. I mean, I'll be honest. A lot of the games I got were sort of like what you just described. ([Time 0:04:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1a87a5f5-313e-45ef-b9c4-f368a590abad)) - **PC Hardware Shaped Game Design And Social Status** - Early PC games favored simplistic mechanics because CPUs had to redraw screens without sprite hardware, shaping an era of minimal graphics but clever design. - Roger highlights CGA/Tandy/VGA differences: Tandy's 16 colors and later VGA plus sound cards made PC setups notably desirable. Transcript: Speaker 1 There was a thematic with a lot of the games that came out then, especially for PCs. Because PCs, unlike the C64 and the Atari 800, didn't have a hardware sprite generator. So the CPU had to draw and redraw everything. So the more simplistic the game was, it was easier for lower end PCs to run them. I do remember because I did have a Donkey Kong knockoff, but it was called Donkey Kong. Speaker 2 What's copyright doesn't matter. Speaker 1 You know, listen, I'm going to be straight and level and fully transparent. When I was a kid in the 80s, and I mean 80s, I mean like 86, 87, 88, in junior high, all the games I had, I got from other people. And that was because I had two disk drives and I had a lot of like floppies. Speaker 2 You were the guy. Speaker 1 I was the guy because that's what you did at school, right? It's like, oh, what do you have? You know, you trade a floppy for a bag of cookies. I mean, that's the gateway to swap. It's a fair price, honestly. I mean, I'll be honest. A lot of the games I got were sort of like what you just described. They were either some version of Montezuma's Revenge, where you go through and you collect the jewels to get out of the temple, or some version of an arcade translation. So they had PC Man for Pac-Man. I had Donkey Kong. They had something Invaders it wasn't space invaders but it was in space invaders like i mean honestly those games weren't that difficult to to code well you suddenly remind me of a game Speaker 2 Called jetpack i think it was jetpack it was cool you went around on a jetpack and collected stuff because that is just what games were back but what about those games like was it just because You you were exposed to them and you're because they were there and like we had fun with like really silly stuff it's like oh do we want to play an ega or vga what color do we want things to Be because you had that like like yeah so my brother and i like we used dos and we just like typed in stuff to play and learnIR and then we could see what the games were. It was very fancy, very exciting. Speaker 1 I will say you were sort of spoiled because I grew up in the era of CGA, which meant you had four colors, which meant some variation of barf or gross brown, right? Because CGA had technically Apollo 16 colors, but it could only display four at any one time. Now, I had a Tandy 1000, and because its graphics mode was lifted from the PC Junior, it could do 16 colors at one time, but not a lot of games took advantage of it. ([Time 0:05:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d251e9b8-31ff-4ecc-a4c5-f9237d0d1e25)) - **Intellivision Astro Smash Sparked Jenn's Console Love** - Jenn's first console exposure was her dad's Intellivision and Astro Smash; she and her brother chased high scores until the background color changed. - The physical game overlays and weird keypad controller made that console feel novel and sparked her appetite for more games. Transcript: Speaker 2 Speaking of spoiled uh the first game i got to actually go hard on uh i never had atari never had a commodore 64 but before my dad started dating my mom, he had an Intellivision. So that was my first console that I got to play with the very funny controller. I'll call it a controller. It basically looked like one of those phones that you hang up on the kitchen wall where it had like the number pad in the middle where you would just slide in the cover that tells you what The buttons do and this weird disc button at the bottom so you used to go left and right and dad had astro smash and when my brother and i got good enough at astro smash so that we got a high Enough score that the background changed color oh my goodness it was the coolest thing in the world to us back then like nintendo was out super nintendo was almost out but we had an television And uh that was the first game i went super hard on and like just seeing the television being able to put these different colored slides on top of the controller i was like oh oh there's Lots of things you can do with this it's just there's not just one game dad had like three games but i understood that there were more games i you know it's it's weird because i didn't get Speaker 1 A console until like right after high school and that's because i bought it myself and you know it was weird because i always went to other people's homes and they always had them but you Know i would play a few a couple hours but like after that like none of it like held my attention okay like i i felt no need to go back and play it it's very different with pc games because there Is a level of game design you have to make up for the fact that at the time pcs had really crappy graphics and you had to make it more about the immersive gameplay style for example uh micro Pros uh was famous for they were famous for doing simulation games but what they did was they broke up the game into different parts outside of like f-15 strike eagles say like you played The um uh silent service which is a submarine simulation you had different parts you had to drive the submarine. You had to navigate and then you had to shoot. Speaker 2 So even though they have to learn to use it once. Speaker 1 Well, I mean, this is a great thing. It's all on the keyboard, but it was considered sophisticated because it had the entire keyboard. They even included little paper layouts that would go over ([Time 0:08:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fd09af75-ac9d-47e3-9b28-470f42e255cc)) - **Splitting Gameplay Into Mini Systems Created Depth** - Roger argues PC designers compensated for primitive graphics by combining multiple gameplay modes into one title to create immersion. - MicroProse examples: Silent Service split driving, navigating, and combat into linked mini-systems that felt like cohesive simulation. Transcript: Speaker 1 You had to navigate and then you had to shoot. Speaker 2 So even though they have to learn to use it once. Speaker 1 Well, I mean, this is a great thing. It's all on the keyboard, but it was considered sophisticated because it had the entire keyboard. They even included little paper layouts that would go over the keyboard. So, you know, now this is the thing they were designed for the uh ibm at keyboard so if you didn't have one of those it didn't really fit all that well it would fit that was my next question But it was it was kind of cool because you felt like you were i mean even though if you if you sort of uh distilled it you were just playing like five mini games that was that were combined Into one game in a single veneer but it felt like oh i'm really running the boat i'm navigating and then i gotta watch the fuel and you know you're sitting there you're just hearing the The speed go brr because that's the engine noise and then it's like oh there's the there's the japanese destroyer i better get in position and then like it wasn't very it wasn't hard it Wasn't hardware taxing but the game the game design really kind of pulled you in because it was uh synergistic one thing led to another and to another micro pros was really good at that They made a samurai game where you had the uh game where you had to unite all the different fiefdoms of feudal Japan into one country and again they were a bunch of mini games. You could do one thing where you move your army and you'd find another army and you would have this sort of land battle but you could also have a stealth mission where it was just a single Samurai and you would have to sneak in and defeat the ninja and run off with the concubine or something or the princess. And that's how you got that territory. So it was literally like four or five minigames. But again, the game design was so clever. ([Time 0:10:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e9f9d9d8-d1d0-4e19-956a-01b2484fc290)) - **PBS Clip Made Roger Want King's Quest** - Roger first saw King's Quest on PBS and wanted a PC to play a story-driven game where you 'are in' the story. - He played it on a Tandy 1000 where disc loads annoyed him but the narrative adventure hooked him instantly. Transcript: Speaker 1 Speaking of adventure games uh heard you were a big fan of king's quest yes now this is why i wanted a pc i saw this video on pbs back when i was in third fourth grade. Speaker 2 On PBS. Speaker 1 PBS. Educational then. I mean, PBS raised me during the summer. I didn't really go to summer school. So PBS did all the education for me. I mean, that's where I first met Ben Affleck, right? On the Voyage of the Mimi. And it was a long time ago. You look it up on YouTube. King's Quest was a part of a feature where they were interviewing school-age kids about computers in the classroom. And they had this one girl talking about this game she was playing called King's Quest. It's like, whoa, that's so cool. It's like a story, but you're in it and you're playing it. And that really hooked me in. That's like, man, look, it's colorful. It had elements where it wasn't just, there are no action elements, right? There's no Twitch gaming aspect. So it didn't rely on any massive need of canned eye coordination. It just needed me to understand and interact with the story. And I thought that was really cool because at the time, I was into choose your choose your own adventure books hey those books are awesome my cousin had like 10 or 12 of them and it's so funny I i would read those instead of play his uh his game and watch donkey kong because they were i was like i gotta know how do i get out of this how do i get out of this there's that whole kind of You know pick where you go and see what happens and i thought it was the coolest thing and i said that game king's quest i need to play it and little did i know when i got my tandy so tandy 1000 Because it was based on the pc jr and ibm uh contracted sierra online back then it was just called Sierra uh to develop a game that would take advantage of all the PC Junior's hardware features And they came up with King's Quest so when I played it on the Tandy uh Tandy 1000 it played exactly like they originally intended and it was great other than the fact that the disc loading Between screens was kind of annoying I thought it was like the bee's knees so even at the, that disc load felt really annoying. Yes, but I didn't know how to get around it, right? Some people had hard drives, but hard drives were like $800. So I wasn't getting a hard drive. ([Time 0:13:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/094c8080-c4c3-4419-bd51-79dbc70a494b)) - **Mario 3 And World Made Jenn A Lifelong Fan** - Jenn got NES then SNES within months and played Super Mario Bros. 3 then Super Mario World obsessively, discovering saves, hidden exits, and Star World. - She and her brother used a Game Genie to experiment with power-ups and screamed when they found secret areas. Transcript: Speaker 2 I know you said that running and jumping and ducking is not your thing, but it is extremely my thing. The first, like, I'm going to call it modern. I know it's retro now, but like, let me have this. My family got the NES and SNES somehow within three calendar months of each other because they were both well out at this point. So we had these huge catalog of games back at places you could rent games because that was a thing. So my brother and I went through Mario 3. It was like, this is amazing. Look at all this. An airship. There's all these powers. And because we're Canadian, we had a game genie. So we got to cheat and have like the hammer suit and world, world two. And it was super great. Speaker 1 I mean, I don't think people understand how liberating those, the game genie. Speaker 2 Especially because we were kids. So being able to run around and not die like we did eventually learn control but like at the beginning it was a lot more fun to be able to survive multiple levels and not have to worry about Getting hit so wait you gotta you gotta nes and and snes because like uh my birthday is in the summer my brother's is in the fall and a lot of times we'll do like joint uh joint birthdays joint Presents and uh some family members had independently saved up separately like oh i also i should mention i am part of a huge family and like that is why i was able and my brother able to Play hockey so young because literally everyone chipped in so spoiled so spoiled so i went from Mario 3 straight into Super Mario World on the SNES. And Mario 3 already blew our minds. Mario World, you can save the game. That was incredible. Look at all these worlds. Look at all these things. Look at all these hidden exits, not just warp zones. The day we discovered Star World, we were running around the house screaming like banshees. We could not believe all of this stuff existed. So that is why I'm still a Mario fan to this day, because those are two of the best games. ([Time 0:16:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/03cde8f8-ea36-4f32-8d60-bd89118870ce)) - **Starflight Was A Star Trek Style RPG On PC** - Starflight gave a mid-80s PC player a Star Trek-like RPG experience by combining planet exploration, mining, alien diplomacy, and ship upgrades. - Crew roles mattered: a comms officer could defuse contact, and racial choices affected encounters. Transcript: Speaker 1 Flights now if you were, and I mentioned before, I was a Star Trek fan, Starflight was the closest that you could get in the mid 80s. When I say mid 80s, 85, 86, or was it 87, to a Star Trek-like RPG. And that's what it was. It was an RPG, but not in the sense that you got hit points or anything. It was an RPG slash strategy game. And your whole thing was to go visit other planets and earn currency by mining for minerals, collecting exotic alien life forms and selling it while trying to solve a mystery of why this Large crystalline object is suddenly heading toward your planet and destroying it. It was one of the first games to implement a form of copy protection that wasn't disk-based. Like, for example, King's Quest, you couldn't copy because it had a copy protection mechanism that wouldn't let you do a disk copy from DOS to copy over the disk. Instead, it used a wheel, used a decoder wheel. And when the game started up, it would ask you a question, you would have to decipher it by spinning the wheel to figure it out. It came with a map. And like everyone that played it at my house was like, whoa, because there was a level of strategy adventure but also leveling up but not in the way of like your standard like an ultima Or wizardry where you just had to go through fight monsters this was about exploration and many you know depending on who you ask a lot of star wars star wars Starflight fans have often Said that games like Mass Effect are kind of spiritual successors because you go to other planets, not necessarily, you know, I mean, to find clues, but you also go there to collect things Like mineral deposits, resources that you use to build up your ship because you sell those and you can buy upgrades, shielding and all that stuff for your characters or the ship itself Speaker 2 Yeah like when you had told me uh before the show about like star flight the title makes me think like oh is this going to be like a star wars rebel assault is this going to be like a wing commander Where you're also like you bust out a joystick and fly but no this is like just a proper rpg yeah it is and you had ship to ship combat uh in fact that was most of the combat uh was ship to ship Speaker 1 And it was kind of cool because you could upgrade the weapons you could upgrade from just like a weak blaster to like these heavy you know laser cannons upgrade your shielding and then Your instead like your character roster instead of having your tank, your mage, your healer, your range attacker, you had communications officer, you had your science officer, you Had yourself. And the great thing is they weren't just superfluous roles. A good comm officer could totally diffuse attention when you're talking to an alien ship and they wouldn't attack you. And depending on the race you picked, it can make it easier or worse because certain races were naturally adversarial toward each other. So you had to be very cognizant of that when you were creating your crew. ([Time 0:23:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/25f0d097-b0af-451e-8f7d-a349ea480979)) - **Sibling Saving Ritual Built Jenn's Final Fantasy Memories** - Jenn and her brother saved for expensive Final Fantasy cartridges, bought used boxed copies, and swapped play/observe roles to experience different numbered entries. - They leveled, swapped party control, and treated early JRPGs as shared story marathons before school. Transcript: Speaker 2 Yeah, that's the plus of these early games. Because again, I'm throwing my brother into this because all of my early gaming was with my brother. We had saved up so much money shoveling driveways. I shovel driveways he mowed lawns because i hate summer chores so i did all the driveways uh and we'd saved up and saved up and we went to square one mall in mississauga and we each bought A final fantasy we did not really know what one of them were we saw it in a gaming magazine it was like oh swords uh and uh i bought final fantasy 2 i think and he bought three i mean we evened Out the money so even though they were crazy expensive we bought used copies uh back then in the late 90s for 120 and 140 canadian dollars we most yes we for some reason we just decided that We are getting these games and we saved and we saved and we saved and this is why like you know it took us to 120 and 140 for used cartridges we did get the boxes though so that was what yes why Speaker 1 Was it so that why was that crazy? Speaker 2 Oh, the battery backup. It's expensive, don't you know? And also, like, the cash conversion in Canada kind of hurt back then. When we go to the PlayStation era, there was closer parity between the prices. But, yeah, no, back in cartridge days, games were super expensive. Speaker 1 I remember a guy in college. I was like, oh, those batteries are, like, they standard like coin batteries so you just have to open up the cartridge and pop it out i mean the thing is if you pop it out you lose your game Saves but you just you know man they really read you i feel angry and it wasn't even me oh for us these were the first games that we bought ourselves We didn't have to like wait for Christmas Speaker 2 And birthdays. We went out and bought these. And so we played like two and three, or if you're counting the other system, four and six, kind of at the same time. So I was playing two and my brother would watch. And then when he started playing three, I would watch. We would like swap back and forth and playing these games that were technically years apart in development uh at the same time to see the difference in sprites to see the difference in Text um to see the difference in systems where you just have in four your guy learns what your guy learns and that's what you get and then in six you can equip espers and if i wanted you know Everyone to learn everything we could do that. We took turns leveling because sometimes you just wanted to run around and fight monsters for an hour before school. Because we were allowed to play before school as long as all of our chores were done and we got up early. So we got a lot of early morning gaming in. ([Time 0:27:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/eeb3a2b1-e7ef-4c7d-b4d4-2e8cc93306f1)) - **Mapping And Grind Made Early PC RPGs Nonstarter For Roger** - Roger dislikes early PC RPGs' grind and manual mapping, saying required paper maps and slow progress pulled him out of immersion. - He credits later RPGs (Might and Magic, Wizardry 7/8) for adding in-game mapping and accessibility improvements. Transcript: Speaker 1 It's weird because i should be a total rpg fan but like the early the early rpgs on pcs just really i mean they really were heavy. So partly there's two issues to understand back then. One was it was, you think JRP, if people want to know why it's grinding is such an element of JRPGs, you just got to look at wizardry and ultimate because that's where they learned it from, Right? And two, they expected you to have a giant pad of grid paper uh and then graph paper and you would literally figure out what your map was they didn't include a map that whole thing was for Speaker 2 You to figure out see i didn't have to do that until etrian odyssey on the ds where you your bottom screen was you draw yourself a map because the game was not going to help you but i mean this Speaker 1 Is the thing like that was that was the standard uh mo uh for these games bard's tale like oh they tell you in the structures make sure you have plenty of paper to draw your maps because you Want it you don't want to get lost and find out where you are that was part of the thrill of those but for me it took me out of it because i felt like well if i'm playing a game on the computer Why wouldn't the map be in the computer why am i taking out of you know like doing this the entire time and it really bugged me it wasn't until they started like might magic i think was the First pc um rpg that started including a limited form of mapping in the game which was a big help but it wasn't until i think wizardry 8 or 7 that i really just got back into pc rpgs because For life of me it's just like man this game is so boring that you even have to take a job in the day in order to get to earn money gold pieces and it was a it was like it was what a feature i think It was called the magic candle or something but it had that feature on the box it's like get a job it's like i had a job how do you think i paid for this stupid game i don't want to i don't want To have a fantasy that involves me going in and getting another job all ([Time 0:30:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/490af4b9-e59a-4bfe-92b1-8cc751d2e7ef)) - **King's Quest 4 Added Time Based Puzzles And Risk** - King's Quest maps were screen-based and required timing; King's Quest 4 added day/night events so puzzles only worked at certain times. - Roger notes you could die or soft-lock, so frequent saves were essential. Transcript: Speaker 1 They were pretty big and like the other rp like rpgs they did you draw a map for that or did you just have a really good memory the the the screens at most i think were eight screens deep this Like this way and then eight screens this way wide. So totally, it's like 64 screens. Not 64. 64 sounds a lot. But maybe 64 screens, maybe more like 48 total screens. Well, hey, there were a lot of King's Quest. Speaker 2 They probably got up to that. Speaker 1 Well, this is a thing. When you got up to King's Quest 4, that's when you really had to start mapping things out. Because it was, this is a thing that game came on like five three and a half inch flop or three yeah three and a half inch floppies so you know it was a pretty big game at the time and a lot of Screens and with that game you actually had to show up at certain parts of the day so only certain things would only happen at night certain things would only happen the day like you couldn't Deal with a vampire at night because they would kill you. So you had to do it during the day while they were still sleeping. Stuff like that. So it was kind of cool. But the thing with King's Quest is if something was chasing after you, you could just go into the next screen and they would disappear. You know what I mean? Like, oh, let me run down to the back down south. Speaker 2 Okay, so they couldn't cross that invisible line. You were safe as long as you made it. Speaker 1 So as long as you moved out of that screen that they were at, you were safe. And the thing with King's Quest, unlike all the LucasArts games, is you could die. You could fall off a cloud. You could fall into a hole. Speaker 2 I know you could soft lock those games really easy like if you use an item the wrong way that was kind of it you didn't know your game was over but your game was basically over and and lucasarts Speaker 1 When they developed their games thank you and i i think they really set a trend here was to make the games not frustrating in other words you couldn't die in the game. You just had to figure out puzzles. So maybe at most backtracking and stuff. But with King's Quest and a lot of the police quests, space quests, you could die. You could have the wrong item. And you just, man, I got to load up a save. And they told you in the manual to save often because you would have to go back to a previous. It's like, oh, I picked up the wrong thing. ([Time 0:32:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1bc2c71c-5e03-4d86-8117-5c694f61d2a6)) - **Leisure Suit Larry Death Gags Became A Running Joke** - Jenn and her brother treated Leisure Suit Larry as comedy: they repeatedly died in gags (alley beatings, traffic) and often played just to trigger death scenes. - They guessed copy-protection answers and loved the game's irreverent humor. Transcript: Speaker 2 You just unlocked a memory for me taunt laura my great aunt one of my great aunts that i also grew up with uh she had a computer and she had adventure like the game where you just like move Left right go through that castle but she also had for some reason the first leisure suit larry game oh yeah my brother and i learned how to beat that copy protection just by guessing our Way through the trivia that you know we could not make heads or tails of but our favorite thing in that game was you start right in front of this bar called lefties or something and we would Go left into the alley and get beat up and die and then you go to the larry factory they give you another larry or you would uh walk forward towards the monitor into traffic and get hit by A car and we thought these two things were the height of comedy i don't even know if we ever went in the bar we opened the game just to do that that was one of the more adult games not crazy lewd Speaker 1 Um but you know i played like three so lewd you could get in that kind of pixels can't you well no but they would put you in the scenarios okay ([Time 0:35:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/30b864ce-d84f-4397-ae16-61fec6499b20)) - **Grind And Item Weight Turn Roger Off Classic RPGs** - Roger hates hardcore grind and inventory micromanagement in classic RPGs; he prefers fast, loot-driven action RPG loops like Diablo. - He criticizes weight limits and permanent item loss as recreative friction rather than meaningful design. Transcript: Speaker 1 I do not like the original games at all i just can't stand them there it's not even the wire graphics but it was so tedious to play it um i it kind of sucks because i bought one i thought i would Really enjoy it and it's like man this is you you you played a game back then because you spent money on it and you felt obliged to like i spent 30 i should play this and i was like man this game Really just makes me annoyed like i just nothing about it just the grinding i didn't feel added anything to the to like how my character like how my experience was doing um And to this day, I look at people getting excited over Wizardry. It's like, I guess. Some people like certain things. Wizardry was not my thing. Ultima was the same way for me as well. Ultima played okay, but at the same time, I thought it was just a little too grind heavy. And to this day, I hate grindy games. Unless grinding is relatively easy, just doing, and that's why I hate JRPGs, doing classic battles with your party. Just let me finish this. I hate that part of it. Why i like action rpgs like diablo where you just you know you shoot things and then you move on you shoot things you move on or slash things and you move on just the devil is a funny counterpoint Speaker 2 There because most people consider the modern diablo is to be pretty gosh darn grindy to get what you want it oh no this is the thing though it's mindless grindy like with with a party grind Speaker 1 I gotta like sit there for 10 minutes like oh do i want a level up or a heal someone with my cleric oh hold on my my magic user has one magic missile left better throw that like just just let It get i want it done with right like i want to and so the thing that Diablo does well was the loot, right? Loot back then on Wizardry sucked. Like a couple of gold coins, crappy weapons that you couldn't use until you were like more buffed and then, you know, buff out your character. Or in certain cases, you know, oh, it's too heavy. I don't see, this is the thing. Back then your characters were limited to a certain number of items. Too many, they couldn't move. In fact, if you overloaded a character, their hit points would drop. So you had to be very super selective about which stuff you kept and which ones you threw away. ([Time 0:38:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/464031a2-da4e-48d4-8f6c-787f0561c46a)) - **Frustrating Platformer Became A Family Memory** - Jenn hated pixel-perfect NES platformers like Bugs Bunny's Birthday Blowout for unforgiving hitboxes but loved watching her mom flawlessly beat bosses. - The game's bonus 50 extra lives jingle replayed repeatedly—an absurd family memory. Transcript: Speaker 2 And on the other side, like I'm fine with grinding. Grinding doesn't bother me because like sometimes, like I said, like before school, my brother and I would just turn it on and, you know, go fight outside of eblen for an hour and be really Happy about that but what i hated was pixel perfect movement and a lot of nes games had let's let's let's call them wonky uh hit boxes where you think you're clear but you're not because An invisible pixel is touching an invisible oh god and there was a game like i kind of hate love it now just because of like the story of it in my life but it was called bugs bunnies birthday Blowout and it was a platformer like like mario you jump up and down you go left to right thought i would love it i love looney tunes isn't this going to be great it was hard as heck oh my goodness Uh my brother and i like we could pass a couple of levels we could fight some of the bosses but it was just too hard and too frustrating to keep up that level of perfection going through and Then like one night got out of bed to get some water and mom is at the last boss like she did this to us in mario too where it turns out like she pretended to be bad playing with us uh like you Know like making a big theatrical thing about like oh no I fell down the cliff or I got hit by the first Goomba but turns out she was a platforming god and uh so it was really fun to watch her Play and like eventually we got her to play in front of us like don't be embarrassed about gaming mom come on let's play together and there was a bonus game too in uh birthday blowout where If you get like the max thing you get like 50 extra lives but it would play the sound for extra lives and the little jingle 50 times oh wow so as we're watching this go mom's like well let's Go eat this is just gonna run before we can do the next level but like in terms of playing the game, hated it. In terms of watch my mom play the game, loved it. Speaker 1 Yeah. You know, the one game I could say that I hated at first, but then sort of came around liking was Zork. Zork initially was sort of confounding because I really didn't understand the concept behind it. It's not that I didn't like text adventure games. I played games like Amnesia. I played other Zork or other Infocon games like Border Zone. And those made sense. But something about Zork just really bugged me until I understood that he was just kind of trying to create his version of Colossal Cave. And so everything was underground. And the Gru was there because he needed a mechanism to get the characters to move forward. Speaker 2 See, that's the only thing I know about the game is, oh, that's where the Gru is from. Speaker 1 Yeah. And, you know, it works out sort of at the end. And I thought it was kind of cool. Once I started getting a hand of it, I liked it so much I actually got Beyond Zork and a couple of the other Zork games but overall I mean just just Wizardry it was just the one like uh yeah ([Time 0:43:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/84b70752-5bf8-4adf-87f2-98e82f1baa24)) - **Text Adventures Need Strong Parsers To Succeed** - Well-designed text adventures feel like conversing with a rich parser and can immerse players, but low-effort parsers or ambitious but underbuilt adaptations (e.g., some Lord of the Rings text games) break immersion. - Roger praises Amnesia and Infocom as examples where text parsing works well. Transcript: Speaker 1 I mean, it's everyone who plays it, they get really sucked in. It's sort of a really well done text adventure game like with a really big like rich parser is kind of like talking to an llm like it interacts with you not at that high level but and close Enough where you feel like you're you're in the world like amnesia that entire game takes place on man in manhattan and so you walk around you talk to people going stuff uh going to hotels And things and it works really well when it's done well but if you have kind of a a sort of a low rent or low effort uh version it really puts you off like i played one of the first um lord of the Ring games and it was a text adventure slash rpg but it was all text adventure and man was that game clunky like you didn't get the feel for anything it just felt like you were you had mary Pippin and and uh and uh uh frodo and i was like i guess it just doesn't feel like it just feels like i'm supposed to do something and i already know how the game's supposed to where you're Supposed to go because i read the book but i can't do it in the game it's very frustrating there were a lot of you know a lot of games with really big um uh feel felt very ambitious but didn't Speaker 2 Have the skill or the technology to fill in that ambition it's like me trying to play crusader kings one day one day i will figure out that game because it seems super fun and the stories Speaker 1 You can make but uh i just get scared about games with big maps you know big i don't mind games with big maps i don't like games that make you wander aimlessly to find something to do that's Like give me story, give me a quest line in whatever. And that's one reason why I think MMORPGs are so big on doing events and other things is they just need you to get to play something. ([Time 0:46:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/332e8404-8166-45d6-902a-96d85ef11026))